Hesperia, California was where it dawned on me the hellhound was on my trail.
Robert Johnson knew what was happening.
“Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail.”
This is precisely what seems to unfold when you drive through Hesperia, California.
You immediately grasp it is in your best interest to keep on moving. You need breathless velocity and breakneck speed. Better yet, best you get off Interstate 15, avoid the Cajon Pass and do everything you can to give the hellhound the slip.
I was fortunate.
That winter morning after the storm rolled through, I cut off the freeway and hoped to lose the hellhound in a long purple cloud bank that had settled over the San Gabriel Mountains. I sailed off onto Highway 138 and took a left onto Lone Pine Canyon Road for the climb up to Wrightwood.
You couldn’t help staring into the rearview mirror. The hellhound wasn’t letting up. Not gaining but not giving anything up. It was difficult to make out its features, even in the sharp mountain sun. He looked like a skulking black lab with an usually large head, a stretched out snout and a pointed skull.
The eyes were also tough to see even though they burned through the glistening sunlight. They might have been bronze, perhaps ringed in green. But just when you started to focus on them, something happened that made them impossible to see.
You just knew the hellhound was there, barreling down on you, and not letting up.
But suddenly the hellhound stopped. It was at the fork where Swarthout Canyon Road cuts off from Lone Pine Canyon Road. The beast stopped and stood still.
My heart kept pounding, my hands kept trembling and I couldn’t get up to Wrightwood soon enough.
I took a wobbly stool at the counter and ordered up scrambled eggs and green chiles for breakfast. On the menu they called it Gabriela’s scramble. The place was empty and there was nobody to ask about the hellhound. I figured the locals would know all about it.
Maybe the lady behind the counter could tell from looking at me, all clattered and rattled, what had happened. I guess she just wasn’t in the mood to discuss it.
Then a snowboarder came in. He leaned his board against the wall below a cork bulletin board blanketed in frayed business cards.
He sat a few stools down. We exchanged nods. Right off he told me I looked like I’d seen a ghost and laughed a little so I told him what happened.
He told me the hellhound had chased him through the snow a few days earlier on the back side of Mount Baldy. He said a bobcat sailed out of the woods and pinned the hellhound on a crusty path of snow. The hellhound managed to wiggle free when the snow caved in under their weight. The last the snowboarder saw of the hellhound, it was racing down a slope before vanishing in the shadows.
Then he said he too was driving through Hesperia, California when he discovered the hellhound was on his trail. He assured me neither one of us had imagined the beast, that this was no specter, no phantom. He said there was no doubt about its speed and tenacity.
He settled on me with a grave look and said the hellhound’s ferocity was so intense that when its blood spattered the snow and sparkled in the sun, the beast smiled, as if to let the bobcat know the wounds meant nothing.
I asked the snowboarder if he knew the music of Robert Johnson and he said no. I told him who Robert Johnson was and he said he really wasn’t into the old time blues artists.
When I asked him why he thought the hellhound wouldn’t go past the fork at Swarthout Canyon Road, he told me it probably had something to do with boundaries we couldn’t understand.
Then he declared I’d likely see the hellhound again. He didn’t pass judgment and he didn’t infer I brought this on myself through less than honorable behaviors. But he emphasized that once the hellhound comes after you it never relents.
It was still on his own trail. He said that even though the hellhound picked me up in Hesperia, California, it could reappear in any town in any state at any time.
When I wondered if we should consider ourselves doomed, he shook his head and smiled. His voice softened.
He told me that when the blues start falling down like hail, it’s just a reminder to keep on moving.
