High Desert Drifters : Harry Takes a Trip Where New Yorkers Fear to Tread

NEW YORKERS are like 19th-Century Englishmen. Wherever they go, whatever benighted part of the world they choose to favor with their presence, they seek to re-create as much as possible of the island they left behind.

So, during the past decade, while this area has enjoyed its most intense period of colonization from the East, we have reaped the cultural benefits of being Gothamites’ home away from home: delis that have been painstakingly modeled on their Manhattan namesakes; out-of-the-way cafes that have suddenly learned how to brew--and pronounce--espresso, and grizzled, angry street people who are just a couple of years away from giving our doorways the distinctive urban perfume of stale human pee.

But while New Yorkers know how to bring, these most sophisticated of our recent visitors don’t know how to take. They tend to come out here, congregate in West Hollywood (because it has what they recognize as street life) or near Ventura Boulevard (because it doesn’t) and issue their verdicts on this very small sample of a very large elephant.

Not that this place’s charms are all that evident to a newcomer. To be fair, I’ve always been baffled by the tendency of large numbers of people even to make this a vacation destination. Aside from Disneyland and the studios, and the beaches during those few weeks when they’re not being soiled, this area’s most attractive qualities have always seemed to reward only the patient attention of a longtime admirer. This is a Siamese cat of a city.

On weekends, certain sections of this newspaper squirrel away little tips on interesting places to go. A recent arrival not yet trained to root out such truffles of travel might never venture out to the desert--not the Palm Springs desert of white belts and golf and Sonny Bono but the real desert, the place that can frighten you with its seeming emptiness. Some of us go out there to ride dirt bikes over it all. I go to see Southern California’s answer to fall foliage, the sunlit fireworks of wildflower season.

These days, there are wildflower hot lines to guarantee that a 90-minute haul out to the Antelope Valley will reward you with more than a view of the newest Builder’s Emporium. But my second trip to wildflower country occurred some years ago, and it was the kind of adventure New Yorkers can get only by jogging in Central Park after nightfall.

My T. W. (Then Wife) and I drove to the Antelope Valley, procured a Lancaster Chamber of Commerce map and headed into the hills. (The wildflowers don’t all bloom at once, so you have to seek out the hillsides where your eyes can be overwhelmed.) On the way, we each “dropped” what we thought was mescaline. I had taken it only a couple of times, officer, on those rare occasions when I ventured out to a Wonder of Nature. I found it to be, as advertised, an extremely mild, almost unnoticeably psychedelic substance. Its chief effect was to point me toward the beauty and keep me from thinking: Hope we get back in time for the Laker game.

If you’re not way ahead of me, you should be. These days, people don’t tell stories about mescaline that end with “and we both had a groovy time.” Pills can be unknowable little guys, and we had arrived overprepared too late in the season for flowers. Or too early. A restroom break revealed either that the walls of the little structure in the wilderness were crawling with thousands of identical insects or that I was staring at the immobile stucco through the window of something dramatically psychedelic.

Now the T. W. and I were out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing beautiful to look at and with our minds set on bake. We consulted the map for the quickest route out of wherever it was we were. Like any reasonable chamber of commerce, the Lancaster folks had depicted their beloved city as the largest settlement in the neighborhood and had surrounded it with a big, red heart. This was mighty persuasive to people in our lack of frame of mind, which is why it took us about 20 minutes to realize that, sadly, the route home lay through Palmdale instead.

Then as now, I had a Sunday radio program, which I had taped in advance to free this day for adventure. So, as our car ascended the last hill out of Desert Hell, I was treated to a cliche of the age coming true. I heard my voice on the radio, and it sounded exactly the way voices in bad versions of acid trips always sound--as if it were coming from the bottom of the bathtub drain. Thawawawawawanks for lisssssssssening.

We got safely home, and, as I lay on the living-room floor gazing at the light-green walls of my rented house, I had an intense realization: This is like being in the bottom of an aquarium, and I should repaint this joint pronto.

It was, and I did. I have been to wildflower country many times since that harrowing Sunday. No mystery pills, no insects, no voice from the drain. For adventure, I now do what the ex-New Yorkers among us do. I go sit in a deli and order the corned beef.