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.

Marines think Twentynine Palms base is worst possible assignment

Conveniently located in the middle of nowhere -- halfway to hell, if you ask most Marines -- Twentynine Palms is possibly the worst place on earth to get stationed.

From "Hesitation Kills," by Maj. Jane Blair,
quoted in a San Diego Union Tribune article

For your perusal, here's a map of the base's location, and here's a picture I took last summer on the base's boundary fence.

Yep, pretty desolate -- but I have the feeling it looks pretty good after you've actually been to Iraq where, after summer temperatures of 120+ degrees, the mere 100+ temps of Twentynine Palms probably feel refreshing.

(Last year I spent a month in the region while researching a novel.)

Mystery crash in the desert

A weekend roll-over crash in the Mojave Desert led to the discovery of a dead 23-year-old Twentynine Palms man, San Bernardino County coroner's officials say.

The dead man suffered head injuries believed to be unrelated to the wreck, which now has prompted a homicide investigation, according to coroner's officials.

-- story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise

Never seen anything more like a "Law and Order" opening.

EXT. -- DESERT HIGHWAY -- DAWN

A car comes along a desert highway, veering across the yellow line, then finally off the road and overturning several times before coming to rest on its side. Silence as the dust settles. Hold on the car's wheels spinning to a stop.

EXT. -- CRASH SITE -- LATER IN THE DAY

The car from a different angle. The site is now crawling with emergency workers. into the foreground come DETECTIVE LENNY and a SHERIFFS DEPUTY.

DEPUTY

I figure he left the roadway over there, did a header into the wash, and then flipped over about four times til he wound up over here.

RACK FOCUS to the wreck in the BACKGROUND. DETECTIVE ED stands up and waves and shouts.

ED

Lenny! Check this out!

OPPOSITE ANGLE as LENNY and the DEPUTY walk over to the wreck, with ED in the foreground, kneeling with the driver's body which is under a sheet.

ED (lifting sheet slightly)

Looks like head injuries.

LENNY

Yeah, I would have figured that.

ED

Well, unless you see a Louisville Slugger in the wreckage, I don't think it's from the crash.

LENNY

What do you mean?

ED

Something made this reverse Mark McGuire signature on his temple.

LENNY (to the deputy)

Pick up everybody carrying a baseball bat.

The DEPUTY goes off.

LENNY (Shouting after the deputy)

He definitely doesn't play for the Angels!

RUN TITLES.

About the progress of my novel

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to starting writing the following April. But other parts of the novel are based on ideas I had as early as March 1996, when I wrote a five page scenario about a man who is trapped by a snowstorm at O'Hare and has to make his way back through the Midwest, through successive blizzards, and when he arrives back in California his life is off-kilter. I paired an idea I had in late 2008, which was a sort of psychological sex thriller set in a rainy Berkeley hills mansion, with that idea, and started writing in April, 2009.

It took until the end of 2009 to write most of the first section, and then in February 2010 I took a car trip to the midwest to research the whole notion of driving in blizzards. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 road trip.") Then it took me until the end of the summer to actually finish the first part of the book -- but I still hadn't written the first chronological section, in which the guy gets snowbound. All I had written was the part set in the San Francisco Bay Area, after he returns from the trip.

Then in September and October 2010 I went to the Mojave Desert to research the second part of the book, because after the guy's life goes off-kilter he moves to the desert and gets involved with the wrong crowd. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 desert trip.") And since returning from that sojourn in October 2010 I've been working on the desert part. I'm about, oh, two-thirds of the way through it, on the downhill slope where everything has been put in place and all I have to do is work through the plot -- as least as far as a first draft is concerned.

Meanwhile, I learned something interesting about narrative. Cris and I have been watching the series "Breaking Bad" on DVD, and we just finished the third season -- or thought we did. The season is broken up onto 4 DVDs, containing episodes 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 respectively. And somehow our Netflix queue got messed up and instead of disc 3 we got disc 4 and watched all of it without realizing we had missed anything.

Yes, we didn't realize we had missed anything. We missed seeing the third quarter of the season, three entire episodes totaling the length of a feature film, and didn't miss anything in the story. (The following sentence is for anyone familiar with the show.) Hank is still in the hospital after getting shot in episode 7; Walt has fired his first meth lab assistant and is now working with his original partner Jessie; Walt's wife Skyler is still floundering in her affair with her boss. Apparently nothing happens in those episodes we missed.

Right now I'm in the same part of my book -- the third quarter -- laboriously working through the plot. I'm a plodding fiction writer, I have to write through all the actions to understand character motivation and figure out why people make the choices at the end of the book I usually already know, by the middle of the book, that they will make. But the lesson of the unnoticed "Breaking Bad" episodes for me is: nobody cares. Cut all that shit out and nobody will notice.

So I'm looking forward to doing that in my second draft. After I finish this one, sometime by the end of the year.
 

A little later: I wrote the above entry before finding this entirely accurate and sadly hilarious article in The Onion depicting a novelist's self-loathing as he realizes all the effort he has put into his novel is in vain: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out. I found the entry thanks to an acquaintance who tweeted about it: "This Onion article is like looking at the most unflattering photo of myself ever taken."

One more from the high desert

Speaking of weird crime in the high desert, this is pretty unbeatable:

Victorville Daily Press, 16 November 2010

Buckets of mercury found in Hesperia home

HESPERIA -- A man and a teen were forced to evacuate their home early Tuesday morning after authorities found buckets of mercury, according to San Bernardino County Fire officials.

