THE TAYLOR HORDE GRAND TOUR/FORCED MARCH 2006

“This is not a vacation,” Robin bellowed. “This is not a vacation for me. The screaming, the yelling, the fighting, this is not a vacation. I get two weeks off a year. Two Weeks. You get off three months in Summer, your father gets six weeks a year. I get two weeks, two weeks, and trapped in this RV with you shrieking monsters is not a vacation. I could be at work and get more rest than this. I cook, I clean, I do laundry here just like I do at home. If you people don’t stop, I swear, we’ll go home right now. And when we get home, I’ll sell the RV and be done with it. I’ll never take another vacation with the lot of you again.”

This was at Victorville, Friday night, first night out. Variations of this speech would be presented to the children almost every day for the next fourteen days as the Family Summer Vacation of 2006 wore on. I was not immune. I was assured that I was as much a part of the problem as the children were.

With me working overtime for roughly a year, equating to an extra paycheck a month, I was hoping the trip would be well-financed. A great deal of that money was spent on the RV itself, but I hoped that when the children saw a souvenir they wanted, we would judge it on its merits and not on whether we could afford it.

I took a week off in May just to assess the things we needed, wanted, for the 2006 Vacation. I made a list of places we were going through, things we might want to see, RV parks along the way we might stay at. I had another week off before we left, where I finalized reservations, worked extensively on our nineteen year-old Bounder RV, loaded wood and charcoal, tools and water, worked on the Onan generator, oil and filter change for it, minor adjustments. I changed the engine oil and filter, transmission fluid and filter, gear splitter fluid. I tried to replace the water pump, something I’d become convinced was beginning to fail from our trip to the Petrified Forest, the year before. Couldn’t do it in time, grimly resigned myself, reassembled, and replaced the radiator fluid. I bluntly said a prayer: “Lord, not as I would have it, but your will.”

Robin loaded every niche and cranny in the cabin with juice, soda, beer, wine, food, clothes. Though shopping trips were inevitable, staples were covered. When we left that night on Friday, Last week of June, right after Robin had gotten off work, we’d never been so overloaded. If all my preparations were not thwarted by fate or oversight, we would be on the road for the next two weeks. It would be the longest vacation we’d taken on the road, ever. In fact, twice as long as any trip before.

Months before, I had started a loose itinerary: Home to Pahranagat Wildlife Refuge, to Ely, to Cobre, to Lucin, to Elko, to Tonopah, to our twenty acres near Wikieup, to the Grand Canyon via the train from Williams, back to Wikieup, to Cibola Wildlife Refuge along the Colorado River, to home. I figured 2400 miles. I would not figure until later how that works out to 171 miles a day. Averaging 50 miles an hour, considering uphill climbs, road work, gas and pit stops, that’s three and a half hours a day trapped in a thirty-four by seven-and-a-half foot cabin with a wife, three children, and two full-sized dogs,. What deluded me to think that the concept of ‘vacation’ could be crammed into that cabin with us was, we’d done it before. There’s a refrigerator, stove, running water, a complete bathroom, two, count ‘em, two television sets, a library of DVDs, VHS tapes, desert books, kid books, National Geographics, beds to nap on. Still, grinding up the Grapevine east of Los Angeles, another thirty miles out from Victorville, I heard from the one child who should have known better, Alex the Eldest, “Are we there yet?”

The essential crux of these adventures, the pretext for going to places in far-flung and remote locations over the Western Deserts, is roughly a hundred and twenty acres, in ten to forty acre lots, that we have bought over the internet, sight unseen, during the last few years. The justification for buying these lands is covered elsewhere, but we own them, pay paltry property tax compared to the one-acre lot our home sits on in Crest California. The biggest lot of land lies not too far away from Cobre in Northern Nevada. This is one of the most remote locations in America that’s not a national forest or wilderness area. About forty miles due east we’ve got a ten acre lot in Utah near Lucin. These lands are goals, I have always figured the adventure was to be found getting there and back.

Three things stood out as ‘items of essential interest’. The ‘Ghost Train’ at Ely, which is the old Northern Nevada Railroad Museum, The Mine Museum in Tonopah, and the Grand Canyon via the steam powered train from Williams. There’s other things along the way, ghost towns, unexplained anomalies I see on the topography maps, things we’ve seen on the previous trips that looked like they needed investigation. All if we had time.

