In a Palace of the One Percent

In mid-October of this year, my wife and I spent a four-day weekend on a thousand-acre working ranch located in the San Juan Valley of southern Colorado, a few miles across the border from New Mexico. The ranch sits about seven miles up from the two-lane main road that winds through that exhilarating landscape. The pavement faded out barely a mile in. From there, we rode dirt the rest of the way, up a pine- and oak-wooded mountain until the last hundred yards where it finished in smooth, freshly laid bluish bitmac that circled in front of a large log cabin facing the San Juan Mountains: 8,000 feet; clear, thin air.

And I mean large cabin: this one covers at least 2,500 square feet, sitting on top of a three-car garage (automatic door, of course) and a six-bed sleeping loft above the sprawling living room. There were three other richly appointed guest rooms toward the rear, off a long hallway along the side facing south, and then the large main bedroom facing the San Juans, where Elizabeth and I slept and could watch dawn rise over the San Juans every morning. The entire cabin is warmed by radiant floor heating and is constructed of massive pine logs (type unknown), grouted together with composite glue.

The elaborate—though, as we learned directly, cheaply built--plumbing rises from a mountain stream two miles below, the water driven through a couple of pump stations. The same stream also winds through a large gravel quarry on the property and is habitat for trout. How and whether this all works together must be taken up elsewhere.

Our wonderful generous host is the daughter of a wealthy Chicago banker who died last year. He willed the ranch to his grandchildren, but, it is feared, they are too urbanized to embrace this high-country palace. Whatever we may think of the set-up here, a far worse fate may await this heaven, as I saw in the suburbs of Pagosa Springs.

As an OWS supporter (or at least its underlying principle), I will not pretend one bit that I didn’t enjoy the hell out of my stay, don’t want to return and have no desire to live in such a place (though I’d want a smaller, cozier space, and simpler and sturdier plumbing.)

From my understanding, the Banker was one of those broadly built, strutting, growling, cigar-chomping, whisky-swilling capitalists who roamed the plains of the twentieth century in large rumbling herds: maybe an enjoyable, novelistic character to know within short slices of time under certain conditions, but perhaps not at others. (Today’s species of rich man—the one-percenters--seems clad in  sleek chrome, with a thin gleam of egalitarianism on an easily scratched surface, if you’re of a mind to claw away.)

 

Full Frontal Bear
 

Judging from these photos, I have an inkling that this portrait of the Banker is true.

The Banker was a big game hunter. I’m not opposed to hunting in principle, when practiced legally and sustainably. I even accept the argument that American hunters are in the main law-abiding, and are vital allies in the conservation and environmental movements (as seen in this recent NYT article) . . .

. . . but again, this is another issue too elaborate to follow here, except to say no one leaves this life physically alive and, like it or not, we’re all irrevocably bound to the mysterious epic cycle of Life and Death, no matter how righteously we try to entangle ourselves from it. All that is up to Someone Else.

Still, the more I think about the stuffed bear, the bobcat, and the mountain lion, I sink into greater sadness and deeper anger at the pointless cruelty, vanity and waste of their deaths. These animals are top predators, each of whom plays a vital role in their ecosystems. They are not food animals for us. They mostly do not exist in excess populations that endanger other species, necessitating their culling (though exceptions may be made for mountain lions).

 

And despite their contrived poses of savagery and aggression—they are only skins stretched around molds—it’s safe to disbelieve that any one of them was killed in self-defense. If so, someone needed to take a forest safety course, and quickly; or, at very least, be prohibited from going anywhere near a nature trail.

They were killed for one reason only: vanity. Male vanity. A man taking life solely to show his power, wealth, and weight.

Trophy hunting, we understand, is an old tradition in primitive societies around the world. For most of our millions of years here, we were favored prey of carnivores everywhere, so the human male’s ability to hunt and kill, both to bring back the meat, and to defend himself, his family and community, was perfectly right. It can even be viewed as a holy act through a certain frame.

 

Having hunted myself long ago, I well-remember the racing river of adrenalin through my system, the mounting suspense and thrill of hunting. (I never hit anything, but yes, I could take up hunting again under certain circumstances.)

Still, to take a life, to take its light, no matter how considered or urgent the reason, is always a deadly serious matter and what we see here is not serious at all, but simple violent strutting, better suited to an end-zone dance on a fall Sunday afternoon. While on a hike around the property, my fellow hiker and I came upon a metal hunter’s nest nailed halfway up a tree and I thought “Cheaters . . . can’t even get down in the brush and stalk.”

