Four and Twenty Beds

by Nancy Casteel Vogel

Grant and I seldom got away from the motel together. But toward the end of March we put the dependable Mrs. Clark in charge of the motel and the children, and took an overnight trip to Los Angeles. A group of our friends were going grumon hunting, and it sounded very appealing.

Grunions are a particularly stupid kind of fish that run for a few nights in the full of the moon during certain months. They swarm up in the surf, coming so close to the beach that a lot of them get stranded on the sand when the wave they came in recedes. They come near to the beach to lay their eggs, which has always seemed rather foolish to me, since years of sad experience should have taught them that a bunch of grunion-happy human beings will be waiting to catch them.

On our way back to Banning the next morning, through Riverside and Colton, we came through miles of highway lined solidly with big, round, sturdy orange trees. The trees were white with bloom; the long stretches of highway were banked solid with fragrant walls of orange blossoms. As we came into Banning there were little boys stationed at intervals of three hundred feet along the side of the highway, selling bouquets of immense white and purple lilacs, and brilliant California poppies.

After a brief and beautiful spring, while it was still spring everywhere else, suddenly in Banning summer had begun again. When I stood out at the clotheslines behind the cabins hanging up clothes, the dried wild grain and weeds in the field whispered and rustled in the strong, persistent wind. The mornings and evenings, before and after the midday assault of the sun, were as lovely as only mornings and evenings on the desert can be. I loved standing, after dark, leaning outside against the corner of the office nearest the highway, where I could see in all directions. The warm, sweet wind blew off the desert, playful, never ceasing. The neon motel and cafe signs, some blinking and some glowing steadily, studded the night with a glittering and colorful beauty, making the whole effect that of an enormous big-city theater marquee. Trucks thundered by, outlined with red lights that were like jewels, and always there were the pairs of bright flashing eyes gliding steadily along the highway from east and west.

The streaks of snow remaining on Mt. San Jacinto and Mt. San Gorgonio were putting up a losing battle with the power-drunk sun. The black widow spiders, after their winter disappearance, were beginning to show their shiny black bodies here and there again, and the newspaper carried warnings that there were rattlesnakes in the fields. California poppies and brilliant wild flowers were still spreading themselves through the fields and the desert itself, and the cacti proudly showed their rare blooms--orchid-like, exotic flowers. All the orchards were at a height of thick green splendor.

The desert area lost its appeal as warmer weather set in, and business began a gradual decline.

Even on a dull night, though, a stranger to the vicinity might have thought traffic heavy enough to justify us in hoping to fill up; what a stranger wouldn't know would be that every night, every motel owner must take a little jaunt in the car from one end of town to the other, inspecting all the signs to see if any have their "no" uncovered; straining to see into the garages, in order to know how many customers the motel in question has hooked. The parade of motel owners alone, if they all happen to go on their tours of inspection about the same time, is enough to make the highway look busy.

Grant is one of those who can't rest until he has made his nightly tour of the town's motels. And he calls me curious!

We didn't try so hard to spot "quickies" when summer approached, except on weekends, because we were sure to have one or two vacancies anyway. During the winter, Grant had made a regular practice of setting the alarm for about three a.m., and getting up to see if any of our customers had checked out. Whenever there were vacant cabins he cleaned them up, turned on the sign, and had the cabins rented again within half an hour.

The extra sleep he got by not having to get up in the middle of the night to clean and rerent cabins was canceled by the fact we could no longer go to bed at nine or ten with the "no vacancy" sign on. As long as our sign proclaimed that we had a vacancy, the doorbell might ring at any hour of the night. Grant had to renew his old custom of spreading his clothes at intervals between the bed and the outer office door, so that he could pull them on as he hopped toward the office when the bell rang.