Twentynine Palms, 2010 - June 25

 

My last full day out here.

Bittersweet.

Newt had gotten up really early, and was well into his day by the time I walked over to the house for a cup of coffee. We piddled around for a time, and then Newt says, “Today, let’s drive to Mitchell Caverns.”

I was all over that shit.

My last chance, and it was a good one.

No, I have no idea what, or where Mitchell Caverns is, but Newt assures me it’s a worthy destination, and he’s never been wrong, and I was quick to gather camera, food, water, and not-so-new-anymore boots.

Cathy saw us off, and off we went.

Amboy road, and up to and through Sheep Hole Pass, and on the other side, it opens way the hell up and a vast panorama spreads out before you, into the morning haze, with range upon range of mountains fading off into invisibility beyond the vast flat stretch of dry lake bed that separated us from the remnant town of Amboy.

Out and around, and Amboy Crater emerges from behind a spur of the Bullion Range, black low and symmetrical in the distance. Beneath it and all around it, the black of the Amboy lava flow absorbed the morning light.

Amboy Road intersects Route 66, and we turn right, headed north and east.

With Amboy behind us, the vast nothingness all around us gathered shape and form, and really kicked into gear, as we hammered down what used to be the main artery between Chicago and Los Angeles.

The desert out here, alongside the roadway, is flat for the most part, and here and there, every once in a great while, something will break the horizon in the far distance and cause you to wonder what’s going on way the hell over there. Trains ply the railway in the distance. Dirt roads beckon. Isolated signs of human habitation, thin and attenuated, separated by mile after mile after mile of flat creosote-dotted terrain.

I didn’t even bother with the camera through this part.

No fucking way in hell to capture what my eyes were drinking in.

Too vast.

Too flat.

Too alien.

Too subtle.

Too bad.

We finally encounter the town of Cadiz (pronounced Kay-Deez), and it made the dry husk that is Amboy look like a thriving metropolis.

No time to stop and photograph, although I’d dearly loved to have been able to at least make some kind of half-assed attempt at capturing the bleak ambience of heart-breaking loneliness, heat, and parched desolation that every human-created thing in the town so strikingly exuded. All around, the endless sea of the desert waited patiently, full-well knowing that in the end, Cadiz would be no more than the ghost of a memory whispered by the wind in the rocks.

Brutal, scary, and phenomenally attractive to this pair of eyes.

Past Cadiz, and we round uphill into the rocks, and then descend gently down into yet another vast basin on the other side.

Route 66 lays itself out and fires straight across, like a rifle shot. Like it’s trying its best to get through this vision of hell as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Creeping death echoes silently from the distant mountains all around.

And I think about the history of this stretch of road, and the people who have traveled upon it, and the punishments the land meted out to them, one and all, as they passed through this way, some making it, and some not, and I resolve to read The Grapes of Wrath again, with a new pair of eyes to see things with.

And I think of my own childhood as well.

At some point, whether this precise stretch or not, I rolled across this, or another very similar, landscape at age two, along Route 66, heading across country, east to west, and again, at age five, heading back west to east.

The first crossing lies in my subconscious, if it lies anywhere at all, but the second is a series of clear memories.

And I remember being very glad that this was not the place we were moving too, and I remember Mom and Dad telling me that we’d had a near miss and almost did wind up out in this sun-blasted furnace somewhere, before the Air Force relented and stationed Dad at Patrick Air Force Base in a place called Florida, instead.

And even though this place repelled and frightened me, it also held my rapt attention.

I was just a little kid, and in those innocent days, before seat-belts and before air-conditioning, I fit comfortably up on that level place behind the top of the back seat of the car, with the sloped and curved glass of our nice new white 1956 Buick’s back window above and around me.

And for endless hours I would lay up there in my own personal observation bubble, completely ignoring the rest of my family right there next to me in the front and back seats of the car, and watch the sky and the land slide slowly past me in the distance.

Creosote covered the desert then, just as it does now, but Mom and Dad didn’t know very much about the desert at all, and called it “tumbleweeds” instead.

