FREEZER BURN: Palm Springs, 117 Degrees

Published in the summer, 2011 issue (#3) of the Inlandia Literary Journal, hot off the press. a wonderful, new online journal.

http://inlandiajournal.org/2011/08/12/ruth-nolan-3/

september isn’t
for ice cream

august cripples
the dogs

july sticks
to itself

june, a time
to lower blinds

we lived on
cool tile floors

four months
in a row last year

grocery shopping
at midnight,

sleeping
through the day

our love
boiled over

when the air
conditioner broke

down and the
frozen pizza thawed

you took my
car keys and

in slow-mo you
knocked over

three 
orange 
cones
then melted 
into the road


The ILJ issue #3 has some excellent pieces this issue, including one by one of my favorite, Inland Empire-based prose writers, Kathleen Alcala, whose work also graced the pages of "Inlandia: A Literary Journey through southern California's Inland Empire," published in 2006. The issue also features a "spotlight focus, Inland Writers Workshop, downtown Riverside," which I've led since summer, 2008, for Dr. Harki Dhillon, who writes poetry & prose, and is a longtime member of the workshop. I'm happy to see cover art by my artist friend, Cindy Rinne & fiction from another of my workshop members, Juanita Mantz Rodriguez, who I believe also attends the Inlandia-Palm Springs workshop, as well. Enjoy!

Desert Home Diaspora

photograph "Bees One: Turtle Mountains Wilderness Near the Rock Altar and Aztec Well, Mojave Desert" by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

If you could call me one more time,
I’d say I’m looking at a raven sky,

that the California desert isn’t Israel,
though our constellations are the same,

I’d say that I’m overjoyed by pink
wildflower clouds in the garden, it’s

April, and the tiny green oranges
you fingered grow bigger on the trees

I’d say that the dog I love is still
healing from his back injury,

that I made a bit of extra cash from
selling the didgeridoo and shotgun,

that the needled Palo Verde trees
are sprayed with yellow designer flowers,

that the red-throated Costa’s hummingbirds
suckle white sugar syrup from my feeder,

that the sunflower seeds you scattered
with one toss of the hand are now sprouting,

that the crows are occupying the tallest wasp-
filled palm, though you once beat them all away,

I swim to the bottom of the deep end of the
pool these torched summer nights, crying stars,

pretending that I haven’t been forsaken
in the promised land, that I don’t need you.


by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan
forthcoming published in “Raven and Crow Anthology”,2011, editor Cynthia Anderson.

for the one who died
halfway between desert and Inland Empire
in the heart of the Badlands
right before Easter Day 2010

Desert Rose: (re)membering memory, here, for your lost flower

DESERT ROSE: (re)membering memory, for your lost flower

I am ancient geoglyph
Trace my blossom in the sand
Where Kokopelli lures me
To follow you everywhere

I’m your white desert rose,
Touch me, I’m from
A million years ago,
Pick me up, I’ll dissolve

I am water everywhere
Intersecting the desert,
Bringing life to the fat shores
Of humanity’s loaded seams

I am wind, then smoke,
Blowing through empty rooms
Flowing through your dreams
Then, standing still

I am drum
Loaning my face
To your beating heart
Your rake’s caress

I am rain and fog
Drifting down from clouds
Unable to fill the thirst
in your searching soul

I am thunder,
You are storm
You are standing still
I am second wind

I am the open mine
You penetrated deeply into me
leaving birthmarks
across my weathered skin

I am barbed wire fence
Circling what you left behind
Crumbling into an empty void
carved out w/your shovel's caress

I am pyramid
rocks on a lonely hill
talisman to goddesses & gods
you would call me Sphinx

I am silent, I am loud
I am meteor, I am sin
I am love, I am apple
I inhabit white sunstroke

Always waiting
Always alone
Always a memory
About to be lost
About to be re-born

I am an old pipe dream
Your last feathered song

I am water in the desert,
I am a fluted memory of land


photograph & poem
by Ruth Nolan

photograph: copy of flower two, by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

poem: Desert Rose (re)rembering memory
copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

They Are Coming Like A Storm....

