My First Visit to the US and Travel through Four S

         
                Alla Valko

           My First Visit to the US and Travel through Four States

            Some pages from the book «America through My Eyes»


                My First Visit to the US
 
All my life I had worked in military-industrial complex enterprises, thus I’d not been permitted to travel abroad. Perestroika came and went and then the hard 1990s began, when scientists lost their hopes to be useful to their homeland. During those years my daughter Lilya had flown to the US with her husband Sergey to live, and a year later I went to California to see her. That was my first travel abroad and my first international flight. Then I began to visit that land far from Russia on a regular basis.

When I first came to America, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. A pleasant town of Ventura, where my daughter and her husband rented an apartment, amazed me by its being so different from small towns in central Russia. In Ventura almost nobody walked, many locations had no sidewalks, everybody drove as the town had no public transportation, and reaching the nearest food store on foot in reasonable time was impossible. The town mostly consisted of one or two storied houses scattered across a vast area, though the town’s population barely exceeded 100,000 inhabitants.

Our apartment was located in a rectangular-shaped two storied building with a swimming pool in the middle, where I occasionally swam, drawing ironic looks and catching side glances from the neighbors because of my lack of swimming skill. The pool was surrounded by banana palm trees, and I felt like I was in a magical world. When first I saw the apartment interior, I was amazed by the kitchen being divided from the sitting room only by a counter.

I was much younger then, but it was difficult for me to fight the jetlag from Moscow to LA. Lilya and Sergey watched TV, turned up to maximum volume, while I, who had difficulty falling asleep, just drifted off while sitting next to them on the couch.

I loved walking along our Del Norte Street and admiring the green hills, that seemed so close and reachable. However, every time I intended to climb to the hilltops I saw the signs reading «Private Property» and «No Trespassing». On my first visit to California I didn’t fully realize that entry-forbidding signs on areas even with no fences were obligatory to obey. Thus, on seeing the sign during one of my walks I went inside a private fruit garden. I walked and saw some big bright green fruit unknown to me.

My curiosity overcame my fear of being caught red-handed, and I picked it up. When I got home, I showed the fruit to my daughter, who also took interest in it. At the time Lilya and Sergey had not yet comfortably settled down: Lilya went to college and didn’t work, and the young family couldn’t afford any extras. As for me, I worked as a senior staff scientist with a degree and in late 1990s my monthly salary totaled one hundred and forty rubles. Surely at the time we still had no idea of any exotic fruits that nowadays are routine.

We faced the question how to eat that fruit. First we tried to eat it as an apple, but instantly rejected the idea as its skin was very hard. Then I pared the skin away and tried to eat its pulp, but it was tart, astringent and surprisingly unpalatable. Lilya seconded my opinion that the fruit was inedible. Then I thought: «Why does it grow in a fruit garden?» And an eureka moment dawned on me: I must surely crack the stone and eat the core. I took a hammer and started beating the stone. No way. After every blow the stone flew into a corner with no cracks. I despaired to get a positive result, so I put the hammer aside. But I didn’t give up and decided to crack the ill-fated stone by putting it into the door aperture and tried to close the door. The stone did not succumb.

The next day Lilya went to the college and told her art teacher about our failed efforts to taste an exotic fruit. One can imagine him laughing hysterically when he heard of our experiments and told his friends and neighbors about them. The point was that I’d found an unripe avocado in the private garden. Naturally, only the pulp is to be eaten when the skin turns brownish-green. He said that the pulp is to be cut in segments, put on a piece of bread with salt and pepper added. Only then one can appreciate the fruit’s unique taste and get unmatchable pleasure.

There are many citrus orchards in Ventura, and in spring the streets are filled with gorgeous scents. While walking the town along the highway I happened to stumble upon a large orange on the roadside. I looked around: there was no one in sight. One side of the highway was occupied by citrus gardens; the other side featured blind fences of private houses with overhanging branches of fruit trees. What was I to do? The temptation to pick up the orange was so great!

I came over and touched the orange with my foot. The fruit rolled, and I noticed its side had slightly rotted. At the same moment I looked up and faced the ironic gaze of a tall man, who was coming towards me. «Thank God,» I thought, «that the orange was damaged, otherwise if I’d bent to pick it up, I would have been deeply ashamed.» Later I stopped paying attention to the cornucopia of fallen fruit that was «wasted».
 
