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by Jason Dietrich
Too often, the road to spiritual-transcendence is littered with dreams of sport-utility vehicles and ads for luxury ski resorts. So what do you do when you’re a 22-year-old house painter from Manhattan Beach, looking for escape and adventure, but without the cash for any of the high-ticket paths to freedom?
Gas up the car, grab a couple of friends and head out to the great western desert to live in the "Right Now," of course.
Granted, when you come from the beach cities, living in the "right now" is easier said than done. For starters, the great western desert is to the east. And since all the really spiritual destinations are out of a house painter’s price range, you’re forced to improvise. So with two strikes against them, Mark Sundeen and his cousins leave their paint brushes behind and set out for the West (heading east) in search of adventure and the liberation that comes with living in the "Right Now."
Road trip to nowhere
Roughly 99 percent of all Zen-inspired, spur-of-the-moment, budget desert adventures end the same way. A hangover, an all-night drive home, a deep seated aversion to wide open spaces, a story to laugh about at family reunions and a profound lack of any sort of spiritual fulfillment is all the travelers come back with.
The remaining one-percent end up with a radically different lifestyle and a publishing contract.
Mark Sundeen is in that one percent.
His
recently released first book, "Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures"
is a combination of Sundeen’s real-life, on-the-road western wanderings,
stitched together with a thread of fiction. Between earning degrees from Stanford
and USC, he traveled the West, describing his adventures in a column for the
local beach cities ‘zine "Great God Pan." The serial was called
"Car Camping: A Guide to Recreation in the Western United States,"
and depending on your personal definition of the word "recreation,"
the column head could be vastly misleading.
Instead of focusing on ferreting out the best snowboarding resorts and mountain biking trails west of the Colorados, Sundeen’s adventure column centered on driving around the Southwest, working minimum wage jobs and picking up hitchhikers. Occasionally the discourse veered off onto the backroads of frontier history, sketching the exploits of desert heroes and the ghosts of canyon legends. It was kind of an odd fit for the music magazine that Sundeen and his friend Erik Bluhm started in 1993 on a double digit budget.
The first issue was a 12-page stapled and photocopied leaflet that was made up mainly of articles cut out of popular music magazines from the ‘60s. When Sundeen moved back to Manhattan Beach from the Bay Area in ’96 and started selling ads full-time, the project slowly grew into a hundred-page full-sized glossy magazine, published at irregular intervals and covering local music and youth culture. Eventually, Bluhm grew more interested in writing about California ghost towns, obscure myths and western history than the indie-rock scene. Sundeen took up recreational road tripping more-or-less full time and the magazine’s focus shifted to reflect that change. "Great God Pan" slowly morphed into a chronicle of the West, past and present. The swing had a definite impact on its readership and Bluhm and Sundeen’s revenue stream.
"At that point I was sick of writing about pop culture and started writing about old legends like the ‘Lost Ship of the Desert’ and things like that. It took our advertisers a couple of issues to notice, but they caught on eventually. Apparently that sort of thing doesn’t have quite the commercial application our they were looking for. It just must not be as marketable as music reviews," said Sundeen.
Hopefully, "Car Camping" can be marketed a little better than the last few issues of "Great God Pan," which vendors sometimes discarded without even bothering to stack on the racks. The book starts off with Sundeen and his cousins, Shapiro and Donny Brown pointing their car towards the desert in search of adventure. Each of them has his own motive. Shapiro Brown is looking for his mother who ran off years ago. Donny Brown is trying to sort out his feelings about his troubled marriage to his San Francisco sophisto wife Annabelle. Sundeen is looking to do something besides paint condos for a while. Both of Sundeen’s companions end up going their separate ways, and he’s is left to sort out which path to take on his own. The first-person narrative centers on his self-conscious attempts to live in the moment and trying to get as "far away from everything as possible."
Money towns
As far away from everything eventually turns out to be Moab, Utah, a small town on the Colorado River that used to be one of the nation’s primary sources of uranium. Since the mines went bust, the primary hope for checking Moab’s economic tailspin has been adventure tourism. The town is trying hard to attract the kind of tourist dollars that keep property values high in chic resort towns across the west.
"With proper planning, Moab could have been a real upscale town like Taos or Santa Fe. But as it is it’s a collection of kind of tacky junk shops and motels. Which is why people like me can afford to live out there.
"Right now though, basically everyone there is either sells souvenirs, guides trips or runs a motel," Sundeen said.
In "Car Camping," Sundeen describes the transformation of the West from a backwoods frontier to the playground of the nouveau riche:
A lot of people from big cities are moving into spiritual towns like Sedona and Telluride, where they can be Themselves and get in touch with the Earth. A good spiritual town should have some Indians within 100 miles and good skiing or mountain biking within ten. The stores should sell turquoise bracelets and cappuccino and there has to be a place to hook up a modem.
