It’s when the white lines of the road blur together into some singular directional arrow that you know you’re truly on your way, eyes fatigued by the speeding scenery and the map crumpled up in the back seat. You may not always know where you’re going, but somehow you always get there—another road trip complete and another story told. But with gas prices on an ever-higher climb, cars are being left behind and vacation hours are going unused. And so this is it, the Last American Summer—the last chance to take another road trip and explore the country from the ground up. It’s in that spirit that we drive out past Long Beach to everywhere from the murder cabins of Baja Arizona to the old sourdough shacks of Alaska, hitting the road one more time before the dream fades.

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Total Wreck
The towns not tough enough to live in Baja Arizona

Four roads lead away from Tombstone, Arizona, and three run to towns lost and gone forever, as the song goes. (The fourth is the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.) Ghost towns are everywhere in the west but they probably outnumber the live towns in Cochise County, the last recalcitrant corner of Baja Arizona, which boomed big—at its peak, Tombstone was the only legitimate American city between St. Louis and San Francisco, presenting touring international operas to pistol-packing drunks—and burst fast and left a map so freckled with what the government maps call “ruins” that you might wonder where the war had been.

And that was there, too—Cochise and Geronimo both surrendered in Cochise County, and during the Mexican Revolution, sightseers from Bisbee would picnic at the border line and watch the combat in the trenches. (The first aerial attack on American territory happened around then, too, when a mercenary pilot bombed Naco, Ariz., and not Naco, Sonora.) As a kid, I was driven or drove past what was known as the “bloodiest cabin in the west”—named for the first of two or three dozen men murdered there—an easy 5,000 times. I once looked down the mine shaft where the bodies were found. It was still braced by the original wood.

There are a few classic books on Arizona ghost towns—most named things like Ghost Towns of Arizona or Arizona Ghost Towns—and the weekend before an old friend of mine left for 13 months in Kabul, we decided to take the one we’d both grown up with and visit the places we’d never been. Some of that was for the same reasons my father said New Yorkers never visit the Statue of Liberty, and some of it was because, growing up, no one had cars tough enough to shove through old roads so wrecked even rain didn’t want to run down them. (“If you are of a certain age in Arizona,” my friend would say, “you must have a certain number of broken cars in your yard.”) But now we had a white Ford pick-up—a perfect Cochise County car, anonymous in traffic and very official-looking on its own.

We drove to the pit mine in Clifton-Morenci—where we visited the Cave bar, once a bar in a real cave until the permit bummers found out the roof was about to fall in and now just a rough little room where locals listen to Alice Cooper’s secret Arizona radio show—and went right through the gate under some vicious rain, wiggling between giant snorting mine trucks and riding the rim of the pit until we got spooked and headed for more stable ground. We drove through Cochise, where the hotel has been open since 1893; through Wilcox, where a drunken Warren Earp was shot on the main street in 1900 and where the liquor store had bottles tax-stamped 30 years ago and never sold; we took the slim Ruby Road across the county line to Ruby, a mountain Pompeii where typewriters and pianos still sat in the schoolhouse. (A handwritten sign warned that a rattlesnake was living in the piano.) We visited La Gitana, the oldest bar in the oldest settlement in the state—where sons of conquistadors came to sit—and found a peroxide-and-polyester couple from who-knows-where drinking apple martinis beneath the fingers of light coming through some old bullet holes in the wall. I think we saw one traffic light on the whole trip.

As I write, I am not sure if this is a happy story or a sad story. Some of these places were barely towns when they started—a post office, a bar and a bunch of holes in the mountain that never delivered. But some of them had baseball teams, newspapers, beauty pageants, schoolhouses and playgrounds, even electricity if they lasted long enough. All that would be left now were graveyards and the jails, which all looked the same—a religious sort of arch for a roof and ragged sockets where the bars were pulled out from the windows on the last day. These are places where civilization didn’t take—the mines quit and after that, “no reason to live” is the phrase, I believe. That simple and sometimes that quick: On that first bend coming into Ruby, it looks almost like a real town with sparkling metal roofs, bright white walls, bright green trees sucking water from the tailings ponds—and then you see the windows, every single one knocked out and dark.

When Tombstone busted, miners pried apart their houses, stacked them on wagons and rolled over the hills to Pearce, where better diggings supposedly awaited. When Pearce busted, the same people let the houses rot and left. Once is enough, I guess. Now Pearce is a giant old general store—usually locked—and a couple adobe stubs at a crossroads where every street runs flat into the horizon. As we stood there, a big diesel moving truck sputtered through the stop signs, the most modern thing on the whole landscape for that moment, and paused rumbling in front of us—they were lost. We turned them around and sent them toward the highway because all the other roads went nowhere. // CHRIS ZIEGLER

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

Going to California
Cooking bacon over canned heat in Colorado Springs

If you drove past us that day, you would have laughed—four sun-scorched kids huddled in the strip of shade attached to our ’95 Mercury Sable. The open hood was catching the noontime sun like a baseball mitt, throwing it back into our steaming engine. Tony and Justin were trading guesses on what went wrong. Meg was on the phone with AAA. I was dialing my father, lying through my teeth about what was really going on with the car that he said “might” make it to California.

