Coyote Crossing

“‘But Lord’, I said, ‘Why is there only one set of footprints on the beach during the times when I was in the most sorrow?’

‘Because,’ The Lord said gently, ‘Those times were when you realized that I am just the reified superstitious construct of the quaint primate mentations of a species trying to grasp the immensity of the material universe.’”

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Running these days through the comfortable neighborhoods of West Hollywood has made me nostalgic for the garden I left last year. During the divorce and subsequent dislocation, I didn’t let myself miss my garden much. My enthusiasm for the garden waned for a while after the dog was planted in it, and for a number of months it was good to get away from that hole in the ground.

But it was my garden. When I’d moved in, I didn’t expect to be moving out again. Moving three dozen times is enough for any person. I’d be able to see trees I planted grow tall, I thought.

One did, but it blew over in a storm on my birthday the year I left.

So I’ve been running past nice gardens, and envying the people who tend them, and resenting that envy, and wondering if I’ll ever trust my life enough again to grant myself the blithe relaxing into a place I decide will be my home. Half a century of never settling is a pretty good indication that the remainder of my allotted time probably won’t be any different, you know?

Gardening used to be part of my identity. I was a garden writer: tens of thousands of people used to read my ruminations on my garden every two weeks. These days I have one plant, a palm, and it’s not looking all that great. Most of last year it wasn’t an issue. I had no garden, aside from the three carnivorous plants I failed to keep alive in my zero-percent humidity shack, but I had the desert. I had Cima Dome and the Ivanpah Valley, I had the McCullough Range and Wee Thump, and I had Joshua trees and creosote and single-leaved piñon and red barrel cactus, I had datura lining the roads to bloom beneath a full moon, and my lacking a garden seemed beside the point.

I lack the desert mostly these days. I’m not really complaining. The Mojave is less than an hour’s drive from here aside from traffic, which is less time than it took me to get to work in North Beach for most of the last decade. I went last weekend and I’m going this weekend.

But there are these gardens here, and I run past them, and I admire them, and I have no garden myself.

The Raven feels bad about this, and tells me we need to be somewhere where I can have a garden. It’s a nice thought. Every once in a while she’ll point out a community garden plot, and I make a mental note to call about space. But there’s something about walking out the backdoor and being there. The ex- is giving away some of the accoutrements of the backyard garden, sensibly enough as I’ve left them there for more than a year and she doesn’t want them and I have no place to put them, and my brother now possesses the smoker our dad gave me ten years ago. He asked what kinds of wood he could use, and I had to think for a while. I rarely bought wood for the smoker. It was all in the yard already: seasonal prunings from the Asian pear and cherry trees, dropped wood from the live oak. Now and then I would saw off an entire trunk of the upright rosemary, grown rampant over five years, and feed it into the smoker in sections over a few hours. Chicken smoked with new-cut rosemary wood and sage leaves is a remarkable thing. The conversation set me off down a melancholy path. Will I ever be in a place long enough to grow a rosemary to that size again?

For the last few months I have been toying with the idea of publishing my garden writing. I put it out in e-book form a few years back, and a handful of kind people bought copies. Surely, I have been thinking, the essays that were in that e-book, written over more than a decade, would find some readers in dead tree form. And then I remember editing the Zeke book, having to put it aside after every page or so for the memories the work stirred up. I do not mourn the gardens so fiercely. But my happiness these days is hardly what I would call robust, and The Raven has been persuading me bit by bit that dwelling on sadness rarely makes it lessen. So I have considered re-editing the garden book, and then I remember another small herb or shrub or bulb that I nurtured in those gardens that I will never see again, part of a life that has ended with characters in it that are with me no more, and I put the task off for another few weeks.

Today I found some resolve. That might have been because Thistle is here with me: another refugee from the same garden. We’ve found some cameraderie, some solidarity, some understanding. He was as much a part of the garden as any tomato plant or clematis, and with him here I feel like I haven’t lost the whole place. I didn’t have to face the work alone, I thought. It was time, I thought, to get the work out of the way, send the book off and get it printed. I found a copy of the page layout document, opened it up.

It opened to the passage quoted below, from a humorous piece on snails.

Once collected, what the heck do you do with them? Squishing a single snail is repulsive: squishing a bucketful is unthinkably vile prospect. Driving them to the hills to release them is a bad idea. Salting kills them, but where can you put a cubic foot of salted snail that won’t kill your garden plants? I do enjoy the taste of escargot, and once thought out loud to my wife that I’d feed my captured snails cornmeal for a couple weeks in order to clean their digestive tracts, then cook them. She allowed as how it was a sensible idea and suggested I start right after our divorce.