A modification occurred at the last moment. Instead of leaving early Saturday, and starting the vacation with a forced march to Pahranagat, roughly four hundred miles, eight hours of driving, we decided to leave Friday evening after Robin got off work, and make it to Victorville, then leave bright and early from there, arriving in Pahranagat early enough to check the area out.

Up until this point, the only RV Parks we’d stayed in had been Kampgrounds of America, KOAs, and while I’m not too impressed with them, they’re head and shoulders above Esteban RV Park in Victorville. I won’t dwell on it, but this is where a seed got planted. On the way out the next morning, I noted that it would have cost us five dollars to have filled our fresh water tanks at Esteban. I could have parked on the street and been just as happy.

DAY ONE, SATURDAY: VICTORVILLE TO PAHRANAGAT

On I-10 headed due east for the Nevada state line, it got hot quick. It was above a hundred, not even noon. Robin wiped furiously at her eyes. It had started yesterday climbing up the Grapevine.

Robin has awful eyesight. When she wore glasses they were the proverbial Coke Bottle Bottoms. Contacts work much better, simply because they’re a consistent distance from the cornea whether she’s looking straight forward or to the side. Sometimes when we’re out hiking or camping, she chastises the kids to pick up their feet, don’t shuffle through the dirt kicking up dust that gets in her eyes and ultimately underneath her contacts. The irritation is God-awful pain for her. Then she has to take he contacts out and soak them, leaving her close to blind.

This had never happened before in the Bounder, though, so my first thought was tthat dust was being stirred up in the cabin, which was demoralizing, since I had spent a whole day the week before cleaning the interior of the Bounder.

I had vacuumed the carpet, washed the walls, steam-cleaned the drapes and shampooed the upholstery. Even so, Robin casually threw out as she’d been loading supplies, “I thought you said you cleaned in here.”

Sure enough, I hadn’t vacuumed up the window rails, where dried carcasses of flies and bugs had accumulated .

One of the reasons for the cleaning, besides dust and grit potentially torturing Robin’s eyes is, that every time we come back from an RV, whether its an over-nighter in the Mountains or a week-long trip, everyone seems to come down with flu or cold symptoms a week later. I had become so obsesses with sterilizing everything I could that, besides wiping the roof and walls down with Pine-sol, I also had poured a gallon of chlorine into the fresh-water tank, filled it up, then, over the months before this trip, had pumped the chlorinated water through all the faucets at least once a week to make sure that every water outlet except the toilet was sterilized. That week before this trip, I had drained the water off, refilled it, then drained it off again before refilling it for the last time. The twins did me one better by getting into the Bounder at some point and leaving the rear sink running until the gray water tank was brimming. I wasn’t going to start the trip with the gray tank overflowing, so I was resigned to taking the RV down to a dump station. Since I was going to do that, I drained off water into the black tank until it was full, so that, not only was my potable water tank sterilized, so was my black and gray tanks.

Despite this, that first night out, everyone complained that the water stank of chlorine. Baths were oily with it. Apparently it had permeated the plastic of the water pipes and we would be in Tonopah, eight days from now before my people stopped complaining about it.

“Good thing we brought bottled water,” Robin caustically pointed out. Buying bottled water had been Robin’s answer to everyone getting sick, as well as remembering to bring the kid’s vitamins, something we’ve always forgotten to do.

Now Robin’s eyes were tormented again by something we had no control over. It was much worse than ever before.

She leaned over to me as I drove, handing me a water.

“Think it’d be okay to fire up the generator, get the air conditioning going?”

Hell, yeah. Besides closing the place up and maybe helping her eyes, the kids were already working themselves into a frenzy. They hadn’t been all that great getting to Vicotrville, but now it was like some kind of mass hysteria. I assumed it was a combination of excitement at the beginning of a trip, and heat. There was nothing I could do. Driving the Bounder is a full-time job. Robin’s speech from the night before seemed to have been forgotten by everyone, including Robin.

“Whoa, look’t that. Came right on.”

I looked over to see the dull orange signal on the gen-set, smirked a bit. We’d been having trouble with the power coming on in a timely fashion, and I’d advanced the RPMs on the generator’s engine just a notch. It seemed to have solved all the problems, while I worked on it at home. The gen-set started quicker, stayed on, and the power became available almost immediately, so I didn’t tell Robin to wait for the ‘PONG’ sound or lift the door that showed the control panel where the little red light comes on with the ‘PONG’. I could sense her fiddling with the unfamiliar front A/C controls.