“It just overheated, Dad,” I said, gummed up. “It’ll be fine in an hour.”

I think I really believed that, too. But after an hour, we were still stranded, stuck in the desert 80 miles from anywhere. We resorted to cooking bacon over some canned heat we found in the trunk. We also began a ritual burial of the rat-sized grasshoppers lodged in the Sable’s grill.

It wasn’t what we had planned, of course, four 20-somethings moving from Upstate New York to Long Beach, rolling along inside a valiant old lemon struggling against a roof bag, two mountain bikes and $2.35 per gallon. But then we didn’t move at all when the fuel pump locked up.

Two cars drove by in three hours we waited. One was a Winnebago that passed us and then decided to back up. All we saw of the driver was a long, hairy arm. He offered four chilled bottles of water and said, “You kids shouldn’t be in the desert with no water.” As the Winnie drove off, we spotted an “LB” decal on the rear window. We took it as a sign.

The second vehicle was a tow truck (courtesy of AAA) driven by a man named Mike who had hauled himself 60 miles to pick us up out of nowhere.

“Two of ya’s is gonna hafta ride in the car,” Mike shrugged. “Even though it ain’t legal, I just got room for two of ya’s in the cab.”

The next hour with Mike (who, as it turns out, had lived in Long Beach for five years of his youth) was spent in silent acknowledgment of the adventure already behind us—five states checked off the trip planner.

Pennsylvania was spent with my grandpa Oliver, who picked at his guitar, and my grandmother Dixie, who stuffed us with Crisco and green beans. Tennessee was spent in the muddy river we used as a bathtub. Missouri was spent in two places—the top of the St. Louis Arch and the outskirts of the Ozarks at Redbeard’s Ranch in Lebanon, where we were greeted by a retired military man clutching a shotgun.

Kansas was just spent. We counted three bumps in a very flat road until we hit Colorado. About an hour across the border, the car stopped running.

Mike unhitched us at the mechanic’s garage in Colorado Springs, where we deposited our vehicle for the night.

Sitting on the curb, peeling my sunburn, I realized I had a phone number in my pocket that might help us out. The day before I had left New York, my parents’ neighbor (a woman named Sally O’Connell) said she knew an old college roommate—Barb Schneider— in Colorado Springs, who we should call if “oh, I don’t know, you have some car trouble or something.” Sally jotted down the number on her barn-scene stationery and I shoved it into my jean shorts—the unwashed ones I had happened to be wearing while sitting on the curb 10 days later.

Within 10 minutes, Barb and Jim Schneider were there to pick us up. They fed us, listened to our stories and let us do our laundry there for two full days. They wouldn’t take any of our money, either.

Jim, who had lived in Long Beach while he was in the Navy, said he had some homework for us when we got there: “Go check out the Pike,” he reminisced. “It was such a great place. The best roller coaster. So beautiful.” (When we got here, we didn’t have the heart to tell him it didn’t exist anymore.)

When the Sable was fixed, we gave her a bath, vacuumed her out and hit the road again, only to have it hit back at us an hour later in Alamosa, Colo., where we discovered we had a leaking fuel line. Apparently, Aldemark Auto back in Colorado Springs had forgotten to reconnect it. Luckily, though, we had just passed another mechanic when we started smelling gas.

We backed up and pulled in. We waited eating mustard and tuna sandwiches. Two bites in, a dusty-haired 12-year-old in Ray-Bans came out of the shop door. He was carrying a six-pack of Bud Light and plopped down next to us, pulling a smoke from behind his ear.

“You guys want one?”

Going west to Long Beach was the only way left to drive—and fate was pushing us there. By the time we crossed the Great Sand Dunes, the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree National Park, we agreed completely.

As proof (and 170 gallons of gas and $1,500 later), we found a little apartment that we still call home. After kissing goodbye last year—right on the hood—I sold the old Sable. // JENNY STOCKDALE

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

Isle of Fresno
Fruit stands and the flip side of forever in California’s heartland

We were almost out of gas when we rolled into Fresno, and somebody suggested that’s probably how the city was founded. Nope—although it feels that way. All those miles of flat land between Northern and Southern California have always begged for somewhere in between. Fresno supplies it. Still, it’s not quite accurate to say that the city is in the middle of nowhere. Fresno is actually where people from the middle of nowhere—a long-drowned town called Millerton—fled to escape a flood of the San Joaquin River on Christmas Eve of 1867. Anyway, we were pretty tired when we pulled into Fresno last week. That’s what I meant by almost out of gas.

