Another road trip

On my way from San Francisco to Pocatello, where I'm heading to visit a friend who teaches at the university there, I stopped in Weed last night (A) and in Burns, Ore. tonight (C):

Based on previous experience, I knew not to expect 3G service for my smartphone inbetween towns, but I thought there was a chance at my destination. No, not with Virgin Mobile. Good as their coverage is in metro areas, this is not in anyone's metro area. Problem: I forgot which motel I had reserved at, and I needed to check my email for the reservation. So I needed wi-fi somewhere. Usually a McDonald's is good for it, but when I stopped a the one here, it wasn't working right.

I noticed a small bookstore-gift shop on the main street, and I went in to ask them where I might find wi-fi. They had free wi-fi, bless them! And they sell espresso, too. It was a little late in the afternoon for me to have a cappuccino, but I bought a book. Stop by the Book Nook when you're in Burns, Oregon.

Okay, but the drive. For many years I've wanted to check out the northeast corner of California, because it's such a mystery. It's not on the way to anywhere; there is no reason ever to go there, unless maybe you're a hunter or fisherman, or you're driving from, say, Weed, California to southern Idaho.

Several times I'd driven through part of this country on US 97 just south of the California border, where it passes through a strange "national grassland" -- the only one so obscure it as "NO WEBSITE":

So if the grassland was so obscure, you can only imagine how curious I was about the part of California east of that. Well, it's high desert -- which means there is almost nothing out there but sagebrush, with the occasional smattering of pine trees in certain advantageous places. But the amazing thing about the drive is that there is nothing else out there. No shacks, no trailers, no ranches, no electric poles, no cell phone service, no billboards. I drove 30 miles before I even saw a sign reassuring me I was on a US highway. And the part in Oregon is, if anything, even more desolate.

It's a real change from the southern California desert which I've visited so often. There it's difficult to find truly empty vistas. There's always a railroad or a microwave tower or a power pylon or some abandoned shack in the picture.

Zero time taking pictures, unfortunately. For part of the drive the shoulders were snow-covered, though almost no snow fell on me. Been lucky with the snow so far.

Film: Lou Harrison - A World of Music

Harrison House in Joshua Tree, Calif.

In September and October 2010 I spent five weeks in Joshua Tree, Calif. to research a novel. I rented a house owned by a performer and filmmaker, Eva Soltes, who also owns and administers a landmark house which happened to be across the street: a straw-bale house designed and built by American composer Lou Harrison. The house today is used by composers and other artists in residence to work on projects.

Soltes's film about Harrison, Lou Harrison: A World of Music, which includes footage on the design and construction of the desert retreat, is playing at the Roxie theater in San Francisco for a week beginning this Friday.

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.

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.

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.

'Sovereign citizen' type files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

A Las Vegas man, claiming damages in a dispute over a piece of desert land, has filed a $38 quadrillion lawsuit against the landowner's lawyers, the Las Vegas Daily Herald reports. Among the amusing facts:

Anderson said the property has been valued $36 billion and asked for 12.5 percent of that value, $4.5 billion. He also asked for additional compensatory damages of four times that amount and punitive damages of 200 times the amount, which added up to $918 billion. In his initial complaint, Anderson said silence on the matter by the defendants would constitute a binding contract.

Silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract! Now that's the way to get things done. I guess a lot of people who wrote the President on various matters are owed some money and favors, if that's where we set the bar.

The key to this story is in the second sentence:

John Theodore Anderson, also known as John-Theodore:Anderson in his filings ...

See the weird punctuation? That's the sign of an adherent of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which I mentioned in my last entry. Basically they believe in alternate theories of American law, theories which lead to fantastic assertions like "silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract."

It's all very amusing -- unless you become the target of one of these wack jobs, I guess, and wind up with all kinds of liens and frivolous lawsuits filed against you.

