The Drive Through Amboy

The last time I went to Amboy was about a year ago, but it took me weeks of going through it before I got to it. And then I wished I’d never stopped.

I should have known, for even as a kid, Amboy was a barrier, a marker, and perhaps a portal, but not a destination. In the mid-1980s, my father was stationed at 29 Palms, America’s largest Marine Base and home for desert training. Locals had three major attractions within an hour’s drive: Joshua Tree National Monument adjacent to the South; Palm Springs an hour to the West; and Amboy, 50 miles to the Northeast. There were several signposts for Amboy along the main street of 29 Palms, and new arrivals quickly learned it was the shortest route to Las Vegas.

During the last week of sixth grade, my class took a field trip to Amboy, and I remember the bus ride because it was 100 degrees in the early morning and I had goosebumps up and down my arms. My best friend’s mother was also my Sunday School teacher, and she had convinced me that the famed Amboy meteor crater (actually an extinct volcano) was the site of frequent human sacrifices by devil worshippers (again, this was the ‘80s). Off the bus and climbing the crater’s 250-foot walls, my thoughts switched from Satanists to Sandy something or other. I stared at her pink shorts until we summited, and then perhaps because of the desert cinescape, drifted off into the Star Wars narrative. In the afternoon, our class drank milkshakes at Roy’s, a diner of peeling stainless that gave the faint impression of a toy store. We were the only customers, and the proprietor recited the history of Amboy, mainly as it pertained to Route 66 and the waves of Okies and Beats and California transplants who had used it as a thoroughfare for their dreams. In the late thirties, Roy’s was built as a café-motel-gas station in the futuristic Googie style, complete with geometric neon sign and a motel office whose white roof and glass storefront intersect in a spike toward the stars. Amboy peaked in the 1950s with the boom in post-war tourism and local processing of chloride, and several hundred residents called it home. But by the time I visited Amboy in the mid-80s, nearly fifteen years after Interstate 40 had made parts of Route 66 obsolete, Amboy was close to becoming a ghost town. Besides the chloride fields, railroad tracks, and a smattering of people living in trailers along the two-lane highway, Amboy was nothing more than the crater and Roy’s.

My family left 29 Palms a few years later, and I lost touch with the kids that stayed. I didn’t return to Amboy until the late ‘90s when I moved back to Southern California. Whether I was in L.A. or San Diego or somewhere in between, I felt the need every few months to escape the soup of freeways and stucco and head east. I took day and weekend trips to places like Death Valley, the Salton Sea, and Anza-Borrego State Park, but I kept coming back to 29 Palms and the road beyond.

Last year, I left L.A. with grand ambitions of writing a novel whose setting was the American Southwest. I spent the first week losing money at Nevada casinos, and the next tracking snowbirds along Arizona’s tourist trail. I looked for a place to write, but every motel or sublet was too expensive, dirty, or dark. The third week I drove to Palm Springs, and the next day to 29 Palms, where I stopped for gas and fished a CD out of the garbage piles in my trunk. The soundtrack to Blade Runner – ambient, spacey electronica that framed ‘80s cinema and the heat waves of my youth, when even the seasoned desert rats turned indoors toward technology.

From 29 Palms, I drove through Amboy to Laughlin, where I resolved to give up gambling permanently and writing temporarily. The next morning, I drove back, staying somewhere between Palm Springs and 29 Palms. And the next day, back the other way (this was early 2008, when money and gas still had a slight resemblance to water). This went on for days, maybe weeks, until I finally stopped at Amboy.

The gas station had recently re-opened, and Roy’s caretaker gave me the new history. Albert Okura, founder and chain-starter of the Inland Empire’s own Juan Pollo Chicken, bought Amboy in 2005 and was refurbishing it as an effort to keep route 66’s memory alive. The cafe and motel would open soon, with the hopes that Roy’s would regain some of its former glory.

I walked the grounds, inspecting the new piping and fresh coats of bright white paint on the motel and cafe, and the faded, crumbling facades of the buildings behind them. I attempted conversation with a group of retired RVers camped a few hundred yards past Roy’s, but my haircut or shirt must have scared them off. A French recumbent bicyclist heated up a sandwich in Roy’s microwave and recounted week one of his six-week ride across America, where he would camp or stay with friends along the way. Two Marines and a girl on motorcycles stopped for gas and exchanged muffled remarks between swigs of energy drinks.

I told the caretaker about the field trip and what Amboy meant to me, and he squinted at me blankly in the hot sun.

“T-shirts are eight dollars if you want.”

I bought one, and two bottles of water, and a frig magnet, all with Amboy on the label, and then I drove to the base of the crater.

Between Sandy and Star Wars, I had only caught a brief glimpse of the view from the top, but I recorded the image and dialed it up later. Whenever my life dictated an escape or alternate reality, I used it as a template. I thought about getting out of the car and climbing the crater again, but I fell asleep in the heat. It was dark when I woke up, so I drove west, this time back to L.A.

When I was younger, traveling and writing used to be heroic, idealized pursuits that led to a teleological end, but as I get older, they are primarily a vehicle to let my mind wander. To collect images and sensations and reflect on them, occasionally thinking up something new, without the demands to make sense of it all. Because whatever joy comes from illumination, from piecing together a life or a world, also comes with a dose of terror. It is a thousand times more real than Amboy’s Satanists and it plagued my novel in the desert, a novel about the kids I used to know and the place I used to live. And in the desert, or at least in Amboy, the only palliative is motion.

If you want to stay in Amboy, Roy’s will probably let you camp, or you can camp at Joshua Tree National Park, or stay at hotels in 29 Palms. I’ve tried a few restaurants there, none worthy of a recommendation, but the 29 Palms Inn had good food when I was a kid. There are several antique stores and art galleries in Joshua Tree that deserve a look, and the park has activities like hiking, repelling, and nature tours.

But the main attraction to Amboy is the drive itself, particularly going east in the late morning, and I want to close with a few memories of it. I have not returned since, and I did not take pictures, so only a handful of images have stuck. And the drive is actually an amalgamation of several drives from a year ago, with many ruptures. Even though the same soundtrack played in the background, I noticed a new detail each time through.

The road out of 29 Palms goes east and then inclines north across a small ridge of mountains. On the descent, past the railroad tracks and the chloride fields, another valley opens that is depopulated and distinct from the spaces to the west. To the left, a mound of black earth towers above the sand floor and nearly meets the muted charcoal mountains that surround it. A geographic anachronism, a partial pyramid of imported soil, but it is vacant, without a visitor or docent to capture it. As the road flattens, it bends back to the east and runs past a white blur, where the horizon splits into a multi-squared pattern of blue and grey and sand, with a black strip and yellow flashes and haze spewing from its center into the sky. Bugs appear on the windshield and fry, and the steering wheel and dash and seats burn, and you sweat and stick to it all. There is a hint of sage, you can feel it in your throat, but you smell nothing. The air is empty, and you can see right through it to the squares, changing color and shape as they shake in the grid.