Friends in San Diego, Salton Sea, Grand Canyon

If a city can be measured by weighing all the chaos and clamor and unmet need and ugliness and waste, everything that can make it hard to feel human, against the good that only a city can produce, the productivity and creativity and community, the thrum of society in motion, then it was easy for me to see how Los Angeles justified its existence, and I was on the fence about San Francisco, but San Diego made perfect sense. A downtown exists, with all the unfortunate characteristics those can have – Travis says it’s the most openly violent homeless scene he’s seen – most of what I saw of San Diego behaves less like a city and more like an overgrown beach town. If you’re wandering anywhere near the ocean, you’ll find you’re funneled toward the water, where even in late November surfers local and global dot the beach, slapping on wetsuits, lashing up kiteboarding sails. Beachside bars have decks and balconies where people watch the water behind sunglasses and talk about what they’ll do on it next.

I took a bus up to Encinitas and saw Ethan, a dude I’d come to know in college through mutual friends and writing classes. He works in coffee and is beginning to find SoCal sustainable. We talked for hours about how we became the people we are and why we love the things and the people we love. We were never close in school, but catching up with him, I was struck again by how many people in my life could have meant a lot more to me if I’d only had the right conversation at the right time. But now, in 2015, we’ve just had one that will sustain our loose palship for a long time.

Ethan lives pretty far up the coast from where I was staying, so I only saw him once, but Alison lives a lot closer. We met up in Ocean Beach for lunch and talked for a long time. She’s buds with Chris and Jon in Pasadena, and a lot of the ground I covered with Jon echoed forward into my time with Alison – the ongoing theme of how our mutual Christianity has changed and grown and relaxed in our first steps out of the cocoon of college. Later she and her roommates hosted their church life group, a gathering of 15 or so 20-somethings, for an early Thanksgiving dinner. There was nothing too academic or didactic about it, just a lot of open, friendly conversation and a lot of people who, if I lived there, I would have taken out for coffee with great urgency. I’m a little envious of how Alison’s only lived in San Diego for as long as I’ve been traveling, yet she’s already found a genuine community of friends to sustain her. If every church could hook up their young adults like that, I’d say every agnostic in a new city jonesing for friends ought to just fake it and get in on it.

Travis, my former housemate and Young Life teammate in Michigan, has lived in San Diego for a year, but he’s been traveling for practically half of that, and putting down roots and developing a family of friends in San Diego hasn’t been his top priority, but he’s still got some, and I met a few while I was there, culminating in a modest little group camping trip an hour or two outside of San Diego, which marked the first night of Travis’ trek northward (with me in the passenger’s seat). Because of parched California’s extremely flammable nature and the direction of the wind, there were no fires allowed in the campground, so we huddled around camp stoves and goofed off and made quesadillas and goofed off more for most of the evening. Then Travis took out his tripod and fancy camera and took some really fun long-exposure pictures of everyone. If you haven’t seen this, you can set things up so that the camera’s taking in the dim night light for several seconds, and you can use a flashlight or glowstick to paint and write along the picture while the shutter’s open, though you’ll barely show up as a shadow yourself unless you’re really still.

The next day, on a whim, we decided it would be nice to see the Grand Canyon. On the way was the Salton Sea, a large lake that, due to natural cycles and human interference, has been both shrinking and growing steadily saltier for years. It smells like rotting fish, and to get to it you must walk across a wide ring of former lake bed, piled in drifts of dead crustacean debris with a consistency somewhere between gravel and popcorn, and rings of dead fish, dried hollow by the sun, laying in gruesome piles and stinking. The water itself is edged with thick, sludgy algae and lots of birds – lazy flocks of gulls that flutter down the beach away from you and long-legged, long-beaked stilts that strut along the coast nonchalantly, stabbing their beaks every few inches into the muddy bank for whatever salty edibles the bizarre ecosystem must support. Beyond the ring of dead sea is a ghost town. Salton used to be a tourist destination, but now all that remains is a coast of sunbleached ’60s houses, abandoned lodgings, docks that reach out into nothing.

There isn’t much to be said about the Grand Canyon. It’s a place to be seen. Insanely vast, the distant cliffs stagger down in layers, forming edges and ledges and curves and whorls in dozens of colors, all stitched and stacked together. We drove towards it all afternoon and into the evening, the rocky sunset soundtracked aptly by Arizona’s Calexico, and pulled into our campsite after dark. It was cold and late, but not too cold or late for more nighttime photography. We were out until midnight driving to new ledges, Travis assembling and directing his equipment, setting his exposures so that the accumulated moonlight made the canyon show up bright as day under the stars.

But it was cold, too cold for my body heat to warm my sleeping bag, let alone the car around me. In the morning I decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle a week of nights like that. It was time for my path to diverge from Travis’s. On our way out of the canyon, he dropped me off in northeast Arizona, where highway 160 leaps off of highway 89 to stretch itself east across the Navajo reservation and towards Colorado.