The morning after the Elections we set off down Interstate 5 past the unmoving windmills of Altamont Pass, fields strewn with ruined fruit, dusty hazy powerlines and signs declaring “Congress Caused the Dust Bowl”

…which was news to me as I’d always assumed 100 years of water mining, industrial agriculture, pesticides and the recent drought had done it. On the other hand, all the foregoing save the drought were in some way exacerbated politically, so I suppose that’s true, but I think the Constituency is more likely to feel that the current Triumphs of the Right now dictate that with the proper party in power the rain will, as it previously followed the plow, follow the pols and we can look forward to a wet wet winter in the nick of time.

Back when the road was new [the gas stations weren’t even in yet!] the bright glare off the stark new concrete along this previously untrafficked edge of the valley was astonishing. The glare remains, but so occluded by poisonous dust neither hills nor the mountains at the southern end appear until they suddenly loom like a flat scrim out of the murk…forty years of progress.

Rising above the dust’s bowl skies became brilliant blue; L. and I were on our way to the opening of our good friend Larry Sultan’s posthumous retrospective at LACMA, an exhibition definitely worth the trip, despite Beverly Hills’ darting angry Audis and shockingly ill-maintained streets…

We turned around the next morning, nearly ruining the front suspension in a Sunset pothole heading for the freeway and turned north. Maintaining the infrastructure [as opposed to endless wars and a vast privatized incarceration industry]; what good is that that?  Jobs?  Bah.

Again up through the faith-based dustbowl and past the still still windmills of Altamont to our own strangely-for-November hazy “North”, geographically, really, the center of the state….

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