A Ride on the Pearblossom Highway
JUNE 23, 2007 Listen to this Story
- Pearl Blossom
- View the Slideshow
Web Resources
Some of the thousands of Californians who trek to Las Vegas by car, take a shortcut through the high desert on California State Route 130. It's also called the Pearblossom Highway and has quite a past as an iconic open road, but it doesn't seem so open anymore with more commuters and roadwork trying to expand the area. Eve Troeh reports on where the highway stands today.
Notes from Producer Eve Troeh
Earlier this month, I heard about some extreme cases of road rage on a stretch of highway outside Los Angeles, CA-138/Pearblossom Highway. The California Department of Transportation announced it was closing a road work site, after repeated harrassment of workers by drivers who just blew their tops.
It was a scene typical of road construction: lines of cars waiting for a break in road work to be flagged through a construction site. But over months of construction, drivers who were waiting made death threats against workers, said they'd climb water towers and shoot them. Then one did. A female worker was hit in the leg with a BB gun. Burritos were thrown. The site was ambushed by renegade drivers who refused to wait their turn. Workers were badly injured, not to mention incensed. The contractor threatened to walk off the job unless the site was closed to the public.
The road work is necessary. Even the most frustrated drivers knew that. Over the years, this two-lane highway with no shoulder had earned the nickname Blood Alley. Cars in a hurry to pass trucks or slower drivers were constantly getting in accidents. There've been more than a dozen fatal accidents on the road in the past three years.
I knew the highway itself secondhand, through a piece of art I'd seen years ago at the Getty Museum in L.A., "Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April, No. 2." It's a photo collage by David Hockney, a Cubist-influenced work that aims to convey the feeling of driving down a desert road from many perspectives and angles. It was made in 1986, and back then the road was swirled with sand, empty of cars, and surrounded by vast, open desert.
The stories of road rage told me that, more than 20 years after Hockney's work, the highway runs through a very different place. Indeed, new subdivisions have swallowed stretches of the open land. Billboards advertise Such-and-Such-Estates, from the 200s! The roads are crowded to the point of breaking people's sanity.
Yet there are pockets of dusty highway and small-town life to be found, as the owners of two small business told me. Maria Watson of Valley Hungarian Sausage Co. has a pleasant demeanor that would put the most anxious driver at ease. And Matthew McMasters of Firestar Fine Arts, who sells prints of David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway" is still enamored of the landscape, and smog-free blue skies.
-
- Music Bridge:
- Wonderplucks
- Artist: Freeform
- CD: Outside In (Skam)
Comments
Comment | Refresh
Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Weekend America reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.
You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.