Veterans Day 2012
MilTree: Healing Military Veterans Through the Arts
Ruth Nolan
The unforgettable memory of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 has passed once again, and commemoration ceremonies have once again played out across the country and world. One event, held on September 11-12, was recently sponsored in the small high desert town of Joshua Tree by MilTree, a new and quickly growing arts-based outreach organization based in the Morongo Basin, whose goal is to show a display of support for veterans of wars who live in the high desert area, some coming from nearby 29 Palms Marine Base, and others who have served in Vietnam and other wars.
"It is our hope that the arts can help bring our returning military veterans, many based at 29 Palms Marine Base, and other members of our high desert community together, and create a safe haven for the types of communication, understanding and healing for those among us who are suffering from the wounds of war in one way or another," says MilTree founder Cheryl Montelle, a dancer, writer, and arts event organizer from Los Angeles who is also a part-time desert resident who has hosted many arts and literature-based events in the Joshua Tree area for the past several years, including the annual Desert Stories show and the author's series at the Red Arrow Gallery.
"So far this year, we have hosted several events that have allowed us to facilitate a coming-together of our area's veterans, active-duty military, and civilians to heal the wounds of the soul through the types of communication created through the arts," says Montelle, who is working closely with Vietnam War veteran and high desert resident Dale Fredenberg in her efforts. MilTree events have focused on storytelling, music, poetry, film screenings, and educational workshops, have included active duty and retired military members and poets, artists, rock climbers, retirees, and a diversity of others from the eclectic high desert community at large.
Montelle was inspired to create MilTree after reading the book "War On the Soul" by Ed Tick, a psychotherapist whose work focuses on the sources and treatment for PTSD that often affects those whose military service takes them to war zones, which he asserts is "a soul disorder, not a mental one." Tick is also an internationally-based lecturer, workshop leader and co-founder of "Soldier's Heart", an organization that works with veterans. Through "Soldier's Heart," Tick has led Vietnam war veterans from the U.S. on visits to Vietnam to meet with war veterans from that country as a way to help heal the wounds of war.
The Sept. 11-12 MilTree event in Joshua Tree drew together artists, musicians, poets, other community members, war veterans and members of the military and their families, and included a screening of Olivier Morel's film "On the Bridge", which examines the effects of war on soldiers who have served in the past decade's wars in the Middle East, such as PTSD and the difficulties of re-adjustment to civilian life. MilTree also offered two free workshops, "The Soul of Community in Healing from the War," and "Women Witnessing the War," both focusing on how community members and others who are connected to military service-members - families, wives, and friends - can learn to understand the effect of war on their loved ones, on their own lives, and how to create help build bridges of healing and communication.
The first MilTree event was a standing-room-only open microphone of storytelling and music hosted by Ted Quinn at Pappy and Harriet's Saloon in Pioneertown this past Memorial Day, where military members and veterans shared their stories with the audience through music and song. Montelle also hosted a reading for Tick from "War On the Soul" at the Red Arrow Gallery this past spring. MilTree also helped promote a program this past summer coordinated by the Homestead Valley Community Center that included volunteers from Yucca Valley and participating Starbucks in the high desert and neighboring Coachella Valley to donate and send packages of coffee and other items to troops currently serving in Afghanistan.
More interactive music, arts, film, and other activities and programs are being planned for upcoming months. Montelle envisions workshops for poetry and art, for example, where participants go into nearby Joshua Tree National Park to draw artistic healing and inspiration from the scenic beauty and power of the desert setting. In a related event that also touches on the theme of the effects of war on human lives, Montelle is also promoting, apart from her work with MilTree and along with Donnie I. Betts, the performance of a one-act play, "Mekong Joe" at the Blak Box Theater in Joshua Tree on Sept 21-22. The production will also feature a discussion with Amerasian actor Joseph Tran Thanh Hai Wandell who was a child of that war and whose life is the focus of the film.
This article originally appeared on Sept 17, 2012 on the KCET Artbound LOS ANGELES by Ruth Nolan, Cultural Journalist @ KCET. Article copyright (c) 2012 by Ruth Nolan
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/san-bernardino/miltree-healing-for-military-veterans-takes-toots-through-the-arts.html
Monday, November 12, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
Imagining The Salton Sea: California's Lost Riviera in Three Cinematic Adventures
July 19, 2012
KCET | Artbound Los Angeles | Ruth Nolan, Cultural Journalist in the California Desert
It's almost impossible to live in Southern California and not have heard of the Salton Sea, which just happens to be our state's largest lake.
