Introduction
As described here, my
wife and I did a 7,500-mile bike tour back in 1994. This was a totally ad hoc journey: we had no specific route, and never knew in
advance where we’d camp each night. Back
then, we lacked a great many technologies that would have greatly altered our
experience:
- Cell phones
- GPS
- Digital cameras
- The World Wide Web
- A lightweight laptop with a good battery
- Widespread Internet connectivity
The following dispatch concerns a day when we couldn’t find a
legal highway to ride on—the interstate abruptly became illegal, which
presented an interesting dilemma: if we
turned around, we’d be backtracking for hours, and would probably have to camp
at the site we’d left that morning, and then what would we do the next day? This was the desert Southwest, which didn’t
have a lot of highways to begin with.
Our quest ended up involving pornography, a chemical toilet, death, the
Center of the World, and a 6-year-old gunman.
No joke!
Searching for a Legal
Highway – March, 1994
Ever since leaving the Pacific Coast Highway, we’ve had
difficulty finding legal routes through southeast California and Arizona. The only route that shows on our map is
Interstate 8, which is sometimes legal and sometimes not. (In general, it becomes illegal if any
alternate route is available.) A day’s
ride west of Arizona, a California highway called Old 80 began nicely enough,
paralleling I-8 and offering reasonable pavement and little traffic. Eventually, however, the traffic and road
surface alike dwindled to almost nothing.
Huge cracks crisscrossed the road like veins on a bloodshot eyeball; the
only vehicle in sight was a military truck that never quite outran us, since
the hapless driver was forced to stop regularly to stabilize his load of wooden
pallets. (Where he was taking them, we
had no idea.) We crashed along behind,
ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, and I winced with every jolt as I thought of my
computer in the rear pannier, and its vulnerable hard drive.
After about fifteen miles of this, we decided to take a
break and refill our water bottles from the jug I’d been carrying on the back
of my bike. It’s an accordion-style
collapsible jug, and fit nicely under the straps that hold the sleeping bag,
tent, and ground pad to my rear rack. I
unstrapped it, and then . . . the horror!
It had been leaking all day long, out of invisible holes! We’d lost a good amount of water, and all
over our tent! My first instinct was to
douse the jug with Coleman fuel and torch it.
Once I’d gotten over the shock, of course, I was more reasonable: I decided to transfer the water to our other
jug, then douse the offending jug with
Coleman fuel and torch it. By the time
I’d transferred the water, I’d decided instead to return the evil jug to REI
and demand a refund.
[It’s hard to see in the above photo, but I’m holding up the defective jug.]
We continued riding: ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP. The abysmal pavement continued for another
twenty or so miles, before the road suddenly ended at a giant sand dune. Two signs were posted. One said, “Such and Such Landfill. No Trespassing.” The other was some kind of disclaimer about
using the sand dunes for recreation at your own risk. Next to a giant dumpster was a big RV, with
an old man sitting out front. Since we’d
just passed by an overpass, we decided that I-8 must be legal east of our spot,
since no alternate route was available.
We struggled over the overpass, only to find that all-too-common sign: “PEDESTRIANS BICYCLES MOTOR-DRIVEN CYCLES
PROHIBITED.”
Was this what fate had in store for us? Trapped, 40 miles into the desert, with
little water and no road? I began
devising my plea to the highway patrol officer who would ticket us for riding
on an illegal freeway: “Officer, we had
no choice. With too little water left to
turn around and go back, and no alternate roads, taking this highway was a
matter of life and death.” But I
anticipated his response: “Well then, I
guess a $250 ticket is a small price to pay, isn’t it?”
We rode back to the landfill and asked the RV man what to
do. As it turns out, his job was to sit
out there under the blazing sun and watch to make sure nobody threw anything
flaming into the big dumpster. He must
have been bored out of his mind, notwithstanding the porno mag he had tucked
under his arm, because he eagerly gave us instructions. “Ya see, this used to go through, and you
could take another off-ramp to the dunes, but the trouble was, people used to
take a shortcut across the interstate, see, and then this one fella, I think it
was maybe a year ago now, no—wait a minute—not quite that long ago, anyhow,
this fella was crossin’ the highway there with his daughter, and he motioned
for her to follow, but she wasn’t watchin’, or payin’ attention, or somethin’,
because she just sort of froze, you know, and didn’t get out of the way and
some guy in a car ran her right over.
Killed her. So they closed the
exit, and now what you gots to do, see, is go across, and you’ll have maybe
half a mile—no, wait, less, I dunno, maybe quarter mile—yeah, quarter mile—of
deep sand to go through, you’ll have to walk yer bikes, and then you’ll come to
this chemical toilet—”
“A what?” Erin interrupted.
