Our family’s West Coast trip started on a Saturday night with our nonstop Sunday morning flight canceled. Instead, we hopped from Midway to Phoenix and then on to Los Angeles. By the time I got to Phoenix, I was as spent as Glen Campbell.
Because we were last to get tickets, we pulled middle seats. I sat between two men who stared at iPads streaming serials I’d just started. Reading a hard copy book (something these guys surely hadn’t done since “Goodnight, Moon”), I couldn’t keep from sneaking peeks at their screens, even though horrified spoilers might ruin both series for me.
I’d recently read a New Yorker article, “New Chapter,” by Louis Menand, who posits, “The novel is no longer at the center of the cultural conversation. People don’t ask today, ‘What are you reading?’ They ask, ‘What are you streaming?’ The TV series is the middle-class entertainment medium of the 21st century,” (Nov. 18, 2024).
I felt like a dinosaur between two cinephiles.
Incidentally, I was reading J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” a masterpiece of wit and wisdom, exceeding even the caustic brilliance of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Our Airbnb near Joshua Tree National Park (named for, as you might expect, its Joshua trees) looked like a glass Big Mac box littered in high desert terrain. Next morning, we breakfasted at Más o Menos, a small, one-room, one-man-host-chef-server-and-manager restaurant. My focaccia breakfast sandwich was delicious, embittered only by speakers blaring “music” sounding like a man screaming after stubbing his toe, a banjo plinking in time with his irregular hopping.
Driving through the national park, initially impressed with the titular trees (a palm tree with multiple stunted, brown, scaly arms and palm leaf fingers), after the first zillion, they turned into yawners. We hiked to Arch Rock, a stone doughnut the size of a kid’s merry-go-round, not the anticipated George Washington Gale Ferris’s Columbian Exposition spectacle.
Staying alert for a certain rattlesnake (and scorpions) the brochure mentioned, I didn’t see much of the terrain past a few feet in front of me. A few days later, I Googled “rattlesnakes in Joshua Tree National Park” and found seven common varieties and one, the Rosy Boa, of “special concern.” Knowing that, I would have been specially concerned to stay in the car.
Next day, we drove to Palm Springs, where everything was tagged with Hawaiian and Alaskan sticker prices. Next to our breakfast table filled with crepes, pancakes and yogurt, multi-colored flower boxes brought a hummingbird flitting from blossom to blossom.
Afterward, we walked beside granite stars embedded in sidewalks naming people my wife and I, baby boomers, recognized and our millennial children never heard of: Buddy Hackett, Sonny Bono, Eva Marie Saint, et al. “Who?” their expressions said, disinterested.
Arching over a mountain, we cruised into Newport Beach feeling like four Dorothys opening a black and white Kansas door into Oz. Green lawns. Bird of Paradise bouquets. Western Red Cedars. Blue Pacific.
After a restful night on a foldout couch (unusual), I made a pot of coffee and bid my family goodbye as they sought breakfast on the beach. At the room’s balcony table overlooking the Pacific, I began this column.
Occasionally going in to refresh my coffee, I remembered my California-based nephew, Chris, suggested I listen to Tim Ferris interview poet and Zen master David Whyte (Dec. 4, 2024): “Outer horizons are so nourishing,” Whyte said. “You’re happier looking at a far horizon. … It’s the unknown inviting you.”
Kind of like writing – pursuing the partially seen, partially felt, partially hidden, and, if it’s going well, most inviting.
Such as, too, we hope, the New Year.
• Rick Holinger’s work was nominated twice for the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Hobart, Chautauqua, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.