Sitting on the back porch, Newt’s going at it wallowing holes in the support lugs on yet another phenomenal piece of art.
Ordinarily, I don’t tend to think of art and lifting lugs in the same breath, but then again I don’t think of art and the hood from an old 1950 Ford, plucked from a long-abandoned wreck that has been weathering in the desert for literal decades, either.
But it’s Newt, and Newt’s a creative motherfucker, and of course the thing is fantastic, and once he gets the threaded rod properly installed between the lugs, I’m going to help him hang it way up there on the living room wall, in his high-ceilinged house, where it will join the rest of the art done by him and his wife Cathy, that you encounter everywhere you look inside and outside his house.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and so I need to back up a little and start at the beginning, or somewhere in the near vicinity thereof.
I’m back in the desert, east of the rat-hole town of Twentynine Palms, California, for only the second time in my life, and I’m feeling like I just came back to my natural home from a long journey to the far corners of the Earth.
Recently, a gap opened up in my life, and bestowed upon me the signal grace of allowing me to take a substantial block of time and do any damn thing I wanted to with it, as well as a couple of spare dollars in the bank to spend. And as if pre-ordained from on high, Newt emailed me shortly thereafter and apropos of nothing at all, mentioned that this would be a good time for me to come and visit, since his job as art professor at a local college is shut down for the duration of the summer.
How could I resist a concatenation of events like that?
Not at all, that’s how.
So it’s fire up the computer, find a cheapie fare to Palm Springs and set the wheels and turbines into motion.
On the Florida end, Lisa ever so kindly offers to put me up for the evening and then drive me to the airport in the morning, and on the California end, Newt will be awaiting me in the ground transportation area at the Palm Springs airport.
Too easy.
No luggage.
Computer bag with computer nestled snugly inside of a couple of pairs of boardshorts, t-shirts, and tank tops, toothbrush and the rest, preprinted boarding passes, and my trusty Nikon D40 in its bag, and that’s that.
Travel light, is what I say, and I’m putting my money where my mouth is on this trip.
Soon enough, Lisa is heading for the airport exits, and I’m going through security, headed for my gate.
United flies me from Orlando to Denver, three and a half hours over an endless behazed patchwork of farmland, rivers and towns. The Mississippi River heaves beneath us midway, but aside from that, despite me remaining glued to my window on the right side of the A320, it’s pretty boring-looking down there, until the very last bit when the snows of the Colorado Rockies show up, just before landing in Denver.
Couple of hours layover, sipping the free internet at the airport, and this time it’s a 757 and we roll south into the air, and bank right, for the climbout leaving Denver. I’m on the left hand side this time, and the scenery below could not possibly be any more different from the first leg of the trip.
The Rockies come immediately into view below us, not all that far down, and despite the fact that it’s June 15, the evidence for a recent snowfall on top of all these peaks is loud and clear.
Brilliant white snow, fresh and new, blazes from a hundred peaks, in clumps, clots, blankets, and branched networks of lightning that fill a million little low places, ravines, and gullies along the sides and tops of the geology below.
Deep green forest provides a very pleasing contrast with the blasting white of the new snow, and around and in between, the heads of unnamed streams and rivers scour the rock into a phantasmagoria of cirques, canyons, cuts, crags, and creases that constantly change their form from one thing to another as perspective and distance both work their magic on the vast prospect below.
I am completely enthralled with it all, and stay glued to the window, despite a few half-hearted attempts at conversation by the gentleman at the aisle-end of the row, across the delightfully empty seat between us.
Sorry guy, but I’ve never taken this particular ground track before, and even if I had, I’d still be glued to this window, ‘cause that’s some world-class scenery down there and I ain’t gonna miss any of it for you, or for anybody else.
Maybe next time.
But only if it’s cloudy and I can’t see the ground.
The Rockies come in waves, with a few good sets and a couple of lulls, but finally it begins to ever so gently subside, and the whole look and feel of the ground subtly shifts gears toward lower relief and lower rainfall.
We’re entering the desert and the colors go from forest green, granite gray and ice white to a bewildering array of reds, oranges, ochers, yellows and khakis, all subtly shifting and shading from one to another as they both cover and define the underlying dry braided stream beds, sharp-edged mesas, fields of sand dunes, and vistas of gently tilted and sometimes rolling land that stretch off into the bland diffusion that rims the horizon. At one point, the unmistakable form of Ship Rock, New Mexico stands out in high relief, easily a hundred miles away, but just as easy to recognize as your own face in the mirror. I marvel at the volcanic visage from far above and far away.
