29Palms - Thursday, July 09, 2009

Coming up on 3pm, right in the middle of the hottest part of the day.

Back in the Hell Trailer, hiding from it, once again.

The desert rhythm will impose itself upon you, and once it has, you find yourself moving with it easily, unthinkingly. Or at least I do.

This desert has insinuated itself into the fabric of my life with surprising speed.

No, I’m not fully checked out on Desert 101 yet, far from it in fact. I’m still fully capable of killing myself out here by accident, if left unsupervised in the wrong place for too long. But I can feel things shifting gears, and in funny ways it almost feels like this is the place I’m supposed to be, and everywhere else was all just a Great Detour along the way here. I dunno. Just another item to add to the Hard To Explain list, and then move on.

The road in, looking back over your shoulder

This morning, Newt drove me out to Gold Park.

Not so far from town as the crow flies, but it may as well have been a different planet.

Out into a gap in the mountains south of town, and in no time at all things had stepped up yet another notch.

The road quickly devolved to dirt and rock, and Newt’s reasons for buying his Toyota 4WD truck, with a set of very impressive no-nonsense tires, became abundant.

We followed a wash into the hills, and it was clear that every once in a great while, the water comes down and nothing at all can stop it.

Just get the fuck out of the way or die.

Real easy, that one.

Newt kept telling me how much the sand had filled in this day, and how nice the road was to drive on

But there was no water today, nor has there been any since I got here, and the wash was just a jumble of dust, sand, and upended rocks, with the mountains sloping down on either side, occasionally pinching things down to full choke-point narrowness.

The road varied from poor to horrendous, depending on where we were, and how rocky it became.

And so we wound, bounced, jounced, jolted, and rolled, farther and farther out into a severe and unforgiving wilderness.

Once again, we had the whole place to ourselves, mile after mile.

Nobody.

Nowhere.

Nothing…..

Mining country.

Or at least once upon a time it was.

In the surrounding hillsides, unmistakable signs were all around, if you looked close enough to see them.

Trails winding off into some seriously god-awful terrain.

Non-descript tailing piles, sprinkled here, there, and everywhere.

Holes in the ground.

Serious, death-dealing holes in the ground

Serious, death-dealing holes in the ground, cursorily fenced off with a few metal stakes and a strand or two of barbed wire. Sometimes not fenced off at all.

Silence was our only companion.

Abandoned cars, fifty or sixty years old and older, full of bullet holes.

Seems as if people come out here and play with their guns, and anything at all that looks like a target gets treated as a target.

Over time, the bullet holes accumulate, and sheet metal things begin to go swiss cheese.

Newt stopped to show me another random mineshaft.

Scary motherfucker.

The barbed wire strand was too close to the thing, and the sides of the square hole, maybe ten feet across, looked as if they could let go and fall down inside it at any moment. I walked up to it without my camera, and I backed away from it after giving it the most cursory glance. Newt seemed drawn to the blackness, and went off to get himself a proper rock to toss down into the ebony, to see how deep it might be, by timing how long it would take to hear the sound of terminal impact down at the bottom. As he returned with a nice-sized rock, a large owl startled the hell out of him as it came whupping up out of the abyss. He shouted for my attention, and as I turned around I saw the bird clear the hole in the ground and wheel off toward the far hillside. We both kind of freaked out at that, and as we stood there not quite knowing what to think, another one whupped up out of the blackness and then landed on a ledge maybe five feet below ground level, and then turned its head to consider the two of us. Barn owl. Big one. Very distinctive heart-shaped face, whitish in color, and a more tan or brown body and wings, with a mottled sort of pattern. The bird watched us for enough seconds, and then took wing and wheeled up and out of the shaft, headed off to where its partner had just departed toward. Must have been a mating pair, and our blundering into their home territory no doubt disturbed them greatly. Sorry guys. Newt put down his rock, and swore to never again toss anything into an open mineshaft, lest he inadvertently cause problems for whatever might be down there, calling the place home.

They mined for gold out here, but it doesn’t look like they ever found very much.

None of the remains of the mines have any kind of substance or weight to them.

Hole in the ground, small scree of tailings, maybe some scattered debris from a shack or something, and that’s about it.

Holy shit, but this must have been a motherfucking hard life.

The rocks aren’t talking, but if they could I’m sure there are some very serious stories that would be told.

Abandoned BLM shack way out in the middle of nofuckingwhere, in Gold Park

And then, after driving for a very long way, getting deeper and deeper into a no-fucking-around zone that was already plenty deep enough to start with, we rounded a corner and there before us was an abandoned BLM stone shack.

BLM is the Bureau of Land Management, and after the Great Depression, or perhaps during it, they actively sought to entice people out here to try their hand at extracting riches from the naked rocks.

From the looks of things now, it was all a great scam to get people to come out here and populate the place, so that some politician or other could live like a fat tick, parasitically skimming tax money from desperate men and families, too far out into this god-forsaken wilderness to extricate themselves.

Godforsaken loneliness in every direction, for as far as the eye could see

And so we drove right up to the thing, parked the truck, and got out to do a little exploring.

No telling how long ago it had been abandoned.

From the look of the smashed interior of the place, I’d guess 50’s or maybe 60’s as the last decade of active inhabitation for it, but I could be a good bit wrong on this.

It sat on top of a small rise, and had a fine view of the surroundings for a full three-hundred sixty degrees, all around. The eerie silence spoke soundlessly of an infinite patience and an infinite lack of concern for human lives.

And as the silence descended, we may as well have been on the fucking moon, looking at abandoned Apollo hardware.

Nobody		Nowhere		Nothing

A great desolation surrounded us on all sides.

Gray-brown rocks and hillsides, undulating off into the distance everywhere you looked. A few scrabbly-looking dirt roads, or tracks, and signs of the everpresent mines subtly hiding in plain sight here and there. Half-hearted dusting of creosote and yucca. Abandoned. Post apocalyptic. Lonesome. Heartbreaking. Majestic. Grand. Lethal. Stunning. Fascinating. Treacherous. Self-contained. Barren. Patient. A growing list of adjectives swirled self-contradictorily inside my head, in a bubbling stew of images and imagery.

I can see why people are drawn to this place

I can see why people are repelled by this place

Hell of a fucking place!!

I can see why people are drawn to this place.

I can see why people are repelled by this place.

Count me amongst those drawn, and very glad indeed that most others are repelled, and cannot see any worth to a place such as this.

Stark beauty

Otherwise, the place would be overrun, and turn into some of what Newt and I saw on our drive “down the hill” yesterday.

Lethality, loneliness, barrenness, and just general unfriendliness

The lethality, loneliness, barrenness, and just general unfriendliness, are all that’s keeping this place, and others like it, from being destroyed at the hands of the “developers,” the chambers of commerce, the legions of lawyers and realtors, the greedy, the unseeing, the self-absorbed.

None of whom can see past the ends of their own wallets, and none of whom give a rat’s ass about leaving things the fuck alone.

Edward Abbey was right.

Fuck you, assholes!

Barrel cactus

May you one and all step into an open mineshaft and never be heard from again!

As, I’m quite sure, did more than just a few of the unfortunates who sought to extract fucked up gold from these very rocks.

Didn’t work, did it?

No, it certainly didn’t.

And despite their best efforts, the silence still holds sway.

We departed, and along the way back, Newt stopped by yet another mine where, for unknown reasons, four or five old abandoned cars lay decaying out under the sun. Out here, things rust, but they do not corrode. Ferrous metal acquires the look and color of rust, but instead of slowly dissolving as it does in Florida, it lasts. The desert, and people, had worked and weathered the rusted hulks into a symphony of outlandish shapes, at once instantly recognizable but otherworldly and unsettling. A profound loneliness had worked its way down into the very atoms of the metal, and it showed.

Abandoned		Never to roll again

The desert is a master artist for those with the eye to see it.

View from atop the scree of mine tailings

Black hole

Farther along the road back we stopped at yet another mine. Scramble up a slope of crumbly scree, trying not to slip as the rocks and pebbles beneath our feet gave way with each new step. Arrived a the top of another one of those small tailing piles, and a black hole about five feet across entered the rocks of the hillside, horizontally. Newt considered things from the mouth of the shaft, but I decided I wanted to see what was in there and stooped over to enter.

Once inside, the air instantly became cool and refreshing, and when my eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, I could see the tunnel I was in went back another thirty feet or so, before taking a slight bend to the right and disappearing from view. I went to follow it, but before going very much farther at all, good sense finally soaked through my thick skull, and I began to consider exactly where I was, and what I was doing. At which point I stopped, very reasonably enough. The view back out the opening was surreal, with a brilliant patch of outside surrounded by indistinct shapes in the gloom. I did not remain inside much longer, and returned forthwith to the world of sunlight and safety, outside.

All around us, the desert brooded in silence.

We pondered that silence for a while longer, and then returned the way we came.