Phelan, California. Spring 1973

High Desert Snow Storm

My nephew and niece rolling in the frsh snow with their Czech puppy. Snow like this is so awesome in the desert. Click to make the picture big and check my Mom's blog for more of these photos!

Desert Quest

In the summer of 1985, I drove out to my brother's land in Baldy Mesa, California to seek God alone in the silence of the desert. My model in this quest were the 4th century Desert Fathers, who fled the cities to live with God in the wilderness of northern Egypt and Sinai. And like them, I had no plans to return to my former life. I would stay in the desert until God called me out. (However, unlike the Desert Fathers, I did bring a camera. The picture above is of my desert camp and my faithful '76 Toyota Corolla.)

In the end, my sojourn in the desert only lasted about three days. Scared at night, alternately bored and scared during the day, I gave up and fled to a friend's house in nearby Phelan.

A couple of years later I wrote a paper on my experience, concluding with the sense of failure I carried about the adventure. My history of religion professor, UCSC's venerable Noel Q. King (and here), gave me a great grade and noted that in such exercises, it wasn't chronos time which mattered, but karios time.

Even more years later, Tim Butler (and here) wrote a song about my desert experience and included it on his album, Good. I hope he doesn't mind me reprinting the lyrics:

Mojave Desert

Going to the light to set himself alight
mojave desert
driving in his bug with three dozen cans of spam
mojave desert
may go for a week -- may go for a life
mojave desert

sitting in one place like that old joshua tree there
joining in the space
far light - star light

days pass on his mount - i don't know the count
scorpions scurry
time becomes a stranger as stranger time becomes
scorpions scurry
oscillations made between madness and a gift
"what am I doing?" (thinks) "what am I doing?"

yet there's a constant company
in his singular abide
moving in space
far light - star light

out of all his water - ate up all the spam
voices talking (small) voices talking
over the horizon clouds are rising up
horses running (sees) horses running

drive back in the car
defeat - a failure - a demise
but wasn't he in star light - far light
a smile cracks across his wind-cracked face as he recalls
the way he lost himself / won himself
beheld the light.

Near Edwards AFB

Carrizo Plain

A friend sent this to me today, and it's so beautiful I thought, hey why not spread the love?

The east side of the Carrizo Plain, in the Temblor Range, about 50 miles due west of Bakersfield, California. Photo taken by Barbara Mathews, May 14, 2005.

City of Quartz

Now Reading: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis (1990).

This book is a must-read for anyone who loves L.A. (Which I think I do, though I may be confusing love with nostalgia, since I haven't spent any time in L.A. in almost 15 years--and that was just for a week.) This one has been on my reading list for about 10 years. I finally found a used copy, so I'm just digging into it.

Mike Davis writes with a lot of energy in this leftist critique of the city. It's a fasinating look contrasting the mythology of L.A. sunshine with the city's noir undercurrent. City of Quartz also looks at L.A. as a postmodern warning of things to come when a megacity falls apart into warring tribes -- a warning that pretty much became reality with the Rodney King riots which happened just a couple of years after this book was published.

A couple of personal connections:

• One of L.A.'s earliest boosters was a journalist named Charles F. Lummis. Lummis' writing in the early 1900s built a romantic image of an L.A. rooted in the so-called harmony of the Spanish mission era. This image drew many of Lummis' East Coast readers to Southern California, in one of the first great migrations of Americans to the city. The personal connection is that my great-grandmother Rita Rivas was Lummis' secretary for 14 years while he was involved in this boosterism.
• City of Quartz opens with a look at "L.A.'s final frontier," a socialist colony which was built in the early 20th century near the high desert town of Llano and collapsed in 1918 (see here and here). In the 1940s, the writer Aldous Huxley lived in the ruins of the Llano colony where he pursued his pioneering psychedelics-aided mystical journeys (see here). It is not far from Phelan where I lived in my teens. The ruins of this colony off of Highway 138 were well known to us back in the 1970s. As far as I know they are still out there. Ironically, in the 18 years since City of Quartz was written, my Mom (who visits the area) and brother (who lives there) tells me "L.A.'s final frontier" has now extended far beyond Llano, deep into the Mojave.

Maybe I'll add more about this book when I finish it up.

Out in the Desert

My Mom has a great story on her blog about her and Irene's recent trip to the Mojave Desert. Check it out here. I loved their photo of the desert shack and hope they don't mind if I borrowed it for a new title banner! (Thanks Mom!)