Of course: you went out to El Mirage Dry Lake, which the New York Times–with musician Ry Cooder as its mystical guide–rediscovered yesterday, in a great travel piece that should remind you why we still live in Southern California.

“El Mirage Dry Lake sounds like a place one step away from nonexistence, but it’s about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, out among the Joshua trees. It’s not far from Edwards Air Force Base, in the Mojave’s military-paranormal sector, where secretive government installations lie low among the jackrabbits — a land of spy planes, space aliens, off-road vehicles, sturdy reptiles and people with freaky desert habits, like racing vintage hot rods on dry lakebeds,” writes Times reporter Lawrence Downes. “It is, in other words, a critical stop on Ry’s California trail.”

Once out there (and El Mirage is way out there), Cooder and Downes met Bigfoot Lodge bar owner Bobby Green and his racing team, and waxed philosophical about the Southern California experience.

“You had to be kind of hardcore to come out and do this,” Cooder told the Times. “Get sand in your teeth. God knows what. It was a working class, blue-collar thing, you know what I mean.”

Backstory: it was race day. Green campaigns a belly tanker (and no, I’m not using quotes around that the way the Times did). It’s a 14-foot-long, 32-inch-wide race car based around a real live external fuel tank from a World War II-era airplane (possibly a P-38 Lockheed Lightning)–built muchly the way racers did after the war.

These were uncommon in the early 1950s–when belly tankers were literally the fastest cars in America–because they were drop tanks; they hung below the plane’s fuselage, and most were simply jettisoned when they were empty. As you’ll see, Green’s example still wears most of its dark, matte blue U.S. Navy paint.

This is a great piece. LAObserved.com’s Kevin Roderick linked to it yesterday, calling it “the best thing I read all day” and offering an amazing quote from Green’s pal Mister Jalopy. We’ll leave you with part of it.

“There is the Los Angeles that people imagine, of red carpet premieres, Botox lunches, velvet rope nightclubs, Venice bodybuilders and tony boutiques. It is not a fable. That is real. Or, at least, it physically exists,” Mister Jalopy writes.

“Then there is the Los Angeles that I know. Aerospace surplus hardware stores, smoky and ashtray-less Koreatown English hunt club bars in crumbling hotel basements, perfect beer buzz lunches in filtered sunlight at the Farmer’s Market , the wild dogs of Pacoima, sprawling thrift stores, trolling junkyards for old diaries and Polaroids … .”

Dunno about you, but I’ll take that Los Angeles any day.

Tags: Bobby Green, California, El Mirage Dry Lake, Lawrence Downes, Long Beach, Mister Jalopy, new york times, Old Crow race team, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas