We decided to take a long weekend in Yucca, Arizona over the Memorial Day weekend with our dogs. When I told friends where we were going, I was met with some confused stares. “Where’s Yucca?” they’d say.
If you haven’t been to Yucca, population 96 as of 2020, I’m not going to tell you it needs to be on your bucket list. We found it by accident last fall while looking for a dog-friendly place to go that wasn’t as far away as Tucson but was still warmer than here. Nestled halfway between Kingman and Lake Havasu City on I-40, there’s a gas station and the Area 66 giant silver golf ball UFO museum and an Indian restaurant that had pretty good online reviews. Beyond that, the town seems to be made up of 40-acre plots of dust, rocks, cacti of all shapes and sizes and many other plants that seem to have the sole purpose of poking you and sticking in your socks and pant legs as you walk around.
It may not sound relaxing, but there’s something about getting truly away from it all while still having some of the conveniences of home. The place we rented in the fall had goats we got to feed and a swimming pool that was slightly too cold to enjoy in October and nothing around for what seemed like miles. The quiet was almost overwhelming, although we could still hear trucks traveling down the Interstate. We took a side trips to see the burros in Oatman and wandered around Lake Havasu for a day.
This trip, we decided we would just hang out and do nothing but relax and enjoy the peace and quiet. The previous house had sold, so we found a new one, on another 40 acres, with an astroturf patio on top of the garage. We packed up the dogs, headed down through Wikieup and then spent the next hour driving dirt roads, clouds of dust flying up around the car and settling on the windows. All around us the saguaro were starting to flower and Joshua trees were everywhere. Finally we found the house, which turned out to also have a campground on its property and fields of foxtails everywhere we looked — two questions we never thought to ask about when we booked the place online.
But after we got over the fact that random campers would be driving in and out of the property all weekend and picked all the foxtails off our dogs and took a side trip to a pet store in Lake Havasu to buy them both boots so that they would survive the vacation, we got down to the business of relaxing.
I had packed a bright green travel hammock I had never used and a couple of books I wanted to read. Mike had his drone and planned to zoom over mountain tops and virtually explore what was around us, but he left the password for the drone software at home and could only fly it 50 feet from the house. I discovered I’m too old to spend any amount of time slung in an awkward position in a hammock, though I tried mightily to get in a few chapters of reading while looking like an underripe banana. A bird dive-bombed me, thinking I was the biggest caterpillar ever. The only thing left we had was a pickleball set we brought along, a sport I intend both of us to pursue in the near or distant future. We knocked the ball around awkwardly in the intense afternoon sun and then gave up and went back to sitting quietly on the shady porch and watching the bees flying around the flowers on the palo verde tree.
Turns out relaxing is not a skill either of us excel at these days. “I’m a little bored,” I admitted to Mike after the second day of relaxing. We both decided it was an odd feeling to not have anything specific to do and nowhere really to go. It reminded me of being a kid again, the summer days that seemed to drag by slowly, a few swimming lessons or a week of summer camp tossed in the middle, but most days just going outside to look for other kids in the neighborhood to play with and then waiting for my dad to come home for dinner before eventually heading off to bed and another day of trying to figure out how to fill your free time.
It seems like a luxury now, the idea of being bored. We have so many devices and ways of entertaining ourselves, I am guessing most of us rarely sit quietly and watch the world around us. That night, as the sun went down, we climbed up the spiral staircase to the rooftop garage patio as the almost full moon rose and the Big Dipper appeared. The only sound was the quiet hum of the house air conditioner. No cars or voices. Just the wind rustling the fronds of the Joshua trees around us. We sat for hours as the sky darkened and watched the stars.