“They Are Coming Like A Storm”
Dedication Ceremony & Protest Held Side by Side on June 17 at Blythe Solar Millenium Site

By RUTH NOLAN
Copyright June 29, 2011 by Ruth Nolan

On Friday, June 17, a private groundbreaking ceremony was held at the Blythe Solar Millenium site in eastern Riverside County and attended by elected local, state, and federal government officials, including California Governor Jerry Brown, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey, as well as German board members of the German-based Solar Millenium company. “We (the state of California) are going to be the world leader for solar energy,” said Brown at the ceremony.

However, the ceremony also attracted protestors from Native Americans and other citizens, who strongly oppose the project based on concerns over the destruction of Native American sacred sites. Members of La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle, the Chemehuevi and Quechan Indian tribes, and other concern citizens who attended the June 17 protest object to the destruction of the area’s estimated 300 geoglyphs, trails, and other Native American sacred and archaeological sites. A
100-foot wide road has already been bladed through the area by construction workers.

“They’ve already destroyed geoglyphs of the sun,” said Patricia Figueroa of La Cuna de Aztlan. “We’re desperate. All geoglyphs are tied to the creation story.”

According to members of La Cuna de Aztlan, former BLM archaeologist Boma Johnson, and members of the area’s Native American tribes, including Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Quechan, there are at least 300 geoglyphs ,as well as parts of the Xam Kwatchan and Cocopah-Maricopa Trails, within and adjacent to the boundaries of the Blythe Solar Millenium site. These geoglyphs hold spiritual/religious meaning that are crucial to the spiritual/religious beliefs and practices to members of all of the Colorado River Indian tribes, including one geoglyph of the anthropomorphic figure Kokopilli; a 16-level altar to the underworld; circles and shapes and swirls that form a spiritual/religious connection between humans, the earth, and the cosmos; a thunderbird; a dragonfly; three whales; an octopus, and more.

The Solar Trust of America Renewable Energy Station is the most expansive solar project to be approved on federal land, spanning 7,000 acres eight miles west of Blythe, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and is expected to be the largest solar facility in the world.

Although it is currently under investigation by the German government for embezzlement and financial misconduct of its former CEO - who received $12.5 after working for only 74 days -, the Solar Millenium company is still on track to receive over 2.1 billion dollars in U.S. loans and an 18 million dollar grant from the Federal government, funded largely by U.S. taxpayer money to complete the Blythe project. The company has also secured taxpayer-backed loans from the Department of Energy, though the total amount was not disclosed.

La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle filed complaints on December 28, 2010, in United States District Court, Southern District of California, challenging the Bureau of Land Management permitting processes related to six large solar facilities planned for the Mohave, Sonoran and Colorado deserts of Southern California. The group was joined by CARE, Californians for Renewable Energy, and 6 individual Native American plaintiffs. Litigation is ongoing.

Citizens and members of the areas Native American tribes have asked the government to focus renewable energy efforts on rooftop solar, instead of destructive projects such as Blythe and in other areas of pristine California desert, which is one of the last remaining, largely ecologically and archaeologically-intact areas of the United States.

According to Philip Smith, who is a member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, “Our church, the church of the Chemehuevi and Mojave and other Colorado River Indian tribes, is on the rocks and on the land and it is on the trails such as the Xam Kwatchan Trail that passes in the area near the geoglyphs. These sacred sites are where we pray and hold religious ceremonies. You cannot replace a sacred site once you destroy it. What will I tell my children and grand-children? That they have no history, that they have no religion, that they can’t practice their religion?

Another protestor, Reginald Wally Antone, a Quechan Indian who lives in Yuma, also voiced his concerns.“My religion, my spiritual life and practices, have to take place at the sacred sites. it can’t happen somewhere else. The Blythe geoglyph site is one of these places, and the Kokopilli geoglyph, especially the eye of the Kokopelli geoglyph, is sacred to the Quechan Indians, according to our Quechan elders. If they destroy that, I can’t go there to pray.”

Salazar maintains that the Obama Administration considered Indian concerns a top priority. We have to make decisions to move forward in a way (that is) respectful of native concerns,” he said.

However, La Cuna de Aztlan, which has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the BLM and several leaders of the region’s Indian tribes, asserts that their concerns have been consistently ignored by the government in all stages of the Blythe solar project planning, including the Department of Energy/BLM sponsored PEIS meetings, held this past February in Indian Wells, which attracted 100 community members, most of who strongly objected to large solar development projects in the California desert.

