Salt air drifts through the window into your subconscious as you sleep.  The air is cool and the fog along the coast hangs thick outside your house.  You sleep dreaming of sea gulls, high tide, and wet sand under your toes.

A hand shakes your shoulder.  "Chautona-  time to get up.  We're going to the desert for breakfast."  The hand disappeares and you hear your door shut behind you.  You glance at the clock.  It's 4:30.  You groan.  You know you'll have fun but it's early.  It's comfy in your warm bed and... It's SATURDAY.

You scramble out of bed.  What choice is there?  You throw on clothes grabbing a jacket that you won't need soon.  Downstairs you see mom put the sourdough jar in the ice chest.  You grin.  This is gonna be great! 

Minutes later you're on the 101 heading toward Lucerne Valley just on the eastern side of Apple Valley.  Somewhere near a dry lake bed (one of dozens) you pull off the highway and bounce over the dirt until you reach the area Dad has in mind.  It'll be perfect.  It always is.  Only someone like your dad would get everyone up to have breakfast out in the desert just for the fun of it.

While Mom and Dad start a fire, mix orange juice, scramble eggs and make sausage, you gather "Tomatillos".  They aren't really tomatillos but at first we thought they were so we've called them that ever since.  Mom will put the berries inside the sourdough pancakes and they are sooooo good.  There is nothing like breakfast, cooked over an open fire, in the middle of no where.  Add sourdough pancakes to the mix and you feel like another slice of heaven has flashed through your world.

Sometimes you stay for a while.  Dad wanders looking for more edible plants while you explore and Mom reads or crochets.  Sometimes you go home almost right away.  You marvel as barren sand gives way to small towns and then larger cities and then drifts into nothingness for a while until you reach large cities again.   The terrain changes from scrub brush to trees and occasional green to the Eucalyptus that FDR had planted as part of his "New Deal" near Fillmore and Moorpark.  You drive past the old Estes Ranch where you lived as a Kindergartner and through Camarillo.  You hope they'll stop and see Uncle Lon.  Half an hour in the Jacuzzi sounds wonderful right now.  Instead, you drive through Oxnard and then into Ventura. 

Mom and Dad drop you off at the corner of Habor and Seaward.  You walk toward the beach.  Once there, you take off your shoes and your toes squish in the sand.  It's amazing, isn't it, the difference in the sands?  Just a few short hours away is another world.  Here you find seagulls fighting over a crab, seaweed wiith sand flies all over it, and an occasional starfish.  There you saw lizards, small birds, and jackrabbits.  Here there is litle vegetation growing from the sand.  There sand is life's soil to everything from sage to Yucca trees.

More than once after such a trip as you walk up the beach toward home, you sing as loudly as you can...

"Oh Lord my God... When I in awesome wonder... consider all... the worlds Thy hands have made..."