Reclaiming

We finally got back out to the desert this weekend after a long hiatus. It had been nearly four months since we spent the night out there, and it showed. The place needed a great deal of rearranging and sorting - we had packed up and put nearly everything in the container to make way for the contractors, and the place itself was full of sawhorses and wood and sawdust. They had also left several large garbage bags full of detritus, and siding all around in the sand which had to be painstakingly walked over to the container, piece by piece. The H was not thrilled with the condition they left the place in - they clearly didn’t care by the end - they also took much of our 5 gallon jugs of water away for some reason. I was annoyed, too, but considering what we went through to get this place finally in order after two and a half years, I take it in stride.

Upon entering the place, we discovered the spiders had claimed it as their own - and two scorpions had taken up residence in the “kitchen” corner. I’d never seen scorpions out there before and I have to admit it freaked me out a bit. I kept having flashbacks to my mother describing her daily habit of shaking the scorpions out of her shoes when she lived in huts in Mexico in the 60s. So I was on edge that first night until it became clear that the bugs were aware of our presence and stayed away the rest of our visit. Still, the H insisted on bagging everything up and spraying poison as we left - not something I would have bothered with, but probably not a bad idea. 

It was uncomfortably hot and dry - much hotter than original predictions - so I tried to lay low in the shade and not move much; I managed to get the kids involved in endless games of Uno, and we did have one lovely night in hammocks under the stars (always the highlight of being there). The H busied himself with projects in the hot sun with no water and was surprised when he felt hit by a truck later. If we were on Naked and Afraid I would be the one that would succeed by conserving my energy and slowly starving; he would be the one that would crash and burn after blowing too many calories with tons of activity. Sometimes it’s about the strategy.

We won’t be seeing heat like this again for a long time; our next visit isn’t for a month, but I hope to spend much of November out there, maybe even another friends-only visit, depending. I don’t feel comfortable firing up the shoddily installed wood burning stove, but I think with the new insulation that our little propane heater should do the trick (with the C02 monitor and a window cracked, of course). I look forward to winter days when long hikes in Amboy or Joshua Tree National Park will be feasible again.

For now, the boys are back at school and I head to Chicago on Friday for a singing gig that involves learning eight new songs; I think we’re being housed in a hostel-type environment where there will be multiple people in a room together which I’m very much not looking forward to. The weekend after we’re at a jazz festival in northern CA where we get our own hotel rooms, and there’s a lot less for me to do and friends in attendance, so I’m excited about that one. Our band travel is, very slowly, returning.

After some false starts, I have a gut-wrenching logo for my podcast drawn for free by someone I did a favor for; I’m not sure when my bandleader will have time to record a little music for me, but I think I can at least start doing interviews soon, maybe once these back-to-back trips are behind me. I’m still nervous about the technical side - making it sound good, promoting it properly, etc etc, but I’m going to give myself the grace that I’m not a professional podcaster and I have to start somewhere. I think the content alone sells it - for anyone curious about my rapidly diminishing obscure little former sect, this will be the one place you’ll get to hear about it from the people who lived it, interviewed by someone who also lived it. I think it could be a helpful resource regardless of how slick it is or isn’t.