Quartzite is a small Arizona town just across the Colorado River from California. In June it is not much, in January it is the RV capital of the universe as thousands of RV’s dot the surrounding countryside like flies on turds. The reason for this infestation is that you can camp for free and almost free on the BLM lands surrounding the town. For a fee of $40 for two weeks or $180 for seven months you can stay at one of the La Posa long-term areas from September through April. These pay sites have dump stations, water, and garbage cans. There are also boon docking areas without these amenities where you can stay for free for up to 14 days after which you have to move at least 25 miles away to another boon docking site. What a deal. This deal is so good that during the season a town with a year-round population of about 1500 to 3500 (depending on which source you read) gets as many as 2 million visitors during the seven months of the “season”.
These seasonal residents fall into two major groups: snowbirds that stay the whole winter and snowflakes that stay for a shorter time. The town responds to all these Q-tips by opening shuttered buildings and erecting a tent city that would make any 19th century mining camp humble by comparison. A Q-tip is a local Quartzite term which refers to the white hair and white tennis shoes of a senior citizen. It is also home to several large rock and mineral shows during this period not to mention the flea markets that explode like cluster bombs over the desert landscape. This is garage sale heaven and Judy had money to spend, praise the lord!
As Judy and I arrived early in the season, we found a nice camping spot next to a dry wash which looked to be a great off-roading area, if we had an off-road vehicle. Someone had landscaped our spot with rocks from the wash, carefully outlining the perimeter of our lot with an interjecting circular driveway with two garden plots made of the surrounding sage brush and our own ironwood tree. I parked the RV, leveled it to DBL (dead balls level), put out the awning, under which I placed our two Astroturf carpets, and patio furniture. Judy quickly prepped the inside of the RV then joined me with a bottle of wine, which I poured into two plastic flamingo wine glasses, while she lit my cigar. Damn I married well! We sat enthralled looking out at the desert landscape filling up with one RV after another. I thought we were really cool till I noticed the solar panels, satellite dishes and ATVs which were pouring out of the RVs around us. These people were planning on staying for quite a while and I envied them.
As the sun went down the stars came out in bunches, some seeming to touch the ground just out of arms reach. The evening soon turned on the cool side causing Judy and I to break out our sweaters and to snuggle on our folding love seat. I decided right then and there that this would be a place that we were going to spend at least a month after I retired. It was perfect. Okay it could use more trees and some grass, and it would be nice if you didn’t have to worry about the rattle snakes and scorpions which apparently like to hide under Astroturf carpet awaiting their chance to ambush the unwary. Also, the water available for free is apparently undrinkable and may even be bad for your RV’s plumbing. But even with its drawbacks it is a place where we could escape the winter rains of the Oregon Coast for a bit, and it’s cheap.
The next morning, I unloaded the bicycles from the rack on the back of the RV and Judy and I peddled to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) shack to pay. Even though we were only going to stay a few days we had to pay the two-week fee as at that time they did not have a daily rate. It took a bit for us to get this across to the BLM lady that we were perfectly willing to pay for two weeks even though we were only going to stay a couple of nights. I think she must have been one of the permanent residents of the region and had a little too much summer sun mixed with a lot of tequila. Judy patiently explained to her again that we knew we were overpaying and although we could camp for free just a few miles away, our only form of local transportation were two Wal-Mart special 10 speeds powered by our out-of-shape and overweight near senior citizen bodies. Although there was still no spark of understanding in the woman’s dull and slightly glazed eyes, she finally accepted our money, filling out the permit that allowed us to stay for two weeks, letting Judy know once again that we could camp for free just a few miles away. I grabbed Judy by the arm and got her outside just before Quartzite’s population was reduced by one. A half hour later Judy was still fuming homicidal, which was really scary as Judy’s temper although hot as a jalapeño in summer, it is usually over in a flash. She only started to calm down after I pointed out to her that I had heard that death by cirrhosis of the liver was a long and painful.
