Austin TX to Orange, CA (An Epic)

I’d been threatening to ‘get cracking west’ for a while, and stop pansying about with these 200-mile-days. But I didn’t expect to end up on the West Coast so soon. I put it down to tiredness, lonely highways and the cold.

It began with meeting a young Obama campaigner in the adjacent hotel room in Austin. Over a few beers in the ‘live music capital of the world’ I divined that he was heading West. Taking a semester off school to join Obama’s campaign machine, he had been sent to Missouri where he worked for a solid four months. After the (historic) victory he had spent a couple of weeks celebrating, and after a week in Austin was heading back to his home in Oregon. So on Monday morning I said goodbye to my Mexican mates and jumped in his car.

We ate up Texas. Texas as many of y’all know is often used by Americans to understand the size of countries. As in the sentence ‘Bolivia is one and a half Texases’. I guess France would be our metric equivalent. Texas is big, and West Texas is boring. So we drove and drove through endless barren countryside, occasionally chatting away. He was an interesting guy, an intelligent thinker who understood the difficulties of practical politics. Refreshingly, he didn’t suffer from that worrying disease of Obamamania which makes you believe that all the world’s problems are now resolved.

Darkness fell and we drove on to El Paso. El Paso is sprawling and shiny, set amongst some crazy hills, and at nighttime the dominant feature is an enormous star of texas placed hollywood style on the adjacent mountains. Here my ride was stopping for the night in a hotel before he drove on towards Vegas. I decided to try my luck and look for a lift that would take me through the night. So he dropped me at a truckstop. There I began my old routine of asking for a lift to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It didn’t work. It was 10pm, then 11pm, then midnight. I had drunk a lot of coffee. There weren’t many people coming through. Everyone was going east or west, to California or to Florida. I kept trying. Then I fell asleep sitting up under my hoodie. The guys on nightshift took turns in sleeping too. I thought they might not be happy with my being there, but they didn’t say anything, and in the morning wouldn’t take any money for my coffee. I wasn’t worried about anything, which was weird. I guess it was my longest wait by far, but really I was just hanging out so it wasn’t too bad.

When it started to get light, I decided enough was enough, and I went out to the onramp and stood there for a while. But it was cold. Very cold, so I was jumping around, looking silly which probably didn’t help my chances of getting picked up. I got the feeling that in this border-town nobody wanted to pick up a stranger. But finally at about 10am, 12 hours after I had arrived, a guy in a truck pulled over. He too was going to California, but I thought I could get a lift up to Las Cruces where I could continue North on the 25 through New Mexico and Colorado.

But then, he told me the story of another guitarist he had given a lift all the way to California. And gradually, tired and not thinking too straight, I decided I didn’t really want to get off at Las Cruces. It was more of a non-decision. Just keep on rolling. And roll we did. He was Fidel one of the coolest cats you’ll ever meet. A Mexican cowboy (he really looked after his black Stetson) who loved to drive along singing. I got my guitar out and we sang La Bamba. He had a whole lot of Mexican traditional music on his iPod, and he gave me a musical tour, singing along all the while. One of my favourites was a Spanish version of Bob Dylan’s “It ain’t me babe”:

No, no, no, no, no soy yo.
No, no, no, no, no soy yo.
Al que ella dara su amor.

I guess in Mexico a song wouldn’t fly if it had the theme “sorry girl, I’m not interested in you.” In the Mexican version, its about a guy who gets stood up at the alter by his love, “It ain’t me- who she’s gonna love.” Wonderful!

In this way, New Mexico dissappeared. Arizona came with its amazing geography, like those american road-trip movies, a strip of tarmac carved through an unbelievable desert landscape. Then came the cactii. I can’t imagine a better way to travel through the West, playing songs on a guitar, chatting, popping back into the sleeper for naps, watching the miles slip by. Night fell and we crossed into California, and stopped for the night in a hotel in Thousand Palms. In the morning we continued on, past the most extensive wind-farm I have ever seen. I guess in California they go for quantity rather than quality. There must have been a few thousand turbines, most of which weren’t spinning. Desert. Cactus. Palm tree. And then we arrived at our destination of Pomona.

There I worked for my ride, unscrewing bolts, putting wedges under tyres, hammering bits of wood. It felt good to get covered in grease in the baking sun. His load was three new trucks for a truck-rental company. The foreman of the yard said that he had had 50 trucks delivered that week. And the company Fidel worked for was sending out hundreds of trucks a week. I thought the country was supposed to be in recession.

Then my friend came and picked me up. We rode down freeway after freeway, cars everywhere. I had arrived in a place that didn’t seem plausible in a desert. So Cal, 48 hours after leaving the capital of Texas.