“It won’t come on.”

Not even a little. The yellow light had extinguished. She pressed the remote starter again. Zilch, zippo, nada.

We were coming into Las Vegas, where we intended to top off our tank so we could cruise all the way to Ely without having to worry about gas. We pulled into a Pilot station at the eastern end of town, and started to fuel up. We only needed a little more than half a tank, but that’s sixty gallons, and at a disappointing 2.91.9 a gallon. I’d been hoping for much better than that after we got out of California. We were getting great mileage, 6.191 miles to the gallon. Five miles to the gallon has been the norm.

We pulled around back to where the eighteen-wheelers park. I got out and popped open the cover on the gen-set. Tried to start it from the starter there. No Joy. I checked the fuse. Blown.

I had a box of fuses, stuck in a new one. The starter cranked, bounced the gen-set around, then died. The fuse had blown again.

I popped open the hood. I was looking for something grounding out, but what I discovered was a wire that had snapped its ring and was disconnected from the house batteries. I reconnected it, confident that, for some reason, that was blowing the fuse.

I was down to my last AGC-5A, the family was sweltering in the RV while I fiddled. I stuck the glass tube in, pushed around some wires, hit the button, and blew the last fuse.

There was some discussion about finding more fuses, but I made the call. Either we were getting to Pahranagat, or going home. Having new fuses wasn’t going to fix this problem anyway. Surely you can buy AGC 5A fuses anywhere. There was a short, a ground somewhere. It seemed to my simple mind that it had to be in the starter button, the remote starter button, or the electric wires to the starter. The fact that the starter bucked for a second before the fuse blew implied to me that it wasn’t fried. Besides, there wasn’t the smell of a cooked motor.

Going home was unthinkable. Pahranagat was maybe a hundred miles away. We were there in two hours, roughly one thirty.

Straddling the boundaries of the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts, Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge is four miles south of the farming community of Alamo. It is desert before you get there, it is desert after. It’s not the desert we’re used to. The Great Basin is flat and covered with monotonous purple sage, with only an occasional startling stir of the landscape, a spasm of upturned ground, signs of volcanic convulsion. This makes Pahranagat all that much more of a shock, when you hit all that green and water.

Pahranagat is Paiute for ‘Valley of Many Shining Waters’. This was part of the trip that I hadn’t planned out too much. We had driven by the Upper Lake the last time we’d gone to Cobre two years before, and had seen what looked like camping spots right there at an honest’t’God lake, right along the highway. I’d written the Refuge and asked about reservations, and Linda Miller wrote back, saying it was first-come, first-serve, no fee ‘at this time’, and she sent me a pile of brochures, mostly about NWR’s nowhere near where we were going, but one was about Upper Lake.

We pulled off where it said ‘Upper Lake’, and drove back a mile along a dusty road to a set of pull-through camping spots that sit right on top of the water. It was a hundred seven degrees Fahrenheit.

I went through the set-up procedure. First you get the leveler out with the little bubble that shrinks in the heat. (I keep it in the refrigerator), then you tighten up the hydraulic drain valve, then hit the button that powers down the three levelers, one in front, two right behind each of the rear wheel assemblies. Robin calls them ‘anchors.’ More modern units have four jacks, but I don’t know why. Modern units also level automatically, some electronic chip calculating it all. With my rig, I wait until I feel all three legs touch down, then calculate which leg needs to be higher to put the cabin in plum, close the valve or valves to the legs that I’m satisfied with, (There’s four valves altogether next to the driver’s seat on the floor) then hit the button again, raising the chosen leg. The reason you need the cabin level, besides the comfort of people walking around in it, is that the closer to level you can get, the better the absorption refrigerator works. The hot water heater, the central heat, the stove and oven, everything works better when the rig is even, but it’s the refrigerator, with no moving parts, that’s dependant on gravity to make its unique method of cooling work.

The lake itself, as well as several other small lakes and wetlands further south, were created in 1963, and are now a major stopover point for migrating birds. The cottonwoods and willow trees that grow around the lake are green and verdant, the air thick with the smell of water in the desert, and yet somehow dusty as well. Though it was a Saturday afternoon, we were the only ones there.

I worked as quickly as possible in the oppressive heat, hoping to release the impatient multitude out of this pressurized cabin.

“Done,” I pronounced as I killed the engine.

