SS4 from a PDX point of view.
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bwillowz at 03.2.11 - 5:05 pm
Chris Martini from PDX joined us on this past SS trip and on the train ride home wrote a letter to his friend. In the letter he describes what happened in a way that brings you right back to that glorious weekend. I read it and re read it four times before i asked him if I could re post it on MR so everyone else could read it. Post your own stories of adventure and your point of view of the trip too if you want!
Thank you, Martini! LA misses you!
So I wrote a letter to an old friend while on the train back to Portland, and thought I would share some of it to describe my time in Salton Sea. Â I havent written anything in a while, and my editing skills are terrible, so my appologies to all my literary friends. Â I hope this gives an idea of what its like there, and does justice to those great enough to put it all together (everyone). Â Enough preface, on with the show.
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Between a man-made mountain that was a technicolor homage to God and the bible, and a water tower with a crusty, neo-hippyish inhabitant who goes by the name “Moth”, is where we set up camp. To our south east was the RV mecca Slab City, and beyond it about 10 miles, a vast wall of brown desert mountains. To the north west was an oasis of natural hot springs and beyond that, the aptly named Salton Sea. The rusty, tan sand around us was mostly flat until it formed a long hill approximately two hundred feet from the campsite, providing a clear view of the aforementioned panorama. For about a week, over a hundred people from LA and elsewhere camped, rode, drank, drugged, loved, fought, swam, walked, sang, whispered, laughed, cried, and blew shit up. It’s hard to sit and try to write what the weekend was like from an objective standpoint, as so much emotion was felt and witnessed by all. Maybe it would help if I described the scene with snapshots of the senses. Â
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During the day the sun was warm and crisp, like a ripe orange. It felt so.. nutritional, and foreign to my pale, northwestern skin. At night it would be cool, with a gorgeous full moon illuminating the camp, the desert, everything. One night it rained, but it was still warm, and felt good showering my sandy, naked body (I was in the hot springs when it started, then walked back to the camp bar and was the “naked guy” that night). There was almost always a breeze, relaxing in the day, remorseless in the cold desert night. The ground was a mixture of gritty sand and clay, so it clumped and stuck to everything when wet. By the end of the trip, everyone and everything had at least some crud stuck to (in, under, over, between) them. Fire was a great source of heat at night except for one minor, little detail: people blowing things up in them. Everything from aerosol canisters to fireworks to magnesium. So staving off the cold night was a dangerous proposition, unless of course you had someone to snuggle with in your tent, which, was rather impossible for me as I brought the “coffin tent” (ultralight, one person). Thank goodness for zero degree sleeping bags. Â
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The smell of tar is the first thing I notice at the mud volcanoes (aside from, well, the sight of miniature volcanoes). They bubble and spit this plain, dull, and rather warm grey mud from somewhere below the surface, heaping into these conical, bulbous “volcanoes”. There’s also a small pit of it nearby, where people are playing with this brainless grey matter by covering themselves and, more to their own delight, friends nearby. Back at camp the air smells slightly salty, as Salton Sea is around seven(!) times the saline concentration of the oceans. If you go to the town nearby you get a fine mixture of natural gas (there’s a turbine energy plant nearby), and, well, shit. Niland, Ca., what a (bombed out, desolate, downtrodden) place. One of the towns two stores had a noxious mystery smell, and a layer of dust covered every single thing except for the stacked cases of beer. This most essential desert beverage looked to be the only item routinely restocked. Back at camp, the people walking around had that “campfire scent”. The predominate aromas coming from peoples “kitchens” were of canned goods and grilled cheese. Unless you were lucky enough to befriend the kids from Santa Cruz, who had a real bbq, and some seriously gourmet meals (for a camping trip). “I’ll take the fresh grilled chicken with garlic tossed broccoli, thank you.”
