Those of you who know me know that I love a good hotel. Below is an essay I read as part of San Francisco’s Litquake Literary Festival for the event “Golden State: Stories about life on the Left Coast,” about my stay at the Two Bunch Palms wellness resort.
The first premise of the resort is: desert. The second premise is: tubs. I’ve come here at the recommendation of a hotel substacker, for a trip that makes sense geographically if not fiscally - I had agreed to go hiking in the Joshua Tree National Forest for a friend’s birthday, and I’m traveling the week after, so there’s no point flying home for just two days. (I can justify any purchase if it involves a nice hotel.) Instead, I lock in the mid-week rate at Two Bunch. I spend the mornings working East Coast hours and the afternoons floating.
The floating is where the tubs come in. Dotted over the property are fat, elevated concrete and teak pools, reservable by guests for 1.5-hour increments, continuously filled with spring water, perpetually around 102 degrees, so rich with Lithium and Magnesium that the water coats your skin in a thin white film.
The healing properties of the water are ambiguous, but according to the hotel website’s copy, they are definitely real. The resort attracts all types - aging hippies, mothers and daughters on bonding trips, and LA Instagram girlies with their much older boyfriends. I come alone.
Day 1
I stay in the Grove rooms. These mid-tier, new-build rooms have too-loud window air conditioning units and look out onto an olive grove. There’s no desk - this place is, after all, for relaxation - but I drag the marbled glass outdoor table in from the porch and work there.
While I’m looking at emails in the early morning, a massive bird lands outside the glass door to my patio. I’ve never seen anything like it, but when I see it again later, jutting out its long neck and running, I realize I’ve seen it many, many times, only in cartoon form - the greater roadrunner, moving surprisingly as it does in Looney Toons.
Outside my room’s front door, each day at dawn and dusk, I run into a tan-colored bunny that I begin to view as a roommate who works the night shift.
And, of course, there are the people. On my first full day, I chose to soak in a tub shaded by palm fronds. Next to me, an elderly woman with bowed legs takes her walker to the tub two tubs down. Nearby guests spring up to help her up the steps, bringing her her giant tote bags and towels.
As soon as the woman settles, she begins to yell. The group in the hot tub next to her has an unleashed chihuahua that is running wildly (delicately sniffing the bottom of her tub). The elderly woman is going to call the cops, the management, the cops AND the management, she is going to have the group removed from the resort and arrested for unspecified chihuha-related crimes. Her voice echoes across the entire area, and eventually, she wins. The women get up and leave.
It’s a hollow victory. Over the next few hours, I listened to the elderly woman make no fewer than five phone calls to family members, one after the other. I can almost hear the relatives on the other end of the line straining to get off the phone.
Finally, all family members called; she hangs up and looks down at her phone, clicking around before dialing one last number.
“Hi. I called earlier. You said you had one grade of wood, or multiple?”
Whoever is on the other end answers quickly. “Oh. Okay. Just one, then.” The letdown in her voice is palpable, even two tubs over. She cannot come up with a question quickly enough to keep this service worker on the line. She hangs up and looks bleakly down.
She has still not gotten in her tub.
Day 2
On the second day, I go to the complementary group Tarot reading. I go to the group Tarot reading because I am always hoping that a Tarot reader will tell me something deeply specific and helpful, something along the lines of “cut your hair in a curtain fringe, apply to the very next job you come across, and make important suggestions to your husband only after you’ve fed him four green olives on a full moon.”
The specificity of the suggestions will shock me and potentially the reader, and I’ll be forced to take their advice despite not believing in Tarot.
The reader at the resort in Palm Desert is a white man in his 50s or 60s wearing a costume on his top half (safari shirt, feathered leather hat, fat gold rings) and a normal guy outfit on the bottom (running shorts, sneakers). He explains that his cards are not a Tarot deck in the traditional sense but a deck he bought 20 years ago on a whim at a gift shop. If we don’t get it, it’s because we’re used to normal Tarot, not novelty gift card Tarot, which is totally different and which only he practices.
The readings begin, and the insights are generic. Let something go, pick something up. It’s a magic show timed around saying the right lines. For the two older women in the room he finds cards to suggest they might be going through changes, then nods sagely when they admit to retirement or menopause.
There’s an older hippie couple, and when he gets to them, he asks if they’ve been here before. Yes, they said. Four, maybe five times, and each time, they got a reading.
“You know Steven, right? The other reader here?” The reader says as he shuffles his card. They say yes, he read for them last time they were at the resort.
The reader nods his head. “Well, he passed just last month. He’d been sick for some time. Fighting cancer for two years.”
“I KNEW IT!” the hippie woman yells. “Last time I was here, he gave me some NASTY cards in my reading. And I knew they weren’t for me. He was reading for himself and PROJECTING nastiness onto me.”
I wait, hoping that she will follow her outburst with something like, “But, you know, very sorry to hear he’s passed,” but instead, she sits back smugly.
The next woman to get her reading bursts into tears at her first card and remains weepy through the next six cards of generic sentiment.
When he gets to me, despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m still in possession of my secret hope that he’ll tell me, specifically, what I need to do. My first card symbolizes procrastination. Well, yes. On too many things to count. My second card is another of the generic ones about letting things go that has come up for almost every person. He looks at me like a caring Dad, glances at my bare ring finger and declares, in a low, soulful voice. “You’ve got to let him go. He wasn’t worth it anyway. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Actually, I’ve been happily married for some time, so not really,” I say, my tone a little too bitchy for a woman who came here of her own volition.
“You can still forget about him,” he says, not taking the bait. He switches tactics, and I watch his profile of me evolve. The next card is fertility, which is the first time it’s come up for anyone in the class. I must have looked pained. “It doesn’t necessarily mean baby. It can be creative work as well.”
“Cool,” I say. I do not sound cool. I sound annoyed. He tells me to name, specifically, what I want and that I’ll get it. “The job I interviewed for yesterday and a move to New York.” He tells me I’ll get both. The class laughs. By the time I get up to leave, I am just happy to return to the mineral tubs, where I can float uninterrupted in the sun.
The next week I get a rejection for the job.
Day 3
On my last day at Two Bunch, I have paid for the only ‘add on’ service of my entire stay. It is a full moon sound bath, completed by a man who the hippie couple informs me is the Bruce Springsteen of sound baths. A real virtuoso of the form.
I walk down the winding paths under the light of the full moon and find that I have falsely assumed that the “full moon sound bath” will be taking place in the light of a full moon. Instead, we are shuffled into the “Yoga Dome,” a massive room with a concrete floor covered in mats. The majority of the resort seems to be in attendance. They are lying down, their heads all pointed toward the new-age orchestra at the front of the room. A fake full moon is projected onto the dome in the position where the real one is sitting just outside in the sky.
If you have never had a sound bath, picture this: it is the soothing sounds section of your sleep app, played live by a man carrying a gong and wearing sandals. There are Tibetan singing bowls; there are more modern American stone singing bowls. In this particular iteration, there are whale sounds and ocean sounds and the sounds of the Instagram influencer beside me shifting to lay fully on top of her much older boyfriend.
30 minutes in, I regret spending extra money for a nighttime experience that involves laying flat on my back beneath a blanket around my bedtime, the exact same activity I’d usually be doing in a bed, sans 30 breathing strangers. I walk back disappointed.
But when I leave the next day, I sneak in a morning soak. For the next few days, even after I’ve showered, my clothes, hair, and skin all smell delicate and floral, just like the baths - proof that something, at least, got under my skin.
Two Bunch Palms: 3 out of 5 baths