Name of the day: Storm Ogle

From the website of the radio station KCDZ of Joshua Tree, CA, this news item:

YUCCA VALLEY MAN ARRESTED AGAIN FOR DRUGS

A Twentynine Palms man who was arrested a week ago for being under the influence of drugs, was arrested again Saturday for possession of methamphetamine. Quinton Umphress, 21, was arrested August 27 when his landlord reported him to the Sheriff's Department for doing drugs in his rental house in the 5400 block of Encelia Avenue in Twentynine Palms. Saturday, Umphress, along with a companion, Storm Ogle, 29, also of Twentynine Palms, was arrested again, this time in the 6800 block of Alpine Avenue in Twentynine Palms for investigation of possession of dangerous drugs. Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle were booked into the Morongo Basin Jail with bail set at $25,000 each.

Actually both names are pretty good -- Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle. Both sound like residents of Ennet House.

Desert sojourn, last day

After the hike on Saturday and a dinner with Christine and other friends that night, the cold I'd had for several days started to get worse, and by the following afternoon I had a fever. So the last 24 hours have been more or less wasted. Although I'm feeling a little better now and have started packing and cleaning for my departure tomorrow morning, my last days here have been subsumed in the sensations of being ill. Today when I drove to Twentynine Palms to gas up the car and to eat lunch, I looked around at the landscape, which I have gotten used to and which I won't be seeing after today, and attempted to see it with new eyes. I'll miss the views from the house.

My trip here has been a success, in that I made good contacts and I found what could be the key to the second part of the novel. It's been a failure to the extent that I haven't followed up on some leads, more or less out of shyness or laziness. There's much more I could have done. But I'm glad I came.

Desert sojourn, day 30

Queen Valley, Joshua Tree National Park

Christine and I went hiking in the Queen Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park (here's the official map [PDF] if you're interested) and had a great critter experience: we saw two tarantulas. Here's video of the first one:

The second one was motionless at the edge of a hole right at the spot where the first one had appeared -- they live in holes in the ground. Christine pointed out that it was mating season and that "males usually don't survive mating... Maybe she bit his head off."

After our hike, we drove a little ways to a parking area for something called Wall Street Mill, a historical attraction we didn't actually visit. Instead, we took a different, unmarked path that led to these ruins:

She said that this used to a store of some sort and that it was open as recently as the early 1970s -- or so she had heard; there was nothing to tell us what we were looking at. We had already been talking about the officially approved activities in the park -- camping, hiking, rock climbing -- differ from the things you can do in the park but which the park staff doesn't want the public to see or know about, such as precolumbian petroglyphs and other relics. She told a story about going to an officially undocumented archeo-astronomical site -- a place where the indigenous people of the area had arranged rocks to mark astronomical events (of which Stonehenge is the best known example) -- one solstice before dawn, and being detained by park rangers who literally jumped out from behind bushes to ask what they were doing there. It was very different when the park ranger assumed his or her police function, she said, suddenly they're no longer this friendly person in a Smokey Bear hat, suddenly they're a cop. And the rangers were very uncomfortable with anyone knowing about the archaeoastronomy site.

Of course, I understand why the park wants to protect culturally significant sites and objects -- they don't want them to get trashed (like, for example, these vandalized petroglyphs). Other sites, such as the Wall Street Mill mentioned above, or events such as the shootout between two crusty pioneers, fit into the Old West narrative the park wants to present.

But the ruins of the store -- if that's what it was -- have no explanatory plaque, no signs pointing to the site, no mention of it on the map. (Here it is on Google satellite.) The 1960s aren't part of the official history.

By now we were standing beside a large piñon pine tree about a hundred yards from the ruins, close by some sheltering cliffs. "There will never be," I said, "a commemorative plaque about the 7000 great acid trips that people took while lying under this tree." And Christine laughed, because that's the kind of thing we used to do.

Desert sojourn, day 29

Local news accounts are full of the story of the hiker from Los Angeles who was lost in the national park for sex days before being found. The story seems to be everywhere, so it's no wonder it's on people's minds. When I was walking yesterday afternoon -- two hours before sunset, up a dirt road not far from the house I'm renting -- a passing pickup truck slowed and stopped and the driver made sure I was okay. "I wanted to make sure you wasn't like that lost hiker guy," he said. Nope, not lost, and not nearly as well equipped, though I do have a hat and usually a pen.

Somebody should find out what kind of pen it was, and put him in its ads.

In other local news, a bar in 29 Palms burned down on Saturday in the wee hours, and it went up so quick that they're investigating to see if it's arson. The place was a sports bar favored by Marines. Most people told me to stay out of it, which is fine -- I really like the Joshua Tree Saloon much nearer, where I went to watch the first half of a playoff baseball game last night. There the guy on the seat next to me had dialed up ten songs on the jukebox, and with each one he told me why he liked it, and often had a related anecdote. Of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," he said that Holly had written the song after seeing John Ford's The Searchers, a film where John Wayne utters that line several times -- or so my new friend said.

He went on to say: "I met John Wayne twice. The first time was at Knotts Berry Farm, they dedicated the John Wayne Theater, and he was there and made a speech. He walked by the crowd and I shook his hand, and then later we went out to the parking lot where we knew his car was -- we recognized his car -- and waited for him. When he came out with the guy who drove him, he stopped and talked with us for about fifteen minutes. Oh, he was very nice, extremely friendly. The second time was when I was working at the Disneyland Hotel. He came down the hall and got in the elevator. Then when the elevator went downstairs, I went with the maid into his room and looked at his stuff. There were some cards there with his name on them -- I wish I'd taken one but I didn't -- that he gave out to people, since he couldn't sign his name because he had arthritis. And he had two toupees. Two."

Later in the day: It was warm enough today to read outside in the shade at the end of the afternoon. I happened to look up and see a long line of birds flying from west to east. At first I thought they were ravens, but then I thought, do ravens flock? After thirty birds or so had passed, it seemed like the parade of whatever it was was over. But I looked up later and saw more -- many more. Now it was clear they were turkey vultures, the species I saw a couple weeks ago. A ragged line, lower and closer this time, flew over in the same direction, just north of east. Dozens of birds, not in a straight line, but maybe between 50 and 100 feet apart. A group of twenty or thirty would fly by, and there would be a short break, and then another forty would fly by. I tried taking pictures of them, but failed.

As the sun set, they flew lower, apparently seeking out a place to roost for the night. There are no tall trees right around here and I didn't see them circling to land. When the sun had finally set, that was the end of the overflight. Majestic!

Desert sojourn, day 28

On my long drive yesterday -- about seven solid hours of driving, all the way from Joshua Tree to Laughlin, NV and back (click for map) -- I listened for a while to right-wing radio foamers. I usually can't stand listening to them for more than about 30 seconds, but I was kind of a captive audience -- I couldn't get anything else on the radio. Plus, it's material for my book, which in part involves characters who have adopted a paranoid view of the state of things. Man, it's all just fear, fear, fear. One guy repeated what he said he'd heard from some right-wingers in the U.K., some tall tale about Pakistani drug gangs and their enslavement of 13 and 14 year old English girls -- white English girls, of course. The American commentator repeated this blather not only without critique but as if it were an oracle of what was about to happen in the U.S. And it all comes from building mosques, he said.

Just an example. I won't waste my time even saying how stupid it is, or how classically xenophobic and racist. What struck me was not the paranoid fantasy, but the enthusiasm -- spoken in a voice trembling with fear and loathing -- with which it was repeated and the explicit prediction that this is where the U.S. is headed.

And I had to remind myself -- Obama isn't even up for re-election for another two years! What will it be like after another two years? How far can they ratchet up the hysteria? Then I realized: that's exactly why terrorists blow shit up, to stoke exactly this kind of hysteria. Thus the right-wing foamers' talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or at least that seems to be the only place it leads to.

