Twentynine Palms, 2010 - June 17

 

Cool start this morning. In fact, it got chilly enough last night that I had to break out the blanket and sleep under that. The thought of closing the windows to the Hell Trailer was sufficiently unsavory as to preclude me from doing anything so foolish, and the night air of the desert was allowed to continue flowing freely throughout.

Slept in till almost 6am. Ahhhhh.

The morning chill was almost, but not quite, uncomfortably cold. And up under the back awning of the house porch, out of the wind, it was very pleasant indeed, slurping internet and listening to the silence.

Soon enough, Newt began stirring inside, and coffee was put on, and I went in there with him to enjoy a couple of cups while Cathy slept on.

Eventually, Cathy awoke and I got my chance to greet her and express thanks for her kind forbearance in permitting me to stay here in this small piece of Desert Heaven for a short while.

And we all moved out back onto the porch for morning coffee, conversation, and just generally absorbing ambience of another dawn as it unfolded itself across the Mojave Desert.

Robin

Steve Bowden had to go and fetch a lift to get the heavy 6x12 perimeter timbers for the new porch on the studio up in to position upon the set of 6x6 posts that had been emplaced yesterday. He finally arrives, and has a pretty girl with him to help, but it turns out that Robin is no slouch by any definition of the word and she’s out there carrying her end of the 6x12’s as if she was six foot four and weighed two twenty.

 

Appearances can be deceiving, sometimes.

There's an awful lot of that shit going on around here, I've noticed.

Appearances indeed.

Newt, Cathy, Steve, and Robin are all preoccupied with the particulars of this phase of construction, and I take my cue to wander off with the D40, looking for shots.

And of course I found plenty, just like I always do.

This place has so many things to grab images from that it’s almost silly.

There is no end to it. It's everywhere I look.

 
 

 

 

 

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



But of course, it's all just a goddamned bunch of junk, too, now isn't it?

   

After all, if it was real art, it would be in an air-conditioned room somewhere, behind velvet ropes, right?

   

And an awful lot of this stuff is just stuff.

   

Things minding their own business being things, and crap that you find lying around on the ground.

   

Nobody ever intended for it to really be looked at, right?

   

Fuck you.

   

I'll goddamned look at it just as much as I want, and nobody's gonna tell me I can't.

Which, of course, is the beauty of the system.

   

In truth, the system could not possibly care less, and in further truth, there is no system in the first place.

   

So you're on your own, children, no map, no compass, no nothing.

   

Disregarding whatever the hell you might see, I see a riot of shapes, colors, textures, meanings, histories, forms, styles, perspectives, relationships, light values, and who the fuck knows what all else, and, fractal-like, it covers all scales from the completeness of the entire place, all the way down to individual motes and flecks, all with their own story to tell and points of view to look at them from.

   

I do my best, but I’m only too aware that I’m missing an ocean for every drop I manage to capture.

   

Ah well, that’s just the way things go, and I’ll not get into any kind of mood over it, but instead I’ll be more than grateful for that oh-so-thin sliver of things I’m fortunate enough to gain some small insight into.

   

And if it ain't your cup of tea, then so be it.

   

Not only will you get over it, but so will I.

   

And I'll just keep on looking at things, and grabbing shots, and enjoying the hell out of myself as I do so.

   

Kinda nice how that works out in the end, actually.

 

 

 

   

 

 

The work is going on by the studio, and I’m in the porch behind the house going after things with the camera, and I hear my name get called.

I’d volunteered to Steve yesterday, and again today, to do anything that might be of assistance, and today he sees fit to put me to use.

Suits the hell out of me.

I wind up on top of a step ladder, giving one end of the heavy 6x12 perimeter beams a lift into place on top of a tottery, unbraced, post that will support it.

Let us not tip this sonofabitch over, shall we now?

No, we shall not.

I do not want to spend the rest of my stay in a hospital, thank you very much.

So we go at it.

