Rock All Night

72




Finally, after mushrooms and orange juice, and Santa Claus lookalikes and doggie angels, and treks through the desert and psychedelic sex… we finally made it to Joshua Tree National Park.

After the drama of the previous 24 hours, the rest of the trip was boring by comparison. We just spent several hours driving around the park (fully sober, by the way – except for Killian, who was never sober). It was beautiful, in an otherworldly, Star Trek planet meets John Wayne western kind of way.

Joshua trees look like God took tree bark and twisted it every which way like pipe cleaners, then added green spiky cacti at the ends of all the branches. The trees are interspersed throughout a landscape filled with odd rock formations. Almost completely spherical stones… natural arches, probably carved by water over a hundred million years ago… and fifty-foot-tall piles of boulders.

It was one of the weirdest and most beautiful places I’d ever seen.

But my enjoyment was hampered by the fuzziness of my head. I mostly just relaxed in Derek’s arms as we reclined in the back seat. Ryan drove and Killian rode shotgun, plinking his guitar and smoking his herb.

Three hours later, after a few short hikes (and a few stolen kisses with my new boyfriend), Ryan turned to Killian. “We good?”

“We good,” he answered, and we rode out of the park and back towards San Diego.