San Diego Reader

Past the Coachella Valley, where the desert floor pushes the mountains out of sight, my grandfather levitates above a steamy I-10, alternately stiff-arming the grill and checking the coolant level of my eastbound station wagon.

“You’re out of your mind!” he says, a plaid shirt and work pants hanging from his lanky frame. “Either that or you’re a masochist.”

I tell him I need to think, and that everywhere else is full.

“But you hated it in the winter, and there’s nothing to do there in the summer,” he replies. “No people, no junk. And it’s 100 degrees every day!”

“If you can tell me why you went,” I say, “then I can tell you why I’m going.”

Our circular dialogue continues until I reach Blythe, where the fishtailing, kitsch-stickered trailers of Havasu enthusiasts demand that I focus on the road.

I cross the Arizona state line twenty minutes later, and the only things I recognize are the jagged, barren mountains that enclose Quartzsite in a dark ring. The skeleton of off-ramps and overpasses and collector roads has grown, but the flesh has shrunk. And besides the gas stations and fast-food restaurants that hug the intersection with Highway 95, nothing moves. Boarded-up businesses and empty RV parks line Main Street with “closed for summer” signs and rows of utility hookups.

I find JR’s RV Park a few miles north on 95, and I exit the car stiff, sweaty, and blinded by the sun-baked roads and aluminum siding. The park is half-full of motor homes and trailers, but I don’t see any people. The thermometer outside the office points to 115, and a white-haired woman comes out looking confused.

I tell her that I am writing an article about Quartzsite in the summer, and ask if she knew my grandfather.

“I’ve only been here a few years,” she says, “and this is my first summer.”

“Can I stay here?”I ask.

“Sure, but you’ll be the only one besides me and my husband.”She points to a sign next to the thermometer. “Twenty-four dollars a night, two hundred twenty a month.”

We talk about her background and the recession, and then I walk the park, admiring leftover gardens of succulents and rocks. I circle the community center where I used to take showers and play ping-pong, then I drag pebbles with my feet until I stumble upon my grandfather’s double-wide.

My grandmother died in 1980, and my recently retired grandfather moved to a small town in the Northwest where my family lived. He stayed with us a few months before buying a house near the high school. In his spare time, he repaired pocket watches and classic cars and dead technologies, but he was soon restless, and on a trip through Arizona found Quartzsite.

By the mid-1980s, we had moved to California, and my grandfather was splitting time between Seattle and Quartzsite with his second wife. They would leave just before Christmas and stay until mid-March, first in a motor home and later a trailer, and I would visit them in the peak season of late January.

My grandfather was a typical Quartzsite resident: white, working-class, 60s or older, and a “snowbird” fleeing from the elements of the Northwest, Midwest and Canada. In the 1980s, Quartzsite had a population of 2,000 during the summer and fall, but by late January, half a million people called it a temporary home, ostensibly to see the flea markets. The RV parks inflated to overcapacity, and the RVers dropped anchor anywhere they could, dry camping on raw BLM land or open space.

My grandfather and his wife would rise at dawn to read the paper and drink coffee, then cooked eggs and bacon with toast and margarine. In the afternoon, they shopped. My grandfather for tools and vintage electronics, his wife for gemstones and beads. He’d come home to an adjacent shed to tinker with his purchases or do home improvements, and his wife smoked in the living room. Occasionally they drove to Blythe to get groceries or day-tripped northwest to the Colorado River, south to Yuma or east to Phoenix. At sunset, sitting on plastic chairs and artificial turf under an RV awning, they shared their purchases with neighbors over drinks. When conversation lagged, they talked about the weather.

On the way back to town, I find the Chamber of Commerce trailer closed, but on the corkboard outside, I read the map, suggested hikes and an advisory titled Desert Survival Rules. Number 1: stick to your plan. Number 2: drink water. Number 3: keep an eye on the sky. And Number 12: a roadway is a sign of civilization – if you find a road, stay on it.