It’s muscle work and me and Steve strain on through it, while Newt and Cathy back a prudent distance away from things, lest something large and heavy take a fall and bounce in an unpleasant way, and Robin works the lift and keeps things organized on the ground.

I enjoy myself thoroughly, with my temporary purpose in life.

In between lifts, there’s the matter of using the level to plumb the posts, bashing the 6x12’s with a hammer to nudge them into the exact right spot, and pinning the whole growing edifice together with 2x4 diagonal bracing to keep it from crashing down and killing us all.

Steve and Robin are both fun to work with and in short order we are done and I’m once again free to point at things with the business end of my camera.

The heat begins to fill in, but this day is quite pleasant compared to some of the days I spent out here last year, and although it’s warm, it’s not unpleasantly so. Ninety-five degrees out here bears little resemblance to ninety-five degrees back in Florida, and the difference is for the better.

Eventually Robin must depart for other work, elsewhere, and with the heat coming on anyway, we knock off for the duration and retire to the porch for relaxation and conversation.

Which is right where things were still rolling along when I decided to avail myself of a bit of this time to come back here to the Hell Trailer and throw a few words together.

As with yesterday at a similar time, the smell of creosote wafts from the well-watered, dark-green and robust plants just behind the trailer, as I pass by. It is a smell that has embedded itself into my brain in association with this place, and I can’t seem to get enough of it. No matter where I go, till the end of my days, the unmistakable aroma of live creosote plants will always bring an image to mind of the Hell Trailer and these very plants right here beside me.

It is good.

It is very good, of that there can be no doubt.

-

In the late afternoon, Newt asks me if I’d like to set up the telescope, and I jump all over that shit.

“The telescope” just happens to be an old ten inch Coulter Odyssey Dobsonian that I’d bought back in the early eighties, and gave to Newt in 1998. Have literally not laid eyes on it since.

It’s an old and dear friend, and I’m thrilled to be able to reacquaint myself with it on the far side of this non-trivial span of years that has separated me from it.

Steve had returned in the late afternoon cooldown, and had done a bit more work on the studio “porch” so it was Newt, Cathy, Steve, and myself as I entered the shipping container and laid eyes on the old blue particleboard tube and rockerbox for the first time in a long time.

A place to view the sky needed to be chosen, and between staying out of the wind, and being able to get an unobstructed view of the ecliptic in the southwest, where Venus, Mars, and Saturn were lined up, we finally settled on the slab directly in front of the door to the Hell Trailer.

How fucking cool is this shit?

Very cool, that’s how cool.

But of course it’s not for everybody, and telescopes are kind of weird, and peeking at things that are light minutes to light years away doesn’t really register in a lot of minds.

Oh well.

Pieces and parts are in place and I’m one half eager anticipation and one half fear for the shape this old equipment might have wound up in.

The main mirror itself appears to be in surprisingly good shape, and I see neither a host of scratches nor a film of dust and crud.

The diagonal mirror is a dirty mess though, and the bracket it sits in seems to have been bumped or moved a little bit, along with the eyepiece holder, too. The particleboard of the tube and rockerbox is beginning to dissolve, and from the look of it, the only thing that has kept it from complete dissolution over the last decade in storage inside the shipping container is the extraordinarily low humidity out here.

So ok. So it’s not perfect. So it’s not research grade. So fucking what?

It’s old, it used to be mine, and it’s very excellent to be laying hands on it once again, letting the memories of the places it’s been and the sights it’s shown me come flooding back.

So fuck you.

Open the back of the rockerbox, gently place the ten inch primary in its low-rent cradle made of plastic-tipped screws and a strap of nylon, and then lift the door on its hinges and screw it shut. Uh oh, one of the screws that fastens the door shut seems to be spinning uselessly, and is clearly stripped out.

Oh well.

Give the one working screw on the other side a bit more torque, and call it done.

Peek into the empty eyepiece tube and let’s do a little seat of the pants collimating.