Once in a while I look around inside the airplane, and sure enough, nobody else is giving any of it the least attention. The in-flight movie holds them all in its fake thrall, and I suppose that’s just fine with me. Whatever, guys.
As the miles continue to unwind, the colors begin to fade, and the interestingness of the landforms fades with it, and at some point after flying directly over the Grand Canyon, filled with a green Colorado River flecked with the bright white of no-fooling-around cataracts at intervals all along its length, we find ourselves over some seriously blasted basin-and-range territory with deathly gray-brown mountains floating like islands on a sea of equally deathly gray-yellow arroyos, sand, and alluvial fans.
We have reached the no-shit desert, and I am immediately reminded of my destination.
Newt lives squarely in the middle of this lethal country, and for whatever reasons, I’ve fallen in love with its death masque aspect.
In fact, just a couple of days prior to taking wing, I took it upon myself to learn my way around this place via the NOAA visible-light satellite imagery and Google Earth.
Punch “twentynine palms” into Google Earth, get taken directly above the gridwork of streets that delineate the town, and then start backing out until things have a similar look and scale as they do on the 1km visible satellite shot, and then look for and memorize the shapes, so that I’ll be able to find Twentynine Palms at a glance, zooming in and zooming out, back and forth, far and near, as I do so.
I enjoy learning this sort of thing, and after a couple of hours spent entertaining myself in this manner, I am able to spot all of the salient features, with perfect reliability.
No, I have no idea why I do stuff like this. It’s just fun, that’s all.
But today, from our cruising altitude of thirty-six thousand feet, the time spent pays itself off handsomely.
A bright near-white dry lake bed creeps into view from the far distance, and I’m reminded of the places I crossed with Newt in the fearsome heat, where they mine for calcite and other precipitates left behind by water doomed to evaporate and disappear out here under the relentless desert sun.
And, while doing so, I notice those very signs of calcite mining, assembling themselves as the detail increases with every mile closer we get to the sight, and sure enough, out in the middle distance, the very distinctive shapes of the Sheep Hole Pass and Dale Dry Lake make themselves apparent, and then, as if to add an exclamation point, the even more distinctive shape of the Pinto Basin suddenly becomes recognizable, despite it being much farther away, and upside down from how I’d been viewing it with my computer, north end up and south end down.
Son of a bitch! Loud and clear, there it all sits, not a cloud in the sky to hide the least bit of it.
We must have flown precisely over Amboy Crater, because it remained hidden, just out of my window-constrained field of view, beneath us.
A quick look in the right direction easily picks up the distinctive east-west runway of the airport, and just past that, the town of Twentynine Palms itself sits in plain sight.
We’re drawing nearer and nearer, and since I know precisely where to look, I decide to see if I can pick up Newt’s place, far below.
Sure as hell, with a can’t miss lineup in my mind, using the runway as my visual beacon, the bright white pinprick of Newt’s art studio gleams exactly where it should be, hard against the tiny dark spot formed by the tamarisk trees and patch of well-watered creosote.
Amazing! Here I am, just about seven miles up in the sky, and maybe three or four times that far away along the ground, and I can see Newt’s fucking place! I strain my eyes mightily to see if I can pick up any hint of the house, which would be ever so slightly below and to the left of the brilliant speck of the studio from my lofty perspective, but I cannot resolve the bright mote into two separate nuclei of light.
The house remains unresolvable, like a double star with components that are just a hair too close together to split with a less than adequate telescope.
I am reminded of trying to split double stars with a six inch Newtonian reflector as a child, and the thought returns to me as a familiar and comfortable smile from across a wide gulf of time and distance.
A look at my watch reveals that it’s just about 3:15pm local time down there.
I wonder what Newt’s doing, right now?
Possibly making ready for the drive downhill to Palm Springs to retrieve my unworthy ass at the airport, perhaps?
I’ll never know.
Wonder Valley and the marvels within eventually fade into the distance, and soon we begin our long gentle descent into LAX.
One last patch of snow-covered mountains, beyond which “civilization” rears its head and thickens inexorably as we approach the coast.
Freeways and houses, houses and freeways, in a solid blanket for as far as you can see. With our ever-decreasing altitude, it becomes an easy matter to pick out individual vehicles swarming the freeways.
Massive interchanges, cyclopean in scope, snatch at their shares of the human tide, and funnel it here, there, and everywhere.
