Thanks for reading Life is Strange! My trip is over for now, but I plan on using this blog to chronicle future adventures, so please do subscribe if you’d like to keep in touch. Until then, wishing you infinite adventures and a whole lot of beauty.
I’ve put off writing this post for a little while because the truth is, I don't want my trip to be over… but everything is ephemeral, all land eventually turns into the sea, and all road trips must eventually come to an end.
So, on September 14th, I left Joshua Tree in the morning, and after a stop at a diner in the desert, I headed for Venice Beach (which happened to be exactly 2 hours and 22 minutes away — there was that angel number again, winking at me). After a stint in LA freeway traffic, which was even gnarlier than I expected, I arrived at the sea.
It was a sunny, perfect Los Angeles day (as many of them are, I hear), and the ocean glittered in the distance, and I realized that had officially made it from one coast to the next.
I walked down the boardwalk, making my way past kitschy souvenir shops blasting pop music. In true LA fashion, I bought a kale smoothie, and then I stopped in an Egyptian gemstone store and wound up talking to the girl at the counter. After I mentioned I’d come from Joshua Tree, she said she’d been hearing about the park a lot and saw this as a sign she should go there. So, the cycle of Joshua Tree pilgrimages continues — as an entity, Joshua Tree seems to have that effect, calling to people when the time is right.
The boardwalk reminded me a bit of Times Square and a bit of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, with artists and bohemians, LA models and aspiring stars floating around on skateboards and peddling their wares.
Eventually I reached an actual boardwalk that stretched out towards the ocean. I made my way down to the edge, admiring the jade sea and thinking about how far I’d come.
During my remaining time on the boardwalk, about three different men tried to ask me out and so that was a little chaotic, but other than that, it was the perfect intro to LA. I ended the visit with a mint chocolate chip ice cream and paid $3 for a lovely girl sitting on a blanket to write me a poem on her typewriter. Then I headed up towards Beverly Hills.
I had made plans to hang out with a guy who I’d met back in New York, an old friend’s roommate. At a party in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, we found out we were both doing solo cross-country trips at the same time, and so we’d been texting throughout the trip, sharing road stories.
It turned out we had a lot in common, from semi-recent breakups to an interest in climate change and socialism to a passion for Buddhism, art, and California, and it was nice to know that a familiar face waited at the end of the road.
All I really wanted to do that night was go to Mulholland Drive (the David Lynch fan in me just had to), and it turned out to be a perfect choice. We drove along the winding roads and up through the cliffs just as the sun was setting, and soon all of LA spread out before us, the palm trees and the bright lights gleaming as brightly as the sun had shimmered on the ocean earlier that day.
Eventually we parked and scrambled up a few hills, picking through brambles and clambering over roots until we reached a peak, which was crowned by an expansive tree that reminded both of us of trees from our childhoods. (It reminded me of the Japanese maple in my backyard, which I used to imagine was the dining room of the forest kingdom I used to play pretend in).
I have to say that getting kissed at the top of Mulholland Drive at sunset with all of Los Angeles in the background was a pretty iconic way to end my trip, and it was one of the more cinematic experiences I’ve had in a while, which feels appropriate for a visit to Hollywood.
Anyways, afterwards we got burritos and had ridiculously expensive Cosmopolitans in an absurdly fancy bar that we stumbled into while looking for a bathroom. We talked about Buddhism and Joseph Campbell and the importance of healing generational traumas and the joy of being our California selves as opposed to our slightly stuffier New York selves, and I decided that I really liked LA.
It’s funny to me that as we go through our lives alone, other people are living parallel lives, having such incredibly similar experiences and feeling such similar feelings. Other people are just as lost and loving and as full of flaws and stories and visions as we are. None of us are really alone in the end, and as much as I love solitude, I am aware that genuine connection is really the lifeblood of change and beauty in this life.
I’m also glad I got to share my stories with you, reader, on this trip — it’s certainly added meaning and substance to these days on the road for me. And maybe that’s part of why I tell stories in the first place, to share beauty and to calcify memories by sharing them with others, and to break through the endless gap between me and other people, to reach out, to join the web of connection and emergence we’re all spinning in.
I left LA regretfully, not wanting the trip to end, and made my way to the outskirts of the city to pick up my friend. This friend was originally supposed to come on the entire road trip with me but wasn’t able to make it. He’s from LA, though, and so he decided to come down, visit family and friends, and do the last leg of the trip with me.
On the way, we went to In N’ Out for the first time, stopped at a cute little Dutch town off the 101, and talked a lot about Twin Peaks: The Return. Then we headed to Big Sur.
I’d always wanted to see Big Sur, but unfortunately our timing was a bit off, and we arrived at sundown. Trees cloaked in Spanish moss ushered us in, and as we drove deeper, a great fog began to creep through the hills.
My friend casually mentioned that he’d heard some Chumuch Native American stories about creatures in Big Sur called Dark Watchers, tall shadowy entities who apparently come out at night and watch travelers from the fog. People have been seeing these entities for hundreds of years, and apparently you are never supposed to approach them.
