More on the wonderland that is Wonder Valley

From time to time (as recently as Oct. 29) I post about my friends down in the desert. It seems the news media is getting closer and closer to discovering their patch of desert, and not necessarily in a good way. Today the LA Times ran a story on the controversy over desert shacks -- the mostly abandoned cabins put up over the last 50 years by homesteaders. My friends Perry and Christine, both artists, are quoted as being pro-shack. On the other side are people with (I suspect) a secret pro-development agenda who think abandoned shacks are eyesores. Christine's comment at the end of the piece suggests the inherent conflict. The anti-shack people want their land values to go up; the pro-shack people -- artists and desert rat types -- want things to stay pretty much the same.

The remarkable thing about this whole story is how remote Wonder Valley is. It's on the far, far edge of the town of 29 Palms, which is the last town on the highway until you go about 100 miles farther down the road to the Colorado River. Yet even here there is now development pressure. Related is how the Bureau of Land Management treats off-road vehicles, which some people like to bounce around the desert without concern for anybody else who might be there, much less the wildlife.

These conflicts happen because of the peculiarly American attitude that anyplace out in the country that hasn't yet been developed up the yinyang must officially belong to no one and can thus be treated as a blank slate on which to project all your hopes, fears, dreams and desires. If you like to tear around in a dune buggy, there is "nothing" out there. If you like to meditate, there is "nothing" to disturb you -- yet those two occupations are mutually exclusive, based on a delusion that the desert (in this case) is nothing, nowhere, empty. Like I say, typically American.