Annabelle Brown’s sister had bought a vacation house in Telluride. She and her husband planned to live there when they were not on vacation. Now they were on their honeymoon in the Caribbean, so we stayed at their new house with the dog and the cat. The dog had a normal-size body but was so low to the ground that at first I thought that it didn’t have limbs. Finally I rolled it over and saw there were legs, after all, it’s just that they were short and only three of them.
The first thing we did after feeding the pets was walk around Telluride and go to all the stores. It was a clear spring day and the streets were wet from snowmelt.
"Isn’t it beautiful here?" said Annabelle Brown.
I could tell right away that it was a spiritual town. Some white people had dreadlocks. Though you didn’t see any actual Indians, real paintings of them were for sale in the store windows. There were fancy gingerbread houses and candy shops and the air smelled like popcorn. Lots of people walked along the main street shopping and laughing. It reminded me of Disneyland, except that everything cost more and there were no minorities.
Annabelle bought a silver bracelet, a pair of sunglasses, a book about wildflowers and a cowboy hat for me. She led me into an art gallery and I stood there while she told the owner about the gallery where she worked and about the painting she did when she could find the time. He had a suit. He had a ponytail. They got along well. He turned and asked if I was a painter too and I said yes.
"What sort of work do you do?" he said.
"Mostly interiors."
"When the clouds gathered, Annabelle took me to a brewery and ordered us raspberry-flavored beer and some fudge.
"Isn’t this good?" said Annabelle Browne. "It’s so unique."
"I have a stomachache."
"Then it started to rain. We went home and I got under the covers and lay there. Annabelle dressed and undressed and walked back and forth. Now that she had been to all the shops in Telluride she looked in the mirror and announced that everywhere in the world was the same and boring and she wanted to go back home to San Francisco. Then she said she loved me a lot, but she loved Donny Brown more.
"Me too," I said.
I turned over and pressed against the wall and tried to sleep.
"Who knows?" Annabelle said. "Maybe tomorrow it will be sunny and we can drink wine."
When I woke up in the morning, I saw that the cat had murdered a small bird and dragged it into the bedroom. She was batting at the corpse with her paw and downy feathers floated across the carpet.
Annabelle was still asleep and I went out the front porch. The last of the snow was melting in the sun.
Now that I was in the West I saw that it was a big place. I didn’t really have a strategy for finding Donny Brown. I tried to think what he would do in my situation, but that didn’t work because first of all Donny Brown would never have reason to go looking for anybody besides himself, and second he wouldn’t go sneaking around with his own wife.
But I wanted to do what Donny Brown would do. I wanted to do what was the most Right Now. I wanted an adventure. Looking up from the porch I was trapped by mountains and trees. I wanted my space empty. I looked at a road map and saw that the closest desert was New Mexico. The land of Enchantment, it said. By afternoon I had gathered my toothbrush and arranged to return in a few days to take Annabelle back to California. I followed U.S. 550 south, picked up a used tire in Durango, and soon the handpainted billboards in Cedar Hill welcomed me to New Mexico. Ice Cold Cider Ahead. Meat Processing Custom Slaughtering. It’s Better to Be a Square Than to Run in the Wrong Circles.
I kept watching the road signs like they would tell me where to go. The green ones were useless with the names of towns I’d never heard of. If I knew where I wanted to go, I wouldn’t need a road sign. The yellow ones had good drawings but gave no direction. Blue signs led me to a gas station in Aztec, but all the good stuff was on the brown ones. One brown sign told me that Aztec had won the 1965 All-American Town Award, another directed me to a national monument. I was looking forward to a cool air-conditioned government Museum with Indian pots and baskets and buttons to push that would trigger recorded stories, but when I got there the gate was locked and the park was closed so I kept driving.
I followed New Mexico 44 to the Nageezi trading post where a brown road sign sent me south to Chaco Historical Park. Soon I found myself careening claptrap down a washboard dirt road with the purple sun in front of me and a black wall of clouds behind. The thundershowers caught up and came thumping down on the dirt and riddled the dusty road with dark bullet holes. Each drop made a pleasing metallic plink against the roof of the Subaru.
By the time I entered the park it was dusk and a big moon glowed in the sky and the road wound steeply off the mesa. On the valley floor I stopped the car and looked around. The basin was surrounded by lumpy beige cliffs and dotted with shrubs and cacti. I didn’t see any other people. So far I liked it here.
I drove on to where the road turned to asphalt. There were cars parked on the side of the road and people looking at the cliffs through their windshields and kids scrambling over boulders. I wanted to go back to my deserted basin but also wanted to see what was ahead. It was easier to press the gas than make a U-turn, so I kept going. Around the bend was the glare of electric streetlights where a fleet of cars and campers slept in a concrete campground. I found the host at his motorhome and asked if there wasn’t someplace nearby where I could sleep for free and be alone. I was on an adventure.
"This county’s parceled off like a checkerboard," he said. "Some’s BLM, some’s reservation, some’s private."
His wife shouted something from the trailer that I didn’t catch.
"Some local Indians been taking pot shots at trespassers," he warned. "Better be careful."