Let me say one more time -- I never can stand to listen to this stuff. So it's really true that I've never heard it before, not full-force for a couple of hours. And the millions of people who thrill to this stuff listen for hours, all day every day. Kind of an astonishing moment in the history of the U.S. experiment with democracy, really. A real test of the question "How much free speech can we stand?" (Coincidentally, the Fred Phelps cult went before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday so the court could address just that question.)

Desert sojourn, day 27

Intersection of Calif. Hwy 62 and U.S. 95

I worked steadily on technical writing all day and through lunch, and then, conscious that everyone back in the Bay Area had gone to Angel Island for a company picnic, I took off. I drove out east of here on State Hwy. 62, which winds through the desert until it reaches the middle of nowhere and dead-ends into U.S. 95, a junction where there is exactly nothing, aside from some directional signs. But I love that drive -- it goes through absolutely unmarked desert -- no rail line, no structures, and for much of the way, not even a line of telephone poles paralleling the road. You get the full bottom-of-the-sea sweep of the desert landscape, punctuated by brown stony mountains. There's no traffic. It's the perfect drive that says "I'm in the middle of the desert and liking it."

Then I kept going to Laughlin, where I lost $25, and turned around and drove back. Thing is, it's 185 miles one way. Luckily, I was able to catch a baseball playoff game on a station out of Salt Lake City. And when that was done, there was the Giants' station from the Bay Area, broadcasting phone-in talk sports. It's all good. I'm darned tired now though.

Desert sojourn, day 26

Looking northeast across the desert after sunset

I can't get over how the weather has changed. Four days ago it was 95 in mid-day; two days ago 85; today 70 at most. A cool breeze springs up in late afternoon. When I took a walk at sunset, I wore a jacket, just as I had for my sunrise walk this morning. I took a quick little snapshot camera video of some quail crossing the road, but it was already too dark for the video to really come out.

After dark I went to "downtown" Joshua Tree (nothing more than a concentration of stores and storefronts, many of them not actually hosting going concerns, near a crossroads) to the Crossroads Cafe. It's the closest you can come to a fairly hip joint, complete with organic salads, white hipsters in dreadlocks, and wicker baskets full of small works of art and craft. And it's the place to get a really decent sandwich. I sat and eavesdropped and made notes on my book. One quote that's going to make it in: "How do you take advantage of a current that's moving against you?" I didn't hear the reply to this probably rhetorical question, but it's just as well, the question itself speaks volumes.

Desert sojourn, day 25

The weather really turned today. Though the sun was, as always, hot and oppressive in mid-day, there was a constant breeze. By 5:30 p.m. when I went outside to read, I actually had to go inside after half an hour because I was too cold. I've turned off all the fans and vents; now, at 7:40 p.m., I think it's about 60 degrees out, or even cooler. Practically a 30 degree difference from this time last week.

I had sort of a critter interaction this morning, if you want to count domestic pets. While I was out on my morning walk, just after sunrise, a pickup truck came bumping along the dirt road. The driver stopped and asked if I'd seen a black and white husky that he'd lost. I said no, but twenty minutes later when I was back in my neighborhood, there was the dog. I called him, and he came over and obediently sat down while I looked at his tag. Unluckily, his only tag was from a rabies vaccination at a vet in Wasilla, Alaska. Well, he was a husky, that made sense. While I was on the phone with them and they were looking up the vaccination records, the man in the pickup came along again, and the dog jumped in the back. The man explained the dog had gotten out when someone left the house earlier in the morning.

If that's not much of a native critter sighting, one very common critter I haven't mentioned yet is the quail. They're all over the place, especially in the early mornings and late afternoons, tootling along on the ground, sometimes in the classic line formation, sometimes in a sort of squad. If they're startled they take off with a very noisy flutter, much noisier than pigeons. But generally they just putter around. They're very cute.