Created accidentally in a two-year period between 1905-07, when a Colorado River irrigation project went terribly wrong, the 15-mile wide, 35 mile long sea - which fills up but a fraction the area in southeastern Riverside and northern Imperial Counties once filled in by Ancient Lake Cahuilla - has come to symbolize the arc of our state's boldest adventures and highest aspirations, and, in the past few decades, has reflected some of our worst social and economic challenges and nightmares, which glare all too clearly back at us from -200 feet below sea level from this vast body of water.
The Salton Sea, 30% saltier than the Pacific Ocean and getting saltier, has been ripe cinematic fodder for many films, many of them offering dysoptian visions of our Golden State's hopes and dreams gone terribly wrong, and an even more despairing, post-apocalyptic future yet to come.
However, several contemporary film-makers have boldly taken the plunge to counter-act these disturbing stereotypes; these recent cinematic works miraculously part the murky waters to reveal an astonishing depth of riches in the stories of the people whose lives are staked out along its shores. Israeli-American Alma Ha'rel's Bombay Beach (2011), Los Angeles-based filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer's Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by the iconic cinematographer Jon Waters, (2004) and the cult classic Into the Wild (2007), produced by Sean Penn, have breathed new life and energy into the stale, dystopian stereotypes that have all too often come to represent how we perceive, and think about, the people who are drawn to live and spend time at the Salton Sea.
"Many of the people of the Salton Sea live on the fringe of society," says Metzler. "They celebrate their own individualism, but it's not in a selfish way. Through their perceptions and misperceptions, the strange history and unexpected beauty of the Salton Sea, along with uniqueness and strengths of the people there, are revealed."
In fact, it appears that, as depicted by these films, the area may be experiencing a sort of renaissance, even in the face of much adversity and the tough economic circumstances that aren't just endemic to the region. There's a whiff here of the optimism and enthusiasm that once spawned the racing boat yacht clubs built in the 1940's by entertainment notables Frank Sinatra and others to service the throngs that once filled recreation-seekers at the Salton Sea's beaches - not to mention the passion for the sea's environmental preservation generated by the late Sonny Bono back in the 1980's and early 90's, and in whose memory the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge has been named.
Increasing salinity and other ecological problems face the sea today, not to mention the demand for its water by neighboring San Diego county, and its future remains uncertain, and yet it persists, no matter how hard the sun beats down -- Much like the people in these hopeful and inspiring documentary films.
In contrast to earlier Salton Sea-inspired cinematic delights, such as the black and white 1950's era thriller The Monster that Challenged the World, the despair-infused The Grifters (1990), based on novelist Jim Thompson's noir classic, and the disturbing, crystal meth-infused murder and mayhem depicted in The Salton Sea (2002), these other cinematic works dive much deeper to reveal an astonishing panoply of real-life people whose widely diverging lives somehow manage to intersect at the Sea's imposing, heat-glossed shores.
"It's a mood and an internal feeling that you get when you step into Bombay Beach that I was trying to capture; it's a side of America that I feel I've never seen," says Alma Ha'rel, whose Bombay Beach won the Unanimous Vote of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival Jury for its "beauty, lyricism, empathy and invention." Ha'rel picked three rather unlikely subjects for her film study: an octogenarian man named Red; a little boy named Benny who's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; and Ceejay, an aspiring high school football player who has recently moved to the Salton Sea to escape inner-city gang violence in Los Angeles.
Ha'rel's film, along with Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea and Into The Wild, stand as a testimony to the human spirit to invent, dream, and thrive, even in the face of, or perhaps as an antidote to, the type of sweltering isolation and adversities imposed by the extreme heat, widespread fish die-offs that fill its beaches with carcasses and bones, and continued threats to its sustainable future, for humans and wildlife - including the thousands of migratory birds that winter there, among them, a small band of pink flamingos that are believed to have escaped from a San Diego Zoo some years ago.
Ha'rel finds common threads in the lives of each of these main subjects of her film, and ties their stories of hope and perseverance together with the power of beautifully-rendered dance sequences imbedded throughout the film to the music of Bob Dylan and the band, Beirut. " I shot many of the scenes at sunset," she says. "There is something really magical about that place. You just have to go there to see it for yourself." Bombay Beach is currently being screened to enthusiastic audiences throughout the U.K.
"Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea," has a slightly different vision of the human element of the Salton Sea than Ha'rel does, and imparts a slightly more ironic and sometimes humorous view of some of the people he interviews in his film, but that doesn't detract from the film's integrity. "I have huge affection for the offbeat and quirky, and the Salton Sea was my fantasyland come true," says Metzler. The film was recently shown on PBS SoCal, and will be screened free of charge for desert-area residents this fall at the Coachella Valley Historical Museum in nearby Indio.