I didn’t want to get shot so I paid the host five dollars and parked in a stall. It was a good looking place, tucked in the crook of a low flat mesa. The rock walls sheltered the camp from the blowing dust but also captured the hum of the streetlights and the growl of the generators. It didn’t seem very adventurous.
Once it got late and I thought I might be tired, I hefted my sleeping bag and a thick roll of egg-carton foam and marched up a loose slope to the top of the mesa. I lay down just far enough from the rim so that I couldn’t see the settlement down the hill.
I was away from everything now and I thought Donny and Annabelle Brown would be pretty impressed. It was quiet in the desert at night. I was in Indian Country. This was where people like me came to be spiritual. I lay there trying to drift into the stars but the moon was too bright and kept staring at me. Then I felt a spider crawling up my leg but when I unzipped my sleeping bag I couldn’t find it. That happened a couple of times and finally I dragged my bed to within sight of the electric campground below and settled down and fell asleep.
The Indians were the first people in the desert. They were very natural. In the old days before being discovered by the whites, they didn’t know enough to call themselves Indians. They had never even heard of India. They did a lot of weaving and dancing and searching the Earth for food. It’s funny that a race of people supposedly so in touch with the Earth spent all their time digging for roots and tubers and never thought to go skiing or whitewater rafting.
I thought I should try to appreciate them. In the morning I drove to the visitor’s center and asked the man in the ranger outfit behind the desk what there was to do.
He asked if I had paid the entrance fee.
"What do you mean?"
He repeated it and looked right at me.
"How much is it?"
"Three dollars."
I shoved my hands into my pockets like I was looking for something. I’ll be right back. My wallet’s in the glove box."
I walked to the car and drove away directly.
I followed the first road I came to and it led me to an archaeological ruin from some Indians. The ruins had been unearthed and partially restored and now you could sightsee them from a web of foot trails and informational signs. I knew that the broken stone walls were very spiritual because the Indians built them, and I walked around in a circle to try to get the best angle and have the deepest experience. But no matter where I stood, all I saw was a heap of broken stone walls. The signs explained that the people who lived there built houses, prayed to gods, and cooked food to eat it. Big deal I thought. That didn’t sound much more interesting that what people do today.
So instead of appreciating anything I just lay in the dirt like an idiot and watched the sheep clouds float across the wide blue sky and the morning shadows inch up the sandstone. A cool breeze smelled like sage. I knew it was wrong, but I wished that those ruins had never been found and there was nothing out here to appreciate, because then there would be no pavement and people and fees, just another drive-fast dirt road through the middle of the empty desert.
In the desert, you can’t remember…
Sundeen now lives full time Moab, Utah, sharing his house with an Australian cow dog and guiding trips for Outward Bound, an outdoor adventure-travel company that leads teens and adults on mountaineering, rock climbing and whitewater rafting trips throughout the West and Mexico. The pace of life in the wide open desert town of Moab was attractive because it reminded him of the laid back atmosphere and freedom of the beach cities decades ago.
"People don’t live there for the status. They help each other build houses and share produce when their trees bear fruit. That’s how it was here when I was growing up here in the ‘70s. But that feeling of community isn’t really here anymore," Sundeen said. "Besides, In Moab you can take your dog anywhere, into the bar with you if you want. When I first moved back down here I got a $103 dollar ticket for riding my bike with the dog on the leash."
But despite the close quarters and the curbs on personal liberty, Sundeen’s experiences in the beach cities and at Mira Costa High School in particular introduced him to some of the muses he would need to take the road less traveled by.
"I definitely learned more at Mira Costa than at Stanford. At Stanford they were very concerned with diversity and liberalism, but everyone was so well off it was hard to take them seriously," he said. "The best Mira Costa teachers were these traditional Roosevelt-style liberals that don’t seem to exist any more. Dr. Whirry had us reading Martin Luther King and the Berrigan Brothers, who were a couple of Catholic priests who opposed the Vietnam War. One of them ended up getting kicked out of the church and the other ministers to AIDS victims. It wasn’t until I got to Stanford that I realized how politically charged what I learned in high school really was," Sundeen said.
Before "Car Camping" hit the racks, Sundeen’s only resume bullets (other than house painter, record store clerk, and flower delivery boy) were as the managing editor of "Great God Pan," writing tutor at El Camino College and editor of Mira Costa’s newspaper, "La Vista."
Sundeen and Bluhm’s next journalistic project is an issue of "Great God Pan" focusing on the area around Utah’s Great Salt Desert, published more in the style of an academic journal than their previous endeavors. The two were able to get a grant to spend six weeks researching and writing about obscure figures in desert history, but the duo are still casting about for money to publish it. Sundeen is also in the earliest stages of writing a novel, set of course, in the desert, and looking for a part time job, possibly painting.
"After the tourists leave, work is kind of scarce in Moab. But then again, the rent is really cheap. It’d be nice to think you could make a living writing books, but I’m not sure I see that happening with ‘Car Camping,’" Sundeen said. ER