We came in from the east, on Kings Canyon Road—the one from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park—although we’d got there by driving up from Long Beach on Interstate 5, branching off onto Highway 99, stopping for an early lunch of Basque food at the Pyrenees Café in a desolate part of Bakersfield, then exiting at the Swedish-themed town of Kingsburg . . . the one with the water tower that looks like a coffee pot.

For the rest of the afternoon, we zig-zagged the grid of two-lane roads among rows of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, grape vines and corn stalks in California’s heartland. Periodically, we stopped at roadside stands and small markets to buy fresh produce. The quiet when we got out of the car felt like natural reverence for the just-picked miracles of life that were colorfully displayed in baskets, boxes and flats. It made me think of eternity, and not in the scared-shitless way.

Savvy Californians have been making this trip for generations. Only during the past five years, however, has the local tourist bureau formally codified the tour, printing up maps and calling it the Fresno County Fruit Trail. Now rising fuel prices threaten to reduce the number of faraway visitors. But this year, at least, the affordability of black and blueberries made me forget all about how badly I’d been beaten up at the gas pump.

Besides, the Fruit Trail occasionally passes through small towns like Parlier, Reedley, Orange Cove and Sanger—filled with the people who work the farms—and they reminded me of the flip side of the forever that had seemed so providential when I was at the produce stands. These towns are all struggling to varying degrees, but that’s nearly always been so—California history and literature is filled with heartbreaking accounts from its heartland—and they seem destined to always be. It’s depressing, yet in a way that also makes you marvel at the spirit of survival.

If you’ve ever heard of the author William Saroyan you’re bound to think of him as you emerge from the farmland and approach Fresno, where the election season signs frequently feature Armenian names. There’s still some audacity to a big city like this in the middle of an agricultural ocean, and Saroyan’s advice to young writers was full of it: “Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.”

Nonetheless, Fresno seems less like an island than it used to. Its east-west boundaries are expanding with new suburban tracts. Its older neighborhoods to the south are withering beneath the weight of unemployment, poverty, gangs and drugs. Its downtown is struggling to maintain its magnificence by recycling—rather than demolishing—grand early 20th century buildings. On the north side, a vibrant commercial strip has sprung up along Shaw Avenue. These dimensions of Fresno are worth exploring, too.

In fact, that’s how we found our hotel—the San Joaquin—a former singles-style apartment complex from the 1970s that has been renovated in a way that transforms its cheese into chic. Flat-effect, swingers-pad rooms that once gave everybody a leering view of the pool have been garnished with tasty color combinations, quirky design elements, plush bedding, two flat-screen TVs and well-conceived landscaping that uses several modern fountains to provide a sense of serenity and seclusion. The idea of getting into the hot tub still gave me the creeps, though.

So . . . where were we? In the end, the essence of getting to Fresno is getting away from wherever you’re from. It’s over the horizon, if not over the rainbow, and there aren’t many cities this big where you can feel this lonely, anymore. In a good way, I mean. // DAVE WIELENGA

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Call EXpress 9-3011
The phone’s off the hook at the Salton Sea, but we’re not

Out past the outlet mall, the date shakes and the spas, the Salton Sea’s scattered hamlets of snowbirds, desert rats and a few nuclear families only ever boomed once—in the flush of post-World War II optimism that made anything possible for 25 years.

Fifty years ago this March, the man who built Azusa—developer M. Penn Phillips—closed his checkbook and opened his mouth here, at the state’s largest inland body of water.

“I have never been able to stand on that rise of land above the Salton Sea without seeing a great resort city,” Phillips reportedly said, hoping to start another Oklahoma land rush. He did.

“Sales that day topped four and a quarter million dollars,” writes author William deBuys in his 1999 Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California. They were borne aloft in small planes, which took prospectors up to look at the land. Love affair consummated, “the plane circled while the new owners admired their possession, and the salesmen grinned.” Not for long.

Wise unto his years, the 73-year-old Phillips abruptly sold his Salton Sea interests in November 1960. Eventually, a company called the Holly Corporation set to work promoting Salton City with that most eco-friendly of enterprises, a golf course. Writes deBuys, “. . . by 1963, Holly realized that Salton City could not succeed solely as a resort.” That year was an eye-opener for America, which had recently discovered global warming.

Soon again, the Salton Sea—formed by men who tried to change the course of the Colorado River in 1905—would be betrayed once more by water: They were flooded out by two winters of tropical storms in the ’70s, then slowly poisoned by years of agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley.

Today the water levels are receding despite that effluent, and while the state figures out how to detox 376 square miles of saltwater, it’s your chance to see what man does to himself. You could play poker, of course; the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians recently opened Red Earth Casino on Highway 86 at Salton Sea Beach.