And, the academy award nominated biographical drama film Into the Wild (2007), produced by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch, Kristin Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, along with other luminaires. The film, based on the best-selling biographical novel of the same name by author Jon Krakauer, places many of its key scenes in Salton City as it follows the Thoreau-styled search for individual truth and meaning made by 22-year-old protagonist Christopher McCandless, an Emory University graduate who leaves his wealthy family behind to pursue his own brand of rugged survivalist. The passion and authenticity of McCandless's journey are deeply imparted upon the people he meets while spending several months in Salton City; not surprisingly, the film continues to gain a widespread following, especially among a young adult audience.
One of the film's most memorable sequences, at a landmark located at the northwestern shore of the Salton Sea, shows McCandless running up a steep, rugged desert mountain at Travertine Point as he leads a lonely, 83-year-old retiree named Franz to a place where they can look out across the sea, not exactly someone would expect to see in the middle of one of the world's most foreboding deserts. But there it is, sparkling blue and clean and true and clear, forever imprinted into memory.
Just like the Salton Sea itself, and the stories of those who some might consider social outcasts or misfits, who reinvent themselves every day just as the makers of the one-of-a-kind yet somehow universally appealing films Bombay Beach, Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea, and Into the Wild impart, upon us all, the revealing and relevant stories of people whose lives flow along the sea's shores and raise their voices into one, never to be entirely submerged, or forgotten, and somehow, against all odds, are somehow brought to the big screen, even bigger than life itself, in places least expected. Just like the Salton Sea, itself.
Dig this story? visit the story at KCET | Artbound Los Angeles and vote by hitting the Facebook like button above and tweet it out, and it could be turned into a short video documentary. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook and Twitter.
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/the-salton-sea-californias-lost-riviera-returns-to-life-in-three-cinematic-adventures.html
KCET | Artbound Los Angeles | Ruth Nolan, Cultural Journalist in the California Desert
It's almost impossible to live in Southern California and not have heard of the Salton Sea, which just happens to be our state's largest lake.
Created accidentally in a two-year period between 1905-07, when a Colorado River irrigation project went terribly wrong, the 15-mile wide, 35 mile long sea - which fills up but a fraction the area in southeastern Riverside and northern Imperial Counties once filled in by Ancient Lake Cahuilla - has come to symbolize the arc of our state's boldest adventures and highest aspirations, and, in the past few decades, has reflected some of our worst social and economic challenges and nightmares, which glare all too clearly back at us from -200 feet below sea level from this vast body of water.
The Salton Sea, 30% saltier than the Pacific Ocean and getting saltier, has been ripe cinematic fodder for many films, many of them offering dysoptian visions of our Golden State's hopes and dreams gone terribly wrong, and an even more despairing, post-apocalyptic future yet to come.
However, several contemporary film-makers have boldly taken the plunge to counter-act these disturbing stereotypes; these recent cinematic works miraculously part the murky waters to reveal an astonishing depth of riches in the stories of the people whose lives are staked out along its shores. Israeli-American Alma Ha'rel's Bombay Beach (2011), Los Angeles-based filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer's Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by the iconic cinematographer Jon Waters, (2004) and the cult classic Into the Wild (2007), produced by Sean Penn, have breathed new life and energy into the stale, dystopian stereotypes that have all too often come to represent how we perceive, and think about, the people who are drawn to live and spend time at the Salton Sea.
"Many of the people of the Salton Sea live on the fringe of society," says Metzler. "They celebrate their own individualism, but it's not in a selfish way. Through their perceptions and misperceptions, the strange history and unexpected beauty of the Salton Sea, along with uniqueness and strengths of the people there, are revealed."
In fact, it appears that, as depicted by these films, the area may be experiencing a sort of renaissance, even in the face of much adversity and the tough economic circumstances that aren't just endemic to the region. There's a whiff here of the optimism and enthusiasm that once spawned the racing boat yacht clubs built in the 1940's by entertainment notables Frank Sinatra and others to service the throngs that once filled recreation-seekers at the Salton Sea's beaches - not to mention the passion for the sea's environmental preservation generated by the late Sonny Bono back in the 1980's and early 90's, and in whose memory the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge has been named.
Increasing salinity and other ecological problems face the sea today, not to mention the demand for its water by neighboring San Diego county, and its future remains uncertain, and yet it persists, no matter how hard the sun beats down -- Much like the people in these hopeful and inspiring documentary films.
