It's interesting to think about how our ancient ancestors migrated across continents to populate the world. Before established roads and maps were invented, nomadic tribes crossed continents on foot and oceans on canoes. They survived threats from predators and the environment itself, crafted tools and shelter to make their homes, and hunted and gathered to keep fed and alive. It's interesting to think about because if our early ancestors were anything like some of the tourists I encounter on my day-to-day during the summer months, we'd be extinct.
I've mentioned the inability of travel-weary people to figure out how doors work. People also oftentimes can't figure out how to turn on their TVs, failing to try the power button. Some guests can't figure out where the bathroom is in their room when there are two doors to look in, one of which being a closet. Basic directions to a room start to sound like IKEA instructions. The hotel suddenly becomes a magical labyrinth where everything is a mystery. I'm essentially a Minotaur in khakis and a button down tasked to point people in the right direction and to solve mystic riddles like how to connect to the WiFi, when I should just be another human being interacting with other human beings that happen to be on vacation.
I like to think the heat makes tourist's brains melt. Summers around here are hot, especially in Death Valley, and a lot of tourists drive through there this time of year to see what the hottest place in the US is like (hint: it's hot). Heat makes people uncomfortable, irritable, and spacey, and when you couple that with a hangover from a couple nights of partying in Las Vegas and a four hour drive through a rolling beige landscape, mental faculties aren't going to be firing at 100%. Whatever semblance of common sense and critical thinking that may have existed in a person is sweated out of the system along with the previous night's shots. The ability to pay attention or listen is a distant memory. Instincts like perception and invention-- instincts that have advanced the civilization for all of human history-- are gone as soon as the city limit sign for Pahrump is in the rear-view mirror.
Mt. Whitney is also a popular destination, and while not hot enough to melt a brain, the air is thin enough apparently to suffocate it. People come in droves for permits to climb the mountain, so cocksure and ready to conquer the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. One would think, surely, being in alpine territory, those instincts of survival and exploration would kick in, but when you consider people come from their homes in San Diego-- at sea level-- and immediately try to climb a mountain that's over 14,000 feet without acclimatization and wonder how they got altitude sickness, or that SAR was called out recently for an injured hiker only to discover he just wanted a helicopter ride back to his car, you start to wonder how some folks survive into adulthood.
Summertime is the busiest season for tourism for the Owens Valley. Being the midway point between Death Valley and Yosemite National Park, and being at the base of Mt. Whitney, makes Lone Pine a popular stop. When exhausted and sunburned tourists, either off the trail or from the desert, brains mush from too little air or too much heat, they oftentimes get to talk to me. Thinking about those brain-melted tourists being descended from ancient nomads is about as believable as me being a Minotaur, but in a way it makes the world that much more magical. If they can make it here, weary travelers emerging from tall mountains and vast deserts, then I can do anything I set my mind to.
If nothing else, I can at least feel good in the fact that, in those moments that I feel stupid, I'm not alone.
Friday, June 15, 2018
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
The Devil's Itch
Yesterday, before I headed out for a run, my friend yelled out, "Remember sunscreen!"
I shouted back, "I did!" because I actually remembered to wear sunblock, and I then set off down the road and then through the desert. June in the high desert means abundant sunshine. Anyone who's met me knows I'm fair skinned. When I'm out for awhile I get rosy, and if I'm out for a bit longer I get beet red, and one time that lead to blisters and a world of hurt, but a few years back I learned the hard way about one potential side-effect to getting too much sun: The Devil's Itch.
It was after a fun weekend of camping and climbing, sans common sense and sunscreen. My chest, back, shoulders, legs, everything got roasted, and I prepared to have every inch of me freckle and peel and be tender for a few days. A few days after that weekend I was getting ready for work when I started feeling itchy. Thinking it might be just a normal itch, I unconsciously scratched at it and thought nothing of it. When every inch of my body started itching in screaming pain, I ended up on the floor in a ball hoping for it to stop, rolling around the carpet like a dog with fleas. I willed myself up and into the bathroom, took a cold shower, rubbed in some aloe vera gel after the fact, and went to work thinking, What the hell was that about?