The Horde poured from the sweltering fiberglass box of an RV like a howling beast of angst. Wading through the wailing demands of the twins for swimming clothes, the eldest weeping over the location of his own trunks, I ran the lines so the dogs could get out.

“You can’t swim in the water. You can wade up to your ankles,” the mother announced. “Okay, knees, but no further in than that.”

I struggled to get the pop-up canopy in place. The original awning the Bounder possessed had been torn from its mounts, we were told, in a desert sandstorm at Glamis. Considering the coke spoon, spare bong screen and cracked mirror we found in the initial clean-up of the Bounder, anything was possible. Instead of replacing the awning, we decided to get a pop-up. It’s more versatile, and it cost a whole lot less.

Robin unloaded and unfolded chairs and little wood tables, and after the initial circus riot had abated, I poured her a wine, and got me a beer. We waded a bit with the kids, more to make sure there wasn’t broken glass on the floor of the lake, but it made the temperature more bearable all around.

Solitude. Despite Highway 93 being just above us, despite the chaos of the child-mob rolling about the camp, peace descended upon us like the Holy Spirit.

Robin urged the kids to get out their squirt guns, which are those water cannon things, ‘Super Soakers’-clones. Hope I’m not violating some sacred registered trademark by using that term. That lasted maybe ten minutes before Nick was howling at the injustice of it all, that Alex’s gun could punch gouts more water out than his own device.

“The whole idea is to get wet, Nick,” Mom calmly pointed out. His parent’s inability to appreciate the depth of this inequity was too great for Nicholas, and he melted down like a piece of ice in the sun, right there on the astro-turf laid out in front of the RV steps to keep down the dirt tracked in.

All my children have studied at the William Shatner School of Shakespearean Tragic Acting. Like partakers at a Bible Belt Revival, they can work themselves into a frothy frenzy in no time. Grabbing them and pulling them apart does not break the spell. I have stood there sharply speaking, “Nick! Alex! Do you hear me! Acknowledge that you hear me!”

Kellian is not as bad as the boys, although she has her moments. She manipulates the situation. I prefer that to just rank screaming. At least for now, she’s my Golden Girl.

I like to say that Nicholas is bi-lingual. He speaks both Shoshone and Klingon. Unfortunately, there’s some real doubts about whether he speaks English. His speech impediment only seems to be outdone by his total lack of interest in fixing it. The school wanted to hold him back a year. He was looking at flunking kindergarten. But the research shows, you can’t do that to a twin and not expect both siblings to suffer psychological trauma. Nick would see his twin sister eternally in a grade ahead of him. With all the pabulum the school officialdom wants to slather on it, you and I both know he would see himself as a failure, and since the schools do not advance a child any more, even working hard to catch up would be futile. Kellian would eternally feel guilt for having left Nick behind. Holding Kel back would guarantee that she’d be bored out of her mind in class, and that always spells trouble. Then, there’s a curious twist; while Nick often can’t recognize certain numbers, apparently forgetting and re-remembering ‘seven’ and ‘nine’, he can consistently add and subtract, and he volunteers an enthusiastic dissertation on his understanding of DNA whenever anyone asks him. When his kindergarten teacher told me about this, she did not seem so much impressed as scared.

“Put the guns away,” Robin ordered. “Put ‘em away until you can play nice with them.” (Alex had violated the sacred rule of No Shooting Above The Neck, but with the Water Bomb option on his particular contrivance, you have to aim at someone’s knees not to get their face.)

“Take the dogs for a walk,” Robin commanded. “Get out of my sight for awhile.”

We sat in the shade of our canopy, heard the children screaming and bellowing, now far, far away. I noted the disparity of the country. The lake side of the dirt road was the desert greenery of an oasis, flat and human-processed, and on the other side of the road, rugged, rocky, with paddle cactus and Joshua Trees, and later I’d find rusty tin cans piled in the rocks toward the highway’s fence line.

“So how bad off are we without the generator?” the wife asked.

“No air conditioning,” I start, “No microwave, no AC power when we’re not on shore power. Can’t charge all the battery packs we’ve got going.” (Quick count: we had five battery powered devices plugged in.)

“What about the house batteries?”

“Engine alternator charges them while we’re driving.”

“So we could just run the engine to keep the house batteries charged. Ooh, but no TV.”

“Don’t need the generator for the TVs.”

“You told me the generator had to be running to watch TV.”

I looked over at her.