Working from a tip, officials were called to a home in the 11900 block of Sixth Avenue at about 1:15 a.m. about liquid mercury being kept in the home.

"They found one pound of the liquid metal in buckets," Jay Hausman, spokesman for the fire department, said.

The man was extracting the metal from computer components, but it's unclear why he was collecting the mercury.

Neighbors said the man actually lived in a trailer in the rear of the home.

"It's a main respiratory hazard if exposed to it," Hausman said. "It's easily absorbed into the lungs through inhalation but it can also be spread very easily by walking through it if there's a spill... Even when a thermometer breaks, it's considered a mercury spill. It's a highly hazardous neurotoxicant."

The man -- whose identity was not immediately available -- was cited for possessing the highly toxic substance. He and the teen in the were forced to evacuate, Hausman said. The residents will not be allowed to return to the location where the mercury was found until a private hazardous material contractor is brought to the location to clean the area, authorities said.

The man was identified today as a 39-year-old resident of Hesperia, a desert town near Victorville, which is between San Bernardino and Las Vegas.

A pound of mercury. I can't begin to know how many people that could kill if it were, for example, thrown into an aqueduct (which run exposed all over rural California). But just think about this guy living in a trailer, patiently collecting the shiny metal for reasons of his own. Think about his teenaged son living there with him. That's the desert.

Petty crime

In the research for my current book, I'm on the lookout for crime stories from the desert area I visited in September and October. This story from today's San Bernardino Sun captures the zeitgeist. Here's the whole story. See if you can find the really jaw-dropping detail.

San Bernardino Sun, 17 Nov 2010:
Twentynine Palms burglary suspects caught selling stolen goods online

By Melissa Pinion-Whitt

Posted: 11/17/2010 01:00:31 PM PST

Two people, including a deserter from the U.S. Marine Corps, were arrested Tuesday in Twentynine Palms on suspicion of burglarizing a home and selling the property on the Internet.

Michael Quimby, 25, and Kimberly Angus, 23, were detained at their apartment in the 73700 block of Raymond Drive when undercover deputies found them in possession of the stolen goods.

San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies received a report of a burglary in the 71000 block of Mesa Drive on Saturday. The victim said several items had been stolen the prior week. He saw some of his items listed on the website Craigslist.com and 29palmsyardsales.com.

Deputies went undercover to buy items from the suspects. They met them at their apartment complex and saw two of the stolen items outside the front door of their apartment when they approached, sheriff's officials said.

Deputies found most of the property stolen in the burglary inside the residence. Sheriff's officials said Angus sold a stolen blue bassinet to a woman at a Jack in the Box in Twentynine Palms. Detectives are looking for the person who bought it so the item can be returned to its owner.

Deputies booked Quimby into jail on suspicion of burglary and for his military warrant. They plan to submit a report to the District Attorney's Office for consideration of charges against Angus.

Yes, these desperate tweakers stole a bassinet from someone, and managed to get rid of it by putting it on Craigslist and then meeting the buyer at the Jack in the Box. You can see why I want to set my story there.

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.

Speaking of parkland

Christine was just telling me about this today, while we were hiking. I didn't know it was happening already. ¡Pobrecitos!

Biologists scour Mojave in desert tortoise roundup

More than 100 biologists and contract workers fanned out across a nearly pristine stretch of the eastern Mojave Desert on Friday to start rounding up tortoises blocking construction of the first major solar energy plant to be built on public land in Southern California. On a sunny morning in the height of tortoise courting season, the biologists methodically peered under every bush and into every hole on both sides of a two-mile lane traversing the project site. Following close behind, workers bladed century-old creosote bushes and erected fencing in areas that will soon be declared a "tortoise-free zones."

The effort in San Bernardino County's panoramic Ivanpah Valley, just north of Interstate 15 and about 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, disrupted complex tortoise social networks and blood lines linked for centuries by dusty trails, shelters and hibernation burrows.

Federal wildlife biologists said it was needed to make way for construction of BrightSource Energy's 3,280-acre, 370-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generation System. Without the roundup, an estimated 17 federally threatened tortoises -- and an unknown number of half-dollar-sized hatchlings -- in the 913-acre initial phase of the project would have been squashed by heavy equipment. A total 36 adult tortoises are believed to inhabit the project site. "We can never say we got them all out of there — these are cryptic creatures," said Roy Murray of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desert tortoise recovery office.

Under a plan approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, as many tortoises as possible will be captured, weighed, measured, photographed, blood tested, fitted with radio transmitters and housed in quarantine pens with artificial burrows. The tortoises will remain in the pens until they can be transported and released in natural settings elsewhere in the region determined to be free of disease and predators -- a process expected to take several months.

Tortoise translocation is still an experimental strategy with a dismal track record. In previous efforts, transported tortoises have shown a tendency to wander, sometimes for miles, often back toward the habitat in which they were found. The stress of handling and adapting to unfamiliar terrain renders the reptiles vulnerable to potentially lethal threats: predation by dogs, ravens and coyotes; respiratory disease, dehydration and being hit by vehicles.

But project biologist and tortoise expert Mercy Vaughn was optimistic. "Our goal is zero kill," Vaughn said.

Good luck with that. Good luck, critters.

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 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 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.