In contrast to earlier Salton Sea-inspired cinematic delights, such as the black and white 1950's era thriller The Monster that Challenged the World, the despair-infused The Grifters (1990), based on novelist Jim Thompson's noir classic, and the disturbing, crystal meth-infused murder and mayhem depicted in The Salton Sea (2002), these other cinematic works dive much deeper to reveal an astonishing panoply of real-life people whose widely diverging lives somehow manage to intersect at the Sea's imposing, heat-glossed shores.
"It's a mood and an internal feeling that you get when you step into Bombay Beach that I was trying to capture; it's a side of America that I feel I've never seen," says Alma Ha'rel, whose Bombay Beach won the Unanimous Vote of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival Jury for its "beauty, lyricism, empathy and invention." Ha'rel picked three rather unlikely subjects for her film study: an octogenarian man named Red; a little boy named Benny who's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; and Ceejay, an aspiring high school football player who has recently moved to the Salton Sea to escape inner-city gang violence in Los Angeles.
Ha'rel's film, along with Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea and Into The Wild, stand as a testimony to the human spirit to invent, dream, and thrive, even in the face of, or perhaps as an antidote to, the type of sweltering isolation and adversities imposed by the extreme heat, widespread fish die-offs that fill its beaches with carcasses and bones, and continued threats to its sustainable future, for humans and wildlife - including the thousands of migratory birds that winter there, among them, a small band of pink flamingos that are believed to have escaped from a San Diego Zoo some years ago.
Ha'rel finds common threads in the lives of each of these main subjects of her film, and ties their stories of hope and perseverance together with the power of beautifully-rendered dance sequences imbedded throughout the film to the music of Bob Dylan and the band, Beirut. " I shot many of the scenes at sunset," she says. "There is something really magical about that place. You just have to go there to see it for yourself." Bombay Beach is currently being screened to enthusiastic audiences throughout the U.K.
"Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea," has a slightly different vision of the human element of the Salton Sea than Ha'rel does, and imparts a slightly more ironic and sometimes humorous view of some of the people he interviews in his film, but that doesn't detract from the film's integrity. "I have huge affection for the offbeat and quirky, and the Salton Sea was my fantasyland come true," says Metzler. The film was recently shown on PBS SoCal, and will be screened free of charge for desert-area residents this fall at the Coachella Valley Historical Museum in nearby Indio.
And, the academy award nominated biographical drama film Into the Wild (2007), produced by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch, Kristin Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, along with other luminaires. The film, based on the best-selling biographical novel of the same name by author Jon Krakauer, places many of its key scenes in Salton City as it follows the Thoreau-styled search for individual truth and meaning made by 22-year-old protagonist Christopher McCandless, an Emory University graduate who leaves his wealthy family behind to pursue his own brand of rugged survivalist. The passion and authenticity of McCandless's journey are deeply imparted upon the people he meets while spending several months in Salton City; not surprisingly, the film continues to gain a widespread following, especially among a young adult audience.
One of the film's most memorable sequences, at a landmark located at the northwestern shore of the Salton Sea, shows McCandless running up a steep, rugged desert mountain at Travertine Point as he leads a lonely, 83-year-old retiree named Franz to a place where they can look out across the sea, not exactly someone would expect to see in the middle of one of the world's most foreboding deserts. But there it is, sparkling blue and clean and true and clear, forever imprinted into memory.
Just like the Salton Sea itself, and the stories of those who some might consider social outcasts or misfits, who reinvent themselves every day just as the makers of the one-of-a-kind yet somehow universally appealing films Bombay Beach, Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea, and Into the Wild impart, upon us all, the revealing and relevant stories of people whose lives flow along the sea's shores and raise their voices into one, never to be entirely submerged, or forgotten, and somehow, against all odds, are somehow brought to the big screen, even bigger than life itself, in places least expected. Just like the Salton Sea, itself.
Dig this story? visit the story at KCET | Artbound Los Angeles and vote by hitting the Facebook like button above and tweet it out, and it could be turned into a short video documentary. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook and Twitter.