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As I wake up from the first night there, slowly unzipping the tiny opening in my one person tent, I barely have time to wretch at the parched “beer/desert/dehydrated mouth” glueing my trap shut, when a cold, canned brew is thrust into my hand. Now while surviving the desert (no one truly “lives” there in my opinion), it is most essential to drink plenty of fluids, water being the recommended substance. Most of the bike riders/punks/enthusiasts in our camp seemed to have missed the latter part of that memo. But with such a communally driven group of people, you never really went “thirsty.” The range of beverages being freely circulated through this bikey clan could have easily matched any bar this side of the Mississippi. Whiskey, rum, vodka, more vodka, all types of beer (including some great selections provided at the camp bar from Tren Way, an LA bike club), and the (un)official drink of the bike-fun movement: 4LOKO. If you haven’t had the (cough) “pleasure” of quaffing down this artisan cocktail of malt beverage and epilepsy inducing chemicals, allow the following recipe to provide the framework. Take a “forty” (a hint of the malty taste, but mostly used for a measure of drunkenness), add a generous amount of chemicals that speed up both your heart and mind to a dizzying, hyper-spastic state, throw in a pinch of memory erasing substance most likely banned and/or used nefariously by governments of the first world, and round it out with a liquid that (after the first few gnarly sips) begins to resemble cheap fruit juice left in the sun for a few weeks to ferment. This drink was recently banned by the government due to its ability to kill those who would have otherwise survived imbibing in another alcoholic beverage, and we drank over 50 of them in the middle of the desert. To counteract all this drunken foolery, we chomped on food equivalent to dorm room rations. Cup O’ Noodles, canned goods, grilled cheese, chips, dips, and pretty much anything else you can think of that has a shelf life of 127 years (and the same amount of sodium in grams) were our sustenance. I would argue that “dehydration” was a taste, and we savored that flavor all the way to the wells (metaphorically speaking, you really didn’t want to drink the water in this place).
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If you were lucky enough to get any sleep, it was the only “silent” period for the entire duration of the trip, and for 50 miles in any given direction from the epicenter that was our camp. And when I say epicenter, I refer to the seismic activity propagated from a battery of megaphones by people whose voices often needed no amplification, various forms of demolition, clanging, banging, and two of the loudest, most awe inspiring, pedal-powered sound systems ever to grace the earth. Im not really sure what made me lose track of time more: the fact that my phone (which was my only clock) died on the first day, or the constant beat thumping thunderously from two concert grade subwoofers, cacophony calls NEVER ceasing from an army of “MC’s” wielding megaphones, random explosions, giggles from lovers, the whirring of bicycle gears, the desert’s wind rushing past, the desert’s silence found in the distance. Ok, I lied. In fact, fuck clocks. Time had no use out there at all. There is no way to find a cadence, or set a schedule, or technologically quantify the experience that was our ethereal congress. The aural onslaught we all experienced was a perfect stimulant to a sense capable of generating such great emotion, and memories. And to stay up, all night.
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The dictionary defines the word “awesome” as: “extremely impressive or daunting, inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear; extremely good, excellent, gnarly, righteous.” Fine, I made up the last part (I’m just a wannabe Californian), but you get idea. The spectacle that was our psychedelic camp against a dramatic, dynamic, dystopian backdrop, was, well, awesome. Every color of tent spread out against the vast expanse surrounding us. The palette of people, from all kinds of ethnicities, sun exposure, and decor (and splattered with dirt and mud and paint and..), included every tint and shade imaginable. Bikes of every conceivable design create a unique, artificial skyline, casting shadows of genius against the sand. The sky was ever changing, ever generous with its infinite spectrum. The deepest blood reds ignite the morning. Light, easy blues walk across pillowy, drawn out clouds mid-day. Triumphant pink and orange begin to fade back to the fire that was their birth when suddenly.. Blackness creeps in, barren, and somber. An emptiness, however, that was punctuated with a brilliant celestial field, a cosmic hint at what might be beyond us. The sky seemed to mirror the very cycle of life that we all came to celebrate, or to abandon.
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