In the early 90s, I drove across the States in a clapped-out Mustang, from the East Coast to California. It was a leisurely drive. I was in my mid-20s and drifting.
I stayed for a stretch in a seedy motel on the Las Vegas strip, at one point sleeping one week for free in exchange for building a wall by the front entrance. I don’t know why the motel owner agreed to this. My roommate – a hitchhiker I’d picked up — and I had never built a wall before. We stretched the work out for a week. But as it grew higher, it became more unstable and we were evicted when it fell over in a shower of bricks.
The night before I’d met a French guy. He claimed to be ex-Foreign Legion. Short but muscular, he radiated fitness and strength. He told me about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Most of the injuries, he said, occurred in the week before the actual running of the bulls. People gather in the streets to drink all night and brave young men climb the lampposts to jump off, trusting the crowd will catch them. Sometimes they plunge right through the upstretched arms.
My roommate and I split up and I drove with the French guy to Death Valley. He claimed to know a remote cabin in the mountains above the Valley floor. It was a three-hour, 13-mile hike, he told me, but the cabin was full of food and we could stay as long as we liked.
Although it sounded a little fantastical, I parked the car off the highway. He advised me to hide it as best as possible – we didn’t want anyone breaking in.
As we hiked across the valley floor toward the distant mountains, he told me how he’d nearly been executed in South America. He was travelling alone in the jungle and was sleeping in the trees to stay safe from jaguars. One morning he woke to find himself covered in blood. There was sticky blood all over his body, from head to toe. At first he suspected that something had been killed in the tree above him, but then he realized it was his own blood. He had been attacked by vampire bats in the middle of the night and they’d drooled his own blood onto his skin.
Afraid of a rabies infection, he headed for the nearest settlement. But he crossed the border into a neighboring country and was locked up by the army, which was battling local rebels. In the cell, he started to exhibit the first symptoms of rabies. But he had more pressing troubles. The army accused him of being a rebel spy and threatened to execute him. They didn’t believe his cockamamie story of solo jungle hikes and vampire bats. It took days of beatings and interrogations – plus his advancing rabies — to convince them of his innocence.
We crossed the Valley floor and started to climb upwards, following a rocky dry river bed full of huge boulders. I was getting more and more nervous. The French guy was crazy! There was no cabin here. Free food and board? In Death Valley? What was I thinking? He was luring me off the road to kill me. He’d take my Mustang keys and disappear. No one knew where I was. Not a soul. The name of the place began to gnaw at me, ringing in my head like a crazy mantra: Death Valley, Death Valley, Death Valley!
When I was a kid, my friends and I hitchhiked everywhere. We hitchhiked to school most days. We hitchhiked all across the country for camping holidays. We’d just take sleeping bags – no tent – and bed down in open fields. This was Britain in the 1980s, which didn’t seem particularly dangerous. But like the US, the UK is high up on UNICEF’s ranking of countries for child abuse.
I have my own kids now, and the thought of them hitchhiking wherever they please seems crazy. I’d never allow it. But they take buses all over San Francisco, and I have no problem with them hailing a car using Uber or Lyft. Because they are using an app, they’re not getting into a car with a stranger.
Likewise, we’ve swapped our house with strangers several times (AirBnB – read on for my wife Traci’s account) and I regularly buy used goods from Craigslist and eBay.
These apps affirm my deeply held belief that most people are fundamentally decent.
I digress: back to Death Valley. I kept trying to get behind the French guy so that I could pick up a boulder and smash his skull in. But he took my falling back as a sign of tiredness and he’d wait up to help me.
I was getting desperate. Death Valley! Death Valley! And then there was the cabin. Sitting on flat near the river bed, just shy of the lip of the mountain. An old miner’s cabin built around the turn of the century. It had four cots and, as promised, it was full of dry and canned food left by previous visitors. Over the years, it had accumulated into quite a hoard. We stayed for a few days, exploring the abandoned mine and mountaintop, which had unbelievable views across Death Valley in one direction, and across the Nevada desert in another.
When we hiked back down to the car, it was just as we left it, except someone had used their finger to write a message in the dust on the back windshield: “Clean Me.”