“You know, a toilet, a chemical toilet.” We’d heard him right. “You get to that, and well as I said, quarter
mile, and anyway, from there there’s this barbed wire fence, see, and you’ll
have to get across it somehow, with your bikes, and as I said, a quarter mile,
and you’ll see this blacktop, and why that’s a frontage road, you see, take you
all the way down to the rest stop, maybe six or seven miles down, and from
there, well I’m not sure what to do. But
see, it’ll look like this.” He dropped
to one knee and began tracing a complicated map in the sand. On his map, I-80 looked like a nest of
snakes. He kept drawing more and more
roads, jabbering away all the while, looking like he might lose his balance and
flop right over on his map, since he was still keeping his porno mag pinned to
his side with his elbow. By the time he
was done, we had no idea which way to go.
Eventually, we did find the chemical toilet, the sand, the
barbed wire fence, and even the blacktop road.
The whole afternoon had taken on a surreal, dreamlike aura, and so I was
scarcely surprised when, off the side of the road, we came upon the Campground
that Wasn’t. A sign declared, “Welcome
to Such and Such Campground,” but there were no facilities whatsoever, just a few
outhouses. No picnic tables, no trees,
no water spigots, nothing but RVs and families standing around in the
sand.
We decided to stop and investigate further, and even in my
dreamlike state I was shocked to see a man and his son sitting in lawn chairs
playing with a large rifle. The man was
teaching his son, who could not possibly have been more than six years old, how
to shoot. (I envisioned the father
saying, “Son, how old are you now? What? Six years old already? Six years old and you don’t even know how to
shoot a gun yet? Come on over here son,
I’m gonna teach you. This here’s a
30.06.”) What their target could have
been, I have no idea.
Other children, also tiny, drove around the dunes on ATVs. I decided on the spot that if we camped here,
we would either be shot, or run over, or both.
After a very brief discussion, Erin and I rode away. As we did so, we saw an entire family
waving. “Bye bye,” cried the
mother. “Have fun, and take care!” We waved back, and Erin and I began
discussing whether or not I’d misjudged these campers. They did seem nice enough—but even still,
guns and ATVs in the control of small children give us the willies.
Eventually we reached the rest stop that the dirty old man
had mentioned, and just before the off ramp we could see, alongside I-8, a sign
stating “Bicycles must exit.” What was
this? How could they tell cyclists to
exit when they weren’t legally allowed on the interstate to begin with? It was like a sign stating, “If you’re
driving drunk, pull over and stop.” The
only possible solution was that the highway had become, at some point, legal
for bicycles. Never mind that we hadn’t
been given the opportunity to get back on.
We rode to the next on ramp, and I-8 was indeed legal for several miles.
At the next exit, we came upon another “Bicycles must exit”
sign, and exited. At the next on-ramp,
another sign said “PEDESTRIANS BICYCLES MOTOR-DRIVEN CYCLES PROHIBITED.” This time, there was a frontage road, but it
was barricaded off. “ROAD CLOSED,” read
the signs. By this time, the sun was low
over the horizon and we weren’t in the mood to find another chemical toilet,
another barbed-wire fence, another section of unmarked blacktop. We took that closed-off road for several
miles, until it reached the little town of Felicity.
Felicity is the strangest town I’ve ever seen.
We thought it might have a campground, since the sign for it, over on
I-8, seemed to have a picture of a tent.
When we strained our eyes, however, the picture seemed to be of a
pyramid. Our eyes, it turned out, had
not deceived us: in Felicity was a giant
pyramid, visible from our frontage road.
Near it was a spiral staircase leading absolutely nowhere, to
nothing. Strange flags, taller than they
were wide, dotted the town. The seven or
eight buildings were all a pastel orange color, and an elaborate city limits
sign declared Felicity to be “The Center of the World.” Its only businesses were a restaurant (inside
the pyramid, I believe), the Felicity Real Estate Center, the Organizatione de
Centrale du Monde, and the Center of the World Headquarters. In the waning sunlight, the place looked as
surreal as a Dahli painting. I should
have taken a picture.
[Of course nowadays we have the Web for this stuff. Needless to say that’s where I got the photos
below.]
That night we stayed at an RV park in Winter Haven, only ten
miles west of California’s eastern border.
We’d been worried about being turned away; instead, they had for us a
lawn and a picnic table, not to mention a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, and laundry
facilities. RV parks are amazingly
common in Arizona; the “snowbirds” frequent this place during the winter from
as far away as Canada, in order to escape cold weather. We have found RVers to be totally friendly;
the next night, in Wellton, Arizona, we met a pair of permanent RV dwellers, Berkeley
grads like us who spotted my Cal jersey and called out to us. They had us over for breakfast the next
morning. Thanks to them, we remembered
to reset our wristwatches to Mountain Standard Time, having completely forgotten as we crossed the
border into Arizona.
Epilogue
So what about that lousy defective water jug? I never did warranty it, but we did manage to
find a suitable replacement: a 10-liter
(2.6-gallon) collapsible jug called “RELIANCE” that worked like a champ! Here it is on the back of my bike, riding high. Note also the gallon can of Coleman fuel
lashed to my starboard pannier.
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