During my first visit to California we made several interesting trips to the neighboring towns of Oxnard, Ojai, and magical Santa Barbara. We walked along the ocean beaches, where on weekends the artists and craftsmen display their works, and in the town proper we visited the art museum, botanic gardens and theatre. We lunched at a seafood restaurant on the pier, watching the ocean.
For my birthday my daughter and my son-in-law presented me with a boat excursion to the Island of Anacapa, one of the Channel Islands opposite Ventura. During the trip I sailed upon the ocean for the first time and saw dolphins, sea lions, cormorants and pelicans in their natural habitat. And when we sailed up to the island, an arched rock of incredible beauty appeared before our eyes. My first trip abroad gave me many new impressions and laid the foundation for further acquaintance with a distant continent.

               
                Travel through Four States

During my next visits we always made interesting family trips. Once Lilya suggested we go to Death Valley. I often heard about it, but I wouldn’t even think of going there myself. But it would be silly to miss such an opportunity. Thus, clenching my teeth, I started to prepare myself emotionally for the trip. Then came the time for practical actions, and I had to decide what to wear and take along.

My son-in-law and grandsons wore shorts, T-shirts with short sleeves, sandals and caps. Lilya also put on her shorts, a light blouse, a wide-brimmed hat and flip-flop sandals. My family members had vast exposed skin areas, and they applied sun block lotion to them so that they wouldn’t get scorched. I didn’t trust any lotions, so I had not a single square inch of my skin exposed. I wore a cotton shirt with long sleeves, cotton thin breeches, knee-high socks, a hat and light enclosed comfortable shoes without heels. The adults took along water supplies, which were absolutely necessary.

The Death Valley in Eastern California features the driest and the hottest climate among the US national parks. The temperature peak reaches 57 degrees Centigrade. Daytime summer temperature, exceeding 50 degrees Centigrade, are common there. In ancient times the area hosted warm and shallow inner seas that left vast marine sediments. The ancient salty Lake Manly dried up, forming the salt basin rich with borax, various salts and hydrates. Nowadays its entire surface is covered with a layer of salt, resembling dirty snow.

Meanwhile the sun was climbing and it was getting hot. We had to hurry to the dunes before the heat peaked. The dunes looked unbelievably beautiful. As far as we could see, there stretched sand hills with occasional green shrubs, which was ever so strange. Lilya, Sergey and the kids tried to scale a sand hill. The higher they went, the hotter their feet were burned by the scorching sand. Once in a while they cried: «Wow, that’s hot!» It was enough for to see and feel it once. I ‘m unlikely to want to go to the Death Valley ever again.

In about three weeks we set off for a long trip through the four states: California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Our goal was to see the world-famous canyons: the Grand, the Brice and the Zion canyons, located in the national parks, as well as the Antelope Canyon, situated in the Navajo tribe territory. The five of us, three generations, walked under the scorching desert sun and wondered at the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, a masterpiece of nature with immerse length and depth up to 1600 meters. It is filled with boulders, resembling man-made structures and architectural wonders, but they of course have been created by wind, water and erosion.

After a night in a hotel in Page  the morning saw us bound for the Antelope Canyon, Arizona. It is not a national park and not as popular among ordinary tourists as the Grand and the Brice Canyons. But it is famous among photographers around the world who get fantastic shots there. In some sections of the Canyon we saw pillars of light as if torchlights shone in semidarkness. The canyon entrance was wide, but in the end it narrowed, and in those areas the light created marvelous lighting effects while passing through small cracks in the vault with multiple reflections from the canyon’s walls. The sandstone forming the canyon has a layered structure with strata of various shades of red, grey and light-brown, and that lighting added more colors to the canyon’s walls. In the pictures we even found blue spots, while blue color was in fact non-existent there.

Our next site was an elevated plateau, where we watched the Colorado River  bend. In that place the riverbed curves around the «Horseshoe» rock, painting various shades of red and bathing in emerald water. Then we went to the Powell water reserve and the border of Arizona and Utah, which is an oasis in hot and dry desert, and took an exciting boat cruise. In some areas the lake, clamped between the two ridges, was so narrow that I shut my eyes, afraid that the boat would not squeeze between the upright rocks and would crash into the edge’s scaling wall.

The more we advanced to the south west of Utah to the Zion Canyon, the more reddish tint we observed in the decaying ridges. We could not but admire the results of wind, water and sun working in unison with frosty chemical erosion and creating amazing and filigree masterpieces in shapes of fortress walls, turrets, spires, temples, minarets, arches, small and narrow canyons and other pieces! All of them look extremely delicate as if chiseled by a craftsman’s hand. Admiring great scaling rocks and numerous small ravines, we noticed that the mountains there also had layered structure and sharp peaks.

