Mr. Monk on the Road (20 page)

But I figured all the windmills and the half-timbered buildings, with their pointy gables, their flower boxes, their faux thatched roofs, and their nods to Hans Christian Andersen’s fables, would still be a visual treat for Ambrose and something new for Monk to complain about.

I was right.

Ambrose was transfixed from the moment we drove into town and he saw the distinctive fairy-tale architecture, the cobblestone sidewalks, the gas streetlamps, the horse-drawn carriages, and the carved storks on almost every rooftop. It may have been superficial and phony, but it was as close to Denmark as Ambrose was likely to ever get.

Monk was adamantly against half-timbered structures, something I learned when we visited Germany a few years back, and he voiced his complaints once again, but I didn’t listen to him, so I can spare you a repeat of his tiresome rant.

Ambrose opened the window, and almost immediately the rich aroma of fresh baked foods and sugary sweets wafted in from the many bakeries and candy shops that lined the streets. My stomach growled.

I found us a parking place in a lot right in the center of town, so even from the RV, Ambrose had plenty to look at. I volunteered to go out and bring Ambrose back a taste of the Danish delights. I insisted that Monk stay behind to keep his brother company. I was afraid that if I brought Monk with me, we’d inevitably stumble on something terrible, like the Little Mermaid with her throat slashed.

So I ventured out into the tourist-swollen streets alone, bombarded by opportunities to buy Danish food and souvenirs at every turn, and I did my consumer duty by giving my credit card a bruising.

I returned with lots of goodies, including an assortment of Danish pastries and some aebleskiver, puffed pancakes shaped like tennis balls that are ordinarily slathered with raspberry jam and powdered sugar. I got my aebleskiver the way they’re supposed to be served as an example for the Monks, but I purchased theirs plain with the jam and sugar on the side.

We devoured the aebleskivers, then dug into the pastries. It wasn’t a healthy lunch, more like one big dessert, but it certainly was sweet and tasty and, at least symbolically, got rid of the sour taste left in our mouths by our experience in San Luis Obispo.

After we ate, I gave Ambrose a little porcelain figurine of the Little Mermaid sunning herself on a rock and a key chain with tiny wooden clogs. Both of the tacky souvenirs were probably made in China, but that didn’t matter to him. I bought them in Solvang, commemorating his visit to a place he’d never been to before, and that made them special. He told me he would cherish them.

Ambrose looked out the window and sighed. “It’s like we’re parked in a fairy tale. When I was a child, I used to dream of going to a place like this, but then it occurred to me that they didn’t have running water or a decent sewage system and that their houses were firetraps made of mud and straw.”

“Very true,” Monk said. “It’s fairy-tale squalor.”

“I also worried about encountering a fire-breathing dragon, evil witch, or menacing troll, and then I didn’t want to go anymore. I must say that this is an improvement on my dream.”

“It’s not often in life you can say that,” I said.

“And I have you to thank for it,” he said.

“I’m only the driver,” I said and tipped my head toward Monk. “It’s Mr. Monk who deserves your thanks. This trip was his idea.”

Ambrose looked with warmth at his brother. “Thank you, Adrian.”

Monk rolled his shoulders. He was more comfortable with corpses than he was with any show of emotion.

“You’re welcome,” he mumbled.

Apparently, Ambrose had forgiven us for drugging him and kidnapping him. Or maybe it was just the first signs of Stockholm syndrome. Either way, I saw it as progress.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

B
efore we continued on with our journey, Monk and I sat side by side across the table from Ambrose, spread out the map of the western United States, and tried to figure out where to go next.

“We can avoid Los Angeles,” Monk said, tapping the map with his index finger. “There is absolutely nothing to see there, and we didn’t bring any gas masks.”

“What would we need gas masks for?” Ambrose asked.

“The air down there is toxic,” Monk said. “It’s so dirty, you can actually see what you are breathing.”

Ambrose shivered. “It’s hard to believe such a place exists.”

“It’s even harder to believe that people live there of their own free will,” he said. “But they don’t live there for very long.”