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/the-salton-sea-californias-lost-riviera-returns-to-life-in-three-cinematic-adventures.html
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Desert Word Walk - Magnesia Falls Canyon to Cahuilla Indian Village Site
Hiking In Magnesia Falls Canyon to a Cahuilla Indian Village Site, Near Rancho Mirage, California March, 2012
by Ruth Nolan, "Desert Word Walker" blog columnist for Heyday Books www.heyday.com
The desert is traversed by many mountain ranges, some of them long, some short, some low, and some rising upward ten thousand feet. They are always circling you with a ragged horizon, dark-hued, bare-faced, barren – just as truly desert as the sands which were washed down from them. – John C. Van Dyke, from "The Desert" (1901), a classic of California desert literature
here I am next to several shiny, flat, "milling slicks" on boulders at pah-wah-te
Today, on a perfect, 70-degree day in March, I’ve joined an archaeologist in the Rancho Mirage Cove, near Palm Springs, to explore and hike a mile back into the narrow, steep slot of Magnesia Falls Canyon to an well-used Cahuilla Indian Village site, pah-wah-te. When we reach the village site, we’ll be looking for evidence of longtime habitation: petroglyphs, potsherds, hand-held manos - fist-sized, round rocks that were used to grind seeds and nuts - and milling slicks, which are large, flat stones whose surfaces have been polished by seed and nut grinding to such a smooth pitch that they appear to have been varnished.
And I'm personally grateful for the invitation to join a small group of people, new acquaintances, if not really friends, to do what I love: get outdoors, walk in the desert, enjoy the company, and make the larger connections to earth and ancestors that give a necessary resonance and depth to life beyond my current circumstances, lonely and bereft as they've been in the past year.
Specifically: since my only child and daughter, Tarah, 23, moved to the Seattle area last summer, and the crushing, sudden ending of a new romantic relationship that had seemed, so beautifully after the tragic loss of my longtime love, to be leading me joyfully into a new life, I've been the loneliest I can ever remember being in my life. In the odd and isolating months since then, the desert, my longtime, comforting lifelong home, has suddenly seemed to be a glaring oppressor, filled with empty expanses, too-silent hours, and a far too hostile symphony of sun.
Empty nest, empty heart, empty life, and there's only one trusted antidote for all of that - to walk the desert again and again, as long as it takes, until I arrive somewhere I recognize, maybe memories of places that link me to stories I remember, somewhere I feel part of the human experience, somewhere I can hear, really listen to, a human voice or two. Somewhere there is a sense...of life to share.
And so, here I am on this day, under the guidance of the archaeologist, making my first steps on the faintest, still-visible threads of what was, for centuries, a well-used Indian trail traversing the north-south length of the Coachella Valley desert area all the way from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea, along which a number of village sites were located, it became a route of exploration for California geologist William Phipps Blake, who led the 1862 Southern Pacific Railroad survey team here; then, it formed a vital leg of the famous Bradshaw Trail, which crossed the desert over 100 miles to and from the gold mines along the Colorado River near Blythe; and finally, into the well-traveled, six-lane, multi-desert city road that it is today.
The Rancho Mirage cove is at the mouth of one of the many highly-valued, wind-protected canyons along the western/southern edges of California desert’s Coachella Valley that line the base of the rugged, dry, Santa Rosa Mountains, which jut steeply skyward as high as 10,800 feet from a near-sea level valley floor. It’s not uncommon to spot an endangered Bighorn Peninsular Sheep here: we’re at the border of a federal sheep protection area monitored by the U.S. Department of Fish and Game, and these cliffs are where the sheep are most at home. It feels good to recognize that in what appears to be the loneliest of places, there are creatures that call this land of what appears to be exile their home.
And to my pleasure, I remember that a walk in the desert, however ambient the day may appear, is never without some startling circumstance that, with distilled irony, manages to seem natural and perfectly in place, and today’s hike is no exception. Bighorn sheep and a highly upscale golf resort, dwelling side by side, with a few hikers thrown for a day adventure into the narrow middle of the mix? Hard to believe, but true. We walk along a 100-foot wide sheep and hiker-designated access corridor, past the lavish, 200-acre estate of one of California’s most prolific Bay Area dot.com tycoons – which sports a private, 18-hole golf course and 20,000 square foot mansion and fills most of the Rancho Mirage Cove. On one side of this corridor, trucks of landscapers and maintenance men wave to us as they enter and leave the estate’s gates. On the other side, our archaeologist points out rows of ancient rock mounds, up to two and three feet high, likely placed centuries ago as sun and star alignment markers by those who inhabited the region long ago.
The cove narrows and seems to reach an impassable dead-end. There’s a small oasis of several Washingtonian Fan Palm trees that offer shade and a bathtub-sized pool of water used as a drinking source by the Bighorn Sheep that visit here at dawn and dusk, and especially during the searing hot summer months. Several piles of sheep droppings, which are the shape and size of rabbit dung, reveal that the oasis has been recently visited by a small herd of the magnificent creatures. I also notice several sheep tracks, another exciting sign that life does, indeed, survive, if not thrive, in these treacherous hills.
