Born and raised in Southern California beach towns in the 1950s and 1960s, it struck me as obvious that car culture was a social, cultural and environmental disaster, so I decided not to drive. This hasn't been particularly easy in car-centric California, but does mean that I have become something of an expert at finding obscure public transportation alternatives.
Favorite forms of transportation have always been boats and trains, because you can walk around, not to mention their constant, soothing motion, which means it's a pleasure to announce that Amtrak California has been improving by leaps and bounds recently. With subsidies from Caltrans, they have quietly been building an ambitious network of trains and buses on existing tracks and roads that is inexpensive to ride, and so far mostly works.
This weekend I needed to get myself from Palm Springs in the California Southeast Desert to San Luis Obispo on the California Central Coast, which is tricky enough to accomplish with a car, but which until recently would have been just about impossible on public transportation. Thanks to a new, twice-daily, roundtrip feeder bus going from the Coachella Valley to the Pacific Surfliner line in Orange County, the trip became possible and was a surprisingly cheap $104 roundtrip besides.
The journey consisted of a two-hour bus ride from downtown Palm Springs to Riverside and Fullerton, followed by a four-hour train ride to Santa Barbara along the coast, culminating in another two-hour bus ride to San Luis Obispo.
None of the legs of the trip were particularly crowded and the mixture of fellow passengers was a perfect example of the word eclectic. There was the usual Amtrak mixture of ex-convicts mingling with the elderly, but in addition there were Los Angeles area commuters, a large and jolly Japanese tour group above, and scores of college kids from all over Southern California migrating between home and campus.
The student above was enthusiastically tearing through a text on Latin American music, and on the return trip I shared all my buses and trains with a Cal Poly student who had a surfboard in one hand and a Modern Library edition of Sigmund Freud's writings in the other.
I was in San Luis Obispo for my father's 80th birthday party (above, surrounded by his four children), and it was an unexpectedly sweet occasion. Thanks, Amtrak, for making it happen.
Monday's return trip started with serious suspense, because the feeder bus to Santa Barbara actually starts its southbound trip in Oakland and is often late. If we were to miss the Surfliner connection in Santa Barbara, that would mean waiting a whole extra day for a bus to Palm Springs.
Thankfully, we had Dave above as the driver, and even when the bus suddenly stopped running and we had to pull to the side of the freeway near Avila Beach, he didn't panic. "It's got to be a short in the computer system," he thought, so just turned everything off. After a decent pause, he rebooted, which worked, and we made it to Santa Barbara with time to spare.
We arrived in the Los Angeles basin just in time for evening rush hour, and suddenly our beach train became a serious commuter train, transporting business people from downtown LA's Union Station to Orange County. The Fullerton transit hub, where we caught the Palm Springs bus, was lively, with about six different regional transport systems connecting up with each other.
There are plans afoot to extend the Surfliner from its current San Diego to San Luis Obispo route all the way north to San Jose where it can join the Capitol Corridor to Sacramento, but the Union Pacific/Southern Pacific combine is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer compensation. For more info, check out RailPAC.org, an advocacy group for passenger rail in California and Nevada.
Last week's free Thursday evenings at the Palm Springs Art Museum, attracted a large group of locals and tourists with two great special exhibits. One featured Southwestern Indian textiles (think wall-size Navajo rugs) and Antibodies: The Works of Fernando & Humberto Campana, 1989-2009, a retrospective devoted to a pair of Brazilian brothers who create whimsical, outrageous furniture (click here) from every imaginable material.
They were also checking out the great permanent collection, including San Francisco Bay Area glass sculptor Oben Albright's Nate from 2009, where a tourist with a hoodie consented to be photographed for their staredown.
Nearby was Cuts, Czech Art Glass from 2006 by Ales Vasicek.
Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000), a Mexico City artist completely new to me, was represented by a couple of striking abstract paintings from 1964, Tres Formas: Ancient Forms above and Rojo y Blanco: White, Red, Green below.
Gerzso was born in Mexico to German immigrants during the Mexican Revolution, was shuttled back and forth between art-loving relatives in Switzerland and his mother and various stepfathers in Mexico City. He became a successful production designer for the theatre and cinema in both the U.S. and Mexico, and started a long painting career in the 1930s, culminating in his abstract period in the 1960s.
Another favorite from the permanent collection hung nearby in the "Western Art" wing, Llyn Foulkes' 1983 The Last Outpost.
Upstairs at the museum is a 2007 funhouse pop sculpture called No title (stacked photos, butter) by Robert Therrien, which performs the uncanny visual hallucination of looking like it is rotating when you walk around it.
In the adjoining room is a favorite 1999 Anselm Kiefer sculpture, Nossis...
...facing Joan Mitchell's beautiful 1990 wall-size painting, Ground.
Rounding out the evening was the great LA-based artist Mark Bradford's 2011 Rat Catcher of Hamelin IV.
Steven Bowditch from Australia (above right), Kris Blanks from Florida, and Derek Ernst from Clovis, California (teeing off) were in the final trio on the last day of the Qualifying School Tournament in La Quinta, thanks to their cumulative scores the previous five days.
The 29-year-old Bowditch above started the day in the lead, but was soon just hanging on to a slim cushion that would ensure a top 25 score to secure next year's PGA Tour playing privileges. Through the first nine holes, he was spraying his tee shots all over the place, into water and other punitive locations. There were a pair of fans from Portland, Oregon following Bowditch during the round who seemed to know everything about his struggle with acute chronic depression, and by the end of the five-hour round, they were close to being mental wrecks themselves. (Click here for a 2009 story by Golf Digest's Jim Moriarty.)
On the other hand, the 22-year-old Derek Ernst, a recent graduate from UNLV, looked happy, calm and collected over those same first nine holes, but he ended up having to face a few mental struggles down the final stretch himself.
There were so few spectators that it was easy to get to know everyone following a group, and the lady above turned out to be Dawn Ernst, his mom, and the gentleman below was Mark Ernst, his dad.
There's a long tradition of obnoxious, controlling stage parents in entertainment and sports, where adults live their dreams through their offspring, but the Ernst parents seemed to be the opposite, quiet and self-effacing and genuinely amazed at the places their son was taking them.
A good analogy for the world of professional golf is professional opera, which requires unusual god-given talents along with years of training and study, even though there are only 200 to 300 star singers at any one time who can be counted on to have a worldwide audience. The same ecosystem holds true for professional golf, and securing a PGA Tour card is a major entryway into the sporting equivalent of those rarified heights.
During a discussion about Derek and his working class versus country club background, an older gentleman offered, "He's going to be entering a very elite circle. There are plenty of millionaires in the world," he added, "but only a few hundred people get to play golf at this level. I wonder if he has any idea what he's getting into."
On the final nine holes, the reality of the situation seemed to hit Derek and putts stopped dropping while his tee shots were landing in fairway bunkers and water hazards.
His father Mark watched from the sidelines with an imperfect attempt at complete stoicism, but Derek had built enough of a cushion over five and a half days that he finished in the top 25 with two strokes to spare.
There was a look of joyful relief on Derek's face as he wrote down his score after the 18th hole, and officially began his PGA Tour career.