We did get to see some glorious views of the ocean and the ragged coast, but soon enough the gloaming shifted to all-consuming darkness, and we were winding through the labyrinthine highways and forests of Big Sur with only my car’s headlights to guide us.
At one point, we were stopped in the middle of the road for a long, long time, waiting for some construction up ahead to clear out. At long last, we finally emerged from the woods, our phones’ service came back on, and civilization re-appeared. Only then did we both acknowledge how utterly unnerved we were, and how deeply strange we had both felt in those foggy, gloomy woods.
Then my friend said he’d seen something that could have been a Dark Watcher on the way in. And I realized I’d seen some ragged-looking men walking on the side of the road who resembled certain horrifyingly evil creatures from Twin Peaks.
The strange feeling lasted the rest of the evening. So that was Big Sur at night; in my memory now it feels like we were sucked into a time warp while we were in there, or like we were teetering on the edge of some vast portal. It was definitely the eeriest part of my trip, and an appropriate ending seeing that I’d been reading the book Ghostland throughout the whole adventure.
In Ghostland, the writer excavates the deeper meanings and sociological implications of ghost stories, and explores what our obsession with ghosts says about us. So in that vein, I have some theories about the Dark Watchers, which people have been seeing in Big Sur for hundreds of years.
On a simple level, they might represent our fear of the unknown, of the dark woods, of death and the infinite mysteries and unanswerable questions that surround our lives. On a scientific level, it’s possible that the creatures are conjured by something called infrasound, which are sounds that are too low for the human ear to hear. Infrasound can be generated by ocean waves, and it can actually cause human eyes to vibrate imperceptibly, creating weird hallucinations out of shadows.
I also think it’s possible that these ancient creatures represent our feeling that the land is much more alive than we know, and that perhaps the hills are watching us, as are the trees and the oceans. I know we are more connected to nature than we could know; we are nature, and the boundaries between us and the spirit world and the electromagnetic forces that connect all of us are thinner than we could imagine.
(My friend is a physicist and gave me an in-depth explanation of the history of quantum physics at one point on the drive, and let me tell you, science has definitively proved that the basic structures of reality seem ostensibly impossible when viewed from a standpoint rooted in traditional human logic).
Maybe the old stories about the watchers represent some kind of foreshadowing of the evil waves of white settler-led colonialism and capitalism that would come to devour the land. Or maybe they represent our collective fear of being watched and seen, or perhaps a layer deeper, perhaps they represent our desire to be watched and seen, either by mystic spirits or extraterrestrials or another person.
All I really know is that we humans are capable of crafting our realities. We are capable of conjuring hallucinations and manufacturing delusions and also capable of tearing them down. We are also capable of such extraordinary feeling, of love that can literally stop time and last forever, and of creative magnificence and destructiveness in equal portions.
I think we can create gods that can become real for us, and we can create real meaning for our own lives. We are also capable of imagining and creating new worlds.
On the last leg of the trip, my friend and I talked about what we thought would happen a hundred or two hundred years in the future. Certainly climate devastation will come; there will be a reckoning. New innovations in science will guide us to places we simply cannot imagine right now.
Perhaps the cycle of creation and destruction will continue; empires will fall, and new forms of spirituality and connection will bloom. I hope to see a world where people realize that they are part of nature, and where people root more deeply in the land around them and learn to exist in reciprocal ecosystems. I do think that an old world has ended, and we’re in the midst of the beginning of a new cycle.
I don’t know what will happen or where it will lead, but I know that I am so grateful to have had this chance to explore strange, fucked-up, magnificent America. It is such a strange country, but then again, it’s a rather strange life.
Late that night, I arrived back at my art collective home in San Francisco, already dreaming of future trips. Still, it was nice to come home and see all my friends, and I was quickly pulled back into the flow of life in our former nunnery. The next day I dropped the car off with its owner, waving goodbye to the trusty Jeep Renegade that had carried me so far.
A few days after my return, some of my friends and I drove out to the beach late at night. I always knew, somehow, that SF’s Ocean Beach would be the true end of my journey, the place where this road would ultimately lead.
We ran into the waves, laughing and hugging each other, feeling the real world and the entirety of the past and future dissolve until there was nothing left but the present.
My journey was complete. And yet I know that as with all things, this ending is also a new beginning, the start of a new adventure.
Thanks so much for coming along for the ride — and until the next one, sending you all my love.
Dearest Eden,
What a joy it has been to share this incredible journey with you in this way. Through your writing I was able to experience your adventures with all of my senses and at times felt like I was right there with you. I hope the memories, lessons, and inspiration you collected along the way will stay with you as you continue to meander through this crazy life. Oh, and I adore the poems and will cherish them 💖
What an incredible journey you had and meeting up with the guy who also journeyed seems a fitting ending. I enjoyed your adventures, while often thinking that I’d never had been so daring- never even thought of it.
How times have changed. You are living in what seems such a terrible time yet you have made the best of it so far. I hope you continue to see beauty in the world, keep looking for the best parts of what there is and working to preserve the earth. My father was ahead of his time, taking all our recycling to the recycling centers before they ever collected it. I know you will follow your inheritance from him.
But you will bring your own imagination and your incredible way with words and music to add to the world, dearest Eden and I will be watching you always, as long as I can.