Ron Van Fleet, Mojave Indian Tribal Elder and grandson of the last traditional Mojave Chief, who also attended the PEIS meeting in Indian Wells last February, has voiced his concerns over the lack of government respect for Native American in the renewable energy development process. The Mojave Indians, along with the Chemehuevi Indians, consider themselves caretakers of the entire California desert region, with ancestral history, usage, and religious practices dating back for centuries.

“In the last five years, they have approached our tribe, with all these big solar and wind projects, and they haven’t told us specifically what they are going to do. Our tribal leaders have written letters and gone to the public meetings to voice our concerns about these projects, and they ignore us and go ahead and do what they want anyway,” he says. “They’re coming like a storm. We aren’t opposed to solar energy. But we strongly object to these huge renewable energy projects that are going to destroy our sacred desert lands.”

Memory: A Poem to commemorate Japan

This poem was written for a collection of poetry penned by southern California poets immediately after the recent 9.0 earthquake/tsunami in Japan. The collection is being overseen by several Cal State-San Bernardino graduate MFA students, and they will be hosting readings that will raise funds to send to Japan. My poem was inspired by the story of the 83 year old woman who rode her bicycle away from the tsunami.

Memory
when you had gone, the wind came, as I suppose it would high, but lonely - Emily Dickinson

she comes again,
old bones breaking free, she’s 83 years old

she comes again,
all she’s sutured together, coming undone again

she comes again,
an elderly woman making her ocean of rounds

she comes again,
riding her bicycle past the waterlogged lost and found

she comes again,
riding through the rice fields scorched by 1945

She comes again
swimming through the memories as they rise and fall

she comes again,
remembering what it was to love inside the flames

she comes again,
not forgetting, having traveled nowhere at all

-Ruth Nolan
March 13, 2011

Friendly Fire: a poem about 2 runaway girls, a shotgun and a jackrabbit cabin

Forthcoming next month in Heyday's new literary series, "New California Writing 2011" http://www.heydaybooks.com/upcoming/new-california-writing-2011.html

FRIENDLY FIRE
by Ruth Nolan


The attic door opened easily
that pearl smooth August night
after a day hitchhiking in dusty wind,
no real labor, no hard breathing.

One push, we climbed on the roof,
two sunburned, runaway teenage girls,
a backpack full of cheese and fruit
stolen from the market that day

We'd broken into a desert cabin.
I shot a window with my father's gun.
No one had been there for so long
the refrigerator was propped open.

We crawled through splintered glass.
You worried that there might be
a dead baby or rattlesnake inside.
I found an unopened bottle of wine.

I held the buck knife, and you held
the fruit. I sliced the salami and
licked my sticky fingers, then you
twisted the corkscrew and laughed.

We sifted through the box of jewels
stolen from our moms. You clasped
a silver necklace on my burnt neck
and I slipped an old ring onto you.

We shared an old wool army blanket
and a man's extra-large flannel shirt,
talked about all the guys we shared,
cock and breast size, abortion cramps.

You wanted to know what it was like
to fight fires; I told you I had no sisters.
I popped the cork, you passed the bottle,
I thought I could taste your tongue,

delivered like the silent rise of moon,
punctuating spaces between stars,
I watched Venus, Orion’s Belt fade
while you spread oysters onto rye.

New California Writing 2011 is edited by Gayle Wattawa, who edited "Inlandia: A Literary Journey through southern California's Inland Empire" and also my terrifice, wise supervising editor for "No Place for a Puritan."

A Desert of Cathedrals; A World of Churches

Save the California Desert from Ruin - NO to proposed solar & wind Industrial Zones!
by Ruth Nolan – presented on February 8, 2011, Indian Wells public hearing to the federal government's fast-track solar/wind installations in the California southwest.
copyright (c) 2011 Ruth Nolan.


