Death Valley

December 19, 2018

It's fun to stumble across the eccentric.  We never claimed to be normal and I hope we never settle to it.  If you call us friends, chances are that you are a little strange too.  This is because quirkiness is the north to our compass.  We gravitate to it and are never, never sorry for it.  I'm happy to report that we did discover a beautiful story in the middle of Death Valley.  I only wish I had found this place 10 years ago.



We did go to Death Valley.  And truth be told, it deserves its own post.  I can't begin to describe it. A truly transporting experience.  But incredibly, our hotel experience was so surprising to me, that it nearly overshadowed my adventure there. In a good way! When does that ever happen? 


So here is another tip for traveling ...
When it comes to lodging, take some risks. 
You almost never die and it usually pays off.  I bet you don't remember a single night you ever spent in a Hilton  or Days Inn.  Those nights disappear.  They are gone.  They never happened. This experience, on the other hand, will always be with us.

In the tiny town of Death Valley Junction, population of three, is the obscure Amargosa Hotel and Opera House.  So as not to disappoint, I will tell you now that this is not a hotel review.  I won't even mention whether the furnishings were "dated" or whether housekeeping needs to "step it up".  I won't be discussing the continental breakfast or the lack thereof.  (Although...I will mention that it does have a community fridge and toaster oven.  Only because I wish I had known that!)  I won't be listing the hotels pros and cons because this is not a hotel.  This is a story.  And all stories have a beginning, so first, we have to go back.

 The Amargosa sits entirely alone at a desolate crossroads.  You need to know this because you need to get a sense of what Marta Becket experienced the first time she came across it.   This woman, a young gorgeous New York ballerina, was touring Death Valley in the 1960s and got a flat tire. She peered into the hazy windows of a tiny dilapidated theatre across the street (the only other building in the town) and saw her future.  She believed that her lifelong dream of running her own theatre was here, in the middle of this desert.  She rented the theatre and spent the rest of her life renovating it and performing for curious desert dwellers and occasional passersby.  In this remote desert, most nights would bring no audience, so this inconceivable woman spent six years painting an audience in the theatre.  When the actual seats were empty she danced for the kings, queens, monks, nuns, and commoners that she had thrown upon her walls.   Eventually, word did get out.  How could it not? Newspaper articles were written and documentaries were filmed.  She ultimately did get her audience and continued to perform in her theatre well into her 80s. Her last show was comically titled "The Sitting Down Show" where she performed, sitting down.  She lived a worthwhile life doing exactly what she loved, whether anyone noticed or not.  Marta, the spirit behind this town, died at the age of 92, last January. She was gorgeous, tenacious, talented and very quirky. Exactly who I want to be when I grow up.  

There is so much more to her story and I won't even try to relay it all to you.  I will just encourage you to look her up.  You will be fascinated, I promise.  I really wanted to get some great photographs of her paintings inside the theatre.  Unfortunately, it was very dark and difficult to do.  And in true Hill Family fashion, we just happened to show up on the day that someone was filming a documentary about the place.  So every time we turned around to take a picture during our tour of the theatre, there was a camera crew two feet away from our faces.   So just look it up!  Her murals are something to see.

Marta painted all the backdrops, made the costumes and wrote all the choreography for her one woman shows.

After she spent four years painting the walls, she spent another two painting the ceiling.

We spent one night in her hotel, an old Pacific Coast Borax Company dormitory which adjoined the theatre.  Though she has been gone for nearly a year, her marks are everywhere.  Like her theatre, she used the hotel walls as another canvas. She had promised to include, along the wall, the portrait of anyone that donated to help restore the building.  One particular portrait, halfway down the hall especially drew our attention. On the wall is a meticulously painted but empty frame.   The girls and I came up with all kinds of theories as to why she would paint a frame with such care and then leave it empty.  Had vandals painted something obscene which had to be painted over?  Had she died before getting to finish it?  The lady who ran the front desk finally gave us the real story, which was so much more endearing.  The donor wanted to stay anonymous.  So, in tribute to him, she painted a frame and left it blank.  Intentionally.  And 50 years later, it is still there.  An empty frame in the wall for a man that shared her vision.  I love this woman.  I wish I could have met her.

 The hotel is supposedly haunted, according to the local lore.  I'm a sap for anything creepy, so this was not a deterrent for me at all.  And while I didn't experience any covers being pulled from me in the night or hear the cries of children or parties in the great room, I will admit that the long halls ARE creepy.  The end of the main hall is  boarded up, painted and covered with a mirror.  Behind the mirror is the unrenovated, purportedly haunted section of the motel known as "Spooky Hollow".  Not going to lie....I walked briskly past that corner and didn't turn around while I did it.  So, no, I didn't see any ghosts, but I legitimately hoped that Marta was there in some kind of spirit, flittering up and down the colonnades. I liked to think about her there in all those hard won and loved details she left behind.  

Hidden behind this mirror, another long hallway...Spooky Hollow

I don't love hotels.  But this is not a hotel.  This is a story.  And I do love stories. From the hotel's infancy as a miner's dormitory to it's maturity as Marta Becket's dream.  Now that Marta is gone, the Hotel is still being maintained.  Only time will tell if someone else will love it like it she did.  So go now, while you still have the chance.  There is nothing like it.


So yeah!  I didn't forget.  We went to Death Valley!  Here's my temporary plug till I get around to visiting it again and giving it the attention it deserves.   I know that people are not typically dying to visit Death Valley National Park...but trust us.  This place is incredible.  A totally new and different brand of gorgeous.  We didn't have enough time to see it all and frankly, Marta pretty much stole the show for me!  But until I get back there to give Death Valley its true due, here are a few pictures to remember it by...