It’s not, and I know that now, but a part of me still remembers it the wrong way and doesn’t mind the error in the slightest.

And a part of me still remembers much else about that cross-country drive.

Which may serve to explain, at least a little bit, my present feelings toward this place.

In a way, I’m going, well…….not exactly home, but someplace nearly as familiar. Someplace known. Someplace I’ve been before. Returning to a part of myself I’d left behind a very very long time ago.

It is a good feeling.

I feel comfortable out here, and I feel like I belong out here, and although I can’t imagine why everyone else fails to see what I see in this place, I am mightily pleased that they do not, or otherwise they’d all be out here with me, and that would destroy the entire reason for being here in the first place.

I like the heart-breaking loneliness of this place, and I like it very much.

And you either understand that, or you do not, and there’s no explaining any of it.

Judging by the numbers, very few indeed actually understand it.

Suits me just fine.

Wouldn’t change it for the world.

Ahead, Essex becomes faintly visible in the distant shimmer.

And eventually coalesces into yet another burnt, blasted, piece of nothingness in the middle of nowhere, for no rhyme, no reason.

Once, perhaps, but no longer. Rhyme and reason departed Essex decades ago but Essex lingers just the same.

And once again, we do not have time to stop but I’d dearly love to.

To view. To photograph. To walk in the dust and heat. To contemplate and consider. To think.

Left turn off of Route 66 and we head toward the north and more nameless mountain ranges, separated by equally nameless basins.

And this stretch of road is, if anything, even more lonely than the one we just got off of.

No cars, coming or going.

No houses.

No homesteader shacks, whole, partial, or even just a concrete slab.

Not even any telephone poles or wires.

Eventually, we see traffic on “The forty” out ahead of us, and we pass above the interstate highway on a nondescript overpass.

Ahead, distant mountains and another huge immeasurable stretch of nothing at all.

God DAMN, but do I ever love this place!

But I do not believe that I’d much enjoy being dropped out into the middle of it alone, with nothing more than the clothes I was wearing.

It would make quick work of me, and I know that.

In much the same way Florida would make quick work of me. Or at least those rapidly-dwindling parts of Florida where you can actually get away from people. And really, Florida has nothing remotely resembling the amount of empty space the like of which you find all around out here.

This time, instead of working our way around, we head right at the distant range of mountains ahead of us.

The sign back at the overpass above I-40 advised Mitchell Caverns ahead, and that’s where we’re going.

And the flatness begins to slope gently, but noticeably, upward, and outside the windows, the vegetation begins to change, and things like Juniper start to show up for the first time.

Along this stretch, Newt stops the truck and permits me to step outside into what may as well be the vacuum of space.

I certainly do wish I could describe our surroundings, but there’s no way in hell that’s ever going to happen.

All alone.

Oh, so very alone in the desert.

It is literally breath-taking.

The land, the experience, the ambience, all conspire to kick me squarely in the gut.

Again, I cannot explain.

But I took a pretty good hit.

Newt understood fully, and grinned a sly grin of mutual understanding.

Words fail, and fail utterly.

And since all I have here is words, and a few photographs that are actually even less informative, I suppose I’ll dispense with going on about it.

Do it for yourself, or do not do it, and even for those who do, most will sense nothing, will feel nothing, and will wonder what in the hell it is that I’m raving on and on about.

So be it.

Back in the truck and roll up and on.

Outside, yucca makes its appearance, and shortly thereafter, barrel cactus.

	I wonder what it's like, living out here?

Lots of barrel cactus. Barrel cacti are very beautiful. I like them a lot.

	Barrel cactus in the wild

The air has cooled with the elevation and it’s quite pleasant outside as we roll toward a sort of scooped-out place in the wall of mountains that now seeks to enclose us on three sides.

Ahead, you can see the buildings associated with Mitchell Caverns.

This land is a preserve, and that’s a very lovely word in a place like this.

It is worthy of preservation.

