Twentynine Palms, 2010 - June 18
Steve and Robin came by early and continued with the construction of the “porch,” but I had a vanishingly small part to play in the work that was done. So instead of performing the work, I took pictures of the work.
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Later on, the tortoises both came out and I finally got a chance to photograph them. I’ve been waiting for a chance to get pictures and it was very nice to be able to.
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And then, as a special bonus, Cathy came by to feed them and I got more shots of that. Nice. Very nice.
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Bonzo trotted up and, as usual, was very interested in the goings on just out of reach behind the fencing...
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...but eventually decided to just go hang out for a while in the shade with Stella, instead.
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Mid-afternoon, Newt and I rode into town to do some errands, and took a long right-angling detour of a return trip through the heat, working our way back to the house. Desolation and decay dogged our tracks the whole way.
This is a harsh and unforgiving place.
Dick Dale’s airplane hangar in the distance, notwithstanding.
Homesteader shacks in every stage of ruin flecked the creosote and sahara mustard that cover the gently rolling sandy terrain all around us. Down a dirt track, almost exactly one mile from nothing at all, a powder blue Cadillac had fetched up, just off the trafficway. But it wasn’t a whole Cadillac. Not even fully half of it, in fact. The rear half of the body, complete, uncrumpled and upright, lay on the sand without benefit of tires or wheels, the back seat intact, within. A couple of miles away, the two halves of a doublewide trailer lay achingly close to one another, without any chance to ever form a coherent whole, wind-tattered and slowly being absorbed into the desert, never to call themselves someone’s home. Out across a wash, a steel-vaned windmill lurched dilapidatedly into the sky, and just beneath it a corroded water tank tottered dangerously close to its final collapse into the creosote. Cabins and houses lay wasting all around in various frozen snapshots of abandoned construction, never again to host the sound of hammers or saws. This is some hard country, and it’s clear that a lot of lives have come to a bad end out here.
I can see why so few people appreciate this place.
But it has a ferocious and thought-provoking beauty about it.
I am attracted to it the same way I am drawn toward the cold uncaring emptiness that lies between the stars.
I do not know why.
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