“They move?” Ambrose asked.

“They die,” Monk replied. “Young.”

I nudged Monk hard. He was diffusing all the goodwill and positive attitude our trip to Solvang, purchase of souvenirs, and massive consumption of sugar had won for us with Ambrose.

“We could continue south to Santa Barbara, a beautiful town, right on the water, and well worth seeing,” I said. “After that, we could head east on the 126 toward Santa Clarita, transition to the Interstate 5 south, then on to the 14 and the 18 east toward Victorville until we hit I-15. From that point, we can decide whether we want to go to Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon.”

Monk nodded. “I like that plan.”

“Because it’s a plan,” I said. “Any plan would do.”

“Plans are good,” he said.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t abandon our plan if something on the road catches our fancy or tugs us in a different direction.”

“We don’t have any fancies to be captured or tugged,” Monk said. “We like plans.”

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” Ambrose asked, underscoring Monk’s point.

I shrugged. “Anyplace that interests us, or wherever we happen to be when I get too tired to drive.”

“Is that wise?” Ambrose asked.

“It’s not like we have to rent a room somewhere. We are entirely self-sufficient.”

“I am,” Ambrose said, then looked at Monk. “But he’s not.”

“That’s why I have an assistant,” Monk said.

“Then it’s settled,” I said and got into the driver’s seat. Five minutes later we were on our way out of Solvang and continuing on our journey.

The one-hour trip down to Santa Barbara on Highway 101 wasn’t remarkable from a scenic point of view, so the Monks kept themselves amused singing “100 Cans of Lysol on the Shelf” until we got there.

I drove slowly down State Street toward the beach, giving the Monks plenty of opportunity to admire the charming town and its Spanish Mediterranean architecture, which was mandated by the city fathers so that every single building downtown seemed to be white with a red-tiled roof.

Monk appreciated the uniformity, and this was one of the rare instances when I did, too.

The whitewashed walls, the lush landscaping, the rows of palm trees, and all the little courtyards and fountains made Santa Barbara undeniably romantic and picturesque in a way that somehow felt authentic instead of merchandized.

Perhaps one reason for that was that many of the people who lived in Santa Barbara had a lot of money, so they weren’t aggressively and blatantly trying to entice tourists to empty their wallets. The upscale attitude and rich sheen had a snooty downside, though. We got lots of nasty looks from people on the street as we drove by, as if we were riding in an overflowing garbage truck instead of an RV.

We drove down to Stearns Wharf, then south along Cabrillo Boulevard between the low-slung, five-star resorts and the long, beautiful beach, which was buffered from the street by a grassy park and a winding promenade filled with bike riders, roller skaters, and joggers, most of whom had impossibly perfect bodies. A strict body-fat-to-muscle requirement for anybody who wanted to exercise in public must have been in the city ordinances somewhere, too.

I would have liked to stay a while, strolling through the streets, visiting the galleries, and sampling wines from the Santa Ynez Valley. But that wouldn’t have given Ambrose much to do, so we moved on.

As we headed back toward the freeway, we passed the zoo, and Ambrose spotted the giraffes through the trees. He shrieked excitedly like a child and pointed to them.

“Look! Giraffes! Can you see them?”

“Their necks are entirely out of proportion to their bodies,” Monk said, squirming a bit in his seat. “It’s just not right. Something should be done about that.”

“I’ll send a memo to God registering your complaint,” I said. “It’s time someone put him on notice about that.”

My sarcasm was wasted on Monk because, as smart as he was, he couldn’t discern it from straightforward speech. I’m sure that he took me seriously and wholeheartedly approved of what I said.

We were in and out of Santa Barbara in thirty minutes, which felt like I was cheating myself and the Monks, but that’s the way it was.

We pressed inland for the next three and a half hours, stopping only for gas. We drove on the 126 through the fruit cup and nut bowl of Southern California. Citrus groves and fields of fruit, vegetables, and nuts lined both sides of the highway until we reached the housing-tract sprawl and big-box-store blight of Santa Clarita and Valencia.

