On my second to last pair of underpants, driving back out through Barstow this morning on the way to Amboy. A sign says its 164 miles to Vegas and I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t fly in to there. It will be two hours back to the hotel tonight and while its only 80 miles from the hotel to LAX tomorrow morning, its saying its a two and a half hour drive. What if I had driven the van and went four and a half hours east after tonights shoot? How much more driving would there be to get home? I’m probably getting jealous of Gordo’s bus life.
Back at yesterday’s location of Ludlow I left the highway and got on a long segment of route 66. Passed a car parked in the middle of the road, everyone out taking photos of the nothing. At a wash, I stopped to pee under a bridge and found the bridge was on wooden pilings with a wooden deck asphalted over.
Gordo had spent the night in a parking lot in Amboy. We hunted for a spot to place the camera - I had brought a reference photo but where had I taken it from? A disorienting field of lava as far as you could see. Saved the GPS so we could find the spot again at night and surveyed the lighting situation. I had forgotten rt66 cuts between the camera and the tracks. I was embarrassed but Gordo assured me that almost nobody comes through after dark. Hardly anyone came through during the day.
We saw the Pinkertons again, driving at train speed on the dirt roads along the tracks. We saw some guys with guns who looked like police installing cameras along the tracks. Curious if the lights would be a problem, we stood around where we planned to set them up at night and they just drove back and forth in the dust studiously ignoring us.
It was too windy to sit out side so we waited in the bus for it to get dark. We figured it would take 40 hours of driving and $1900 at the current federal rate to get to Amboy from home…flying, renting the car and hotel room was cheaper. Around sunset, we set up the lights and then the camera - in the dark it was hard to say where it was pointed. Guess and check. The lights were all wrong, we ran across the desert to repoint them, half expecting Geraldo Rivera to pop out of nowhere and say he’s watching people run across the boarder. He didn’t. The Pinkertons didn’t either. Everyone was gone.
Tags: Amboy BNSF night lava california desert train
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Tags: Mojave route 66
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