There aren't a lot of articles on The Devil's Itch, also known as Hell's Itch, but from what I've found there isn't much reasearch on it and roughly 5 to 10 percent of people have dealt with it at some point. It manifests 24 to 72 hours after the initial burn, usually where there was the most sun (like shoulders and backs, or in my case everywhere on my lobster bod). While apparently nobody knows exactly why it happens, it can last up to a couple days and can drive a person up the walls. It's not permanent, but it absolutely leaves an impression. Like, there's a subreddit for it of people swapping experiences and remedies, which goes to show that, one, there's an internet community for everything, and two, it's pretty gnarly.
Maybe it's caused by nerve endings in the skin firing off while healing, or the oils in the skin being reintroduced into damaged tissue or something, but I don't know since I'm not a doctor or medical researcher. I'm just a guy that tends to get pink when the sun's out that learned a valuable lesson in skin care one time. When I'm out and about in the desert, especially in the warm season, I do my best to remember the SPF 50 and a hat. It'll be a miracle if I don't get some kind of skin cancer, but I'll also consider myself lucky if I don't have to experience that kind of sudden, maddening pain again.
Remember: prevention is the best medicine. Use common sense, use sunscreen, use hats and long sleeves, and maybe you'll make it through the summertime without crying and writhing on the floor from The Devil's Itch.
I shouted back, "I did!" because I actually remembered to wear sunblock, and I then set off down the road and then through the desert. June in the high desert means abundant sunshine. Anyone who's met me knows I'm fair skinned. When I'm out for awhile I get rosy, and if I'm out for a bit longer I get beet red, and one time that lead to blisters and a world of hurt, but a few years back I learned the hard way about one potential side-effect to getting too much sun: The Devil's Itch.
It was after a fun weekend of camping and climbing, sans common sense and sunscreen. My chest, back, shoulders, legs, everything got roasted, and I prepared to have every inch of me freckle and peel and be tender for a few days. A few days after that weekend I was getting ready for work when I started feeling itchy. Thinking it might be just a normal itch, I unconsciously scratched at it and thought nothing of it. When every inch of my body started itching in screaming pain, I ended up on the floor in a ball hoping for it to stop, rolling around the carpet like a dog with fleas. I willed myself up and into the bathroom, took a cold shower, rubbed in some aloe vera gel after the fact, and went to work thinking, What the hell was that about?
There aren't a lot of articles on The Devil's Itch, also known as Hell's Itch, but from what I've found there isn't much reasearch on it and roughly 5 to 10 percent of people have dealt with it at some point. It manifests 24 to 72 hours after the initial burn, usually where there was the most sun (like shoulders and backs, or in my case everywhere on my lobster bod). While apparently nobody knows exactly why it happens, it can last up to a couple days and can drive a person up the walls. It's not permanent, but it absolutely leaves an impression. Like, there's a subreddit for it of people swapping experiences and remedies, which goes to show that, one, there's an internet community for everything, and two, it's pretty gnarly.
Maybe it's caused by nerve endings in the skin firing off while healing, or the oils in the skin being reintroduced into damaged tissue or something, but I don't know since I'm not a doctor or medical researcher. I'm just a guy that tends to get pink when the sun's out that learned a valuable lesson in skin care one time. When I'm out and about in the desert, especially in the warm season, I do my best to remember the SPF 50 and a hat. It'll be a miracle if I don't get some kind of skin cancer, but I'll also consider myself lucky if I don't have to experience that kind of sudden, maddening pain again.
Remember: prevention is the best medicine. Use common sense, use sunscreen, use hats and long sleeves, and maybe you'll make it through the summertime without crying and writhing on the floor from The Devil's Itch.
Friday, June 1, 2018
Bakersfield
Roadside signs advertising fast food, motels, and truck stops clustered together along the freeway exit along with power lines and billboards, like weeds competing for sunlight. It was fitting considering I was looking at Weedpatch Highway, east of Bakersfield, right off the freeway.