Vegas to Red Rock, NV

December 18, 2018

 

"You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society." - Henry David Thoreau

I love Tennessee.  It has its seasons.  Our fall and spring are to die for.  But in winter, the green fades and it rarely displays that cozy, snowy postcard winter bliss.  More likely, it will be a disagreeably cold and rainy couple of months.  This family starts to feel a little trapped and stir crazy.  So this year, we decided to do something a little different. 


 I'm always on the lookout for cheap flights from Tennessee to … well... anywhere.  Seriously.  We just constantly scan all the flight deals until we see something interesting.   And that, my friends, is step one of the trick to traveling on the cheap.  Find the cheap flights.  To anywhere.  And then go to that place.  On those dates.  The rest can fall into place fairly easily.  You simply cannot operate the other way around on a normal human's budget if you want to go to more than a few places during your lifetime. 
So to summarize the absolute biggest trick to travelling...

 

How to find flights...

• [Me]                Where are flights cheap?
• [The internet]  Vegas round trip $97, December 17th - January 4th
• [Me]                We're going to Vegas!
• [Also Me]        But I don't want to go to Vegas!  I hate Vegas.
• [Sensible me]  Ah...but you can drive to a lot of places from Vegas.
• [Me]                Right.

 How NOT to find flights.….

• [Me]                 Cold sucks!  I want to go to Puerto Rico the week after Christmas!
• [The internet]   Puerto Rico costs seven million dollars the week after Christmas.
• [Me]                  I give up.  I'm going to Target to buy a cute scarf instead.

 

Confession.  I had both of those conversations, but not necessarily in that order.  So...long story short...the internet told us we could go to Vegas from December 17th to January 4th.  And that is exactly what we did.  So what do you do when you the universe sends you to Vegas?  You  make the most of it and then get out of there as soon as you can.  Sorry Vegas!  But you are expensive and half naked.   We did find a fun little park near the historic Fremont Street.  At least we thought it was a park.  It was certainly fun enough with giant chess and cornhole, a three story Victorian train car to climb around in and a 30ft polar bear made out of car hoods.  As it turns out, it was a staging area for Lyft rides!  As in...you call Lyft to pick you up and hang out at the Polar Bear till they show up to get you.  Crazy.  It does, however, shed some light on why we were the only kids in the park. 

So after our obligatory stay at Circus, Circus where the kids put their whole heart into winning all the Willy Wonka cards from the pushy quarter game and after Tom and I spent our customary $20 to see if Luck would be our Lady...we headed for the hills.  Literally.  We fled Vegas and rushed to Red Rock Canyon.   

I have a confession.  I don't care for cities.  They bore me.  I admit that there is an energy in cities that is exciting, but it pales in comparison to what a quiet sit in nature does for me.  I crave being in the presence of something real.  Thirty minutes outside the city and we were transported to the Nevada of before.  Before the invention of neon lights.  Before tiny computers in our pockets called strangers in automobiles and told them to pick us up at the giant polar bear.  Before scantily dressed girls wearing feathers.  Before Blackjack and penny slots.  Only terra at its purest and sweetest.

There is such a stark contrast between the city rolling away behind you and Red Rock Canyon rising before you.  The right angles give way to the stunning curves and pockets of the canyon.  The pleading of buskers yields to the whispering of grass.  Despite a parking lot teeming with cars, we were greeted with near solitude, only passing three people as we meandered along the ridge, up and over the first of the hills.  I watched a long-eared jack rabbit bound across the rocks . We followed it over the crest of a hill, amazed at how it could be so clever as to disappear from our view entirely in that barren landscape.

Naturally, walking up to the canyon, the gravity of the place was lost upon the kids.  They moaned and whined about the prospect of walking so far for a bunch of rocks.   We ignored the pleading to go back to the hotel.  We only half attended to the complaints of ankles and knees that were hurting straight out of the car.  However, as we began our steady climb up the canyon, the complaints seemed to obey the laws of gravity and remained  tethered to the ground.  Our spirits rose with every foothold up the canyon.  







As we climbed, we watched the red rocks suddenly change to white Aztec sandstone.  The red coloration is the result of iron minerals in the rocks, exposed to the elements and converted to rust.  Rust never looked so beautiful.  Dizzy  epically dabbed over the Mohave Desert and did a little bit of cactus hugging.  We inspected all the gnarled trees and dared each other to peer into crevices in the rocks.  We climbed to the top of the first hill and peered curiously into a sole puddle of water, pooled into an indentation.  Strange enough to find a pool of water so exposed at this elevation, but more curious still to see that it was full of bees, some still with enough strength to muster movement in their wings.  Where in the world had they come from?  And how long had it taken one of them to find this oasis in the desert and send word back to the hive?



 If you didn't know better, you'd think we had only two children.  But I assure you that we do have three.  At some point, we gave up trying to capture Olive in photographs, since she would risk her life darting behind rocks and ducking to evade the camera.  Truly,  she does travel with us.  And the lack of photos prove only that we respect her wishes...to an extent.  Someday, she will ask us why there are no pictures of her during our travels.  This is the one I will show her.   I'm choosing to trust that she will remember all the gorgeous details without the photographs to remind her. 



Ivy spotted this rock from a distance and declared it to be a turtle rising from the water, mouth agape, ready to eat something.  I have to admit that it took several minutes of her coaxing me through it before I could see it.  Do you?



We barely scratched the rusty surface of this canyon. At every bend, I was overcome with the reality that someone was fortunate enough to see all of this first.  Someone walked over a hill and was presented with this beauty without any advance notice. I can't even imagine what that would be like.  But the feel of the walls, the mystery of the bends, caves and crevices, the trio of coyote that bound across the path in front of us...all of these will mark it in my memory.  I have to say that we will be back, as I am certainly not done with this place yet.