The other very common critter is the cottontail rabbit. They're all over, too, big ones and little ones. Very shy, but you you can't help but notice when they bolt from cover and sprint across the sand until they're out of sight.

Desert sojourn, day 24

Boulders just inside Joshua Tree National Park, near my rented house

This morning marked the fourth day in a row that it was stormy in the morning. Although it wasn't very close to my house, it did look like heavy rain in Twentynine Palms. By the time I went over there for church at 10 a.m., though, it was all cleared up.

But it did mean I skipped my walk in the morning. So after working on my book this afternoon, making up characters and researching yet another area I know nothing about -- theft of native American artifacts -- I took a small walk about an hour before sunset. As I've said before, at the top of the street, half a mile from the house I'm renting, is the boundary of the national park. And you can slip through a barbed wire fence and just go walking. That's what I did for about an hour. I only got a few hundred yards into the park at the most -- there's no trail and while it's easy to go overland, you do have to thread your way between cactus, creosote bushes and boulders while also looking out for squirrel holes (ankle spraining danger) and snakes (bite danger). Quartz litters the ground. It's gorgeous, which is why it's a national park.

Nice weekend. Glad I got some work done on my book!

Desert sojourn, day 23

No walk this morning, as it was even stormier than Thursday morning. Much more rain fell, especially between here and the town of Twentynine Palms, where I was hit by a hard rain on the highway. When I got to town, the power was out. At Denny's, they let me order coffee and pie, and then, since they quickly ran out of coffee that had been made before the power was out, they began turning people away. In fact, they couldn't even charge me. I tipped the waitress anyway.

I drove with Christine today back into the Mojave Desert Preserve, where I had gone last Saturday. It was a cooler day, and when we got out to walk around at Cima and Kelso (I didn't take any pictures today) it was much more pleasant than last week. We encountered no rain on our trip. Christine resumed telling me gossip about local weirdos. I don't think she'll ever run out of stories about them.

After we got back I spent the rest of the day transcribing yesterday's interview and researching some more today about a heinous murder that happened 100 miles from here but which might just as well have happened a few miles away. Young people, drugs and alcohol, abandoned military bunker, guns -- what could possibly go wrong?

Desert sojourn, day 22

Sky (yesterday evening)

I've started taking pictures of the sky -- just the sky, with no landscape in it. I don't know if this is because I've had some startling revelation about the nature of geographic space in the desert and the irrelevance of the land, or if I'm just bored with the sights of the neighborhood.

But! today I talked to a guy in his mid-20s. He grew up here. And his parents, who have lived here for decades, live in two old L.A. streetcars that somehow got hauled up here. Well, at least the streetcars form the basis of their house. That's one thing in the neighborhood I haven't taken a picture of yet. In the desert, you don't go around taking pictures of people's houses the way you would in San Francisco, and the reason is that you don't know who lives there. It could be an ex-con, a meth-crazed Marine vet, a guy on Megan's List, a biker on the lam from his enemies, or any number of people who live out here precisely because the extra space allows them some privacy. So you don't want to stand in the road (or, if you're really suicidal, on their property) snapping pictures of their place unless you want to be looking down the barrel of a gun.

Nevertheless, the nice family who live in the streetcar-house won't shoot me, so I'll take a picture of their house some day. But I'll phone first.

Anyway, talking to the young guy was an eye opener. Every time I start asking people about their lives here they wind up telling me crazy stories about meth-crazed villains, even though I don't really ask for them. Today's beaut was about... well, see for yourself:

Ex-Marines sentenced to prison for killing in Twentynine Palms

Associated Press, 22 Aug 2004

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. - Two former Marines were each given three-year prison sentences for the machete death of a man they lured to an off-road area in the Mojave Desert.

Alan Patterson and Justin VanMeter, both 24, were sentenced Friday in Superior Court on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Both have been in custody for two years and probably will be released within a year, prosecutors said.

