High and Dry in the Mojave

Let this be a lesson to you all: Don't try to con teenagers when it comes to spring break. It can be done, of course, but the consequences are bound to be unspeakably harsh.

This winter when we were all sitting around the table in our house in Oregon City, facing the prospect of six more months of gloom and rain, the four of us decided that an escape to someplace sunny, dry, and hot in April might recharge us, making it possible to trundle on through the sunless Oregon spring.

For years, I've wanted to spend some time in the Mojave desert. I've driven across its basins and mountains many times, but always on the way to or from someplace else. There was a spot on the map that had long intrigued me: Twentynine Palms, California, a small desert town at the northern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. I suggested this as a potential destination. Apparently, when I said Twentynine Palms, our kids, aged 19 and 17, heard Palm Springs, that sprawling cancer of a city 50 miles to the south. They were enthused for once and, ridiculously, I did nothing to discourage their fantasy.

Dumb move on my part.

We flew from Portland to Sacramento to Ontario, California. I detest airplanes and this was the first time I'd flown since 9-11. The rest of the family, frequent fliers all, had already become inured to the groping searches, the demands to remove shoes (which in our son Nat's case could, depending on the shoes, be a noxious event in itself), the ceaseless checking for photo ID, the seizure of knitting (though not crochet) needles and nail clippers. As it turned out, self-consciously liberal Portland conducted the most intrusive searches of the three cities, with the lines slushing forward at the pace of the Wisconsin Glaciation.

Having arrived bleary-eyed at PDX three hours early, I had a chance to watch dozens of searches and try to make sense out of who was being singled out and why. By and large the pat-downs at the gate seemed to be dictated by a simple quota system--ten to twelve individuals per flight, roughly twice as many men as women. (Nat and I were searched four times in four flights. Our daughter Zen once. Kimberly not at all.)

A demographic note. In Portland, nearly all of the people charged with doing the searches were black; most of us being searched were white. It was a fetching irony, and a situation that might do more than anything else to instill popular resentment toward the relentless incursions of the Surveillance State. There's nothing like a good strip search to convince even the most stalwart Republican that perhaps Ashcroft has gotten a little carried away.

I'd say one out of four passengers who'd been selected for inspection huffed, pouted, and acted indignant, many of them snapping at the searchers with boisterous declarations of their patriotism. And, for the most part, the searchers kept their cool, trying to keep the searchees calm enough so they wouldn't be booted from the airport as, to give an old phrase new meaning, "flight risks." Many of them snickered, shook their heads, and imparted knowing winks to their colleagues. One could easily imagine situations where blacks who objected to similar searches by cops on the shoulder of, say, the New Jersey Turnpike ended up being hauled off to jail or to the morgue.

Ontario was a different story. The searches here were more cursory. Instead, this rather puny airport had opted for a robust show of military force, with more than a dozen (all white, as far as I could tell) national guard troops prowling the corridors in full combat gear, including M-16s, giving young women the once over. It had the creepy atmosphere of the airport in Buenos Aires during the height of the Dirty War.

From Brand Hell to Devil's Garden

We headed east on Highway 10 out of Ontario. This must be one of the blandest roads in America: a smog-drenched corridor of car lots, cloned subdivisions, billboards promoting phone sex and Indian casinos--the latter day rubble of the California dream.

The monotony is broken only by the brooding hulk of the San Bernardino Mountains and by Cabazon, home of the giant truckstop dinosaurs featured in PeeWee's Big Adventure and the Desert Hills Premier Outlet Mall.

If you thought we'd drive right past Cabazon, you don't know our daughter, who as a taskmaster would shame even merciless old Ward Bond from Wagon Train, the sixties TV western sponsored by the Borax Company, the mining conglomerate that has done more than just about anyone to ravage the outback of the Mojave.

This may be the world's hautiest outlet fashion mall. It's an orgy of brand retailing wrapped in a kind of faux-Venetian architecture. The stores hawk discards from an array of designers, from Donna Karan and Gucci to Barney's of New York and Versace. In the Giorgio Armani Exchange a near brawl broke out among about 20 Japanese teens, each fighting for possession of as many of the impossibly tight tops as they could grab.