I was sitting in a McDonald's, staring out at the hazy horizon at the businesses across the road while I ate a cheeseburger, thinking about how excited I'd get to go to Bakersfield when I was a kid. My family would make the three hour drive from the Owens Valley once a month to visit my grandparents, so I spent many hours of my childhood in the back seat of a Suburban watching the desert floor of sagebrush and Joshua trees turn into rolling hills of golden grasses and sycamores, and then to miles of farm land that looked like a patchwork quilt from above. It was a departure from the norm, so I thought it was fantastic.
After my McDonald's lunch I headed west on Edison Highway. Scrap yards, shuttered buildings, and businesses with spray painted signs lined up on the left, a seemingly endless line of train cars stretched to the right. Downtown is a collection of '20s design and utilitarian brick buildings from the '60s. New suburban developments have taken over where corn and cotton fields had fallowed years ago, nestled against older post-war neighborhoods and oil refineries. Oil wells bob up and down in backyards. New freeways cut through town like asphalt rivers. Palm trees and tumbleweeds sway in the wind.
After spending the day with my aunt and cousins I drove my dad and myself eastbound to home, just like my dad drove my family back in the day. Bear Mountain and Tejon Ranch off the 58 were a welcome sight, but the best view of Bakersfield to most people (including me) is in the rear view mirror. The brown-gray haze faded back into the familiar rolling hills, and the rolling hills sprouted dozens of wind turbines, giant white pinwheels in neat rows standing in contrast to the deep brown of the hillside, as the landscape turned to desert beyond Tehachapi. The sycamores turned to Joshua trees, and they in turn became sagebrush by the time I got home.
Bakersfield isn't a pretty city. It's not the kind of city people dream of moving to, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, but a city you either learn to love, learn to survive, or learn to escape. There are a lot of cities like that in California alone; trying to reinvent itself, expanding for a growing population, full of people making a living or at least surviving, rural roots being taken over by the weeds competing for sunlight. Maybe it's being exposed to the pesticides and petroleum byproducts at an early age, or hearing that song from Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam since I was born, but there's something endearing about the streets of Bakersfield that make me both hold it in some reverence and avoid them like the plague if I can.
I was sitting in a McDonald's, staring out at the hazy horizon at the businesses across the road while I ate a cheeseburger, thinking about how excited I'd get to go to Bakersfield when I was a kid. My family would make the three hour drive from the Owens Valley once a month to visit my grandparents, so I spent many hours of my childhood in the back seat of a Suburban watching the desert floor of sagebrush and Joshua trees turn into rolling hills of golden grasses and sycamores, and then to miles of farm land that looked like a patchwork quilt from above. It was a departure from the norm, so I thought it was fantastic.
After my McDonald's lunch I headed west on Edison Highway. Scrap yards, shuttered buildings, and businesses with spray painted signs lined up on the left, a seemingly endless line of train cars stretched to the right. Downtown is a collection of '20s design and utilitarian brick buildings from the '60s. New suburban developments have taken over where corn and cotton fields had fallowed years ago, nestled against older post-war neighborhoods and oil refineries. Oil wells bob up and down in backyards. New freeways cut through town like asphalt rivers. Palm trees and tumbleweeds sway in the wind.
After spending the day with my aunt and cousins I drove my dad and myself eastbound to home, just like my dad drove my family back in the day. Bear Mountain and Tejon Ranch off the 58 were a welcome sight, but the best view of Bakersfield to most people (including me) is in the rear view mirror. The brown-gray haze faded back into the familiar rolling hills, and the rolling hills sprouted dozens of wind turbines, giant white pinwheels in neat rows standing in contrast to the deep brown of the hillside, as the landscape turned to desert beyond Tehachapi. The sycamores turned to Joshua trees, and they in turn became sagebrush by the time I got home.
Bakersfield isn't a pretty city. It's not the kind of city people dream of moving to, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, but a city you either learn to love, learn to survive, or learn to escape. There are a lot of cities like that in California alone; trying to reinvent itself, expanding for a growing population, full of people making a living or at least surviving, rural roots being taken over by the weeds competing for sunlight. Maybe it's being exposed to the pesticides and petroleum byproducts at an early age, or hearing that song from Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam since I was born, but there's something endearing about the streets of Bakersfield that make me both hold it in some reverence and avoid them like the plague if I can.
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