I park my car near the westerly freeway off-ramp and walk east along Main Street, stopping at the handful of businesses that are still open. I start at T-Rocks, a large sand lot where chunks of tumbled stone line the fence, resting on oil barrels and wood tops cut in the shape of wagon wheels. Under a tent at the back of the lot, the owner shows me pendants of amethyst, emeralds and tourmaline, and I ask if she wants to buy some of my grandfather’s rocks.

“Maybe,” she says, “We buy all the time.”

“Who do you sell to in the summer?”I ask.

“People passing through,” she says. “Travelers, energy workers on the way to Sedona, people who know we’re here.”

At Daniel’s Best Jerky, whose numerous billboards line the I-10, a seventy-ish clerk named Trish tells me she came here seven years ago for a man, trading in the humidity of Oklahoma for dry heat and bagging groceries until she landed at Daniel’s.

“There’s karaoke at the Yacht Club on Thursdays and Fridays,” she says, “and bingo at the senior center. Sometimes you see four-wheelers on the weekends, and there’s a golf course in the desert a ways off. Most of the time it’s hot like it is today, and you just stay indoors.”

In the early twentieth century, the area around Quartzsite only boasted a few landholders. Charles Tyson, the town’s most prominent early citizen, built the stage station for west-bound settlers in 1866, ran the post office in the late 1800s, and tried to attract the outside world’s attention. Mining led to a mini-boom, but by the 1950s, only five families were left in town.

In the 1960s, small groups of retirees from the Northwest came to Quartzsite in pursuit of warm winters, clean air and the untouched scenery of the Southwest desert. Vendors followed, holding the first Quartzsite Pow Wow in 1967. Gemstones highlighted the event due to their local presence.

The Sun Belt relocation and RV crazes of the ‘70s and ‘80s flooded Quartzsite with visitors, and eventually more than 4,000 vendors paid for space at gem shows and flea markets each year, selling everything from rare antiques to dollar-store items.

I peer through the windows of the Yacht Club, a restaurant with $10 chicken dinners and pictures of sailboats and lizards juxtaposed on its walls, and chat up the manager of the Yacht Club Motel. Carol Cannon is a single mother in her twenties with four kids, and she moved here from Missouri six years ago to live with her mother. She shows me one of the rooms, the only non-RV alternative to the Super 8: half of an old single-wide, dark and swamp-cooled with burgundy bedspreads and thin-paneled walls, for $53 a night.

At the east end of town, I see a naked man walking in front of a bookshop. Or almost naked, because only a straw hat, turquoise necklace and turquoise-beaded genital pouch cover his lacquered body. The Reader’s Oasis is owned by Paul Winer, a nudist and former boogie-woogie musician.

“Came here twenty years ago with $30 in cash and a bunch of t-shirts to sell,” he says, “and now I got my own store. Built it on a loan from the bank a few years back.”

The bookshop is one of the few wood and steel buildings in town, and it holds a large inventory of paperbacks, CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes. Next to a collection of rare books, a portable CD player shifts from the Zodiacs to the Five Satins, and they croon “shoo doop, shooby doo”into the stillness.

“It’s like family farming here,” Winer says, “because I’m not making big profits. But after twenty years on the road, I found a place to settle and have a life that I could enjoy.”Winer constantly walks around the store or moves in place, and through his long, scraggly hair, he says, “I’ll sell in five years, hopefully to another local, and go back to playing boogie-woogie on the road.”

I retrace my steps along Main Street, surveying buildings with names like Bargain Barn and Addicted to Deals, then stop under a plaid awning in the heart of The Main Event, Quartzsite’s primary outdoor market. As a kid, I terrorized the vendors by screaming up and down the crowded dirt aisles and playing with their wares, then terrorized my grandfather by claiming incurable boredom and begging for the television. Inside the maze of folding tables and tent poles, people bargained and bartered and told travel stories, and in its heyday, The Main Event had concerts, rodeos and fireworks. The grounds had the dusty, unkempt look of a grainy Western that I miss now, but at the time, I was more interested in a clean picture and science fiction narratives.

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