To Get Acrost

Needles Today

From my front door at the Budget Inn in Needles, a freight train heads west from the Needles Station.  Five diesel engines pull about fifty flatcars, loaded with containers, headed for Barstow, then Los Angeles.  Another engine pushes from the back.  Six engines are needed for the two thousand feet trains must to climb to South Pass in the next fourteen miles.  It’s the same grade I coasted down to this sleepy town along the Colorado River. 

When I had reached South Pass, elevation 2,600, yesterday’s day’s work was finally over.  I could see the green valley and Needles in the distance.

On a day of rest here, I rode just a mile to the Colorado River to see what it’s like for the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel, Grapes of Wrath, when they camped along its bank.  It was here that they pondered the last and most treacherous section of Route 66 from their Dust Bowl ruined farms in Oklahoma.

“The camp was quiet in the blinding heat, but the noises of hot grass—of crickets, the hum of flies—were a tone that was close to silence.”

“The sun hung low in the afternoon, but the heat did not seem to decrease.  It sank toward the baked and broken hills to the west.”

“[The cop] ‘called us Okies.  We don’t want you Okies settin’ down,’ he said.”

The shore of the Colorado River doesn’t look like that today.  It’s all private and commercial, designed for tourists.  

“Near 300 miles to where we’re goin’,”  and he meant the desert I crossed in the past few days, going the other direction.  They didn’t know if the old jalopy truck would make it up the hills in the summer heat, so they started in the evening..

“'We got to get acrost,' Ma said."

“’It don’t take no nerve to do sumpin when there ain’t nothing else you can do,’ said Al.”

“Up the long hill, through dead country, burned white and gray, and no hint of life in it. . . They topped the pass while the sun was still up, and looked down on the desert—black cinder mountains in the distance . . .little starved bushes, sage and greasewood.”

”’What a places.  How’d you like to walk acrost her.’ Al said.”

“’Lot’s a people done it; an’ if they could, we could.’”

“’Lots must a died.’”

“Dusk passed into dark; sharp stars came out in the soft sky, stabbing and sharp.”

“’I don’t think they’s luck or bad luck.  . . .only one thing I’m sure of, an’ that’s nobody got a right to mess with a fella’s life.  He got to do it all hisself.’”

“The truck moved over the hot earth and the hours passed. . . "It was near midnight when they neared Daggett, where the inspection station is." 

Of course, the inspection station is not there anymore.

I hope you see likenesses in these three crossings of the great Mojave Desert, and how a lone bicyclist might relate the them.