“No, they’re DC. They run off the house batteries.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

There had been an instance, camping in the Anza-Borrego, where the only thing that seemed to keep the TVs on was running the gen-set. I realized later that the TV DC cords were the wrong ones for those appliances. They heated up and the TVs shut down. I ordered the right ones from the manufacturers, problem solved. I’d told Robin about it. I tell her about everything that costs money, so I didn’t repeat all this. Instead, I just said,

“They’re DC.”

“AC, DC,” she countered dismissively. “That’s not what you told me.”

I sighed.

“And we can’t grind coffee.”

Robin groaned.

“We have to go home then.”

“We can grind coffee while we’re in the RV parks,” I pointed out. “Package it up like we did when we tent camped.”

Robin pondered this observation, then nodded.

“We don’t need the generator, then. It’s a luxury, we’ll miss it, but we don’t need it.”

“Maybe there’s someone in Elko who can fix it,” I added.

With that, we settled into our chairs and watched the sun ease toward the western horizon.

It just crossed my mind, we have never thought to buy a can of ground coffee, freshly ground coffee beans are so ingrained in our psyche, I’ve never heard Robin even mention it.

The host came by, checked to make sure our dogs were on leashes, shared the gift of gab.

“Where is everybody?” I asked. “We’re all alone.”

“Almost,” he countered. “There’s some people down at the other end here to the south. People just don’t know about this place. I stumbled across it by accident myself. Figured I’d stay awhile. Here I am a year later.”

It turned out the host is from Chicago. Considering the temp had been at a hundred and seven and was still in the triple digits, this had to have been a major cultural shock.

The kids returned, more tired, a little less noisy. They went back in the water, with care now, since the host had spoken of something called ‘Swimmer’s itch”, which apparently is some kind of water-born parasite.

The sun set, but we had light until after nine, and all the while it cooled.

We would be travelling a hundred fifty-one miles to the Ely KOA tomorrow. We rounded up the rug rats and went to bed, but not without the wife saying, “We could have spent a week here.”

There’s trails, all sorts of signs of past civilizations here including petroglyphs, a bird population like nowhere else, ghost towns and ruins, mines and just vistas and mountains to look at as the sun or moon casts new shadows across them. Yes, we could have spent a week there. What the Taylor Horde has got to start doing is taking the whole summer off. Another demonstration of my need for an alternate means of income.

That night it was a new moon. The stars seemed blurred with the haze that hung over the water. Something woke me in the night, a woman’s voice outside. It was loud.

I also hung in a haze. I crawled outside, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to wake the wife and kids.

There it was, a woman’s voice speaking passionately in Spanish. Someone camping nearby, I thought. The cadence, the anguish seemed pointedly contrived. I’ve never heard a Novella, the Mexican version of a soap opera, but that’s what crossed my mind as I listened to the long monologue the woman gave.

But it wasn’t from the sides of us. The campsites line the east side of the lake The voice came from across the lake, maybe to the right, the north. The trebling hysteria in the ardent diatribe ended suddenly with a sob. I don’t know if I just imagined it or not, but I thought I heard a very soft male voice in response, urbane, detached, a hint of humor in the tone. Though I can’t even say for sure I heard the male voice, I imagine it was not condescending nor taunting, more like an acting coach directing some Hispanic student in delivery.

And she started again. Its times like this I really kick myself for not mastering the second language of my part of the country, studying German and Chinese in school instead.

Maybe someone was watching a movie. The camp host had made mention Mexicans like Parhranagat. But it wasn’t coming from a camp. There may have been a light there to the north, but I didn’t have my glasses on. The female continued her melodramatic monologue. I grew bored and went back to sleep. The next morning while loading the astro-turf , I looked out to where I’d thought I’d seen a light. Across the water, there were only reeds, not even a trail, let alone a campsite.

It wasn’t until we got home, sitting on the patio, that I asked Robin if I’d told her the story of the Sobbing Woman. She blandly answered yes, I’d told her, but Kellian, the daughter leaned into me, and in her five year-old voice whispered, ‘A ghost.”

While we stayed free at Pahranagat, according to the host, there is an ‘iron ranger’ standing by, and in short order it will cost at least something to camp at Upper Lake. It would have to be a substantial fee to make it not worthwhile to stay at APahranagat. It would make a nice place for a group of denizens of a certain desert message board to rally at. If you want peace and solitude, though, you might want to make sure the Taylor Horde is not there at the time of your visit.