It’s rush hour down below us, and I find the term “rush hour” to be quite amusing, because it’s all going at a snail’s pace right now.
And the cars and trucks extend in unbroken bands, bumper to bumper, multi-lane, off into the haze for as far as you can see.
Glad it’s not me down there, fuming in frustration, behind some anonymous steering wheel.
Newt grew up here, and enjoyed it mightily when young, before all of the orange groves were plowed under and implacable hosts of people smothered the land from one end to the other, and over the horizon, too.
I can see why he bailed out on the place.
One day I’ll probably bail out on Florida, in much the same fashion.
I’ve seen the future and I do not like it very much. It shall be someone else’s present, not mine, once it arrives.
Shortly before we touch down, the landward edge of the marine-layer stratus swiftly slides beneath us and blocks visibility, and when we pop out from beneath it, we’re very close to the ground indeed.
Bump thump, whine moan, and taxi to the jetway under a solid overcast of June Gloom.
Another couple of hours waiting at the gate, but this time the internet isn’t free and I do without, sitting chilly in my tanktop, baggies, and flip-flops, looking very out of place amongst the crowd all around me.
Time to depart finally arrives and we have to go outside and walk to the twin-engine Embraer turboprop. It’s even colder outside than it was in the terminal, with a chilly west wind blowing the marine layer in from the never-warm Pacific that lines the nearby shore.
Short hop across all that swarming humanity to Palm Springs, crossing the high ground a bit south of San Jacinto Peak, just outside of town, and bounce and sideslip in descent through the crystal clear turbulence downwind of the peak, finally making a smooth touchdown with the wind running directly down the runway.
Exit the plane and it’s an immediate caress of warm desert air, right at sunset.
Ahhhh.
Love it!
Finally here!
Head out to the arrivals area, and there sits Newt.
Perfect end to a perfect day flying.
Handshake and hello, greetings exchanged, and it’s time to catch up, as we get the hell out of Palm Springs, and head up hill toward Newt’s splendid isolation seven or eight miles beyond the last town, Twentynine Palms.
On our way, the light goes out and night sets in.
Talking story the whole way.
Cathy, Newt’s wife, is not around right now, as she’s back at her parent’s place in West Virginia. Mom and dad aren’t doing all so very well, and she’s there on a bittersweet mission.
Newt will pick her up, also at Palm Springs, tomorrow night.
So we get back to his place, and he shows me around, and points out all the cool stuff he’s done since last I was here. Bonzo, his dog, the one who launched himself into me at warp speed one evening on my previous visit here, has mellowed considerably, most likely as a result of having a girlfriend now, another rescued mutt named Stella. Stella is a sweetie and we hit it off straightaway. Bonzo himself clearly remembers me, despite the passage of just a couple of weeks less than a full year’s worth of time.
A crescent moon hangs low in the west with Venus for company, and it’s just as beautiful as hell.
The desert night is pure balm.
Stars dust the vault overhead in a way they cannot back in Florida.
I am very happy to be back here.
Eventually, it closes in on eleven o’clock, and it’s time to head over to the Hell Trailer and get some shut-eye.
Back home in Florida, it’s now 2am, and I should be dead tired, but the sky takes hold of me in the form of an absolutely brilliant constellation Scorpius, complete with a stunningly bright Milky Way, arching from low, just above the Twentynine Palms Mountains, south of where I stand.
And so I spend another full half hour, all alone, eyes dark adapting, listening to the silence, walking along familiar stellar highways in the sky.
When I was young, it was dark like this out on the beach in South Patrick Shores, but those days are so very, very long gone.
But the sky remains, and if you can get away from the ever-encroaching lights, it will reveal itself to you in all its former glory, as if nothing ever happened.
One day all of the lights will go back out, and I’m not so sure whether I think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and my head flits from one tangent thought to another as the peace and tranquility continues to soak into the pores of my skin.
Finally, time to go to bed.
And get one last little gift.
Directly over my head as I lay in bed, the cover for the vent has blown back off the opening, and stars glimmer with desert clarity inside of the small square cutout. And then, awareness dawns upon me as I realize just exactly which stars I’m looking at. Framed within the opening, as if it was custom made for the job, the constellation Corona Borealis, complete, shows off its symmetrical curl of stars, with Alpha, the centered jewel of the crown, standing out from all the rest.
Amazing.
Ok, that’s enough, go to sleep, and sleep well.
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