Tonight will be my last night in Quartzsite. Six nights has been plenty to get to understand this place, although I can’t claim to have seen everything. It’s a much more complicated picture than I had expected. Quartzsite is not just a spot in the desert that RV’ers claim as their own every winter. It’s not just a phenomenon for retirees. It has a zeitgeist that I have not encountered anywhere else.
Matt, Carrie, and Jay are good examples of why this is so. They have been coming to Quartzsite for thirteen years. Lately they stay in their 1966 Airstream Overlander in the LTVA, but in prior years they camped in a conversion van for which Carrie hand-built the cabinetry.
They are undoubtedly in the minority among the zillions of retirees who are parked here in their giant triple-axle fifth wheels and half-million-dollar Class A motorhomes, but they contribute a very important part of the overall feeling of Quartzsite nonetheless. They staff the rock shops and add to the culture. They are the folks with the bonfire in the wash at night. They help keep it lively.
And there’s much more. There’s a guy in town who runs a book shop and wears almost nothing all day (at least when it is warm). He’s a regular tourist attraction in his own right. There’s a pyramid-shaped monument to a Syrian (“Hi Jolly”) who came over here in the 1940s as a camel driver, and stayed the rest of his life. Someone has an aluminum trailer (either a Silver Streak or a Curtis Wright) on floats stored just outside town, and there are other people dry-washing the earth to find gold. Thousands of years ago people pounded mesquite seeds with rocks and you can still see the holes they wore in the stone cliffs. Every one of them has a story.
Weighed against the diversity of people who are here and who have been here in the past, the thousands of RV’ers who sit indoors and watch TV every night are not the most interesting part of Quartzsite. They are like grains of sand, amongst which a few dazzling diamonds can be found. I’ve had fun finding a few of the diamonds, and if I come back to Quartzsite, it will be to find more.
Solar report: no reading taken at 8 a.m., I was in a rush to get out and photograph Matt, Carrie, and Jay at their trailer before they went to work. At 5 p.m., batteries were at -43 amps, so after six nights of boondocking with full sun most days (and careful conservation), we’re in pretty good shape. The safe useful capacity of our batteries is about 170 amps. I’m also still in good shape on water and holding tanks, which is not a big surprise. Even with three of us in the trailer we can get 4-5 days, so six nights by myself was pretty easy.