But if you’ve come this far, why not see what used to be the sights? Turn off at North Shore Beach and admire the remains of midcentury modern architect Albert Frey’s North Shore Beach & Yacht Club (phone EXpress 9-3011).

Pigeons nest in the walls and tarantulas strut around the swimming pool, which is dry. Then get back on Highway 111 and drive to Bombay Beach, a waffle of a town laid out on a grid and shielded from the Sea by dikes. This is where the boats came to die.

Forlorn little cabin cruisers, bereft class B hydroplanes, spooky yachts perched on wooden pilings—they were all built to go somewhere, except the hydroplanes. Now, like the Salton Sea—and like our country, which was built to run on petroleum and petroleum accessories—they’re not going anywhere.

And if you listen really hard you can hear the algae bloom, out on the Sea. // THEO DOUGLAS

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Living in the Ice Age
Alaska the hard way

After 6,892 miles, $1,224 spent on gas and 59 days stuck in the car, my boyfriend and I haven’t met anyone else doing what we’re doing—a five-month Arizona to Alaska marathon—although there have been unconfirmed sightings of cars that look as dirty and filled with junk as ours does. We’ll have logged more than 10,000 miles by the end of the trip—more than most people put on in one year—but right now we’ve finally reached our halfway point, and I’m going to enjoy sleeping in a bed. A real bed with a real bedframe that I can sit up in, not a bed made of plywood built into the back of a modified Subaru—we call it the Suba-bago—where I have to be a gymnast to crawl out the back doors to pee in the middle of the night, avoiding giant bugs, bears, and anything else the Alaskan wilderness feels like throwing at me.

I had always wanted to go on a long road trip, one where you stopped when you felt like it, where you ate greasy food in mom-and-pop diners and where you met those inevitably strange and interesting characters along the way. After some days where we spent more time driving than doing any other activity, the mental images I had constructed for myself of what this trip was going to be like began to fade. I began to think that not only were we not going to pass through anywhere worth stopping, but that the only thing I was going to get out of small towns and greasy spoons was a larger butt.

I was starting to get a little crazy cooped up, thrashing around in the seat like some beached sea mammal, before we decided to stop on the Lost Coast in Northern California. Camping near the ocean in a place so remote made it easy to forget that San Francisco was a few hours away. The park ranger had warned us about bears, and in the middle of the night I awoke in a panic after hearing a strange noise outside our windows. Struggling to get my glasses on, I could see four large, dark shapes surrounding our car, and heard a clacking sound on our roof rack. A herd of juvenile elk were grazing near us, and one had gotten his antlers stuck as he licked sea salt off our Yakima box. I fell back asleep listening to the ripping of the grass, amazed at how I could feel their breath on my open window. Dozing off, I sort of hoped that would be the closest I would get to a wild animal.

A few days later, after slogging through Canada, an evil and expensive place one is forced to pass through, we finally reached Alaska. For the last six weeks, we have driven all through Southeast, Prince William Sound and the Kenai Peninsula. We’ve spent a lot of time in the car, I’ve definitely gotten fatter and I’ve been wearing so much bug dope that I’m sure DEET has leaked permanently into my bloodstream. Not wanting bears to get into our food, we’ve been hiding our edibles in portajohns at the campgrounds. There’s nothing more appetizing than getting your oatmeal out of the ladies room. We’ve also stood a few hundred feet from a calving glacier towering over 300 feet tall in Cordova, hiked eight miles in pouring rain in Juneau, followed a moose down the road to McCarthy and floated the Chilkat River in Haines.

We’ve met the sons and daughters of old sourdoughs and homesteaders who are running the family business and living in old trapper cabins built at the turn of the 20th century. We’ve also seen towns that have lost their Alaskan-ness by being on the cruise ship circuit, where more than half the town is owned by a huge corporation and locals are almost forced to become caricatures of themselves. Some places are like being in a Universal Studios “AlaskaLand.” I kept expecting to see mechanized grizzly bears jumping out at pedestrians on the wooden sidewalks.

The locals call it the “New Gold Rush”: the road system that allows me to make this trip is slowly eroding the wilderness that made Alaska so unique in the first place. Tales about carrying three spare tires are becoming less common and so are the kind of people willing to have that sort of experience. The campgrounds we’ve been in are nearly deserted save for the occasional weekend warrior from Anchorage. When we tell people what we’re doing, they now react with stupefied horror at the cost, the length and the permanent inconvenience of our trip. To them, it just doesn’t sound like fun. // NICOLE ZIEGLER

Tags: alaska, baja arizona, California, colorado springs, fresno, gas prices, Long Beach, murder cabin, opec, peak oil, road trips, Salton Sea