As we headed south on I-5 to the 14 freeway, we passed the Magic Mountain amusement park, and Ambrose couldn’t help gaping at the park’s enormous roller coasters and water slides.

“I’ve ridden on some of those,” Ambrose said.

“How could you have done that?” Monk said. “You’ve never left the house.”

“I did it virtually,” Ambrose said. “It’s a lot safer and much more sensible. All of life would be better if it could be done virtually.”

“Only someone who has never experienced life would say that,” I said.

From there, we headed into the high desert, exposing Ambrose to a landscape entirely different from any that he’d seen before.

But he wasn’t able to appreciate it at first. He was too terrified and, to be honest, I was a little anxious myself. That’s because we were traveling a two-lane stretch of blacktop known as Blood Alley that cut across the vast, empty desert scrub.

Blood Alley got its name because drivers in this desolate expanse tended to fall asleep at the wheel and drift into oncoming traffic. Or they attempted to pass the slower cars in front of them and misjudged how much open roadway they had to make their move before facing a head-on collision. Or they saw the seemingly endless stretch of road as their own personal racetrack, stomped the gas pedal to the floor, and lost control on one of the many sudden dips hidden by the heat sheen rippling off the asphalt.

The shoulders of the highway were lined with makeshift memorials, faded crosses, and piles of dried flowers, left to honor the foolish, the fatigued, and the innocent who traveled the road on their final journey to heaven or hell.

But after a while, the memorials disappeared, or perhaps were blown away by the dry desert winds, and then it was just us, the road, and miles of arid dirt, dotted with brittle brush and cactus. It was, in its own way, every bit as awe inspiring as the California coastline.

The road was an undulating, uneven ribbon atop the sand, which made it feel as if we were a yacht riding the ocean swells instead of asphalt. Driving at a steady, reasonable speed, there was a certain rhythm to the swells that I found soothing. It was no wonder so many drivers nodded off.

The highway led into dreary, sun-baked Victorville, where the two-lane roadway widened into a boulevard lined with fast-food franchises and used-car dealerships, before it connected with the I-15, the primary artery between Southern California and Las Vegas.

Just a few miles northeast of Victorville on the I-15, civilization abruptly disappeared and within minutes there was nothing but hardscrabble desert and hills in every direction. Besides the cars on the highway, there were no signs of life. Even the massive power lines veered away, like giant metal giants marching off single file on a lonely path into the barren hills.

But with the desolation came four lanes, a higher speed limit—seventy miles per hour—and a sense of freedom, of possibility, of an entire world opening up in front of us just waiting to be explored. I found it extremely relaxing and, it seemed to me, so did Ambrose. His eyes sparkled.

“You like the desert?” I asked.

Ambrose nodded. “It’s the first time that I’ve thought that stepping outdoors might not be so bad.”

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit, which led to an overpass connecting two ends of a narrow road to nowhere.

“Where are we going?” Monk asked.

I ignored the question and drove along the rough, pothole-ridden road until we rounded a bend around the edge of one of the dry hills and the I-15 was out of our sight.

I stopped the RV and turned to Ambrose, who sat in the passenger seat.

“Here we are,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

He looked at me. “Do what?”

I got up out of my seat, went over to the door, and opened it, letting in a blast of heavy, hot air that felt like a blanket, fresh from the dryer, had been thrown over me. I swept my hand out toward the desert.

“Try it,” I said. “Take that step you were thinking about.”

“I can’t,” he said, shrinking into his seat and tugging on his seat belt.

“You just said you wanted to.”

“I had a fleeting interest,” he said. “It fled.”

“There’s nobody out here but us. There are no distractions, no clutter, no noise, and no chaos of details to keep track of. You can see for a hundred miles. When have you ever been able to do that?”

Monk stared at me from the dinette area, and I gestured to him to come outside with me. He hesitated, then came to the door, motioning me over. I got close and Monk whispered.

“Are there any rattlesnakes, lizards, spiders, or red fire ants in the vicinity?”

“None,” I whispered back. “Now get out here and set an example for your brother. This is an opportunity that might never come again.”