And here, the canyon narrows abruptly, both vertically and horizontally, into a another of the desert's own brand of deadpan, contradictory surprises: we've reached a steep, dry waterfall 75 feet high. Although dry today, in the arid, early March weather, the rock face is lip gloss smooth and very slippery, evidence that water, indeed, has passed through here, with what appears to be voluminous quantities. This is the only route in and out of the canyon from here, and is the first in a series of other dry waterfalls that will also have to be climbed. But I am up for the challenge. I'd rather be here, taking the risk of falling, than to be at my house, feeling like the last person who dropped off the edge of the desert where the old Bradshaw Trail ends: at an abandoned, gutted mine that can no longer be plundered for its gold.
Several hikers decide to turn back, not wanting to risk a fall, but I brave the first waterfall climb, and after that, climbing the others isn’t so bad. I gain confidence and know that, if there is a village site ahead, then there have undoubtedly been many others who have passed through here before me - humans and sheep and probably mountain lions, coyotes, lizards, and snakes - and I feel a certain sense of belonging on a special kind of pilgrimage so easily and often forgotten by contemporary woman and man. And after negotiating an hour’s worth of narrow twists and turns in the sandy wash of the canyon, we arrive at the relief of shade offered against the noon sun and warming temperatures by a huge group of palm trees here: we’ve reached pah-wah-te.
It feels good to rest and listen to the other hikers as they marvel in awe at where we are, of how good it feels to sit in the relief of shade offered by the tall palm trees here. As I run the palm of my hand along the smooth rock face of one of the village site’s milling slicks, and learn that seeds from these palm trees, ground on the slick, was a vital food source for the people who once lived here, I can almost imagine that I hear voices from long ago, the voices and words of others who once passed through here, and perhaps even the voices of those who are yet to come. The voices of those I'm with today mingle with these imaginary, but all-too-real and proven onetime past and possibly future visitors to this site.
And suddenly, what felt like a remote desert hike suddenly becomes a place of life and humanity, full of stories and events, voices marking the passing of life and time, stories whose depth and richness can only be fully known by the ever-staring rock faces of the canyon walls, and above them, the magnificent granite cliffs of this mountain range, and the largest peak of all, described as I a kitch by Cahuilla elder and religious leader Francisco Patencio – born in this region in 1840 – know for sure.
And suddenly, this oasis, this ancient village site, this destination for a day hike for a group of friends and frequent stopping point of bighorn sheep and other desert creatures becomes an extension of home, one illuminated and made all the brighter by the omniscient desert sun, just now cresting for a short while, at mid-day, high noon, high above the steep canyon walls that loom above, before slipping into the shadows towards twilight again. As I look to the highest cliff, there it is: the silhouette of a solitary sheep, poised for seconds at the highest nosebleed heights in a place where arguably, no human has been or will every likely be; it nods its massive head towards us before it whispers its way into invisibility beyond the next ridge, leaving the scent of its heart, the memories of its long voice, on my day. I saw it. I felt it. I know it is alive. As am I.
story and pictures by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2012 by Ruth Nolan
by Ruth Nolan, "Desert Word Walker" blog columnist for Heyday Books www.heyday.com
The desert is traversed by many mountain ranges, some of them long, some short, some low, and some rising upward ten thousand feet. They are always circling you with a ragged horizon, dark-hued, bare-faced, barren – just as truly desert as the sands which were washed down from them. – John C. Van Dyke, from "The Desert" (1901), a classic of California desert literature
Today, on a perfect, 70-degree day in March, I’ve joined an archaeologist in the Rancho Mirage Cove, near Palm Springs, to explore and hike a mile back into the narrow, steep slot of Magnesia Falls Canyon to an well-used Cahuilla Indian Village site, pah-wah-te. When we reach the village site, we’ll be looking for evidence of longtime habitation: petroglyphs, potsherds, hand-held manos - fist-sized, round rocks that were used to grind seeds and nuts - and milling slicks, which are large, flat stones whose surfaces have been polished by seed and nut grinding to such a smooth pitch that they appear to have been varnished.
And I'm personally grateful for the invitation to join a small group of people, new acquaintances, if not really friends, to do what I love: get outdoors, walk in the desert, enjoy the company, and make the larger connections to earth and ancestors that give a necessary resonance and depth to life beyond my current circumstances, lonely and bereft as they've been in the past year.