The vast majority of humans no longer live in the savannahs and forests, or even on farms. At this point in time, we are not the endangered. We are the endangering. And, in a horrific paradox, if we carry on as we are, in parasitic pursuit of a so-called freedom (a human and spiritual idea that plays little or no role in the workings of Nature) we will become the endangered again. But it’s not the leopard in the tree we will have to worry about—it’s the ruthless might of Nature Herself, stronger than any of our bombs.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

(Photos by author)

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Colorado Morning

There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places

And desecrated places

--Wendell Berry

             

I’m seated in a wood-slab patio recliner on the east deck of a huge cabin, the legacy of a cigar-chomping Chicago banker and big game hunter.

It’s a clear-blue early morning on the late side of mid-October in the San Juan Valley of Southern Colorado. Ten feet below the sturdy deck, a dew-sparkled gold meadow slopes ruggedly down to a dirt road that winds like a petrified stream through this thousand-acre working ranch. Two storm-toughened ponderosa pine stand guard to the left. Ochre groves of gambel oaks patch the ground nearby, their fall leaves reddish brown, except for a grove close to my right that appears to have been scorched to the bark. Death lurks everywhere, sometimes strikes by fire.

A quarter-mile away, across from the hill on which this cabin confidently sits, a ponderosa- and oak-clad ridge rises from south to north. At the top of the incline sits another house. The cabin I’m a guest in is of modern construction. The pine planks and logs gleam as if new; the grout that glues the shiny logs together is made of modern rubbery composites. Nevertheless, this grand comfortable space has the brief, pleasing illusion of having assembled itself out of the surrounding woods. The other house on the hill is boxy, squarely and green, like a Monopoly house, indifferently placed on the board, more a survivalist shelter than a home.

The strong newly-risen sun over the southeast hills forces me to look northeast. There the southern range of the San Juans rises, its walls a massive undulating murky indigo under a pillowy blue sky. Here distance shades all colors toward the sky’s. The first real clouds since we arrived Thursday night sail in from the northwest, making me realize how barren of drama the sky has been. I feel a little regret that whatever booming spectacle they brought to the north has long dissipated.

Banded Peak’s streaks of snow barely show in the morning shadows. Chama Peak, to the south, rises over bold swatches of dark green fir and bright blazing aspen, the contrasts banging my eyes. The aspens impress me as a giant living organism, which they are, knitted together by a single root system. One of these groves, which, I’ve read, lies somewhere in Colorado, has been called the largest living thing in the world. Big as they are though, eventually they all will give way as Douglas firs march over them toward their own climax. In this case, Death comes with the shade cast by the taller trees.

I also know, looking through binoculars, that there is the tiniest dot of bright red, like a lone maple tree or maybe a human structure, peeking out from somewhere in those forests. What it is I don’t know, but I’m content not to.

The ridge sinks away to the north. Then the ground rises again in another broad slope of sunny aspen and green pine. From my head-on perspective, it launches itself straight up to morph into the bare dusky walls of Navajo Peak and its close companion, Apache Peak. Both mountains seem to stand shoulder to shoulder, magnificent and reassuring in their near-permanence, fearsome in their stern indifference, time as marked by erosion their only worry. I imagine climbers have scaled both summits, but the scars will be scoured and forgotten, quicker then we know. Their massive faces darken pleasingly under the passing sheet of gray and white clouds and gleam when the sun returns.

A light buoyant breeze chills and dries my skin, aging me faster than it does the mountains. The clouds drag their shadows over the hills and mountains, painting pines, oaks and aspens with uncanny shadow.

A raven and a blue mountain jay squawk and dart by, nervous and competitive. The jay rasps, like a screw-top bottle cap being opened. The cleverly disguised artificial stream, dug next to the cabin with water pumped up from a stream two miles below, roils down into two separate silver braids, splashes peacefully, as mesmerizing and genuine as the real thing.

This world seems still with deceptive confidence, calmly exudes a grand power. It’s peaceful on its tricky surface, but strands of violence, of life intertwining with and growing from death, always weave underneath, all of it knit by an unknowable, barely discernible power.

My constant thrum of aches and pains matter less here than they do at the place I call home, my nagging loneliness nothing in the vastness. The only genuinely dark shadow is cast the dark drone of jets passing far overhead, invisible, but a warning that this is my last day.

I’m home, but still not home from that Colorado morning. I live in a fine neighborhood, and I’m grateful for it, but aches, pains and loneliness now crowd my attention. Death stills lurks ruthlessly under the crust we’ve built over Nature. This barrier between us and the Earth we emerged from makes our impermanence seem all the more callous, arbitrary, incomprehensible, absurd. Nature finds it way, pushes up, back and through, with claws and vicious hunger.