We rode our bikes into town and checked out the flea markets and tent stores that flanked the two main drags. One of these was an RV parts store which had everything that a usual RV store would have plus a lot of used stuff. Our water pump in the RV was acting up and I had no trouble finding a compatible new replacement for about the same price I would have had to pay at a Camping World. There were the usual craft stores with Navajo jewelry, leather goods and ceramics that you find at any larger “farmers” market, but then there were also people selling portable gas BBQ grills and step though Honda 90’s and all kinds of stuff to fill up you RV till the springs break. The area is also a rock shoppers Mecca with dozens of open-air shops selling geodes and fossils. We wandered around for hours stopping to eat at one of the numerous roach coaches which also spend the winter here. Judy and I had a great time and were reluctant to leave the next day, but we needed to get to Tucson as we were expected at my daughter house for Christmas.
Our second stay at Quartzite was not as nice. It was June, it was hot, and we were terrified that my soon to be ex-son-in-law was going to harm our youngest daughter. We had left Waldport on a Thursday evening and driven late into the night to boon dock for the night near Weed, California. Early the next morning we drove all the way to Quartzite arriving after midnight, exhausted, tired, hot and scared. I pulled the RV into the La Posa site just south of town, the same one we had stayed in the previous winter. We did not camp in the same spot as Judy wanted us as far as possible away from any plant life as she just knew that rattlesnakes would come out after the heat of the day to do their snaky things. For once I agreed. I drove around for a bit in the area to find a nice flat spot. We had no problem doing this as we were the only ones there. I got a couple of beers out of the fridge and stepped outside to find that Judy had set up our two folding chairs and was sitting in one buck ass naked. Now there was a surprise. Judy does not often go naked even in our house with the shades down. To be honest I had only seen her totally naked outside one other time when in our youth we tried out a picnic table during a warm rain in the red woods. That did not work out too well as slugs seem to have taken up residence on the same picnic table and did not move out of the way quickly enough. Ugh! However, her present nudity was not an enticement, it was pizza oven hot, so I shed my clothes and planted my skinny ass (my only skinny part) in the chair next to hers. We sat there drinking our beers, cooling off a bit in our bareness, and bit less fearful. It is hard to worry when you are naked and looking at a full canopy of stars on a moonless night. After a while Judy even quit looking for snakes.
The next morning, we were on our way once more on I10, planning on turning south at Buckeye on Highway 85 which was the shortest way south to Tucson. We never made it. A sudden thump followed by a high-pitched screaming squeal indicated trouble. I pulled off the road to find the serpentine belt shredded and laying on top of the air cleaner. By this time in my RVing life, I had learned the importance of a cell phone. We had towing which I soon arranged for but where to take the RV. I made a quick call to my mechanic, Larry, in Waldport who has a brother with a mechanic shop in Quartzite. Turns out his brother is only open during the snowbird season, but Larry gave me the name of a shop which he thought was okay that was open all year round.
Two hours later we were there. The mechanic appeared to have either a bad knee or a badly malfunctioning prosthetic leg soon verified my problem with a quick look under the front of the RV saying.
“Yep, serpentine belts gone all right”.
Why he didn’t know that from me having handed the shredded belt to him in the first place, I couldn’t fathom a guess. After his learned diagnosis he crawled out from under the RV, said “won’t take any time at all to fix it if NAPA has the part”.
He then hobbled across the shop in an ambulatory motion where it appeared that he had to push with his hand at every step to get his knee to straighten. This peculiar mode of locomotion did not seem to cause him pain, nor did it seem to slow him down. He then proceeded to sit down next to the biggest swamp cooler I have ever seen and to sip on a can of coke. We stared at each other for a bit. I looked at Judy. She looked at me. Hannah on her leash in front of the swamp cooler looked at us both.
“Should I go to NAPA and get the belt” I asked?
“Nope, I’ll go”.
“OK, any place close we can go to lunch”, I asked.
“Just the Burger King across the street”.
“OK, we will be back soon.”