A Desert of Cathedrals; A World of Churches

I was 10 years old in 1973 when my father first drove me in his old Volkswagen Bug from my hometown of San Bernardino, imbedded in the smog of southern California sixty miles east of Los Angeles, up the long, steep grade of Interstate 15 and over the four thousand-foot lip of Cajon Pass. I held my breath as we reached the top and saw, for the first time in my life, a land that was as wide and vast as the sea. There, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a long necklace of headlights stretched east for forty miles; toward the west, the sky was lit with rose and orange hues. We descended towards the small town of Victorville, racing past Joshua Trees whose thick-needled fists etched gracefully and fiercely against the sunset. I knew then and there that I’d found my place, my calling, my landscape. I stuck my head out the window and looked up: there was the evening star, a slice of moon alongside it. I was instantly and forever smitten.

This was an empty and imposing land, rife with danger and thrill. I sensed that an entirely new adventure lay in wait for our family there, where we intended to re-locate to be near my father’s new job. My intuitions were confirmed when my mother opened a kitchen drawer to find a baby Mojave Green rattlesnake; when I went to bed serenaded by a symphony of coyotes every night; when my brother went to the hospital with dehydration after climbing a harsh rock peak near our house on an August afternoon. The desert was as silent as a church during a funeral and as wide open and empty as a schoolyard on a Sunday, but it was never, ever boring.

It’s essential that President Obama, in his swiftness – and rightly so - to shift the country’s energy needs to renewable energy, considers how easily a tragic irony may prevail in the current rush to establish massive industrial zones that will harbor renewable energy facilities in the California deserts. We now see the damage and that our dependency on fossil fuels has done to our planet. To repeat the large-scale energy production facilities for any type of energy, including “renewable,” which requires the types of massive technological zones that have already been approved or are pending approval under Obama’s “fast track” renewable energy plan in the California deserts is to foolishly and tragically follow the same swath of destruction caused by fossil fuel technology. In other words: in our rush to embark on a new era of sustainability, let us not destroy in order to procreate. Renewable energy production can, and must, be implemented in a responsible manner that doesn’t leave tremendous carbon footprints, and does not take more than it gives.




On that day when I was 10 years old, the road that we drove on layered over a network of extensive and sophisticated Indian trails, used for thousands of years by different desert Indian tribes to traverse the Mojave Desert, following the entire 150 mile length of the sporadically-flowing, northern-seeking Mojave River, sometimes weaving between forests of cottonwood trees, and more often not, to its final resting place at Soda Dry Lake. The road we drove on was interwoven atop a trail network – just one of many that traversed every nook and cranny of the California desert - that had myriad village sites, culturally important, and well-established geographic notations throughout their vein-like expanses. In other word, there was and is no part of the California that is not known or has not been known and lived in and used as a culturally crucial and a sustainable way – to the various Indian tribes who have lived here since time unknown.

Little did I know, on that first drive to the high desert, that this region, largely seen to that date as a waterless wasteland ready for the taking and wonton raping, through widespread and reckless mining and military usage, for example, was, in even in the 1970’s, just beginning to be approached, investigated, researched, and understood for the environmental, cultural, archaeological and internationally significant region that it was and is. Millions of visitors come to the area every year from throughout the area, to visit our national parks, and also from the hugely populated urban areas not far from our desert’s westernmost edges; that our area is so attractive to others, as a one-of-a-kind geographic icon, and also so much in demand as a recreational outlet for southern California’s masses, not to mention that the deserts are home to many endangered species, wildlife corridors, Native American resources and spiritual-cultural sights, such as those named in the Salt Song Trail Ceremonial songs of the Chemehuevi Indians, should only give more importance to the extremely careful consideration of disturbing and forever destroying what little of this precious area that still remains under the fragile care of our collective hands.



As a child, I perceived that the desert was a place of wildness and possibility, quickly learning the nuances of rock hunting and tortoise sightings, of flash floods and dry waterfalls, and to succinctly endure long months and seasons when rain doesn’t fall. As I grew older, I came to see that this was also a peopled place, and as I read about my adopted homeland as widely as I could, I learned that this was a land rife with stories of courage, despair, a land where hopes are endlessly fulfilled and countless dreams are dissolved. I learned that the desert is not some desperate, completely waterless void: in my hikes and explorations, I learned that thousands of springs and waterholes grace it. They are often hidden, detectable only to the longtime desert resident—by a lone cottonwood or sprig of weed in the Mojave, and by a cluster of native Washingtonian Fan Palm trees tucked into deep canyons of the Western Colorado. Likewise, instead of being easily diminished to the tiresome caricatures dominated by a literary canon that favors cities, farms, and forests, the human character of the California desert defies the stereotypes created by those writers who have tried to tuck it into a neatly categorized place.