Are we really living longer or are we really only drawing out Death’s work, making our dying longer, stretching the agony by days, months, years? We may survive longer but live with less feeling, little wisdom and only a crumbling fig leaf of faith.

I’m told this is a good thing, but I’m still waiting for that paradise I’ve been promised to sprout through the plains of concrete around me. I understand that the Earth’s population will reach 7 billion this Halloween. I’d like to be wrong, but it’s impossible for me to believe that Nature’s not about to ruthlessly burst out of the closet door or reach up from under the bed on which we doze and drag us toward extinction. Seven billion people and an increasingly stressed environment tell me that we’ve sinned greatly and it may be too late for either atonement or forgiveness.

Our skies may eventually clear and that valley will almost certainly be there . . . but we may not be; to wonder at it, to bow to the sacred power of its hidden face.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

(Photos by author)

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Impressions of the I-5

Sorry, only photo I could get this time.

Down the western slopes of California’s Central Valley runs Interstate Highway 5. It’s a journey south my wife, Elizabeth, and I take a couple of times a year to visit her sister and family in Pasadena, California.

The I-5 starts way up north at the Canadian border and runs nearly 1,400 miles south to Mexico, the only U.S. Highway to stretch border to border. The section running through central California, from south of the small valley town of Tracy to Grapevine, is called the Westside Freeway. 

I’ve heard it called the most boring drive in the state, an approximately 200-mile, four-lane ribbon of windswept drear where cars wrestle for road space with menacing truck caravans that sway in the high winds. There’s not much good eating beyond ubiquitous McDenny’s, and tourist snares such as Andersen’s Pea Soup and the famous but overpriced, Harris Ranch. Hell’s Highway.

I don’t quite agree. (Highway 99, in my view, is the road to nowhere, through towns like Turlock, Merced, and Fresno, a litany of strip-mall despair, through areas that are said to be among the most polluted in the United States. I-80, down the East Side of the San Francisco Bay also has little to enchant habitual sightseers. There, the Bay is carefully concealed, so you're not distracted from shopping by nature's intrusive, capital-draining beauty.)

For long sections of its sunlit path under broad skies, Interstate 5 is pleasantly scenic. Elizabeth and I live in the Bay Area and our journey begins about 70 miles east of Emeryville, where East 580 sews itself into the I-5 as it descends from Sacramento. From there, it serenely rides above the Central Valley and below the hills and mountains to the west.

Because it’s a favored commerce route between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the drive does require close attention. Elizabeth, the more confident city driver, handles the chores at either end, while I take most of the long middle section, often with Duke Ellington or Gordon Lightfoot on the stereo.

When not at the wheel, I closely watch how the sunlight plays its splash and trim on the distant hills to my right, their contours like the backs of sleeping animals against the dark blue of the low ragged mountains—what I believe is the Diablo Range--that rise and fall under clear skies.

Most of the nature in the valley below has been gone awhile now, its Iowa-flat, checkered table sunk under a scummy brown mist. While the hills seem soft pillows of untouched gold, various veins of poison have flooded up from the valley below, along with a range of invasive species. By one account, only 1% of the original species of native grass, Nasella puchra, remains anywhere (though occasionally we glimpse the patches of scrub that once dominated the area). A hundred years ago, the north valley lay under a seasonal inland sea upon which ships could sail from the San Joaquin River and bays west. But the sea is gone and only wheeled vehicles roam the valley floor now. I seldom look out that side for too long.

The town of Kettleman City, near the mid-point, is said to suffer from a cluster of birth defects. Responsibility for this has been laid at the door of a company called Chemical Waste Management. I hold my breath a little as we pass through this area, keep my eyes on the hills.

Overall, the central valley seems always sunk in glowering anxiety. It’s the nation’s food basket, but an unnatural field, a gift forced from Nature. Once semi-desert and chaparral, it was ruthlessly dug up for a garden and wears its vegetable raiment uneasily—Nature, or (the farmers in the central and south sections say) the government, is always threatening to take the water away. But water wasn’t really there in reliable quantities before the dams and other huge irrigation projects were built to redirect water from the San Joaquin Delta and the Sierra.

Along the interstate, signs erected to protest government policy a few years ago have drooped and faded. Maybe passions have been dampened by last year’s rains. But, reports say, weather patterns have abruptly flipped from El Nino back to El Nina, promising another dry year. The rains will fade again and, someday, sooner than we realize, be absent too long for things to grow as they have been. Nature has never cared for our status quo. She always bats last.

To some, maybe the world around I-5 never changes, but when I look closely, I notice new things from trip-to-trip. This Thanksgiving, we saw what appeared to be a new water treatment facility south of Tracy. For the first time, I noticed sheep grazing in the fields, looking like clumps of scattered
crumbs. I may have missed them before or this may be a response to changes in the ecological economy.

Near the town of Alpaugh, the mountains fade west while I-5 sinks southeast into the valley. Boredom at lasts set in for a hundred miles or so through towns like Buttonwillow (where Elizabeth and I spent our first honeymoon night at the Super 8 Motel, unaware that area too has its own toxic story) and
nearby Wasco (more about that on the trip back).


There is one unmissable attraction though--the Kern Wildlife Refuge in Kern County: 11,000 acres of wetlands both original and restored. It's a soulful place, especially during an early fall dusk when thousands of birds rise through shafts of sun into purple skies. The only thing wrong with Kern is that it's 15 miles east of the I-5 and local accommodations are laughable.

Finally, we turn toward the mountains again. At Grapevine (named for groves of wild grapes they say still grow along the roadside,) I-5 rises quickly into the wild rugged Tehachapi Mountains and the Angles National Forest. Mostly known as “The Grapevine,” for a few regrettably short miles the
“Ridge Route” is the most scenic part of the drive. The high-desert Tehachapi range may not be high, but it’s brawny, defiantly rugged and gorgeous, especially when storms unfurl across its rocky summits. It beckons to hardy explorers, promising mystery and a Wild West ambiance. There appear to be few roads winding among them and I encourage myself to someday check on that, to explore a little their fabulous ridges and ravines.

This rough beauty doesn’t last long enough. Once past the Angeles National Forest, there’s Castaic, Magic Mountains/Six Flags and so on. The only truly interesting feature I can point to now is William S. Hart Park, the home of the movie’s second great cowboy star after Broncho Billy Anderson, William S. Hart. Located outside of Newhall, his Spanish Colonial Revival-style is a cozy wonder, striking and pleasant to wander in, especially its lovingly tiled wood flooring. Don’t stay too long, or you’ll ask to move in and they’ll say no.

Somewhere in here, the mysterious local custom of appending the article “the” to Freeway names begins: I-5 becomes “the I-5” and U.S. 210 becomes “the 210.” I always feel a foreigner. It may have something to do with Southern California vs. Northern California.

After another fine and pleasant Pasadena Thanksgiving, we left earlier than usual, both because of an approaching storm (which might have closed the Grapevine, as storms do) and an unspoken concern about an adored and elderly friend. 

Going north, I noticed bales of cotton stacked along the road, next to white-dabbed cotton fields. Once again, as we approached the exit ramp to Wasco, we recalled this is where Jack Nicholson jumps into the back of the open-bed truck to joyfully bang away on an old upright in his 1971 classic Five Easy Pieces. (This also near where Hitchcock filmed Cary Grant being nearly dusted off by the winged assassin in North by Northwest.)

Our sinuses shriveled and eyes teared up as we passed through a methane cloud, past  fenced-in wastelands where unhappy California cows sagged on their feet, their noses in the bare soil (Though occasional beef eaters, we darkly refer to these muddy industrial pens as “cow-centration camps”,
or, even more tastelessly, “Cow-schwitz.” I’m not at all vegetarian, but this I believe: Food animals should always live as good a life as we’d wish for ourselves and should die swiftly.)

Just before our first rest stop, a bit past Buttonwillow, a flock of birds in the distance swam through a blue sky, swirling and whirling, funneling and flying as one in delightful patterns like a school of fish in the sea. We hurriedly parked at the rest stop and leapt out to look closer, but by then their search for food had ended, while our long drive still stretched ahead.

(Re-edited 11/30/10 & 12/2/10)

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author


Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 15, 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. Other of his essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium: Fish Far Out of Water

When in Monterey/Pacific Grove, California, my wife and I always make time-space for a real monument to hope in these environmentally perilous times: the Monterey Bay Aquarium, located in Monterey’s Cannery Row.

Monterey Bay was once home to one of the world’s sardine fishing capitals but now, thanks to overfishing (and why enough people aren’t worried and pissed-off about this beats me), it retains only the shells of its former glory. John Steinbeck, who gave Monterey’s Cannery Row neighborhood its name in his titular 1945 novel, would recognize only the tin-roofed exteriors of the many old canneries; like abandoned seashells, their interiors have been take over by another species, namely Touristus garishus who may, at first glance, look as colorful as deep sea monsters, but lack a
certain exotic exquisite aquatic grace, wonder and mystery (except for an excellent antique store on Wave Street, we mostly skirt the rest).

But the one thing that would please Steinbeck, (and one of the legacies of his friend, the pioneering marine biologist Edward “Doc” Ricketts), is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an example of what people can do when they’re given the opportunity to really care about something. Even the most shark-eyed observer would experience it as a genuine miracle in an era where we seem about all fished out of them. Here, hope for our stained, poisoned and battered planet remains stubbornly, bright and alive.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened 25 years ago on October 20, 1984. As the docent on our recent trip, Nancy Larkin, tells it in 1977, a group of marine biologists at Stanford University’s Marine Station (also called Hopkins), located in Pacific Grove, were engaged in some beachside brainstorming in the shadow of the old Hovden cannery, (the last one to close in 1973). Just like in one those old 1930s Hollywood
musicals, someone pointed at the old cannery and piped up: “Hey guys! What d’ya say we turn that old cannery into an aquarium and invite every fish in and around Monterey Bay!” (OK, I made that part up).

Take the Tour, Feed the Fish

Among the marine biology students joining the brainstorm on the beach that day was Nancy Burnett, a daughter of Hewlett-Packard founder David Packard and his wife Lucile. Shortly afterward, along swam Nancy’s sister, Julie Packard, a U.C. Santa Cruz student majoring in marine algae studies.

Nancy and Julie went to their parents and told them what they wanted to (Try imagining Paris Hilton doing anything useful like this. Yeah, hurts the brain, doesn’t it?). With the money and power of the Packard name behind it, the project became a slow-rolling unstoppable wave.David and Lucile Packard not only said yes, but, as Nancy Larkin told us, they provided full start-up funding and personally dived into the project’s development. Packard mere and pere sailed to other aquariums around the world to study both the right and the wrong ways of building and maintaining aquariums. (Big issue: working conditions for the non-aquatic land-living staff). In a
sense, they reeled in the fantastic colorful world of the ocean wilderness up safely onto dry land, benefiting both humans and the splendid life forms that live in the briny deep.

The aquarium, which covers three acres and 300,000 square feet, provides a tidal wave of sensations, especially for new visitors. A backstage room tours provide an excellent calming perspective for the overstimulated visitor. Even after a half-dozen visits, even my largish brain has a hard time wrapping itself around the aquarium's ambitious epic scale.

Inspired by the work of Ed Ricketts, the aquarium is organized along specific undersea environments (or biomes), instead of individual species. One thing this
teaches is how interconnected all undersea life (and, by implication, life on land) is.

With so much to see, this humble space can only touch on a few favorite things. One of the aquarium’s permanent exhibits is the 28-foot deep Kelp Forest. One of the largest aquarium exhibits in the world, this underwater forest cycles through 4,000 gallons of water per minute and teems with sinister sinuous leopard sharks, dozens of other fish species, including hypnotic, shape-shifting schools of sardines, abruptly changing direction with every disturbance like flocks of birds as they swim among the towering trees of kelp (Fun fact: Kelp, despite its giant size and beanstalk shape, is not a plant, but an algae, due to its lack of many of the structures found in plants).

The Kelp Forest

Another favorite sea environment is the Outer Bay, a series of galleries that offers an eerie, powerful and meditative glimpse of life 60 miles offshore, starting with a donut set into a ceiling where an estimated 3,000 anchovies swim in a hypnotic circle. It climaxes in an awesome lovely blue million-gallon aquarium displaying the animals found in the outer bay during a warm El Nino pattern. (For us seafood lovers who find this all a little mouthwatering, the museum also provides a handy “Sustainable Seafood Guide.”)

Even in the midst of this current extinction, our Earth still teems with odd creatures, (some seem spun from the oceanic imagination of H.P. Lovecraft). The weirdest ones of all inhabit our oceans at its greatest, darkest depths. The aquarium does a terrific job of introducing these unique animals in their special exhibits. The current centerpiece exhibit of strange life is “The Secret Lives of Sea Horses” featuring the sea dragon, one of the most delightfully hallucinatory animals on the planet.

No, Not Seaweed

A final tribute must be paid to the museum staff. Of the 1,300 souls who work here, 900 of them are volunteers and you couldn’t find a more friendly and committed team. (Fun Fact: A number of the volunteer divers, charged with entering the tanks for maintenance and animal care, are paraplegics). Everyone here is deeply, but cheerfully, committed to the aquarium’s mission “to inspire conservation of the oceans.”

Volunteer. Donate. Go. Because I said so. Because Nature is always good for your soul. Because your planet, the only one you have, will thank you.

(All photos by Author)

Them Thar Hills!#4: Chemical Desert

When I wake up in Emeryville, I stay under the blankets as long as I can. In the mountains, I rise with dawn’s first light.

On the morning after we arrived in Lone Pine, California, I spent a couple of hours trying to capture the special light on the Canon before awaking Elizabeth. The town’s back streets seemed populated by wary dogs and horses that grazed in rough little ranchettes on the outskirts.

Around ten, we drove south down 395 for a mile, then turned east on 190, the northwest road into Death Valley National Park. I took photos all along the way, but was too slow on the draw to nail a wandering coyote (canis latrans).(Would this be a post-modern vacation, experienced entirely through a camera lens?)

We drove down the northeast shore of Owens Lake, a body of water once sixty feet deep that nourished Owens Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in California a hundred years ago, before Los Angeles—via visionary William Mulholland—pronounced it theirs. Even now, though, pools of water remain along its impoverished bottom, glistening like forgotten tailings of silver.

The sun rose, the air grew hotter. In the distance, down parched slopes of brush, scattered forest of Joshua Trees (Yucca brevifolia) grew widely spaced to keep a frail pact over sparse water supplies, a defiant miracle in a world that looks too impoverished to support anything but scrub. Desert tree still sounds like an oxymoron.



We entered the park and reached Crowley Point around noon, at the top of the first of two long descents to reach Death Valley. Ravens greeted us, seeking handouts, but you don’t ever feed the wild animals, not on purpose. The salt flats of the Saline Valley spread out below looking like sterile ice. The great distances below were unnerving.

Hold out your hand, please, thank you . . . .

Crowley Point was named after Father John Crowley. A plaque christens him “The Padre of the Desert.” Further research tells the story of a Catholic priest who devoted his ministry (and finally sacrificed his life) to raising Owens Valley and Inyo County from the dead after L.A. had sucked its lifeblood away. He helped turn the area into a major tourist destination for outdoor enthusiasts. Maybe he liked the ravens, too.



Stark beauty all around, enough to make me dizzy. But what about the pioneers who first struggled through here in 1849--1850? There’s what we see now and there’s what they saw then. Sure, they were astounded all right: maybe astounded by despair. To them, this land was just one great wall to struggle over after another, rising from hell hot to hell freezing and back down again, almost like Prometheus, but for them the stone rolled down the other side instead. Even after making it through Death Valley to the south, cruel Mojave Desert lay in wait up ahead. Who among them would see beauty in this arid vastness? Who of us now wouldn’t shrink from the car-less journey they made?

After Panamint Springs (a brief white flash of RVs, huddling behind desert trees), we crossed the Saline Valley. On the steep climb up the Panamint Range on other side, we made encouraging noises to the struggling Toyota—if it were a horse or mule, it would’ve stared at us like we were loco before collapsing. We crossed over Towne Pass then down the barren slopes on the other side and stopped at Stovepipe Wells. Death Valley finally sprawled before our eyes. Spring tourists wandered everywhere, but this world is so radical, no one–not me in cowboy khaki, either--looked like they belong here.

The name “Death Valley” sticks for good reason: to this day, tenderfoots, city- and suburb-bred, still occasionally go a-wandering and don’t make it back. Maybe this happens from lack of attention, education or maybe they’d become inured from seeing deserts only on TV sets or movies in air-conditioned rooms (Maybe all desert-set movies should be watched in temperatures of plus-100ºF, no concession stand, either). Their fates hover around my mind. I did learn one useful thing from
watching those westerns, A and B, alike: Don’t screw around out here. In this world, water is the only gold, so carry plenty and keep help close by.

Still, once our awe had simmered a little, it was time to steer the car onto a few shoulders and down some side-roads. Seems we were a bit late for the wild flowers: Only scattered yellow patches of desert sunflowers (Geraea canescens) remained. Outside Stovepipe, past the sand dunes, we wandered apiece through the Devil’s Cornfield, a bleak garden of Arrowweed (Pluchea sericea) plants that struggled up through crusty sand that crumbled under our shoes (apparently this indicates a
shallow water table of about 5 feet).

Some miles on, we turned onto a washboard road. A shuddering couple-mile drive ended at a low little canyon they call Salt Creek. Salt Creek runs year-round through the Death Valley’s furnace heart and so brings life to a rich marsh oasis.

The most visible animal in this narrow-gauge environment is the endangered Salt Creek pupfish (Cyprinodon salinus salinus), a tiny Piscean about half the size of my pinkie. There seemed to be hundreds of them swimming in the clear shallow stream along the mile walkway. I put the Canon to work, taking dozens of photos. (Stop by the house some time. I’ll force you to sit through a slide show of all of them.)



Fascinated, we closely watched the creatures battle through their mating rituals. A thin skin of life in an edgy environment like this is bound to focus you—there’s sure no tin-ass neon around to distract. It’s miraculous how these rare tiny fish are both vulnerable and profoundly tough enough to thrive in this hellscape.

Elizabeth figured out that if she drove a little up on the shoulder, the car wouldn’t shake so much on the way out. Some miles on, riding above the white salt pans stretching below, we made another right into the Harmony Borax Works. Some of you may remember Death Valley Days, a 558-episode TV western once hosted by Ronald Reagan (among others) and sponsored by The Pacific Borax Company. This was one of the mining sites for borax. Though not mined in the valley for years, it’s still a common component in many products. (The orange cliffs in the photo are borax sources.)



The Harmony Borax Works only stayed business for five years in the 1880s. The remote location required them to process the borax for use onsite. The workers were Chinese laborers, exploited for a pittance. Most of them lived onsite, too—like in many “company towns,” the money they earned, they spent at the company store. On that score at least, the company likely wound up losing nothing, which was what the workers got when the works closed down. The huge wagons of borax, dragging a 1,500 gallon water tank, really did require a 20-animal team to ship the finished
product to market (actually 18 mules and two horses). Again, it looks like a grim life, lived by people likely unmoved by nature’s beauty.



A mile on, we came to our last stop: tamed and overbuilt Furnace Creek, Death Valley’s urban center, pop. 31. We checked out the Death Valley Visitor’s Center and learned this: Life only takes hold in areas where sodium makes up no more than 6% of the soil and water. Past 6%, nothing lives. It becomes a true lifeless desert, a chemical desert. Take away Earth’s egg-shell of atmosphere, the whole world would be the Death Valley salt flats.

Badwater, the lowest point in the U.S., lay ahead, but our shadows were long and gas was low. We needed another day we didn’t have. We drove out of the Valley, back to Lone Pine, emerging from the park right at the golden hour: long shadows and clear soft light burnished the land, while up ahead, the blue wall of the Sierras beckoned us yonder.



If it sounds like I didn’t love Death Valley, believe me I did. But it’s the kind of love seen through narrow, wary eyes.

Them Thar Hills #3: Ride the High Desert

Mt. Whitney from Lone Pine

One of marriage's many benefits is travel. At least with my marriage. (Other marriages I’ve seen, mmmmm not so much, which may be why I waited so long.) Since Elizabeth and I hitched our wagon, I’ve seen places I’ve only dreamed about, places I thought existed only in flickering shadows on forty-foot walls or from TV tubes.

Places like Lone Pine, California, which we used as a base for a journey to Death Valley we took last weekend. It turned out to be one of the best too-short vacations I’ve ever taken.

After a night in Bishop—a town with a “Move Here!” pull—we arrived in Lone Pine, a remote community of around 2,500 souls that lounges in the high windswept eastern desert about four hours northeast of Los Angeles by car and ten miles of raven-flight from Mt. Whitney, which is the highest point in both the 400-mile wall of mountains called the Sierra Nevadas and the continental U.S. (I’ve touched before on this spectacular world in essays concerning that guaranteed best seller of mine whose progress I’ll be catching you up on, soon).

Lone Pine has a mite less of that “Move Here!” pull. The one-stop town seems a tad poor—a couple of good restaurants, but the bars aren’t much for elbow-bending and the nearest real bookstores are aways back in Bishop. It seems to serve mostly as a way station for Death Valley and the Mt. Whitney Summit.

But, unlike so many small American towns these days, you can take in a movie on the weekend. Better yet, attend the annual Lone Pine Film Festival. Each year thousands of film buffs make the trip to this faraway town to celebrate the movies. Sounds like a dumb thing to do. Why waste gas and risk a nosebleed and acrophobia for a movie? If you want to get sick, there’s always American Idol.

Here are some of the reasons: Gunga Din, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Bad Day at Black Rock, Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, Tremors, Gladiator, Star Trek V, Comanche Station, most of the 66 movies that make up the Hopalong Cassidy westerns, plus enough B-westerns to give the Lone Ranger saddle sores. All of these Hollywood productions, and more, were filmed over a period of eighty years in the rugged, haunting hills of round red boulders and rocks that make up the Alabama Hills that rise west of town, under Mt. Whitney. Hollywood loved these hills, along with other locations in the area, professionally, artistically and personally—Barbara Stanwyck (The Violent Men) had her ashes scattered in the wind that blows through this lonely desert when she passed away in 1990.

The Alabama Hills

They say that in outdoor movies, especially Westerns, the land also plays a character in the story. If true, Lone Pine has played such roles as Afghanistan, Texas, New Mexico, Old Mexico, Peru, Argentina, even Kansas. Lone Pine’s performances were as steady and sterling as Morgan Freeman’s and more than once galloped off like The Wild Bunch with whole movies. No Oscars for that kind of acting, though. No Oscars to God for sets and lighting, either.

This Western fan grew to know those weird jumbles of stones and tremendous granite walls like a backyard, but I knew them only through the keyhole of movie theaters and TV screens. Those mediums truly mediate. They fail to prepare you for the experience. The light that filters through movie cameras and film is only a pale stream of the light that’s really there, especially at morning and dusk. (I’ll bet my Canon that Galen Rowell is rolling around on Heaven’s Floor, laughing and pointing at my humble efforts here: “Off to Land Camera Hell with you, Burchfield! Tee hee hee!”)

We rode into town on a perfectly cloudless early Friday afternoon, and headed right into the
Alabama Hills with only the late Dave Holland’s enthusiastic, well-meaning, but thinly-budgeted On Location in Lone Pine to guide us to some of the locations for some of Hollywood’s best productions. Didn’t get far. Except for Movie Road itself, also marked by a plaque dedicated by Roy Rogers, nothing is signed (though I swear on stacks of Luke Short and Larry McMurtry I know that setting below from some movie somewhere). Spot after spot tugged and nagged at me like a stubborn mule, but the memories refused to gel. Wonder had me in its grasp.

Mr. Scott, C'mon Outta There, Now. . . .

We failed to find the unbelievably named Gene Autry Rock (described with polite tasteful modesty as looking like a cucumber; go back to that link to the film festival . . . at the top . . . yes, that's what it looks like, doesn't it!?). We hiked a nature trail to a small but elegant sandstone arch, took some pictures (I eventually took over 350 in all) and then high-tailed it back to town to explore the recently opened Lone Pine Museum of Film History, set right on Highway 395.

Keyhole to Eternity

Deer in the Alabama Hills

With its narrow focus on one sub-subgenre of Hollywood history, the museum can’t throw a saddle on the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, but the love is there with its big collection of bright shiny pop culture artifacts. Separate exhibits that covered many eras in Lone Pine’s history from silent movies and the singing cowboys to Gladiator and—Elizabeth’s all-time favorite--Tremors. For me, Randolph Scott didn’t get the dedicated exhibit he deserved while Zane Grey seemed to get more than he needed (Arizona, Nevada, and Utah were the famed author's actual hunting grounds) and I was surprised not to find DVDs of Lone Pine movies for sale in the gift store. An old 1941 Buick and some of the other cars, all drove in Lone Pine movies, were very cool.

"No, dear, sorry, we can't take It home . . . stop crying, will you!?"

For fans of well-kept vintage hotels, Lone Pine has one of the best I’ve seen: The Dow Villa went
up in 1924 as Lone Pine’s movie business boomed and has done well ever since as the main bunkhouse for film crews, though nowadays, they don’t come by like they used to. The hotel has since swapped its Hispanic façade for pine shingles, but the interior is warm and elegant. The front desk clerk told me that, unfortunately, no records remain of who stayed in what room before the late 1940s. A plaque outside assures that John Wayne stayed in Room 20 of the newer attached motel—he was here to film a Great Western Bank commercial no less--just before the grass started waving over him in 1977. A mosey by Room 20 brought no tall, drawling ghost to the window—though I spent the next two days walking with a tilted swagger and calling everyone—even Elizabeth—“pilgrim.”

Still, it was fun to guess just who might’ve slept in our small, cozy room: Errol Flynn (busting the bed with every gal in town)? Mr. Grant? Randy? Hoppy? Or even Lee Van Cleef? I can see just him, lying on the bed, grinning like a weasel at the henhouse door, chuckling like a rattler as he plotted the next day’s evil before sinking into the sound sleep of bad guys everywhere.

I slept well, too, heh-heh-heh . . . .

(Changed 4/1/08)