I'm on a 5-day geophysical survey for work down near Bakersfield. Coming into town on Monday, I wasn't sure if I'd ever been to Bakersfield before. Now I can affirm that I had not. It's an experience that lingers.
Our project area isn't actually in Bakersfield but in the nowhere nearby, about 20 miles away maybe, as the crow flies. We actually started out looking for a hotel in Taft, the closest dot on the map to where we'd be driving to everyday. As we rolled into the vicinity of Taft, I was staring out the passenger window of the company truck at flat scrubby desert. At this end of the valley, the hills should be visible on three sides of us, but hazy air pulls at them, showing through chunks here, obscuring them completely there. It doesn't lend to a feeling of openness but more a sense of distortion. The sun is hot but it feels darker than it should be. It's the haze, I suppose. Where does it come from, I wonder? Pollution from Bakersfield? Dust from the flat nothingness around us? Does it drift over the grapevine and crouch here?
The landscape itself is dotted with oil pumps, a sight unfamiliar to me since my childhood in Orange county. The marker posts leading us into Taft were church signs. The first baptist church of Taft welcomes you. Episcopal. Catholic. 7th Day. On and on. No buildings that I could see, just sign posts. 14 of them in all. The town itself, once we reached it, was full of boarded up buildings with open signs still hanging by rusty threads out front.
From Maggie's pickup in front of us, Lara's voice came over the radio. "Shannon, it's like a Stephen King book."
I picked up the radio from the car console, still looking out the window. "Yeah," I answered back through static, softly. "I read that book."
Stephen King wrote a pair of books awhile back, called Desperation and The Regulators. Rather interesting concept. The books came out about the same time. Each used the same characters in entirely different situations, like different lives or parallel universes. One of them, "Desperation," was quite good. It was set it a town, for which the book was named, in the no man's land of the Nevada desert. I don't remember exactly the description of the town of Desperation -- it may not match the description of Taft -- but regardless of the details, this place feels like that town, if you can dig that.
A look at our project area only cemented this feeling. Our project straddles two "towns" out near Taft, each with a population of around 100 and indistinguishable from each other. A stretch homes along the highway. Houses with dirt yards. Trailers with confederate flags flying. Boarded up shacks that look as though they ought to be condemned, though somehow you got the feeling that they were occupied. A cow nosing around for weeds growing up through what used be the bed of a pickup truck, rusting into the ground. No one outside. One of the girls on the crew says something about a twilight zone episode, seen long ago in childhood.
We move on. We'll stay in Bakersfield tonight.
Our field work over the next few days was beset with problems. Just about every piece of equipment we had that ran on batteries went flat. The GPS units, despite good satellite coverage, were confused. A power inverter went out for no apparent reason. We actually snapped an axle on the rig and tore a wheel clean off, plodding back through loose grey silt that sank you down past your ankles to retrieve the parts. It took two trips and both trucks to haul out the gear. By now, our whole system is being held together by a generous application of electrical tape.
The whole area is grey. Sometimes loose silt, sometimes hard-packed and full of foxtails and tumble weeds and brambles above my head that tear and scrape. Here and there, on dirt roads we found litter and bits of rubbish people had dumped. A couple of old couches. A pile of tin cans, mostly rusted through. At the eastern extreme of the project area, the fields changed. Full appliances like washing machines, mountains of old tires, filing cabinets, car parts, vcrs now not only dotted the landscape but became it. We hiked out to the area after the geophysical equipment had been through with the idea of mapping in any debris that might give out anomalous readings. We quickly gave up on this exercise as futile, such was the extent of the rubbish. More interesting that the garbage were the holes. Clearly man-made pits here and there with odd geometries, for no apparent purpose. We collected what data we could and bailed as soon as possible. Skirting the houses on the edge of the field even though the dirt road behind them would have been an easier walk than backtracking through the vegetation and soft earth. It felt safer.
Back in my hotel room tonight, I stepped into the shower hoping to wash the project off me. We're done now. Heading home tomorrow morning. I washed half the desert down the drain. The other half is outside the bathroom door in my boots. Grey, powdery, sticking to me like this weird desolate feeling I haven't been able to shake since we got here.
I missing my home. I want to kiss my husband and bury my face in my cats' fur. (Ben smells like dirt, but not this desert powder the color of nothing. Ben smells like the dark brown earth under the tomato beds in my yard. He smells like sunshine and grass. Meeko smells like baking flour, soft and clean. Always has.) I'm feeling the need to touch back to something familiar. Something comforting. Sunshine on the back patio. A cup of tea with my neighbor. The comforting clutter of my sewing room.
Wish me safe travels. I'm coming home.