Even though we were considerably south of Badwater, we wanted to camp further north to give us a jump on going home the next day. On the way, we stopped at a low spot on the playa that still held some water leftover from the rain, then it on was to Zabriskie Point to play tourist. Zabriskie Point is probably the number one view spot in the Park because it is so close to downtown Death Valley: two hotels, a golf course, a restaurant, and the Park Headquarters. The Inn at Furnace Creek, where Michele and I got married in 1993, is only three miles from Zabriskie and, the sunrise after our wedding, we posed for photographs there so it was fun to see a German couple doing the same thing (although they seemed younger and hipper than I can ever remember being).

Then we drove a couple of miles up the road behind Zebinsky and followed a gravel road up a drainage to the Hole In The Wall where we camped. three miles up a fan behind the hole.

As I’m writing this, the only three people who seem to have a chance to be president are all old, white, and male, coronavirus infections have passed 100,000, and South by Southwest has been Canceled, so writing about Death Valley seems a little strange, frivolous.

The good news is that everybody seems to agree that Bernie Sanders is now classified as a white man; that would not have been the case fifty years ago. But, white man or not, he is still old and almost undoubtedly not going to win. The people in power, the people with money, do not want change that costs them anything and Bernie represents that change, the speed at which they circled the wagons around Biden, at his first sign of life, was truly stunning. David Brooks thinks that this is a good thing and he presents a pretty good case. His core point is that The politics of the last four years have taught us that tens of millions of Americans feel that their institutions have completely failed them. The legitimacy of the whole system is still hanging by a thread. The core truth of a Biden administration would be bring change or reap the whirlwind. I’m not a Biden fan, I didn’t like him when he first ran for president in 1988, but maybe he has been around long enough to fight the system. Maybe.

The consensus, at least among the so-called mainstream media, is that Trump aggravated the problem by taking the coronavirus as a personal affront and he stonewalled it when he first found out about it in January. All he did was pretend that the coronavirus was a hoax. Maybe pretend is the wrong word, he’s old and maybe he just can’t comprehend the reality of what he’s facing. I know that I’m having trouble fathoming it. I read that China has at least 3,015 deaths but I keep reading that the epidemic is slowing down in China and, out of 1,404,000,000 people, 3,015 doesn’t seem so bad. I keep reading that the flue has killed more people this year so how afraid should I be?

South by Southwest has been shut down and the Ferrari team may not be able to leave Italy to go to Australia for the first Formula One race of the year; is that overkill? I don’t know but I do know that Michele and I were going to go to a movie tonight and we decided not to. Last Tuesday, we went out to dinner at Fey, one of our excellent local Chinese restaurants and it was almost empty. Now we are thinking, Why take the risk? No matter how small. Tonight we’re going to stay home and watch Hustlers. Speaking of which, we saw Contagion the other night, and I would heartily recommend it.