They were convicted July 6 of the August 2002 killing of Daniel Smith. Prosecutors alleged that they lured the 19-year-old to the Sugar Bowl area of Twentynine Palms and took turns hacking him with a machete because they thought he was informing sheriff's deputies about their alleged drug dealing.

The other funny thing was when I told the guy where I was staying so he could come over. "Oh, the old Garrison house," he said. Thinking he was getting mixed up, I said no, the Harrison House is across the street.* "No, I know which house you mean," he said. "It used to belong to an old tweaker named Garrison. I used to babysit there." And when he walked in the door he laughed and said, "Man, this place looks much better than it used to!"

* See my entry for Sep. 20.

Desert sojourn, day 21 - day of storms

I've been getting out later and later for my morning walks, and as a result I do too much of the walk in full sunlight. So this morning I was all set to get out early. Had my alarm set for 5:30 and everything. But the sky had other plans. I was awakened a little after 5:00 by strong breezes coming in the the windows, which I keep open at night. By the time it started to get light, the wind was really blowing and there were lightning flashes. Clearly it was no time to take a walk. We had another colorful sunrise and by the time it got fully light I could see dark clouds here and there and precipitation coming from them. I took the picture above, showing the house I'm staying in under a rainbow, just after sunrise. And I took this video (1 min. 4 sec.) about the same time.

But it wasn't until around 8:30 that a little rain finally fell on me. It lasted for ten minutes or so, not getting anything around here very wet. Though I was glad I had gone outside and closed the windows of the car, which I also keep cracked open.

Now at mid-day it's just kind of cloudy, with clearing in the east. The storm cleared out the haze in the air, and the clouds are making it a little cooler.

Update a little later: While all that weather was going on, searchers found a guy who'd been missing in the national park for almost a week.

Desert sojourn, day 20

Sunrise along Foothill Road, Panorama Heights, Joshua Tree, Cal.

More clouds this morning, another dramatic sunrise. In the southwest I could see some precipitation falling out of clouds as near as 15 miles away, but I don't know if anything reached the ground. The Wunderground.com page for Joshua Tree says the humidity is an usually high 41%, so there may we be some showers somewhere.

Less than an hour after I came back from my walk, I was sitting at the kitchen table next to an open door when I heard a sharp whack sound and felt a vibration. It felt as if something had struck the roof of the house. For a second I thought the house might have been hit by a stray bullet -- no one is supposed to shoot their guns within half a mile of any dwellings, but you never know out here. I crouched down in the doorway, trying to see if anyone were assaulting the house, or anything else such as one of the bullet-riddled abandoned cars nearby, but I didn't see or hear anything. Eventually I went back to work.

One of the standard questions I've been asking people I meet here is, Of anyone you happen to pass on the road or in town, how many people do you think are packing? I wanted to see if that question would evoke a response like, "Are you kidding? Everybody!" But no one answered that way. They all thought about it for a while and then made a guess. Of course that is a different question from whether people have guns at home; I presume a lot of people do. The first day I was here I heard a story about a Wonder Valley resident who shot a feral dog which had killed one of his goats and had come back for the other.

Now it is true that things are more wild-west in Wonder Valley (see map), which is a good 15 or 20 miles east of here. But I wouldn't put it past some of the social misfits in the neighborhood -- and there are old junky places in my neighborhood along with the nice houses, places with junk cars and trailers and piles of junk and a broken, improvised fence and a general air of Crazy Desert Crank Addict And/Or Survivalist Nutbag. When they built their place twenty or thirty years ago, this was little more civilized than Wonder Valley is now. So yeah, people have guns.

Desert sojourn, day 19

Because the moon is now several days past full -- living out here, you become aware of the times of sunset and sunrise and the phases of the moon, because they are so evident -- yesterday evening I did some stargazing, lying on my back on the table outside, the same table I eat dinner at around sunset. I noticed a few wispy clouds and some haze on the horizon, but it's been getting hazy the last few days, and the conditions didn't detract too much from my enjoyment of the night sky. As a city dweller, especially someone who lives in San Francisco where the fog comes in so regularly and obscures the sky at night, practically any views of the stars at all is a huge improvement over what I'm used to.