Maybe I’ll try again in six months.

2 comments on "Bibliomancy"

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The Raven and I went out on a long daytrip yesterday, into the Owens Valley then east, towards Death Valley. We passed by the Famous U2 Joshua Tree — the site was infested with pilgrims as we went by — and dropped down into Panamint Springs past the always mind-bending Rainbow Canyon.

After a while spent at the Panamint Springs Resort, which has no springs and applies the word “resort” to itself as a bit of hyperbole, we headed south into the Panamint Valley. The sun dropped down behind the Argus Range. I took some photos and we headed farther south, which is how we got to Trona.

I’d been to Trona once before. It struck me then as one of the bleakest towns I’d ever seen. In the decade since, it’s bleakified even more.

I am speaking here as someone who has lived in both Buffalo and Nipton. Not only does it take a bit more than a boarded up building and a blowing plastic grocery bag to get me to call something “bleak,” I actually appreciate bleakness as an aesthetic. But Trona is one of those places that outbleaks even me. Come into town and a heavy mantle of despair settles in on you. The rotten eggs smell of the chemical plant doesn’t help. It’s the kind of place that after an hour there, you actually find yourself saying sentences you never thought you’d say before, like “I can’t wait until we’re in Ridgecrest.”

I hasten to add that this judgment has nothing to do with the people living there. It’s a company town. Most people who live there live there because they’re paid to. This is not a reflection on their character or qualities.

A few towns I’ve spent time in do rival Trona in overall emotionally debilitating bleakness. Gila Bend, AZ, for instance. Or Ajo, a little ways south of Gila Bend. It’s not surprising Ajo’s gone bleak: it was a company town for the Phelps Dodge open-pit copper mine, which has been closed for years. There’s a recurring chance, each time the economy picks up, that ecotourism will boost Ajo’s fortunes: it could conceivably work as a gateway community for Organ Pipe National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta wildlife refuge. US border policy, which funnels both migrants and smugglers into the back of beyond in Arizona, has stunted tourism in both those places. The last time I visited Ajo, in 2006, it seemed like there were fewer than ten businesses still operating. One of them was a Basho’s supermarket obviously kept afloat by customers from the Tohono O’odham reservation. There was a gas station that sold sandwiches and coffee, and a Mexican restaurant.  A few motels. I think that’s it.

Not that a thriving business climate always saves a town from being bleak, as Golden Valley and Bullhead City, each in Mohave County AZ, prove abundantly.

I remember Hawthorne, Nevada as another such bleak town, or at least one heading in that direction. Sharon and I were there for a morning about a decade ago, heading back to the Bay Area from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. We were looking for a place to get breakfast, and we found one, and the food didn’t kill us. Looking it up just now I find that there are about a dozen places to eat listed there: maybe we just caught the town in a bad cycle. It’s anchored by an army base, and I don’t think we had two wars happening at the time. Maybe global instability has helped Hawthorne’s economy some. But I remember a bleakness there that was only partly assuaged by our leaving town and chasing pronghorns along dirt roads in the upper elevations of the Wassuk Range.

Tule Lake, CA, is another, and Dateland AZ, and Searchlight NV: good people there all for good reasons of their own, and each one of them has seemed unremittingly bleak to me on one visit or another. It may be more me than the towns. The bleak towns seem to concentrate in the Arid West, for me. there are dead towns back east, but the profusion of Ailanthus and kudzu and honeysuckle always soothe my mind.

What towns have struck you that way?

11 comments on "The bleakest town you’ve seen?"

Taken today, 5:00 or so pm, from the Trona-Wildrose Road south of Panamint Springs. If I’m not mistaken, that deep cleft in the mountain there is Surprise Canyon.

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This is a first draft of chapter three of the J Tree book, to be read tonight at the Writers Group. Again, like previous chapters, it won’t be here forever, but I thought I’d maximize the feedback possibilities in this new age of open-source writing.

Chapter one is here. Chapter two is here. Both will be coming down in a week or so.

1 comment on "Desert rain"

I’ve reinstalled “gravatars”, which allow you to have an avatar on your comments. Right now any comments by people who haven’t registered a gravatar (Globally recognized avatar) will bear the default Coyote Crossing icon, which is cool enough. But if you want your own, go register one here.

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