HUNTER S. THOMPSON, CHARLES MANSON AND THE SINKHOLES OF TRONA

By Cole Coonce
3/8/05

We were in the middle of nowhere. Having heard no news for a couple of days, it wasn’t like we could make informed decisions about travel plans back to Los Angeles.

I suggested we go back Sunday night, as Jack had a plane to catch out from Burbank to Seattle the next afternoon and why thrash to catch a plane tomorrow, if we can make time now? Yes, leaving Death Valley late Sunday evening seemed like a good idea at the time. But seeing as how we had no access to weather reports – there was no newspapers nor TV nor radio nor cell reception in our motel in Stovepipe Wells, and the parallel mountain ranges of the Sierras and the Panamints had sheltered us from the inclement weather that had been soaking the hapless flatlanders 200 miles away in Los Angeles County – it was not an informed decision, really.

“I can have us back in LA in three and a half hours,” I told Jack. I felt confident. From years of driving experience and miles of eating white line in the great Southwestern American desert, I knew the two-lane highways out there so well I once picked out Trona-Wildrose Road in a photo essay on motorcycles by the grain of the asphalt in the picture (!).

So we blew off the ninety bucks we had already spent on another night’s sleep at the Stovepipe Wells motel and hit the road.

As soon as we crested Towne Pass at 5000’, we entered the mother of all storms. The raindrops started innocuously enough, all right, and seemed to trickle down and tickle the windshield with no more malevolence than soap bubbles out of a corncob pipe. During our descent into the Panamint Valley, however, the shit began to hit the Osterizer…

Instantaneously, the rain kicked with the ferocity of a burro peaking on angel dust and I switched off the vintage punk rock on the CD player and switched on the AM radio. We needed weather information, so I began keying the “up” and “down” arrows from KFWB to KFI, the two stations with enough wattage to possibly penetrate hundreds of miles of a hostile ionosphere and dense mountain ranges that would work as earthly reflectors and bounce the radio signal back to Los Angeles like Marconi’s personal funhouse mirror.

In a word, we got static, and I cranked up the intensity on the Chrysler’s windshield wiper system until it threatened to swivel out of its socket. We were a mile high and descending a wet mountain buried in clouds, the radio told us nothing and I used the transmission as a brake. Jack, meanwhile, was freaking. He had lost his glasses that afternoon during an unpleasant encounter with a park ranger at Zabriskie Point, and he couldn’t see squat except the blurry bounce of headlights off of soaked asphalt, or if he put on his prescription sunglasses, he could at least focus on the darkness by Braille.

We took the left turn to Trona, and it really got desolate. We were on the desert floor, in the country where the mass-murdering Manson family had been discovered thirty years ago and where flyboys from China Lake crank up the afterburners on their military jets and pretend the specks on the highway are rogue, bandit Sunnis or Shiites or whoever it is we are mad at this week in Mesopotamia.

As a Seattle boy, Jack had never been to Death Valley before and knew very little of its mythology. Filling him in on the folklore, whether it was the exploits of the old silver miner Seldom Seen Slim or Squeaky Fromme seemed like a necessary device of distraction from how hairy it was to be driving to Los Angeles in the mother of all rainstorms. I was, after all, traveling with a blind man who was justifiably afraid of drowning. In the desert. In a car. It was that kind of night.