Twentynine Palms, 2010 - June 21

 

Summer solstice.

High sun, as high as it’s going to get.

And, as advertised yesterday, Newt took me on a drive out to a place called Corn Springs, that I had no idea as to what it was, where it was, what it meant, or pretty much anything else.

But I’m in your hands, Newt, so let’s roll.

Up with the sun.

Gather provisions, water and food, camera and lenses, nice new boots, and I’m ready to rumble.

Today, Cathy begins teaching a summer term at the college, so for her it was the first day of work. Shame she couldn’t come with us.

Down State Highway 62, the Twentynine Palms Highway, and roll into the morning sun toward the east, away from town, and away from everything. They don’t call Twentynine Palms “The Edge” for nothing.

Very little traffic and the already thin signs of population promptly begin to get thinner. Lots of open spaces dominating a patchy scrim of homes and cabins.

Out past Dale Dry Lake, and things finally just gave up altogether, and the last sign of human habitation, aside from the asphalt we were sailing down at a good speed, went out with a whimper and from then on we were over the edge and it was hard-ass creosote and saharan mustard desert, rimmed by hard-ass bare rocky mountains and nothing else.

I was as excited to be entering this brutal environment as a little kid on christmyass morning.

I had no idea what lay ahead, and the feeling is a delicious one when you’re entering a strange alien landscape and then plunging on deeper into it without hesitation.

Yesterday evening, the light got nice, and I determined to take the long lens and try my best to get some shots that give at least a sort of hint to the scale of things out here. Looking through the shots afterwards, one of the things that I scrutinized was this very stretch of road, as it dwindles away to nearly nothing just before it goes over the last rise and disappears.

And now here I was riding on it, hammering eastbound to god knows where.

Not far at all from the end of the Twentynine Palms Mountains, the last little bit of the Sheep Hole Mountains dribbled away, ahead and to the left of us, and as we passed the final spur of exposed rock, the road swung left and we were now headed more or less northbound directly away from the Twentynine Palms Mountains, taking a gap between the Sheep Hole Mountains to our left, and the Coxcomb Mountains to our right. Rock. Sand. Creosote. Saharan mustard. Distance. Light. Silence. Emptiness. Time. Volume. And a remorselessly abiding cruel patience.

The landscape continued to become more and more lunar. Or perhaps Martian. It’s hard to say. The enormity that surrounded us does not give itself away to explanation. I try my best, but I know that I’m making no headway whatsoever when it comes to conveying the stupefying empty desolation that surrounded us on all sides without gap or imperfection. Aside from the road itself, and occasional vehicles going past us from the opposite direction, a vast and implacable nothingness brooded silently, sinisterly, all around. God help you if your vehicle breaks down out here. Cell phones do not work out here. You are on your own out here. The heat and the dehydration brought on by an utter lack of water will either one, or both, kill quickly, and both are as patient and uncaring as the rocks themselves.

It is something that must be felt.

You cannot convey it.

And most people recoil from with a feeling of boredom that is founded upon an unspoken sense of terror.

But not everybody.

Newt is a connoisseur of places like this, and I’d dearly love to learn the craft too.

And so we roll out through the gap, and once clear of the western end of the Coxcombs, the road swings back toward the east and the terrain takes another notch upward in crazed death-dealing beauty as it runs along parallel with the Coxcombs, eastbound, just north of them.

Newt says this is his favorite terrain in this whole area, and I can certainly see why.

Adjectives fall miserably short on all levels. Photographs, too. Here's a few perfunctory shots I felt compelled to take from our moving vehicle, but even as I was hitting the shutter release, I knew full well that I had zero chance of capturing the least little sense of the place. Ah well, so it goes.

This part of the Coxcombs has an entirely different look to it from the Bullion, Sheep Hole, and Twentynine Palms ranges. The rock is pretty much the same gray-brown color, but it lurches into the sky and falls back down with a much more triangular and sharp-edged aspect. And it’s somehow spinier, too. There’s no way I’m going to be able to describe things, so I do believe I’ll just stop here and say, “The hell with it,” and not trouble myself further over not being able to share any of this with anyone. Once again, these few pictures I took completely fail to give the essence of things out this way. Drive through it for yourself, or not, and that’s about all that can be said. But if you ever chance anywhere near this place, then do yourself a favor and take that stretch of S.H.62 east of the Sheep Hole mountains all the way to the junction with S.H.177. Maybe do it in the morning or the evening, when the light is better, with plenty of highlights and shadows to throw things into relief.

Just be sure and get your vehicle checked out first, and bring plenty of water.

Just in case, ok?

At 177, we finally part company with that contingent of roadfarers who pull shiny muscleboats on trailers behind lookatme trucks.

Go left, and you’ll wind up at the Parker Dam, on the Colorado River with a host of waterborne nitwits all zooming around in circles, going nowhere, until it’s time to call a halt to the drunken fun and games, put the gas-swilling boat back on the trailer, and return to their god-forsaken lives in L.A. or Bakersfield, or who the fuck knows where.

Newt goes right. South.

And we do an end-around on the Coxcombs, which by this point have settled back down to a semblance of normalcy, and strike out across the basin toward a place called Desert Center.

Eastern side of the Coxcombs. There's real geology out here, and some day I'm gonna find out how it all works.

Which is a sun-blasted ruin of a little townlet abutting Interstate 10 that looks like it could be one of the worst possible places to grow up in the entire United States.

There doesn’t even appear to be so much as nothing in Desert Center.

Again, it’s hard to describe. Baked, bleached, and blighted.

Catch the interstate, and roll eastbound some more, and finally a sign advises “Corn Springs, 2 miles.” We've traveled over a hundred miles so far, but it really does not seem that way at all. Distance out here is a very peculiar commodity.

Nothing. Nobody. Nowhere.

Take the remarkably small and unprepossessing exit off the main artery, and things change in a hurry. Dirt roads. Slow.

Corner of Corn Springs Road and Chuckwalla Valley Road, which is what passes for downtown out here

The Chuckwalla Mountains shimmer in the heat directly ahead of us.

We’re on an alluvial fan that slopes gently up into the Chuckwallas, and it looks very alluvial indeed.

Catastrophically so, in fact.

Unimaginable violence, but it hardly ever happens

Instead of the usual sand, it’s gravel and rocks, and the whole thing, while flat and gently-sloped like an alluvial fan is supposed to look, is crisscrossed with ravines and gullies that tell a tale of some no-fucking-around flooding that apparently can occasionally gouge this terrain into the shapes we see all around us. I suppose that every hundred years or so, or maybe every thousand years or so, whatever it is that comes down out of the Chuckwallas is just unstoppable. Some kind of nightmare slurry, not quite water, not quite rock, but instead some horrible amalgam of the two, with teeth made of large boulders, roaring downslope, ripping up, moving, and redepositing the entire body of the land all around here.

Pretty sure I wouldn’t want to be sitting downslope in front of it when it comes.

Evidence of water under the surface is all around us.

The greenery is greener, and contains actual trees here and there down in the low spots, in addition to the ubiquitous creosote.

But what water there may be is well beneath us and there is none whatsoever on the surface.

You'd never suspect that directly ahead of you, there lies the wide-open entrance to a rent in the mountain range, that nearly transects it, one end to the other.

We round a spur of rock, and begin to wind our way along the jouncing dirt road that follows a wash up into the heart of the range for a surprising distance.

At one time, there was a proper spring at Corn Springs. But nowadays water does not flow on the surface, and it is said that an earthquake sometime back around the turn of the previous century shifted something underground, and the water stopped flowing. Once again, I find myself wishing I knew the geology out here better than I do.

By then, the Indians who originally lived here had already met their fate at the hands of the white invaders and their blood and bones had well and truly been absorbed into the earth, never to be seen again. But they left behind more than the untraceable wreckage of their bodies. They also left an array of enduring petroglyphs all over the rocks in this area, and these petroglyphs are what we’ve come out here to see. The oldest rock art has been dated to over 10,000 years old, and I marvel at the thought of a people, on foot, with no draft animals of any kind, somehow not only finding their way out here in the first place, but then actually figuring out a way to survive for millennia in this cruel environment. Musta been some bad-ass motherfuckers, is about all I can say for any of it.

The dirt road goes beyond the location of the spring itself, which is given away by a small stand of California Fan Palms that look incongruously out of place in this wasteland of rocks, blocks, and sand, and we follow it for another mile or two, along the wash, down in the bottom, hemmed in on each side by rocky canyon slopes and walls.

And find, out here in the fucking very middle of nowhere, two odd things.

The first thing, which we can see a bit farther on, but do not travel to, is somebody’s house. A fucking proper house, very obviously lived in, in a place where no house should be.

Who it is, how they survive, and what they might do out here will never be known to me, I’m sure.

I find myself drawn to the idea of living out here so far from nothing, in a wild wonderland of rock, sand, and cactus.

Maybe some day I’ll come back, and see if I can get acquainted with whoever lives there.

The other odd thing is a strewnfield of rusted cans and other detritus that was apparently dumped here over a period of years by an unseen mining concern somewhere not all so very far away.

There's no end of unexpectedly weird things you can find out in the desert, a hundred miles from nowhere

I suppose they dragged it all out here to this place on the wash to keep it from crudding up their own locale, wherever that may have been. Who can know?

We stopped and got out, and wandered around the place desultorily.

An archeological examination revealed a few steel-sided, aluminum-topped pull-tab cans sprinkled in among the vast majority of rusting all-steel ones which had been dealt with manually, using a proper can opener, sporting a pair of triangular openings on opposite sides of their tops. No pop-tops. Only just the few pull tab cans. When did pull tabs give way to pop-tops? Late 60’s? Early 70’s? Whenever it was, just before that time is when the dumping stopped and things have been sitting here in the merciless sun ever since.

Away from the field of trash, the landscape was fierce beauty incarnate, surprisingly green following the rains of the past winter and spring. Ocotillo, in particular, grew vigorously all around us, against a background of palo verde and smoke trees.

Ocotillo is a strange plant, ugly at first, but possessed of an alien beauty that grows on you with the passage of time.
The place almost seemed habitable, but you could look around and see that the heat and aridity will eventually return for real, torch every last one of these deceptively verdant-looking plants all the way back to bare branches, sharp spines, and dead shriveled leaves, having their way with things as they always will out here.

Ok, enough of that, let us head back to the spring and the petroglyphs.

And so we did.

Corn Springs itself is now an austere little campground. We drive around the small area set aside for parking travel trailers, in the shadow of the palm trees, but there is not so much as another vehicle out here. Not another soul anywhere to be seen.

We drive a short distance past the spring, stop once again, and exit Newt's truck to go have a look see.

Where the water stops and the desert starts		It's a small place, far removed from anything or anyone

 

And immediately see not only legitimate Indian petroglyphs, but also, must unfortunately, illegitimate white guy faux petroglyphs, much of which shared the very same rock faces, cheek by jowl, with the ancient originals.

What the fuck is up with people, anyway?

Don’t get me started, ok?

But the real thing was loud and clear, and in many places was undisturbed by more recent hands, especially in places that looked hard to get to, or dangerous, especially for drunk guys. Hopefully, a few of the more artistically obnoxious drunks have managed to take substantive falls from sketchy perches, paying a high price for their desire to fuck something up that their tiny brains cannot even understand in the first place. A bleached femur wrapped in tattered scraps of denim would have been a treat to find, but I saw nothing of the sort, alas.

So we walked across the wash to a distinct pile of glyphed rocks, and then back to the area where the truck was parked and around a small marked trail, trying to separate petrofact from petrofiction, and I got myself some photographs of them both.

Lost stories. What can it mean? Who's hands did it?		Newt considers the work		An enduring enigma, never to be properly unraveled

And in truth, five hundred years hence, or perhaps a few thousand, whoever it might be that happens along out here will likely be just as interested in the interloping petfauxglyphs as they will be the original articles.

I'm pretty sure this one's authentic		I have my doubts about this one		I have no doubts whatsoever about this one

But I still don’t like the low-rent motherfuckers who defaced this place, anyway.

Fuck every last one of you superficial sonofabitches. Except for you, G.K. You kept it cool, and kept it away from everything else, and what in the hell were you doing out here in the middle of nowhere anyway, even as World War Two raged all around the globe?

And if ancient petroglyphs (and maybe a few not-so-ancient petroglyphs) aren't your thing, well that's still plenty ok. The area itself is way more than enough all by itself. Have I told you that pictures utterly fail to capture this stuff yet?

 

Finally, it was time to go, and we fired up the truck and proceeded to retrace our hundred-mile journey out here, back to Twentynine Palms.

Two hundred miles, out and back, just to see a pile of rocks.

Imagine that.

And the scenery rewound itself in exactly the same way it unwound itself on the way out here.

And was just as indescribably beautiful and fearsome, going the other way.

When we reached Desert Center, and got off the interstate, we permitted ourselves to take a mini-excursion of the immediate junction area, admiring the post-apocalyptic blight and creeping ruin.

 

Imagine what life must have been like, attending the Desert Center School. Or perhaps going down to that drive-in burger joint, which must have been the action hub of the whole place on Saturday nights out here, back in the early 60's.

There are plenty of places in this world that qualify as "god-forsaken" but I'm not so sure that Desert Center is one of those places. In order for god to "forsake" something, she would have had to know of its existence, and have cared about it, in the first place, right? I get a strong feeling that god has never had the faintest notion that Desert Center is an actual place, that really exists, and could possibly be cared about. And so, as a result of that unassailable logic, you can not truthfully describe Desert Center as a "god-forsaken" place. Imagine living in a place where "god-forsaken" is a place above you on some brutal hierarchy, a gleaming rung on the ladder that you can only aspire to, but never rise up far enough to achieve.

One day archeologists, or perhaps paleontologists, will puzzle over the bones of this place in much the same way Newt and I puzzled over the glyphs we found at Corn Springs.

Onwards, and Newt decides he wants to go look at some cycloptic earthwork at a place called Eagle Mountain Mine.

Left hand turn off 177, past a very out of place and unhappy-looking golf course with some developer’s idea of golf guy homes around it, and out into the implacable desert we sail.

Here and there, bits and pieces of people’s lives lay scattered more or less randomly out on the flats.

In the distance, the mine could be seen, and Newt fancied that there should be somewhere that we could get a look into what ought to have been one hell of a big hole in the ground.

Hell, we took a longer detour than this to look at a big hole in the ground in Arizona, last year, so why not now? Of course, Meteor Crater probably has more going for it than some damned mining operation, but what the fuck, why not?

And as we neared the thing, it was clear that one hell of a lot of rock had been ripped up, processed, and dumped into a stepped series of tablelands of vast tailing deposits.

Somewhere, an Egyptian Pharaoh is jealous of this thing. It’s that big.

But it looks to still be an active work area, although not by much, and as we drove past a mile-long scree of tailings looming over us which was dwarfed by that which remained farther ahead and farther above us, it became obvious that we would not be looking down into any kind of hole in the ground, large or otherwise, today. Our consolation prize was the discovery that they decided to build themselves a prison out here, which we got to see in the middle distance.

Ok. Fine. Turn around and head back.

And along the way, Newt espies a line of high-tension power wires riding a row of distinctive metal pylons that stretch off with military precision to invisibility in the distance, back toward a nameless mountain range, and decides he wants to take the small dirt service road that runs along beneath them, to maybe cut a corner off of our travel distance on the way back.

Me, being the idiot that I am, I enthusiastically endorse this decision.

But it takes very little time at all for common sense, and maybe some survival instinct too, to persuade Newt that this little one-lane dirt track headed off into the distant haze might not be the road for us.

So we stop, and since the track is so narrow, and the shoulders so soft, we back up all the way to the paved road and very prudently return to more familiar ground to make our return on.

And while heading back toward the safety of S.H.177, we begin to attempt to figure out where our little dirt track under its endless row of pylons would have taken us.