Specifically: since my only child and daughter, Tarah, 23, moved to the Seattle area last summer, and the crushing, sudden ending of a new romantic relationship that had seemed, so beautifully after the tragic loss of my longtime love, to be leading me joyfully into a new life, I've been the loneliest I can ever remember being in my life. In the odd and isolating months since then, the desert, my longtime, comforting lifelong home, has suddenly seemed to be a glaring oppressor, filled with empty expanses, too-silent hours, and a far too hostile symphony of sun.
Empty nest, empty heart, empty life, and there's only one trusted antidote for all of that - to walk the desert again and again, as long as it takes, until I arrive somewhere I recognize, maybe memories of places that link me to stories I remember, somewhere I feel part of the human experience, somewhere I can hear, really listen to, a human voice or two. Somewhere there is a sense...of life to share.
And so, here I am on this day, under the guidance of the archaeologist, making my first steps on the faintest, still-visible threads of what was, for centuries, a well-used Indian trail traversing the north-south length of the Coachella Valley desert area all the way from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea, along which a number of village sites were located, it became a route of exploration for California geologist William Phipps Blake, who led the 1862 Southern Pacific Railroad survey team here; then, it formed a vital leg of the famous Bradshaw Trail, which crossed the desert over 100 miles to and from the gold mines along the Colorado River near Blythe; and finally, into the well-traveled, six-lane, multi-desert city road that it is today.
The Rancho Mirage cove is at the mouth of one of the many highly-valued, wind-protected canyons along the western/southern edges of California desert’s Coachella Valley that line the base of the rugged, dry, Santa Rosa Mountains, which jut steeply skyward as high as 10,800 feet from a near-sea level valley floor. It’s not uncommon to spot an endangered Bighorn Peninsular Sheep here: we’re at the border of a federal sheep protection area monitored by the U.S. Department of Fish and Game, and these cliffs are where the sheep are most at home. It feels good to recognize that in what appears to be the loneliest of places, there are creatures that call this land of what appears to be exile their home.
And to my pleasure, I remember that a walk in the desert, however ambient the day may appear, is never without some startling circumstance that, with distilled irony, manages to seem natural and perfectly in place, and today’s hike is no exception. Bighorn sheep and a highly upscale golf resort, dwelling side by side, with a few hikers thrown for a day adventure into the narrow middle of the mix? Hard to believe, but true. We walk along a 100-foot wide sheep and hiker-designated access corridor, past the lavish, 200-acre estate of one of California’s most prolific Bay Area dot.com tycoons – which sports a private, 18-hole golf course and 20,000 square foot mansion and fills most of the Rancho Mirage Cove. On one side of this corridor, trucks of landscapers and maintenance men wave to us as they enter and leave the estate’s gates. On the other side, our archaeologist points out rows of ancient rock mounds, up to two and three feet high, likely placed centuries ago as sun and star alignment markers by those who inhabited the region long ago.
The cove narrows and seems to reach an impassable dead-end. There’s a small oasis of several Washingtonian Fan Palm trees that offer shade and a bathtub-sized pool of water used as a drinking source by the Bighorn Sheep that visit here at dawn and dusk, and especially during the searing hot summer months. Several piles of sheep droppings, which are the shape and size of rabbit dung, reveal that the oasis has been recently visited by a small herd of the magnificent creatures. I also notice several sheep tracks, another exciting sign that life does, indeed, survive, if not thrive, in these treacherous hills.
And here, the canyon narrows abruptly, both vertically and horizontally, into a another of the desert's own brand of deadpan, contradictory surprises: we've reached a steep, dry waterfall 75 feet high. Although dry today, in the arid, early March weather, the rock face is lip gloss smooth and very slippery, evidence that water, indeed, has passed through here, with what appears to be voluminous quantities. This is the only route in and out of the canyon from here, and is the first in a series of other dry waterfalls that will also have to be climbed. But I am up for the challenge. I'd rather be here, taking the risk of falling, than to be at my house, feeling like the last person who dropped off the edge of the desert where the old Bradshaw Trail ends: at an abandoned, gutted mine that can no longer be plundered for its gold.
Several hikers decide to turn back, not wanting to risk a fall, but I brave the first waterfall climb, and after that, climbing the others isn’t so bad. I gain confidence and know that, if there is a village site ahead, then there have undoubtedly been many others who have passed through here before me - humans and sheep and probably mountain lions, coyotes, lizards, and snakes - and I feel a certain sense of belonging on a special kind of pilgrimage so easily and often forgotten by contemporary woman and man. And after negotiating an hour’s worth of narrow twists and turns in the sandy wash of the canyon, we arrive at the relief of shade offered against the noon sun and warming temperatures by a huge group of palm trees here: we’ve reached pah-wah-te.
