Well, the desert is getting a little cooler and so the Loved One and I
went off for a not especially adventurous
weekend in Yucca Valley. I had no great
walking project in mind, but I had simple plan to drive along Skyline Ranch
Road (not the worst name for a road) until I found a likely looking place to
pull over and park, and then we’d walk for a while.
And that’s exactly what we did. On
the maps Skyline Ranch Road looks pretty much like a real road - and it is at
first, but on the ground it rapidly turns into a dirt road, then a dirt road
with deep gouges, and then it becomes no road at all. I liked that very much obviously.
It was late Friday afternoon, the sun was going down, the sky was full
of interesting patterns, though with nothing resembling a “sunset” and it was
one of those walks, the best sort really, that didn’t have to be some intense
cosmic experience: it was just a walk.
We did however come across this very appealing rock formation, which
I’m sure is well known to locals, with a tree growing in its midst, with holes
and gaps running through it so that the wind howled and moaned. If you were the kind of kind of person who
worshipped landforms you could do much worse than worship this one.
Yucca Valley still has one of my favorite used bookstores, the Sagebrush
Press Bookstore, a place ever more crammed with stock, some of it decidedly
pricey, some of it not, and I can never go in there without buying a book or
three. This time, among others, I bought
a copy of Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across
America published in 1979, a book that I’ve been aware of for
years, but have never really settled down with and read. That night in the motel in Yucca Valley I
could do exactly that.
In fact the title is a bit of a misnomer. The books tell the story of Jenkins’ walk from
Alfred, a town in New York State, to New Orleans, an impressive feat for sure (1,273
miles according to Google maps) but not “across” America in the ordinary sense
of the word. Jenkins wrote a second
book, with his wife Barbara, titled The Walk
West (1981) which covered the journey from New
Orleans to Florence, Oregon: which is rather more of a crossing it seems to me. Arthur to
Florence – it has a certain understated majesty to it, no?
Reading Jenkins today, he seems in some ways, to be ahead of his time,
fretting about what is being done to America by corporate interests, but at the
same time he’s part of that long tradition of writers who go off in search of America
and themselves, and find them both pretty much wherever they look.
One of the fascinations of the book as far as I’m concerned is that Jenkins' journey took place at very much the same time that I was making my first
trans-America trip, from Toronto, Canada (long story) to Santa Barbara, California,
and although I was hitchhiking I inevitably did plenty of walking. Like
Jenkins, I experienced much warmth and much generosity from the people I met, such as the boys above, and
only the smallest amount of occasional terror, also from the boys above. This
was pretty much the end of the hippie era, but hippie ideals and down home all-American
values are by no means entirely at odds.
In his book, Jenkins does from time to time have a tendency to drift into a kind of all-purpose
Zen/National Geographic spiritual wisdom : “My main purpose
was to be where I was,” for example, but heck, it was the times.
This is what Peter Jenkins looks like these days:
This is what Peter Jenkins looks like these days:
