29Palms - Saturday, July 04, 2009

Just past high noon.

Blue sky, looking east

Blue sky, looking north

Blazing hot outside.

What a surprise, eh?

So far it’s been a slow day, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way. Not a whole lot to write about.

Brand new outdoor shower

Yesterday, while I was engrossed in trying to describe Noah Purifoy’s art, Newt and Cathy made an outdoor shower right behind the Hell Trailer, and I never noticed a thing. Came out of the trailer shortly before sunset, and the thing was just there. My mind was elsewhere, I guess. Their finished product is just as cool as hell. Whimsically bent-up copper pipe, which Newt brazed and sweated together, and a very nice area to stand under the shower nozzle, done by Cathy, created with a unique combination of style and functionality. Nice piece of work.

This morning at sunrise it was delightfully almost-cool and Newt and I played rancher (you start early out here and try to get as much done as you can, before the heat really starts flooding down out of the sky and shuts everything down until just a little bit before sunset) and tied some fencing wire to two of the gates to his property, which, prior to this, were simply open metal frames that you could walk right through if you chose to do so.

Bailing wire, pliers, red wagon, big heavy roll of fencing wire, and water to drink in plastic bottles.

And I actually managed to help a little bit, despite my complete innocence of things rancherish.

We would have finished the job by doing the third gate, but the swelling heat knocked that shit down, and that was that.

Tra la la.

Maybe we’ll finish up tomorrow. Dunno.

Later on, while the three of us hung out in the cool of the house, the subject of creosote somehow came up, and before all was said and done, google had been dragged into things, and Cathy discovered that there really is such a thing as creosote tea.

Creosote

So of course we decided we needed to see what this shit was all about, and as Cathy put the water on to heat, I went back out here to the creosote bush right behind the Hell Trailer (it seems to be the most robust one around, and it’s got a bunch of pretty little yellow flowers on it), and broke off a few sprigs of bright green creosote bush, complete with little yellow blossoms.

Back into the house, and dunk the sprigs into the hot water and hang out a while, while it makes tea.

Now please keep in mind that this whole area is covered in a well-spaced layer of creosote bushes. Hundreds of miles of the fuckers, in fact.

Now also please keep in mind that we’re in the middle of the no-shit desert, and any sort of forage or foliage in the no-shit desert is fair game for a host of half-starved wildlife from tiny insects right on up to jackrabbits and some occasional cattle (although there’s no cattle out here).

And, despite the fact that the creosote is the only green thing around, and that there’s an awful lot of it around, it doesn’t get eaten, or otherwise molested or even touched, despite having no thorns or any other outward signs of a defense mechanism.

Creosote blossoms

It just sits there, completely exposed.

But it never gets touched.

Hmmmm.

Methinks it’s using chemical warfare to defend itself.

And we’re gonna be drinking it as tea here very shortly.

Brilliant.

The tea is now just about done, and the aroma of creosote fills the air.

Creosote has a very distinct smell, and not everybody likes it, but we all think it smells quite nice. Can’t really describe it. Smells like nothing else, although to my nose, there are strong overtones of too-warm electrical insulation or perhaps overheated circuit board in the overall creosote bouquet. That said, it’s still a pleasant smell. I know, that doesn’t make any sense at all, but then again neither do I.

Hell Trailer, number one

Newt says it doesn’t smell anything at all like that to him, and since it’s his nose, we’ll let him have his say in the matter. But with me, and my nose, that’s what you get by way of a description, although as descriptions go, it’s probably not the best.

Ah well.

Creosote aroma comes on strong whenever creosote gets wet. Out in the desert, a strong aroma of creosote is a sure sign of recent rain. I got my first exposure to this bit of interestingness in the desert of southwest Texas, maybe a hundred miles east of El Paso.

STRONG aroma of creosote in the air, and then just a few miles farther down the interstate where the pavement had remained bone-dry, nothing at all.

And right now, the house is just loaded with the aroma of creosote.

So Cathy pours three cups of the stuff and passes it around.

Hell Trailer, number two

Kind of a dark yellowish shade, but nice and transparent. Easy to see right through. A bit oily-looking, though, and seems to leave a slight oily residue along the inside surface of the cup.

Bottoms up.

And Cathy makes a face that I can only describe by saying I wish I had my camera with me to take a picture of it.

Strong taste.

Not what I’d call a pleasant taste, either.

Tastes just like fucking creosote, in fact.

And leaves a creosotey aftertaste, too.

Yum.

Hell Trailer, number three

Newt opines that it’s not all that bad, and I agree, but neither one of us finishes so much as half of our cup of creosote tea.

Cathy falls short of even that.

The good news is that nobody suddenly reaches for their throat, chokes out a constricted “aaarrruuuuuuwk” and promptly falls dead on the floor.

So the creosote tea has at least got that much going for it.

Which, I suppose, is a good thing.

And now it’s an hour or so later, and I made it all the way over here to the Hell Trailer under my own power, and I’m still not dead, or even sick, so things seem to be getting better and better.

Though I suppose if the stuff is sufficiently slow-acting, there’s still plenty of time left for me to suddenly keel over, stone dead.

I’m convinced that there’s a perfectly good use for creosote tea, but I don’t know what it is.

Maybe put it in a spray bottle, and use it as an insecticide or something? I dunno.

It’s gotta have a use, somehow, right?

Ah well, I guess it’s not my job to figure out how to get rich on creosote tea.

It was plenty enough just to be the test pilot for the shit, now that I think about it. I’m pretty sure I’ve had more than enough creosote tea to last me the rest of my life, in fact.

Next time you find yourself in the desert, maybe try some for yourself, hmm?

///////

Hell Trailer

2pm, sun still up in the very top of the sky.

Just got back from getting some shots of the new outdoor shower, some close-ups of the creosote, and a little walkabout outside the compound.

Studio

The blasting overhead light of midday is terrible for taking photographs, but I wanted to see if I could maybe convey the look of things out here with the full heat of the hottest part of the day on them. Don’t think it worked, from the look of the images.

Blazing hot, number one

Kinda hard to take a picture of “blazing hot” but at least I tried.

I’m guessing it was 103 or 104 out there, and there was no shade anywhere. The sun was just screaming down out of the sky, and adding substantially to the already-heavy burden of heat the air itself was carrying. It gets hotter out here, plenty hotter in fact, but it was hot enough anyway.

Blazing hot, number two

Just the bright pan of the desert reflecting light and heat up at you from below, while the main event broiled down from above.

Blazing hot, number three

Nothing was moving out there, except a bit of hot breeze now and then, which only seemed to make things hotter. I’m guessing electric hair dryer sales out this way are pretty minimal. All you have to do is step outside for a few minutes and you’re done. And, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen anybody with wet hair out here at all.

Blazing hot, number four

Wet hair doesn’t stand much of a chance in a reverberatory furnace.

All living things were elsewhere, staying the fuck out of it. No bird, no insect, no lizard, no nothing.

Blazing hot, number five

I only lasted a little over a half hour, even with a bottle of water to pull on every so often.

I’m not acclimated to this kind of an environment, and I didn’t want to push things even the tiniest little bit.

This is a brutally unforgiving motherfucker, and it will kill you as surely, quickly, and unfeelingly as the ocean will.

The ocean, I know.

Blazing hot, number six

The desert, I do not know.

So I took it a little gingerly.

Heatstroke is not only lethal, but it can come up on you with surprising speed, and if there’s nobody watching you when you crumple to the ground behind a creosote bush, then you’ve got yourself a bit of a problem, now don’t you? Nah, I don’t need ANY of that shit, thank you very much.

Bottom line: Goddamn, but it’s fucking HOT out there!

How the fuck did people survive this thing back in the old days?

Blazing hot, number seven

I mean, here we are, with a team of oxen and a covered wagon, and we’re going to cross this fucked up desert?

About all I can gather from any of that is that whatever it was that those people were getting away from back east must have been some seriously fucked up shit.

Blazing hot, number eight

Either that or they were just about the stupidest motherfuckers on the face of the planet, and had zero idea about what they were getting themselves into out here.

Probably about equal parts of both.

I dunno.

I guess I’ll just have to add the fucked up heat to my ever-growing list of stuff that’s hard to describe out here.

///////

3:15pm

Well that was interesting.

Just did my first dust devil.

Big dust devil in the far distance

Small one, only about fifty feet across or so, nothing at all like the quarter-mile high (or maybe even higher) monster Newt and I saw in the far distance last Wednesday.

But it was certainly vigorous enough.

I’d just walked out of the trailer, camera in hand, for no reason at all, and was gingerly stepping barefoot across the hot concrete slab in front of the trailer.

And as I’m pooting around, facing northeast and looking at nothing at all, suddenly the sound of the breeze in the tamarisk tree steps up a notch. Then it stepped up another notch, and the hot wind began blowing in my face, and then it stepped up another notch and really started blowing in my face as dust, sand, and a host of other light debris suddenly thickened all around me while I reacted as quickly as I could, placing the lens cap over the camera lens.

And then for a few seconds I just stood there, eyes closed, while the gale blew into my face like the febrile breath of hell and the cloud of dirt and dust physically assailed me.

Then the wind started coming back down as quickly as it had ramped up, and I opened my eyes to see that by golly there was a fucking whirling dervish of a dust devil centered just beyond the edge of the slab, right there next to me.

The apparition moved away from me to the northeast in a frenzied yellowish swirl of dust, sand, and bits of who knows what, departing my vicinity, crossing the fence, and moving out into the open creosote beyond.

Before I’d had the presence of mind to take the damned lens cap back off of the lens, my swirling friend had moved far enough away, and had died down somewhat, as to be not worth the effort to get organized with the camera.

So I just stood there and brushed myself and my hair off as best I could, and watched it continue on out and away into the distance.

I can report with confidence that it obeyed all the laws of atmospheric vortexes in the northern hemisphere, and was rotating counterclockwise, as all good low-pressure systems do, even the weency little ones.

Never saw nor suspected that it was coming.

Just snuck up behind me and was upon me before I could figure out what the hell was going on.

It’s clear that there’s plenty to learn about this desert, that’s for sure.

I’d love to be able to put in the requisite time to allow that to occur, but that’s not going to be doable on this trip, unfortunately.

Ah well.