And finally we roll to a stop, a hundred miles from where we started, give or take, in a little vest pocket of a campground where no one camped, with nobody around our immediate area. We’d passed a small group of folks out doing what appeared to be community service work, maintaining the place, and a few workers, and one or two automobiles with visitors in them, but the essence of the place was the lack of people.

Just a few human beings can be very easily absorbed into such vastness and they tend to disappear as if they were never there, unless you make it your business to remain in their company.

Newt and I had other ideas, and did not make it our business to remain in anyone’s company.

And once again found ourselves enjoying a most very splendid isolation.

We knew from the beginning that the caverns themselves would not be open to the public. We’d aimed for the off-season, and we scored a direct hit. I’m sure the caverns are very nice, but there’s plenty more out here than dripstone.

And once again, here I go, and once again, words dry up uselessly and blow away like puffs of smoke in the breeze.

The mountain.

The shapes.

The lowland in the distance.

The rocks.

The colors.

The cacti.

The flowers.

The light. The sun. The mountain air. The silence. The nature trail through the magnificence of the cactus garden. The lack of other people. The hiking through it all. The marvels. The wonders. The land. The sky.

Fuckit. I can’t do it, and I know I can’t do it, but I still keep on trying to do it.

The words and photographs are, in essence, of no worth at all.

Worse, they give you a false impression that you really do understand.

You do not understand.

You will not understand.

Hell, I don't understand it myself, so how am I supposed to convey something I don't even understand in the first place to someone else? Yeah right, sure thing.

Time ran out, and we departed for the long lonesome road back home.

-

Along the way, in the bare-ass middle of nowhere, they'd erected a small monument to Route 66.

So we stopped and checked it out.

Beautiful and fearsome, as it always is out here.

-

And as a last little bit of strangeness to cap the day off with, carbon monoxide hits Newt and I both, at the same time, heading uphill into the Sheep Hole pass. We do not realize what it is at the time, but only figure it out later, discussing the onset of our peculiar mutual symptoms of lethargy, tiredness, and fuzzy thinking. It does not kill us, and once out of the car and back to breathing good air things clear right up and all is well. But it was a weird little interlude, for sure.

-

That evening back at the house, nice dinner, chicken, salad, corn on cob. Thanks guys.

Last evening, spectacular clear sky post sunset.

Hanging on the fence, south of the Hell Trailer.

Sunset colors, including a band of green.

Full moon low above the mountains to the southeast.

Venus in the west.

Artistic cloud to the southwest, and while watching that, possibly the best Space Station pass I’ve ever seen begins with me picking it up low over the Twentynine Palms mountains to the south southwest.

Cathy was in studio, and I went over and called her, and she came out and watched.

Brilliant visible pass, with Station brightening to equal the brightness of Venus, which was handily right there in the same sky, off to the west, for the comparison. Tracked all the way across the sky, culminating perhaps seventy degrees of elevation to the east southeast, and then as the gloom continued to gather, and Cathy went back to her work in the studio, I watched the station all the way across the sky till it disappeared, faint with enormous distance, but still clearly visible, behind the ridgeline of the Bullion Mountains to the north northeast.

Amazing.

Stayed and watched the darkness gather, the glow in the west shrink, and additional stars filled the sky.

In the end, the light in the western sky wasn’t quite extinguished, but it was vastly overpowered by the moon, and the ecliptic was delineated all the way across the sky, starting with Castor and Pollux very low in the northwest, then Venus, then Regulus, then Mars, then Saturn, then Spica, then Antares preceded by Delta Scorpii, and finishing off with the moon.

Amazing.

Ordinarily, the brightness of the moon intrudes into my appreciation of the sky, but not tonight.

Little dipper was standing on its tail, dipper directly above the north star, and the Big dipper was above and to the left, tipped over, pouring its contents on someone far to the north northwest.

Deneb, Altair, and Vega in the east.

Occasional airliners far far overhead, riding highways in the sky.

Hell of a show.

If I have to go, at least I got a good sendoff.

This time tomorrow, I’ll be winging homebound.

 

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