Newt is of the opinion that it will intersect 177 at some point, but I am not so sure of this.

Once back on 177, we can see that the nameless range kind of peters out on its right-hand end, and the question becomes do we verge back westbound from our present northbound heading, before or after that nameless range? And does our little mystery dirt track intersect 177 or not?

Soon enough, the answer becomes frighteningly clear.

The dirt track, which has completely disappeared into the invisibility of unguessable distance along with its power line and row of distinctive pylons, does NOT intersect 177, and worse, 177 does NOT hook left on the near side of that nameless range.

Had we stayed on that goddamned dirt road, we would have been well and truly fucked.

Phew.

No thanks.

Forty miles from I don’t know what, out into the desert, and who the fuck knows where?

Lost, that’s where.

No, I do not believe I need any of that at all, thank you very much.

This is the precise exact way that bleached human bones wind up miles and miles from nothing out in this desert.

Brrrr.

And so, just as if we know what the fuck we’re doing, we permit 177 to eventually hook a little left around that bitter-end spur of rock. Finally, after many MANY miles were traveled, sonofabitch if the distinctive shapes of those high-tension powerline pylons don’t begin to show in the distance.

So ok then, that little dirt track finally DID intersect 177.

You were right all along, Newt.

Unfortunately, looking back along the line of pylons as we pass beneath the powerline, it becomes clear that the dirt track goes directly up, into, over and beyond the same mountains that 177 wisely chose to do an end around on.

I do not think I would have liked to have taken the chance, betting my own personal ass, on being able to traverse that range on a one-lane dirt road in this truck.

Too goddamned many ways for things to go wrong in severe and irreversible ways.

Nope. Nuh unh. No wanna.

Not gonna.

Fuck that shit.

But all’s well that ends well, and it’s good to still be alive and well.

And eventually, ahead of us in the distance, we encounter the intersection with 62, the good old Twentynine Palms Highway.

From here, which is once-again-familiar territory, we now realize that the "unnamed" range of mountains which we almost drove off into, on a one-fucking-lane dirt track, was actually the south side of the Coxcombs.

Well ok.

Just goes to show how amazingly deceptive the desert can be, especially when it comes to leaving things out in plain view where you can never lose sight of them, and yet still become disoriented to the point of no longer knowing where you really are, nor what you're really looking at.

That's some pretty goddamned scary shit when you take the time to stop and think about it.

We pull over at the intersection and get out of the car, and I take a few more shots of the infinite desolation all around us, and then we get back in and roll westbound.

And soon enough we reenter the weird and wonderful terrain where the Coxcombs take full flight of fancy, once again.

But this time it’s different.

Doesn’t look the same as it did this morning.

And then I realize that we are smack into the middle of this riot of rock and sand at local noon on the summer solstice, with the sun riding as high in the sky as it ever possibly can.

And outside, the land seems to have realized this too, and has transformed itself accordingly.

Not only are there no shadows, but the very rock itself has changed.

Newt and I both notice the effect.

Instead of being the usual dark gray-brown that I’m used to, all of the rock, everywhere around us on all sides, has taken on the pale white appearance of bleached bones, under the relentless, all-conquering sun that is screaming down from directly overhead.

Weird and uncanny, and once again not properly describable with words or pictures.

The whole world as bleached bone, lying in the desert sun.

A bit unsettling, this.

But the truck thankfully keeps on rolling right along, and the next question becomes: Are those the Sheep Hole’s?

The answer is given with the passage of more distance, and it is in the affirmative.

Dale Dry Lake comes into view around a bend, and the familiar sights of Wonder Valley tell us we’re almost home.

Off in the far shimmer, Newt’s beacon of an art studio glimmers as a distinct white spot.

And soon enough we take the turn onto Godwin and shortly thereafter we’re greeted by Stella and Bonzo, wisely remaining in the shade of the tamarisk trees by the Hell Trailer as we go through the gate.

Home again, safe and sound.

Helluva damn day!

Thank you my friend Newt, I have no idea how I might ever be able to repay you for this one.

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