Most people are certainly familiar with stories of the rugged desert survivalist, the consummate “desert rat” or gold miner, grizzled and worn by sun, who wears a rattlesnake-skin headband and roams the desert with a bag of tools. However, the stories of the earliest people, our desert Indians, whose very languages, creation stories and songs depict an active relationship between the landscape and an early and enduring people, such as the many locations named and form a crucial contributions to historical and contemporary American literature. In stock desert literature, stories of rugged western settlers, gunslingers, and stagecoach riders, who brave the desert’s harsh expanses and pray to make it to water, have been greatly emphasized. In contrast, the true stories of our state’s deserts are as rich and textured as its geography, which covers 25 million acres, comprises one-fourth of the state’s expanse, and includes all or parts of seven of the state’s largest counties.




I’ve been told by biologic resources that the California desert is second only to the Amazonian Rain Forests in terms of its plant diversity. Scientists are still trying to learn what treasures reside here. Further disturbing of desert topsoil that is necessary for mass installations of renewable energy facilities will not only rob the entire southwest of the CO2 formation that naturally occurs in the living, biotic “desert crust,” but will pose a tremendous threat to the respiratory health of millions of southwestern residents and create an uncontrollable “dust bowl” and sharply influence the inevitable increase of such viral diseases as the dreaded “valley fever,” already on the rise in the area; the disaster of Owens Dry Lake comes to mind.

The California desert is a very windy place, and it doesn’t take long for disturbed desert to stir up and create hazardous dust-zones. In addition to posing serious health threats, there is the issue of freeway visibility. Already, on various places along Interstate 10, a major east-west artery involving traffic and heavy truck travel from Los Angeles to points east, dust storms are ea problem. This area includes the corridor in eastern Riverside County where proposed renewable energy sites have already been approved, have large yellow warning signs that say “warning: dust storm ahead when lights blinking.” I’ve been on the freeway in the area when the blowing dust has been so bad that I’ve had to pull over.



In the desert, “church is on the face of the land itself,” and to scar its essence needlessly is, in essence, to tear down a world of churches and tear down a vital part of our human and national and global heart. In the desert, an old-growth Joshua Tree is the equivalent to an ancient redwood tree in our state’s northwestern forests. In the desert, the sacred desert tortoise, a federally-protected species, is what the great white whale is to our Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In the desert, the golden eagle and red-tailed hawk will be among the thousands of birds who live and migrate here on important migratory corridors who stand to lose their lives when they are sucked into windmill farms. We all know what happened in the Gulf of Mexico and the widespread environmental and cultural havoc created along out southern coastlines this past year with the BP Oil Spill. To install massive, technologically experimental and highly polluting, noisy, destructive renewable energy facilities in the California desert is to spell disaster that will have no relief.

Rather than exploit the California deserts, I’d say let’s do more to protect them, now and for future generations; to protect precious aspects of our country’s heritage so important to all of us, as a country and global community, that once gone, can never be replaced Let’s not destroy virgin desert lands, what little of them remain, and forever desecrate this very special area that is still so largely unknown, a place that motivates spiritual and personal renewal and inspiration, a region of uniqueness that can never be duplicated. Let us not forever destroy the cultural and archaeological artifacts of our desert’s Native American people, many which to date remain scantly known and little understood. The California deserts are filled with heritage and wisdom that we can’t afford to erase. At a time in human history when so much has been irreparably plundered world-wide, it would be in our best interests to sustain that which might very well serve us in our efforts towards survival on our heavily overtaxed planet.

The desert hums with the pulse of overlapping human lives to form a river of sound, a complex and richly-woven conglomerate of human voices that sometimes overflows its shores with terrible roars, gathering momentum to overrun the dry wash, and at other places, dissipates entirely, only to relieve the eyes with the gracious vision of water, that may or may not be a mirage, later on. I invite you to step in, lightly, if you please, with great reverence and curiosity and respect, to share its mysteries, its rough edges, its infinite tranquilities.