It feels good to rest and listen to the other hikers as they marvel in awe at where we are, of how good it feels to sit in the relief of shade offered by the tall palm trees here. As I run the palm of my hand along the smooth rock face of one of the village site’s milling slicks, and learn that seeds from these palm trees, ground on the slick, was a vital food source for the people who once lived here, I can almost imagine that I hear voices from long ago, the voices and words of others who once passed through here, and perhaps even the voices of those who are yet to come. The voices of those I'm with today mingle with these imaginary, but all-too-real and proven onetime past and possibly future visitors to this site.
And suddenly, what felt like a remote desert hike suddenly becomes a place of life and humanity, full of stories and events, voices marking the passing of life and time, stories whose depth and richness can only be fully known by the ever-staring rock faces of the canyon walls, and above them, the magnificent granite cliffs of this mountain range, and the largest peak of all, described as I a kitch by Cahuilla elder and religious leader Francisco Patencio – born in this region in 1840 – know for sure.
And suddenly, this oasis, this ancient village site, this destination for a day hike for a group of friends and frequent stopping point of bighorn sheep and other desert creatures becomes an extension of home, one illuminated and made all the brighter by the omniscient desert sun, just now cresting for a short while, at mid-day, high noon, high above the steep canyon walls that loom above, before slipping into the shadows towards twilight again. As I look to the highest cliff, there it is: the silhouette of a solitary sheep, poised for seconds at the highest nosebleed heights in a place where arguably, no human has been or will every likely be; it nods its massive head towards us before it whispers its way into invisibility beyond the next ridge, leaving the scent of its heart, the memories of its long voice, on my day. I saw it. I felt it. I know it is alive. As am I.
story and pictures by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2012 by Ruth Nolan
Monday, February 20, 2012
Refrigerator Flood
Refrigerator Flood
Mija, Mijo, Meatloaf, My Little Home Slice
End of the world soup, expired.
Broken meth pipe, once air freshener.
Frozen wedding cake, it's my daughter's.
Grapefruit juice frozen, from old trees
Quinoa from Costco, bought for 2012
Cocoa Krispies from the Dollar Store
Your daughter's Cup of Soup, Shrimp.
Save the Desert flyers. Faded now.
man and wife statuette shrink wrapped
Syringes for liquid B12 prescriptions, mine.
Tapatio Hot Sauce for carne asada.
Wild Salmon suffering from freezer burn
Four dozen corn tortillas, string cheese
Two cans of Coca Cola, no more egg whites,
Expired chilis in Trader Joe's cans.
End of the world vegetable seeds.
Enough expired food for the apocalypse.
New bank account, old deposit slips.
Old horchata, spoiled greens, rancid butter.
Your leftover eggnog from Christmas, 2010.
Your leftover Vienna Sausage, Hormel Chili.
Six frozen Pizza Kitchen Pizzas, pepperoni.
cracked 1989 baby cup kept just in case.
Men's brown sock, size 9, doesn't fit.
La Coste Alligator large windbreaker jacket.
Used copy, it's no place 4 a puritan.
Two dogs, one cat, unmarried life,
Rats chew ceiling lamp wires @ midnight
Open the cupboards at dawn, moths fly out.
Mija, Mijo, Meatloaf, My Little Home Slice
End of the world soup, expired.
Broken meth pipe, once air freshener.
Frozen wedding cake, it's my daughter's.
Grapefruit juice frozen, from old trees
Quinoa from Costco, bought for 2012
Cocoa Krispies from the Dollar Store
Your daughter's Cup of Soup, Shrimp.
Save the Desert flyers. Faded now.
man and wife statuette shrink wrapped
Syringes for liquid B12 prescriptions, mine.
Tapatio Hot Sauce for carne asada.
Wild Salmon suffering from freezer burn
Four dozen corn tortillas, string cheese
Two cans of Coca Cola, no more egg whites,
Expired chilis in Trader Joe's cans.
End of the world vegetable seeds.
Enough expired food for the apocalypse.
New bank account, old deposit slips.
Old horchata, spoiled greens, rancid butter.
Your leftover eggnog from Christmas, 2010.
Your leftover Vienna Sausage, Hormel Chili.
Six frozen Pizza Kitchen Pizzas, pepperoni.
cracked 1989 baby cup kept just in case.
Men's brown sock, size 9, doesn't fit.
La Coste Alligator large windbreaker jacket.
Used copy, it's no place 4 a puritan.
Two dogs, one cat, unmarried life,
Rats chew ceiling lamp wires @ midnight
Open the cupboards at dawn, moths fly out.
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