Then this morning there were even more clouds, so there was an ornamented sunrise:

In fact, I didn't see the sun itself at all until about 9:15 a.m., so my morning walk (which took place at sunrise) was shaded after sunrise for the first time.

In other news, there was a story in the Riverside paper today about the acquisition of a couple of sections of nearby land for the national park. The interesting parts of the story are about the flora and fauna on the land and the part about the waterfall that appears when it rains. Wow, I'd like to see that.

Desert sojourn, day 18

Hawks nest along Cottonwood Road, Panorama Heights, Joshua Tree

There's the hawks nest I spotted yesterday. At least I assume it belongs to the pair of hawks I saw hunting from the tops of those same electric poles on two different days. They weren't around this morning; I suppose they hunt different ranges on different days. They aren't dumb. The only critters I saw this morning were two gleaming black ravens. They looked so well-fed that it seemed hard for one of them to lift off the ground, but maybe he was just being lazy.

It's hot again today, but I have no cause for complaint, since it's actually much hotter in Los Angeles, if the weather map is to be believed:

Update: The L.A. Times has just reported record-breaking temperatures of 113 degrees in downtown Los Angeles.

Still, I'm thinking of going to the movies this afternoon, a mid-20th century way of escaping the heat. There is one movie theater, predictably in a shopping center in the suburbanized town of Yucca Valley. And there's a drive-in too, which all my hip friends say is the only way to go. That's in Twentynine Palms. Actually, knowing there's a 6-screen megaplex in a shopping center in Yucca Valley and a drive-in in Twentynine Palms tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the difference between the two towns.

Desert sojourn day 17

Up early today, 4.5 miles. In my now-standard rectangular route in the neighborhood, I encountered for the first time a female runner. She was going clockwise while I was going counter clockwise, so we passed each other twice. She was heavily equipped with the arm-strapped combination music player-runners timer and looked very professional.

I also saw the two hawks I saw a few days ago, and this time I noticed their nest. I didn't have a camera with me, so I'll take a picture tomorrow.

I skipped church and worked all day long on my book, and I got a lot done. While I was working, a coyote trotted right by the window in broad daylight -- it was maybe 10 in the morning -- but I didn't move fast enough to take a picture of him. Handsome animals.

At the end of the day I sat outside reading and drinking a beer. As the sun set I took this picture of the view across the street. It didn't come out that great using the cellphone camera. I guess I was too lazy to go back in the house and get the better digital camera. I took that picture at sunset; the hills are the foothills of the Queen Mountains and they make up the southern border of the national park.

It was quite a hot day. When the sun set I hosed off the west side of the house, where the concrete back porch was radiating a tremendous amount of heat. And it's supposed to be hot tomorrow. I can always go someplace air-conditioned; I can even take my laptop and work from wherever.

Desert sojourn: day 16: Up above and down below

From a letter to the editor of the local paper on the controversy about whether the nearby town of Yucca Valley should permit the construction of a Super Wal-Mart (Yucca Valley is the only suburbanized town here, full of shopping centers, national chains, and stoplights; they already have a Wal-Mart the size of a hanger for jetliners, the controversy is over whether they should be allowed to build a "Wal-Mart Supercenter" the size of a football stadium):

For individuals who have no financial worries, please think of those of us who live on limited incomes. We are the ones who travel down below once a month to shop at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

They travel "down below" -- in other words, west on the highway down a long, steep grade to Palm Springs. Up here we are in the Mojave Desert, elevation 1500 to 5000 feet; down below they are in the Colorado Desert, elevation from below sea level to about 900 feet. There's a real awareness here about the difference between life up here and down below. Not only is it cooler, less humid, and prettier up here, it's much less suburbanized -- except for Yucca Valley.

Yucca Valley is a story in itself, and I should be devoting more time to researching it. There's a reason the place is full of shopping centers: the town is run by developers and their chums. And reportedly they all go to the same big-box evangelical church. All very cozy.

