Poop Shute

Spring Time In The Desert

I've made the drive between LA and Phoenix dozens of times now. It's only just now dawned on me that until recently, I had never made that drive in spring before.

This past weekend I made a drive home for a couple days. I needed to do my taxes, and my grandfather is my accountant. I also wanted to see my family, and pick up a few things that I had left behind.

On my way out to Phoenix I left in the evening, and by the time I got out to the desert it was pitch black, so I didn't notice anything. But on the way back home to LA...

You know those silly cliched scenes that you see in the movies and TV when two characters that are romantically linked are running towards each other in slow motion in a gorgeous field of flowers? I felt like I was driving through that... but replace the cheesey romance music with my Ipod blasting Blitzen Trapper, The Sparks and Queens Of The Stone Age.

Densely packed bursts of school-bus-yellow flowers lined the freeway for miles and miles on end. There was a sprinkling of some smaller purple flowers too, but the golden bursts was what really caught the eye.

They were so thickly packed in along the edge of the pavement itself that you couldn't see the edge at all or even the soil the bush was growing out of. Each bush was covered with literally hundreds and hundreds of tiny flowers and, in most cases, was on top of the bush next to it. Some were only a few inches tall, others couldn't be smaller than four feet, and all of them happily hugging it's neighbor to get a better view of the only thing of interest: passing motorists.

After taking this in for a bit, I started to notice something funny. I looked out further at the rest of the landscape, and there was merely an occasional dot of gold here or there. It was sparse on the school bus flowery bushes. There was plenty of scraggly green brush, and stick-skinny trees, and several varieties of cactus, but very few golden flower bushes.

It was as though the majority of the flowers were precocious little four-year-olds clamoring and crowding for the attention of passing cars, blooming with all their might and shouting "Look what I can do! Look what I can do!"