Angry desert rancher wants someone to bully

Awesome part-time job available in the high desert for some human doormat:

Ranch Hand Part Time (Joshua Tree, CA)

Ranch Hand to feed, water care for buffalo, goats, sheep, and pigs. Includes mucking stalls, helping with newborn care and births. Rough, heavy work in every kind of weather. Hot weather or rain, cold. The animals are spoiled and overfed. Their stalls cleaned either manually (rake, shovel, wheelbarrow or by tractor. Feeding them takes a long time and they have special feeding instructions for supplements and grains. We have weekend yardsales and if, u want to make a little extra money you can help sell. If, you can't drive a tractor we can teach you if you are eager to learn. The worse the weather the heavier the work. Rural lonely environment. Lazy folks looking for a place to stay -- need not apply! Must be able to lift 120 lbs. Welding skills help or we might teach you, if you are eager to learn. Auto mechanics skills are helpful. The ranch has a full shop with a lift on property. The pay is dependent on your availability and skills -- your contribution in labor and time is all flexible and negotiable. To apply you must write me why you would like to have this job. I don't care about your spelling or grammar. If, you prefer email me your phone number and I will call you.

I love the part about the "spoiled" animals with their "special" diets. I have the feeling he intends to treat them better than his ranch hand.

Clearly this rancher hasn't heard about the wonderful human resource called illegal immigration. They do the jobs we don't want!

The desert 'love lost lawyer'

There is a body of internet practice called search engine optimization or SEO. It is the art and science of engineering a web page, or blog posting, to try to ensure the page floats to the top of the results dellivered by Google and other search engines when certain phrases are the subject of a search.

One look at this page and you'll see what I mean.  Titled "Twentynine Palms Wrongful Death Attorney, Lost Love Lawyer and People Search Attorney for Twentynine Palms -- Find Your Lost Love," the page features a 1325-word supposed article about a lawyer in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., a small town adjacent to both Joshua Tree National Park and the world's largest Marine Corps base. According to the article, a lawyer named Sebastian Gibson will attempt to "find your lost love or obtain compensation for you for the wrongful death of a loved one ... (using) the highest quality legal resources that can be utilized to find the person you are looking for."

In reality, this so-called article consists of repetitions of certain stock phrases, reworded into a variety of different sentences. The idea behind SEO is that you can't just put a bunch of phrases onto a page over and over again; you have to make it look (to the bot, at least) like an actual blog posting. This is where the art comes in: to cram as many key words as possible into something that looks like an actual article. 

Such an "article" begs comparisons to the compositions of certain dull-minded high school students with whom I made my acquaintance back when I was an English teacher. In each class I always had a couple of students who couldn't write at all, and who, when assigned to write an essay, would simply string together certain key phrases, usually drawn from the question itself. Asked about the character traits that make Atticus Finch so memorable, such a student might write, "Atticus Finch had very good character traits that made him memorable. These traits showed good character, such as memory and strengh. I thought Atticus Finch was a strong character and had a good trait." (Only they were actually more poorly written than that.)

Clearly the so-called article exists entirely to draw the attention of search engines to the law practice of Mr. Gibson -- and a search on his name reveals he makes something of a hobby of SEO. Or maybe it's someone in his office, or some internet SEO firm he's hired. It looks like he's getting his money's worth.

But what I'm interested in is the mythical qualities embodied in this picture. The lawyer in the remote desert town whose practice is, in part, the search for "lost loved ones." In between working on a few wrongful death cases, he trolls the internet looking for your old high school girlfriend -- or maybe, in the case of Marines returned from their third or fourth deployment in the war on terror, that foxy female tank mechanic they used to drink beer with in Tikrit back in  2005.

This cries out to be a movie, starring perhaps Jim Carrey or Woody Harrelson,  as a hard-drinking lawyer with a client played by, I don't know, Ben Affleck. The client is trying to find an ex, played by Charlize Theron (if this were the 80s she would be played by Nastassja Kinski, a la Paris, Texas). The film could be written as a straighforward comedy, but I like it better as a bittersweet film (again, a la Paris, Texas), the real subject being the fact that the lawyer character's life was wrecked when he lost the love of his life (played in the present by Helen Hunt and in flashbacks by, say, January Jones).

Related: The Lonely Brinks 'Stockroom' Man

technorati: SEO, films, 29 Palms

Post 3501

Earlier this month Cris and I went to visit our friends down in the desert near the town of Twentynine Palms [location], and we made the mandatory trip up into "the monument," as locals still refer to Joshua Tree National Park (which gained national park status only in the 1990s). I took a few pictures up in the park -- see my Flickr set -- but I'm not nearly as good a photographer as this guy, so take a look at his blog if you want to see some really beautiful pictures that capture something of what the park is really like.

technorati: desert, Joshua Tree National Park, cacti