There are not many people that are interested in the land snails of the Caribbean Islands, but those that are, really are. Stephrn J Gould as remembered – probably badly – by me.

Michele and I drove to Stove Pipe Wells the other day, and then we drove back home. I think we were tired of winter and wanted out of the cold, if even for a day. It was a glorious 95° at Stove Pipe with a clear blue sky.

Stove Pipe Wells is a named place, officially listed in GNIS, the Geographic Names Information System. A named place is one step smaller than a census-designated place, which is one step smaller than an official town. It is at sea level, at the bottom of a road that drops about 5,000 feet, down an alluvial fan in an almost straight line. It is near the middle of the enlarged Death Valley National Park but at the edge of the geological Death Valley. Stove Pipe Wells really is just a motel across the road from a general store/gas station, with a newish Ranger Station in a sort of trailer/temporary building. Its only charm is that it is charmless. When we got there, the Ranger Station was closed for the evening.

Michele had popped an extra ten bucks for a “Dune View” room, putting us in the building farthest from the restaurant. Dune view is pushing it somewhat, but, from the covered porch in front of our room, the dunes were distantly visible. The Dune View room also put us next to three pairs of fellow desert rats. When people ask me about Death Valley and how long they should plan to be there, I tell them, “Two hours is too long, and two weeks is not enough.” Our fellow travelers all fit in the two weeks is not enough category. Like us, they had been coming here for years, and, also like us, they used to camp out and were now spending the night inside at the Stove Pipe Wells Hotel.

Michele went down to the local Saloon, only four buildings away, and came back with an Old Fashion for herself and a Manhattan for me so we could join our neighbors in an ad hoc cocktail hour overlooking the distant dunes. I had hoped to pick up a couple of tips on new, to me, roads and walks but we had all been to the same places so it was a cocktail hour of trading stories. It was a cocktail party with strangers, all madly in love with the same place, a warm and friendly get together with old friends, talking about old times. I enjoyed the hell out of myself.

The Bay Area has been rainy and cold this year, with an emphasis on cold. The constant rain has made everything green, which is great to see after years of looking at dry, exhausted hills, but the sky has been low and grey. Since early February, almost every day has felt like winter. I’ve reacted by complaining and hibernating. But, and this sort of surprised me, the natural world didn’t hibernate; it just acted almost normal.

In some cases, hyper-normal might be a better description.

I love California, irrationally so, I know. My daddy loved California – it was as close to God as he ever got – and I think he passed that on to me. California is so big and so varied. On the San Francisco coast, the Sierras mean watershed, but they are also a wall, putting a big part of California in a rain shadow.

This fascinating topo map is in a lovely building, the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitor Center, that is new to us even though it has been there for almost twenty years. The interagency part is sort of interesting and a result of funds coming from the Federal Government – US Forest Service, National Park Service, and BLM – State Agencies, and the notorious City Of Los Angeles Department Of Water And Power. The Center is designed by Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects and built by Atherton Construction LLC. Marcy Wong et al. are from Berkeley; in this case, they probably didn’t displace any local architects. Atherton Construction LLC seems to build only for the Federal Government.

On our first night – of only two – we stayed in Lone Pine so I could see the Sierras full of snow in the morning light. We had dinner at a seldom open French restaurant in the booming town of Independence, a census-designated place of about 670 people (up by 95 souls from ten years earlier). Michele had the Lamb Shank a La Gasconaise which she very much enjoyed and I had an OK French Onion Soup with a nice salad .

The next morning , I got up earlier than Michele and drove north then east past the abandoned airfield that used to support Manzanar. Looking back at the bright white Sierra Nevada escarpment , it looked like The Wall from Game of Thrones stretching both north and south as far as I could see. The Owens Valley was warm – T-shirt temperature warm – even early in the morning, but the grass and shrubs were still brown and the trees were still leafless. It seemed like an inhospitable place and the remains of Manzanar made its location especially cruel.

During WWII, the United States Government imprisoned about 110,000 Americans who were of Japanese ancestry, I don’t think they were even arrested, they were just rounded-up and imprisoned. Manzanar Relocation Center – and I’m not sure that is the real name, now it is just called Manzanar Historic Site but Manzanar Forced Relocation Center or Manzanar Concentration Camp would be more accurate – was “home” to about 10,000 of those Americans.

On the way home, we drove back to 395 and then south to the Red Rock Canyon Recreation Area which the LA Times said had good flowers.

It did.

We bought a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg several weeks ago. It came from Illinois via Florida through an online auction site called Bring A Trailer. On any given day, one can bid on almost anything car-wise, from a restored 1957 Mercedes-Benz 220S coupe to a hot-rodded 1980 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 to a 1972 McLaren M8FP racecar.

Against all appearances, our Touareg is a real offroad 4X4 with high ground clearance and a transfer case with a low range, so we hope it will solve the two problems we had taking our Hyundai Tucson on steep rocky trails. So, while we do expect the Touareg will take us places the Hyundai couldn’t, we do not expect it to be a very good day-to-day car.

I feel guilty badmouthing the Hyundai, it wasn’t particularly exciting, but it did everything it was designed to do. It has been flawless for a hundred thousand miles (except, strangely, one backdoor will not open). It is the most relievable car I’ve ever owned. The only experience I’ve had with Volkswagens is Michele’s GTI, and that was one of the most tossable, delightful, and just plain funest cars I’ve ever driven, although it wasn’t particularly reliable.