Looking down at the diagonal, which is a mirror set at a forty-five degree angle, facing back toward another, larger, mirror, and attempting to turn the three adjustment screws behind the primary at the opposite end of the tube from where I’m squinting at it in such a way as to cause the reflection of the secondary (diagonal) mirror to line itself up in the exact center of the reflection of the primary mirror, is an interesting task, to say the least.

But finally, after a bit more time blindly fumbling with the adjustment screws and watching the reflection of the reflections move around in more or less random ways, things are centered close enough to suit me and I very prudently decide that enough is enough, and hey let’s see what we can see through this thing.

Drop the eyepiece into the focusing tube, squint through the finder to line up a likely test target, and immediately discover that the finder scope on the side of the main scope is so far out of alignment that I can’t find the top of a fucking fence post sitting a mere hundred yards away.

Ok, so let’s do some finder align then, ok?

Ok.

And of course the mounting bracket is loose and it won’t stay put and I have to get to work on that with the Phillips head and try to pin it down at least to the minimal point of it staying put well enough for me to twist the three adjustment screws, and on and on and on and the thing’s wrong and it won’t move right and ah…..fuckit. Close enough, goddammit.

Alright then, it all finally comes together in a more or less way, and it’s time for let’s put this motherfucker on the near-half moon floating up there in the darkening purple, and let everybody get a look at it.

And the magic works, and the craters stand out in high relief along the terminator line, and everyone agrees that the moon looks pretty cool, despite my whining about glare and stray light and a host of other obscurities that nobody really gives a rat’s ass about.

The first stars have emerged dimly against the still-too-bright background, and I finally locate Saturn.

Swing the scope around and pick up the planet in the eyepiece and it’s just this tiny splop of creamy light with astigmatic flares all around it and glare making it hard to determine where the edge of the planet stops and the sky behind it starts, and in general it’s a complete piece of shit.

Phoo.

Switch to the higher powered eyepiece, hoping that the creaking, twitching, uncooperative rockerbox will allow me to at least half-assedly keep the image visible even as the earth’s rotation inexorably causes it to swim out of the field of view.

And then, once I finally get it all sorted out, and an image makes itself somewhat recognizable, I am confronted with the fact that we did a ring-plane crossing only last year, and the glacial pace of Saturn’s thirty-year orbit around the sun has yet to tip the rings very far forward, and instead of this neato Planet Saturn I’ve got a somewhat larger splop of creamy light with a sort of a creamy line going through it across the middle.

Feh.

So I duly warn everyone, and let them take the eyepiece, and yes indeed, Saturn really is pretty goddamned underwhelming, isn’t it?

Yes. Yes it is.

Ah well.

And move on to Mars, which is barely a pinhead of orangey light, with no features whatsoever, and thence to Venus, which is another featureless splop of creamy light, about the same size as Saturn, more brilliant, but without even so much adornment as a line running through the middle of it, and our tour of the Solar System this evening is over.

Whoopty flip.

Back to the moon, which is nicer at greater magnification, and that’s the end of that.

The moon is now glowing malevolently in a much darker sky, and the glare from the moon washes things out in a way that will completely destroy any chance of enjoying any kind of dark-sky object, be it nebula, start cluster, or the Milky Way.

Game,set, match, we lose.

Everyone has a few nice words to say, but it’s clear that this was no kind of life-altering event for anyone.

So it goes.

And in truth, I really don’t care.

We did the best we could, and who’s to take anything away from doing the best you can?

Maybe I’ll give the optics a bit of a cleaning tomorrow, and we’ll see how things go, but the moon is only going to be making things worse as it brightens toward fullness next week, and this telescope is a light bucket, not a surgical scalpel to extract superfine detail from reluctant subjects.

So the planets will remain less than wonderful, and the deep sky will sink further and further into the murk of the moon’s glare, and maybe if I come this way again I’ll pay a little more attention to the fucking phase of the moon and hit the timing right.

Maybe.

And yet, despite all that there was to wish for, and all that failed to come to pass, I’m tickled as all hell to have been given the privilege of using this battered old optical instrument one more time.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity, Newt, it’s very much appreciated.

Ok everybody, show’s over, you can go home now.

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