June 27, 2006: Palm Springs

You may have a preconceived notion of Palm Springs: golf and tennis, palm trees and swimming pools, pink stucco and blue hair. And you may be right. But it’s so much more: endless strip malls and parking lots and fast food joints, interconnected by wide roads and fast drivers, interspersed with desert scrubland, surrounded by barren mountains in the distance. It is, in essence, like many of the suburbs of Los Angeles, but with far more heat and far less water.

Even though I grew up in Southern California, I’m a Northwesterner by birth and by temperament. I like our cool, damp weather and omnipresent greenery. I take the absence of life-giving resources and the presence of death-dealing reptiles and insects as evidence that human habitation is unwise. I find the existence of even small towns in such locations improbable.

I would no more condemn Americans for living where they do than I would commend them for it. We are free to reside where it suits us. Yet our enormous, metastasizing desert metropolises – Las Vegas is a perfect example – impress me as both absurd and unsustainable. They gobble energy with a voracity that is appalling to behold and produce waste at an even more terrifying rate. Go see the film An Inconvenient Truth to understand the implications of uncontrolled growth: rapidly approaching catastrophe on a global scale.

Since there are giant wind farms just outside of Palm Springs, it's tempting to assume that much of the city's energy comes from wind and other renewable sources and so give it a partial pass. But this energy flows into the general power grid, not to local consumers. They get their juice from Southern California Edison, just like L.A.

I’ll get off my soapbox and tell you what we did today to beat the 110-degree heat (presented in no particular order and bulleted like a PowerPoint slide show for no particular reason):



• hours of swimming with the boys, whom we slathered with sunscreen and who, considering how pale they are, miraculously avoided sunburns

• making and eating ice cream sundaes by the pool

• sitting in our condo, watching the DVD Return to Sin City, a Gram Parsons tribute concert that my sister attended

• writing this blog in the cool of the Palm Springs Public Library, which provides free wireless Internet access

• assembling a “Scrambled States of America” jigsaw puzzle with Tommy in our resort’s activity center

• playing table tennis with Danny and his new friend Matthew from room 406

The boys also explained to their grandmother how one of their computer games worked, and while she enjoyed their enthusiasm, she almost certainly did not understand what they told her. My mom, unlike her sister Harriet, has never shown the slightest inclination toward using a computer. She’s never owned one, nor browsed the web, nor sent nor received a single e-mail message. And now that she’s suffering from acute aphasia, a crippling difficulty in producing words, it’s highly unlikely she will ever do so.

Mom’s disability, either the product of several small strokes or of an undiagnosed degenerative disease, will be familiar to many people with aging parents. Her stuttered utterances are almost entirely devoid of nouns, so listening to her is a guessing game and an exercise in patience. Since she’s unable to construct a coherent sentence, we may spend half an hour getting a single piece of information out of her. Last night it took nearly that much time to ascertain the type of cereal she wanted me to buy. I never did determine its name, so I had to guess, and apparently I guessed well.

Add to all of this severe arthritic scoliosis (curvature of the spine) that keeps Mom in a permanent bow, her use of a walker, and the extraordinarily long time it takes for her to bathe and dress and apply makeup, and you can see that this is a sometimes trying relationship. But we love her dearly and do our best to please her, particularly my sister Peggy Sue, who has shouldered the heroic task of living closest to her and attending to her immediate needs.