Still, the GTI was light and lithe, and the Touareg is the opposite; it feels heavy, and solid, like it was carved out of a solid block of unobtainium. The Touareg, along with the Phaeton luxury sedan, was part of Ferdinand Piëch’s, Porsche’s grandson and head of the Volkswagen group, plan to expand the Volkswagen company upscale to compete with Mercedes and BMW. This was partially in reaction to both BMW and Mercedes expanding down into Volkswagen’s traditional market with the Mercedes A-Class and the BMW 3 Series. Both the Touareg and the Phaeton were designed to be way better than the cars they competed against to compensate for Volkswagen’s reputation as an inexpensive car builder.

Like Range Rover in the late 80s, Volkswagen started with a very solid offroad chassis, then luxed it by adding every bell and whistle known to man in 2000. Our car/truck/SUV – it does look more like a car than a truck – has standard upscale goodies like leather upholstery, woolen carpeting, and a sunroof. It also has problematic electric luxury items – like six-way power front seats with four-way power lumbar support and a power-adjustable steering wheel – that, Like the Range Rover, may become a problem after miles of dusty washboard backroads. BTW, the Touareg even has an airconditioned glove box.

For its first shakedown drive, we drove the Touareg to the Owens Valley, where we drove around in the Alabama Hills before we took it 12.6 miles and 5,000 vertical feet up a dirt road to the Cerro Gordo mine. The Touareg handled all of it effortlessly.

The Touareg seems to be more of a Frau Gruber than a Diane Kruger; it feels sturdy and unstoppable. Still, it is nowhere as good ergonomically as the Hyundai. Part of that is age, the Hyundai is fourteen years younger, but part of it is German engineers thinking they know what is needed better than the future users. The Hyundai has a digital panel that shows the projected range with the current fuel level, while the Touareg has an unneeded amp gage – with numbers – that is unreadable in most light conditions and is the same size as the small, also usually unreadable, fuel gage. The cup holders in the Touareg are two high to put a water bottle in without constantly elbowing it, and on and on.

The road that we had hoped to test the Touareg on, the Lemoigne Mine Road, was closed because of a washout, and the Hunter Mountain Road was snowed in, so we didn’t give the Touareg a real test, but, so far, it seems like it will be up to the task. BTW, the view of the formally dry Owens Lake from Cerra Gordo Road is terrific. The locals say it is the first time one can see the reflection of the Sierras in the lake since 1915, when LA Water and Power started sucking the aquifer dry.

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Computers are not revolutionary, smart phones are revolutionary. Said by me, with apologies to Che Guevara who said “Medicine is not revolutionary, sanitation is revolutionary.

I was listening to NPR (in the car while running errands, I think). Two people – a guy and a gal, as my dad used to say – were talking about Social Media and the use of algorithms to drive traffic and how they are changing. The woman said something along the line of, “All of sudden, I’m getting tweets made by some rando guy with only three followers.” The use of some rando guy as a descriptor on NPR took me back, and I am still thinking about it.

I love that our language is still changing so rapidly, that it is so pliable, so malleable, and so alive. I wonder if they still have it – and I’m not going to look it up – but the French used to have an Office of Official French or something like that. I remember it was installed when the French were still coming to grips with English becoming the global language and words like le weekend were starting to contaminate their language. The French establishment feared that the French language would fade in importance on the world stage, joining other languages like Tagalog, K’iche’, or North Frisian, drifting into insignificance.

While I don’t think that will happen soon, France’s power and influence is waning and will probably continue to wane and making an official way to speak French will not help. Nobody thinks English is insignificant because it lifts words like patio, loot, powwow, or cookie, from other languages. Like sharks and Love, culture and its language has to keep moving forward to survive. Something, I’m glad to say, English is still doing.

Several days ago, Michele was talking to me about a couple of young people she is working with on a project. They had been working with several tools that allowed them to more easily collaborate. It occurred to me that they grew up with smart phones and the constant connection to everything that smartphones provide. They are on their phones with their friends or associates – or social media – all the time time and that means they are connected all the time.

I’m starting to hear the expression late-stage capitalism increasingly; now I realize it’s gone rogue and is showing up everywhere. Late-stage capitalism implies a couple of things. Capitalism, like everything else, has cycles and it will die out. Maybe capitalism was great, but it doesn’t work now. The phrase almost always says that capitalism is at the core of the inequality rattling our society right now. But I’m not so sure. I think the problem is not Capitalism, per se, but too much individualism and not enough concern for the commonweal. In many ways, kids being on their phones all the time is a reaction to that individualism and the isolation that individualism promotes. They are not as isolated as their forebearers, they are part of a new, growing collective.

Lastly, without trying to figure it out – which is fairly easy – follow this link to a restaurant and guess what country it is in. I was surprised. https://lucky.ua/en/#0s

At the last minute, over the Easter Weekend, Michele and I drove down to Bakersfield, over to Mojave, and then up to Lone Pine, and finally, to Stove Pipe Wells in Death Valley. We were looking for wild flowers as much as anything else, but we were really trying to get out of the cold.

More later, but Happy Belated Easter for now.