Finally, Tuesday

Finally, after five days of coughing, fever, phelgm, rain, winds, and driving, driving, driving, dodging countless truck and trailer rigs on narrow, nightmarish highways at dusk and dark, in a daze of fatigue and medicine, with only a nights respite at a dreamtime Chumash pictograph site, I cross summit after summit and drop down deserts, through Joshua Tree from the Mojave to the Sonoran, wind my way through the mud canyons of the San Andreas fault, skirt the lemon and orange groves, the date palms, bounce across the Anza Borrego Badlands through an immense storm of blowing dust, endure a night of wind threatening my flimsy tent, and emerge t-shirted into sunlight and warmth, among friends -- ocatilla, barrel, agave, mesquite -- with tiny fishhook cactus in bloom, hillsides crazy with jumbled stone, and Kumeyaay pottery shards big as my heart on the desert floor.
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