Day 4, Lancaster and the High Desert

In Lancaster, I pulled into the E-Z 8 Motel, which was as clinical and temporary as the city itself. I asked the lady behind the desk how long would it take to get to the poppy fields preserve. "I didn't know there was a poppy fields preserve!" she said. An older man with red hair and a wind-wrinkled face overheard me and said, "not far, just follow Avenue I."

I told him that I knew the winter rains were bad this year, and that there was supposed to be no flowers. "You may be surprised," he said. In the morning, I left the hotel keys at the desk and asked the lady behind the counter, "I am trying to get to the park with the poppies.do I just follow Avenue I?" "Poppy preserve! I didn't know there was a park."

"Lancaster is the poppies!" I said. "It's like Paris and the Eiffel tower." She sipped her coffee and said with conviction, "I've lived here all my life." I told her that the California poppy was the symbol of the state, of endless plains and endless land, and that Lancaster alone bore the signature.

The road to the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve wound its way along the beige of shameful office parks until it cleared into farmland. I remembered Mike, who drove my brothers and I from Delano to Hardscrabble while playing Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. He said, "this is the kind of song where you feel like you have arms that are fifty feet long."

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