Boulder Dam

We're snaking through massive lithic skulls of gray and mauve. Berry plants and twiggy little bushes adorning the path; a little phalanx of huddled cactuses to our left. Now standing in the middle of the high desert, I see a sign posting no swimming in front of me a dried up marshy looking graveyard of dead and sun-torched trees. It's like beaches on Venus. The ribbed and ashen carcasses of wind-buckled shrubs scattered like whale remains ahead. Misplaced Angelenos all around me, not just the day-trippers, but the family caravans packed for a week. Maybe LA will look like this in 100 years, all dried up. I've reached the dam and I'm standing in the evaporated soil of the dried up reservoir. Staring up at a blackened wall of rock and chipped stone I get the vague sensation of being watched... Jimi and I just smoked in the van, maybe that's why, safari-spliff ride through the park to get things started in a bright way. James is passed out in the back after Johnnie Walker seems to have run with him, they went for a dizzying stroll under the stars, he'll be puking in the parapets. The desert is full of dangers but like Hunter Thompson said we are professionals. Our van got stuck on a soft shoulder of sand last night. The left rear wheel a foot deep in the grainy quagmire waiting beside the road like an underage hitchhiker. We tried to turn around on what looked like packed sand (Pakistan?) but it was cracked sand sucked us in, stuck in a rut after sun down, we were at the mercy of the desert, at the whims of her wild wind, goners for sure. Oh yeah my brother was driving Mark's Honda right behind us, but fuck we had a High Desert Test festival to get to, art to see, people to schmooze, margharitas to shake and slosh down. And then like a well-induced vomit on a velvety morning after we were rescued and spit out of the sand by the wings of Washington (not exactly): towed out by a jock in a pick up with Washington plates, he said he did it all the time, I felt the guy needed a good Samaritan Award or least a Desert rabbit Foot hanging from his mirror, maybe it'd save him some parking tickets