Still, most people seemed mainly interested in toting around a bag with some elite store's name and brand on it. Others, quite sensibly, headed straight for the Godiva Chocolatier.

The whole scene is so overwhelming that it's possible to imagine that even Naomi Klein--the Boadacea of the battle against Brand Culture--might feel faint at the prospect of an afternoon trolling the aisles. I finally took refuge in the Bose speaker store, found a CD by The Kinks and cranked up You Really Got Me loud enough to awaken the San Andreas Fault.

About 20 miles outside of Cabazon we came to the junction of I-10 and Highway 62. In the notch between these roads, there's a patch of Sonoran desert known as the Devil's Garden. By most accounts, it was once to the world of American cacti what the Hoh Valley is to temperate rainforests: the most exuberant expression of the biome on the continent.

In 1906, George Wharton James, in his book Wonders of the Colorado Desert, described the strange cactus jungle this way: "When we find ourselves on the mesa, we begin to understand why this is called by the prospectors 'the devil's garden.' It is simply a vast, native, forcing ground for thousands of varieties of cactus. They thrive here as if specially guarded ... I know of no place where so many are to be found as in this small area near the Morongo Pass."

Twenty-five years later it would all be gone, plundered by Los Angeles real estate developers--the great barrel cacti and ocotillo uprooted for replanting in the obligatory cactus garden that adorned nearly every house in southern California.

The passing of seventy years has done little to restore the damage. There should be a sign somewhere commemorating this spot as one of the great battlefields in the history of environmentalism, the Antietam of the desert preservation movement.

The cause of the desert was taken up by one of the great unsung heroes of the environmental movement, Minerva Hamilton Hoyt. Hoyt wasn't a female John Muir. She wasn't a mountaineer or a desert rat. She was an LA socialite.

Hoyt proved to be tenacious, visionary, and connected. She soon got FDR's ear, and more importantly, face time with his Interior Secretary, the original Harold Ickes. Ickes pere was a titan of his time, nothing like his son, Harold Ickes, Jr., the weasely hatchet man of the Clinton White House.

Ickes took Hoyt's maps and within three months had withdrawn from private looting more than a million acres of land from Morongo Pass east to the Colorado River, then still a river in flow as well as name.

Over the years the mining firms and ranchers and Pentagon whittled away at the monument, seizing anything of commercial or strategic value. In 1993 when Clinton and Dianne Feinstein pushed through the California Desert Protection Bill, creating Joshua Tree and Mojave National Parks, it turned out to be a far cry from the original vision hatched by Hoyt and Ickes. The deal was another Clintonesque win-win gesture, designed to grab headlines but save precious little.

Highway 62 is a 175-mile-long arc of road cutting through the heart of the Joshua tree country from Palm Springs to the Colorado River town of Earp, at the foot of the Whipple Mountains. The road climbs up out of the carbon monoxide-glutted haze of the Coachella Valley past the shadow of Mt. San Gorgonio onto what the locals call the High Desert and we know as the southwestern tip of the Mojave. We moved quickly past the towns of Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley, and Joshua Tree, increasingly inhabited by the service workers for Palm Springs, who have been priced out of the absurdly inflated land values in Coachella Valley.

The original Highway 62, now buried under asphalt and the ubiquitous DelTaco drive-thrus, was known during the prohibition era as the Bootlegger's Highway. At night, giant Joshua trees (including the largest known tree in existence) were soaked with kerosene and lit on fire, like giant tiki torches, to mark the perilous path to John Shull's place near Indian Cove canyon. Shull was the club-footed genius of Mojave moonshine, whose potent concoctions found their way to the speakeasies and casting rooms of LA.

It was after nine when we finally pulled in at the Inn at 29 Palms, a small resort, perched on the edge of a fan palm oasis, consisting of about a dozen nicely kept adobes built in the 1920s. There were immediate remonstrations from the back seat. Apparently, this wasn't exactly (or even remotely) the kind of spring break get-away our kids had in mind. Their worst fears were confirmed by the hotel: no phone, out of cell range, no video games, no nearby shopping district, and a television the size of a cantaloupe.

Revenge would be swift and unsparing and it would come in the form of--Palm Springs.

Next issue: Liberace's Bathroom.