I didn't write yesterday because I was tied up with work all day, and then I drove over to Christine's in Wonder Valley to watch a DVD with her and Deborah and a neighbor. Antonioni's Le Amiche (English title "The Girlfriends") from 1955. Wow, it was so beautiful, and the direction was so fluid and complex. Back then he was as good as Kurosawa in shooting complicated interior shots with people standing all over the frame, depth of focus, and lots of movement. It was so good.

The full moon has been gorgeous the last few nights. And as I lay in bed last night I heard coyotes howl. That was nice. But then in the middle of the night I awoke to a ruckus, a great deal of barking -- lots of people here have dogs -- and the desperate howl of a wounded animal. It didn't sound like a rabbit (plenty of them around here); I was thinking a pack of dogs might have got at a smaller dog.

Well, I thought there wasn't a pack of dogs around here. But this morning when I went on my walk, I took precautions. The only danger, however, was a chihuahua.

Update, 9:00 pm: I took a long drive, winding up on the old Route 66 where it cuts through the desert north of here. I took this picture somewhere around the ghost town of Chambless, looking back toward the Sheephole Mountains in the distance, behind which are Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. This picture fails to capture the dramatic sweep of the desert land, which is very beautiful out there.

Desert sojourn, day 14

Warning sign on the border of the Marine base

Today for the first time I did not take a walk in the morning. I slept in a little, then worked a little on my book, then had coffee while I started work. Then I knocked off at 4:00 pm and went in Christine's 4-wheel drive out the same road I had tried to go on last weekend -- her vehicle is more suited to the desert roads than my Volvo sedan. We drove across the mesa on the other side of the valley, all the way to the border of the Marine Corps base. (See the map from a few entries ago.) Then we turned west and drove along the border of the base, past a small mountain called Goat Mountain, and out to Giant Rock.

Giant Rock is worth a story on its own, and many have written it. Here's one version, emphasizing the New Age strain that is abroad in this area. (Not far away is a structure called the Integratron. We'll go to the New York Times for an illustration of that; interior here.) It's been the scene in the past of rave events in the 1990s, and more recently as a rallying point for off-road partiers. When we arrived, there was only one pickup truck, with a couple of guys drinking beer, one of them taking a rifle out of the back of the truck. They didn't look hostile but there's not much to do at Giant Rock if you don't have beer and guns, so we turned around and went back to civilization, passing through Landers and arriving back in Joshua Tree.

Desert sojourn: day 13

I went to the nearby "government center," i.e. the courthouse and jail, to observe a morning in court.

About two dozen people were there to be arraigned, almost all of them on traffic offenses and other misdemeanors, but I didn't know that when I was waiting in the hallway with them all. Almost all of them were either in their twenties or their sixties -- I guess those are the times when you do the worst driving.

When we were let in, a female deputy served as the bailiff and made announcements: No gum chewing. If you want to ask for time to pay your fine, ask while you're before the judge. Interestingly: "Your case is important to you. It's not important to me. It's not my job to listen. It's your job to listen. Don't ask me later what was said." And: "The time to ask for traffic school is when your case is being heard. Some people don't understand that." The judge came in, a man in his late thirties or early forties, while the public defender was making her announcements; no one paid attention to the judge's entrance.

Finally the judge announced a name. No one responded. He said the name again and looked around the courtroom. Nothing. "Bench warrant -- fifty thousand," he said, passing some papers to a clerk. In front of me, a young black man who was sitting with a small group, presumably a family, shook his head in dismay. The judge announced another name. That person also was missing. "Bench warrant -- ten thousand." The young man shook his head again. After that, most of the people on the calendar were present.

There were a few prisoners in orange jumpsuits sitting in a section in the front of the room, by a door that led to holding cells, I suppose. One was a scrawny white woman who sat listlessly, scratching her arm; another was a scrawny Latino; another was a black man with nappy hair. A white prisoner was brought in for a few moments, and then he did something out of line that I didn't see, and the deputy (also female) who was guarding the prisoners hauled him back out the door and scolded him in the hallway for a while; then I didn't see him again.

