Panhandling

Between the smoke filled, air-conditioned gambling halls of Las Vegas and the sprawling opportunities of LA comes the Mojave desert. I was in that desert a few weeks ago, slowly recovering from the assault on my senses that Vegas had been. We stopped off in Barstow, a desert town that owes its existence to the fact that the Interstates 15 and 40 meet at its border. I got out to stretch my legs in the car park round the back of the fastfood mini-mall we had pulled up at. The first thing I saw was a sign saying 'No Panhandling'.

I'd been reading a lot of Western stories about Apache Indians, cavalrymen and prospectors who had lived in this desert. I thought that this sign must be a warning to any prospective prospectors not to start panning for gold in the parking lot. It seemed no less unlikely than everything I had seen in Las Vegas. Indeed, I could imagine that a lot of desperate people returning to LA with empty bank accounts might decide to try their luck, get out a pitchfork and start digging up the parking lot hoping for a strike.

It was only when I reached Laguna Beach the next day and saw the same sign again that the penny dropped. Panhandling was the American word for begging. There was something sooooo OMG American about this. The noun panhandle is common in American parlance when describing the landscape, a stretch of land that sticks out from the bulk of the country into the sea. There's the Florida panhandle, the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma and on. That the same word is used to describe the physical geography of their landscape and the act of begging for money is fitting. Much as I loved it, America seemed an incredibly, inexorably unjust society.