Judy and I walked over to the BK in silence. We got our Whoppers and ate them in silence. We both just knew that this was going to be a long day. Did everyone who lived year-long here have a drug and alcohol problem or were we just being unlucky. Sure, enough when we got back the mechanic was sitting just where we left him.
“So, did NAPA have the belt”? I asked trying to appear calm.
“Don’t know yet. Henry won’t get back from lunch for another half hour or so.”
Then it dawned on me. The NAPA store was closed for lunch as in the summer it had only one employee, Henry, who was enjoying a long and leisurely lunch break because nobody lives in Quartzite in the summer. I had mistaken the one-legged mechanic’s attitude for having spent too much time in purple haze land, when in fact he was just patiently waiting for the auto parts store to open. Didn’t take him too long to fix the RV after it opened either as by late afternoon we were back on the road, making it to Tucson near dusk that day.
We have returned to Quartzite several times since our retirement. Our longest stay was 10 days, which is about as long as we can go without renewing our fresh water. Ten days is also about as long as we can look at rocks, secondhand junk, and eat at roach coaches no matter how good the food. One local food specialty is especially obnoxious. Date milkshakes are overly sweet and have chunks of unhomogenized dates in them that hit my tonsils resulting in a gag reflex.
But there are other exciting things to do at Quartzite, like visiting the Hi Jolly grave maker. Quartzite’s most famous citizen was Philip Tedro also known as Hadji Ali or Hi Jolly. Quartzite is Trump country, so how does a Syrian Muslim have the largest grave maker, a pyramid, in the Quartzite cemetery. The answer is camels. In 1856 the US Army hired him in an experiment in which camels were to be used as beasts of burden in the “Great American Desert”. The experiment failed as mules and horses which were also used by the US Army, panicked at the sight of them. Seems like unreasoned fear of Arabs infected dumb American animals like it does dumb Americans today. The Civil War might also might have had something to do with it. What ever the reason the poor innocent camels were auctioned off with some of them were later abandoned in the Arizona Desert to fend for themselves in an alien land which had rejected them. Hi Jolly eventually settled in Quartzite where he died in 1902 where the citizens loved him so much that they erected a makeshift pyramid in his honor with a copper camel affixed to the top. A plaque was added to the monument by the Arizona Highway department in1935 further honoring him, but what he contributed to the highway depart that didn’t exist till years after he passed, is unclear to me.
Okay, what else is there to do and see in Quartzite. There is a grocery store in a giant tent where the food is in bins, a post-apocalypse department store, where they sell rusty spoons and guns, and great fossil stores. The best one was Moroccan Fossils. It was in a more permanent building with row after row of wonderful rocks with giant trilobites, ammonites, crinoids, and all at bargain basement prices. The shop was made even more special by the older Moroccan man behind the counter. With a mouth full of gold teeth, he greeted us with a huge smile and a line of blarney that would put a drunken Irishman to shame. The second year we were in the shop he claimed to remember us and called us his family. The man had such joy and loved his shop so much that we assumed he owned the place. The next year he was gone. With heavy hearts we approached the clerk and asked about the old Moroccan. Turns out he did not own the shop, but the clerk who told us this did own it. They would bring the old guy over every year from Morocco just to sell fossils to tourists like us. They would have brought him over that year, but the Trump State Department would not grant him a visa. Really, this old fossil guy with the big gold tooth grin and bigger personality was considered a danger to the good ol’ US of A.
Before writing this blog, I tried to contact the shop, to get his name and status. Can’t find a listing for the shop anymore. It was hard to tell, but there may be a different rock shop in the same building. They could have sold out or had to change the name as it might be unethical to have a Moroccan fossil shop without an actual Moroccan. Maybe repeat customers like me quit going there because their prime attraction was not the fossils at all. What ever the reason, I take some no solace in the fact that the Trump administration turned an old man loose in the Moroccan desert to fend for himself just like Hi Jolly’s camels 120 years ago.
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