Fifteen or so misdemeanors were handled; the most interesting ones were a woman in an uncomfortable-looking tweed suit who got busted for speeding and not having a license and who said her husband was overseas in the military, and a beefy young white man who was cited for neglecting the care of an animal. He got a pretty stiff fine, if I recall.

The parade of misdemeanors ended, and a few public defender-represented cases were called. The assistant D.A. was not present at first, and one of the PDs joked that the judge should dismiss the case. The black man was dealt with -- his case was continued. The judge and the DA and another lawyer disappeared to chambers for a conference, and meanwhile the deputies started chatting casually with each other. The bailiff asked the one who was in charge of the prisoners: "You going to start doing yoga with us?" They chatted about vacation spots, and then started talking about the worst fights they'd ever had on duty. The second deputy, whose name turned out to be Courtney, began, "Out in Landers, on Lynn Lane -- you'd know the family I'm talking about..." (pregnant pause) she'd once fought for fifteen minutes with an arrestee and that at one point, when she had him on the ground with one handcuff on, said to him: "I'm gonna call in on my radio. If you move, I'll bash your brains in with my radio!"

And then the major event, the scrawny Latino, who was up for a number of robbery charges including a home-invasion robbery, pled guilty to a bunch of charges and was given a total of eight years and four months in prison. Then a deputy came in and said she had another prisoner out there and gave a name. It took several minutes for them to figure out that this person was supposed to be released to the custody of someone from Panorama Ranch, the drug rehab place a couple blocks from me in JT. "Is there anyone here from Panorama Ranch?" the judge asked, and everyone looked around, and especially at me, since I was one of the few people left in the room by that time. I didn't say anything.

After that, things sort of devolved. They were waiting for something.... The DA disappeared and everyone waited, and had a snack from a bag of candy bars kept by the clerk. Then the judge went out. Finally the court reporter said "Are we done?" and the bailiff said no, they were waiting for the DA to come back so they could handle this last case, and she indicated the only other person still sitting in the audience section aside from me. Then the bailiff looked at me and said "What are you here for?" Just observing, I answered. She didn't seem to think that was out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, a little while later, chilled to the bone by the courtroom's air conditioning and with no sign that anything else was going to happen anytime soon, I left, after being there for over two hours.

Tonight's the full moon, an event I've been anticipating. Since I can't see the moon rise above the horizon from my house, I'll try to drive north a little, away from the mountains just behind me to the south which mark the borders of the national park. However, I did see the almost-full moon set this morning at 5:50 as I was getting ready to go out on my morning walk.

Desert sojourn: day 12: Eagles! or buzzards or something

I started my morning walk around 6:00 a.m. and I have a new, simple strategy: walk towards the sunrise until the sun actually rises, and then turn around and walk away from the sun. This worked great this morning, except that I kept going for another twenty minutes or so after sunrise. This caused no problems, except that I went 5.25 miles instead of around 4 miles, and toward the end of the walk I could really feel the sun on my back. Usually I'm indoors before it starts to heat up.

Around 10:15 in the morning, I glanced out the window and saw this:

Click the picture for All Sizes on Flickr.

Then I recalled that Christine had told me a few days ago about just this phenomenon -- huge birds (buzzards?) settle in large trees for the night during their annual migration right around this time of year; they circle and swoop down in the evening, then take off in the morning. And sure enough, this morning there they were.

I caught them just as they were forming up to head wherever they were going. They had a three-foot wingspan -- they were much larger than the hawks I saw yesterday -- were golden-brown, and were sort of circling each other as they slowing gained altitude and headed off to the west. Here's a short video I took with the same digital camera; it doesn't show much detail, but you can see them swooping around each other. Wow, that was exciting.

Update: Christine informs me they are turkey vultures.