We did not see powerful waterfalls here, but all of them were very high. In the Zion Canyon nature exposed its talents, creating tremendous and majestic sculptures, but not, however, as delicate as those in the Bryce Canyon.
Our way back was through Las Vegas. I had already been in that city at the turn of the century. Then we’d stayed at the «Mirage» hotel and at night we’d watched the performances staged at the «open scenes» near hotels. We had seen a magnificent fountain transform into a fire-spouting volcano, pirates boarding the ship with untold wealth, intercepted in the ocean’s expanses. We had admired the Eiffel Tower’s replica in the «Paris» hotel. Then I’d first seen the dancing fountains of the «Bellagio» hotel. We hadn’t been able to take our eyes off their magnificent jets, slowly ascending and descending to music, occasionally lit up by blue and pink lights.

Once we’d lunched at the «Excalibur» hotel restaurant with its magical architecture. Our buffet lunch for three had cost only twenty dollars. Lilya and I had overestimated our abilities and had filed our plates to the rim, and in the end we hadn’t been able to eat everything. In the past, food in Las Vegas had been very cheap. The aim was to make tourists gamble at the casinos and leave their money there.
 
We adults also had joined in the gambling, though it hadn’t made me excited as it hadn’t taken either mental efforts or skill. I had happily lost my personal dollar, and Lilya and Sergey had offered me a dollar each, I hadn’t refused and lost them too. Sergey and Lilya had been gambling «big», sometimes winning, but in the end each of them had lost five dollars.

Many hotels in Las Vegas are interconnected with passages, so that the tourist, without exposure to the surrounding heat, could really have fun in the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurants, stores, boutiques and halls.
Driving some 25 miles from Las Vegas we’d seen the Hoover Dam and the big power station, ensuring Las Vegas’s development among the surrounding rocky desert. The station had been built at the Colorado River water reverse, called Lake Mead. Owing to it the Desert Star City shines its electric lights at night, and is «cooled» day and night by numerous fountains.

But this time our Las Vegas stay was brief. After a night at the «Imperial Palace» Hotel we drove along the major Fremont Street and the Strip in the morning, parked at the «Mandalay Bay» hotel and walked along its spacious halls. The hotel impressed my imagination by its luxury, design, grandeur and finishing. Marble floors with mosaic inlays, lamps, inimitable in their shapes and sizes made us really delighted. The hall’s center hosts a transparent dome, allowing sunrays to pour down on the decorated flowerbed of young bamboo with delicate green leaves that become almost transparent in that lighting. In another place the blue lit-up canvas serves as a background for dry stems with naked branches stuck into a layer of tiny pebbles that seem to radiate the light by themselves. It is really so beautiful!

Everywhere there are round tables with vases and impeccably arranged real or artificial flowers, enormous tubs with palms and other exotic plants I’ve never seen  and the names of which I surely don’t know. Lilya and I visited the ladies room and stopped short. The ladies' room turned out to be decorated magnificently. The walls were full of large mirrors, the counters above the hand-washing basins featured glowers vases and small bottles with various fragrances, as well as aromatic soaps and toilet paper with intricate patterns.

Many places featured sculptures, and among them we noted the majestic statue of an Indian goddess, probably Guanyin. One of the halls hosted a huge aquarium almost to the ceiling, shaped like a palace, with decorated fish inside. The aquarium made our boys really happy. The last thing we admired was an exquisitely designed cascade fountain with water flowing down the terraces.

The trip tired us, but we got lots of unforgettable impressions! Our spirits were high, and after leaving Las Vegas we rode and sang a song about Old McDonald the farmer and his cow, that the kids learned at kindergarten.
Suddenly Sergey says: «Lilya, look, the patrol car demands us to stop.» Lilya, sitting at the steering wheel, obeyed without demur. A patrolman came up and wrote a speed ticket… in the desert! Then I knew that in America it’s impossible to offer a bribe to a policeman. After three violations a driver’s license is withdrawn, and every violation is fed into database. To delete a violation entry a policeman suggests that the guilty party should pass an exam to renew their license. We went on our way home.

When it grew dark we got worried that our permanent driver Sergey, who took over, might fall asleep at the wheel. Then Lilya began to read out loud an ironic detective story, and we, grownups, occasionally laughed, and the kids laughed along, yawning and pretending they understood everything too.

We hurried home, because the next day some had to go to work, others – to kindergarten, and someone else…everyone had his own business to mind, though.