Goodbye Golden State

I drank as much water as I could stomach Thursday night; I was afraid I might just throw it back up - I was in rough shape. When I initially arrived in Vidal Junction, I realized I hadn't urinated in about seven hours because I didn't have any liquid my body could get rid of. When I finally went to the bathroom after downing those first quick drinks of water from the agricultural station, my urine was dark and looked my like sludge than liquid. I needed to keep drinking; I was cramping everywhere, legs, back, arms, even the sides of my chest. I moved as delicately as possible, gingerly setting up my grease streaked tent on a spot of hard scrabble about 100 feet from the heavily trafficked road. To say camping in Vidal Junction was roughing it was an understatement: the ground was littered with rocks that poked up everywhere through the floor of my tent, and I spent most of the night trying to move rocks out from under my back. The air in the tent was stuffy and smelled like Ben-Gay, it was seventy degrees overnight and very still, hardly a breeze to be found. I didn't really sleep, I just lay as still as possible to avoid another charley horse or aggravate one of many knots in my back, and drank little sips of water until the nausea finally subsided. Never again will I be in that situation, believe me.

I got up early on Friday morning, and made my way to the only restaurant in the Junction, and ate three eggs, two strips of bacon, three sausages, two pieces of toast, hash browns and a gigantic glass of milk, with water of course. Cheap greasy spoon food on a paper plate never tasted so good! I decided to bike just nineteen or twenty miles to the next town, Parker, AZ. It's the first town in Arizona across the border from California, the border being a fairly narrow river that apparently is a magnet for boating enthusiasts from miles around. I'd been certain I was delusional when I saw the first car pulling a boat east a few miles outside of 29 Palms the previous day; when 50 of them went by over the course of the day I thought I'd be dreaming of cartons of orange juice or bottles of Coke or something, not boats.

I pulled into a donut shop just across the bridge into Parker, and had a donut and coffee (yes, I was still hungry) while listening to the banter between the counter woman and an older guy that seemed to be a longtime customer; they had a familiar conversational style and were good naturedly ribbing each other about everything from the weather (It's not hot, you old duffer!) to employment status (When are you going to get a real job?) and talk turned to the river and all the boaters when I had a chance to ask in between jabs. Donut shop woman said that everyone launches their boats into the river, even though it's pencil thin and heavily trafficked. She went on to say that that stretch of water is known as the most dangerous waterway in the country, and it's not hard to see why: lots of people from a thousand zip codes around drinking while zipping around a congested waterway in the boats they rarely use. Add no real law enforcement and let the games begin. Hard to explain death by boating accident in the desert, I bet.

I asked them about a motel for the night, and they said I'd better try a place across the street - there was a motorcycle rally in town for the weekend, and most of the local motels were booked with motorcyclists (and of course the Hell's Angels were in town too!), but they thought I could get a room there. I crossed the street, hoping I wouldn't get run over by a gang of bikers or flattened by a someone pulling a boat to the river. Goodbye Golden State, hello wild west.