IT'S NOT JUST THE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS ...

Oh wait, it is ...

AN OCCASIONALLY WEARY AND SOMEWHAT LONESOME TRAVELLER

Life being as it is, it turns out I’m in the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, writing a very short piece about walking in the American desert.  The opening is below.

 

More than that they’ve got an illustrator (Jaqui Oakley) to do my portrait – from photographs not from life - a perfectly decent-looking man who only very very vaguely resembles me.

The first two paras of the article:

Geoff Nicholson

NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR

The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States —it was the 1970s —and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced.            

I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle. That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did. I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction.

RUSKIN ROCKS, AND SO DO I

Last year, at LAX airport coming back from a trip to the States, my luggage and I got pulled aside by security. I’m one of nature’s worriers but I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, and I knew that I had, a little reluctantly, left my legal recreational marijuana behind.

 

It turned out that the security woman had looked at the X-ray of my bag and seen something worrying in the side pocket. I unzipped the pocket and found that the thing worrying her was a rock that I’d picked up while walking in the Mojave desert.

 

Fortunately I did not end up being interrogated in a small room by uniformed men with small mustaches.  And when I showed the rock to the security woman who’d pulled me over, she seemed to find the situation, and me, rather quaint and charming, and she let me go on my way with my rock.  But I couldn’t help worrying that maybe a stricter woman or man might have taken it more seriously and accused me of trying to steal part of America, like it was the Elgin Marbles or something.

 

I think this is the rock in question but I’m not 100 per cent sure.  I really need a cataloguing system.

 

This year the inamorata and I were walking in the Saguaro National Park, in Arizona, on the Broadway Trailhead, a very dramatic-looking but incredibly safe- feeling bit of walking territory with people just going for an afternoon stroll or exercising their dogs, 

And we saw a man heading towards us who was jogging rather than walking and he had something in his hand and he slowed when he got near and he said, far more to the inamorata than to me,  ‘It’s turquoise and copper.  I collect pieces to give to people,’ and he handed her a very small rock he was carrying, perhaps just a pebble, that looked, and stills looks, like this

 

To my untutored eyes it didn’t look much like either turquoise or copper but it was a nice little gift.  We had no problems at all at airport security.

And the two weeks later in Sheffield, England we saw some of the Ruskin Collection, and it turns out, and I did sort of know this anyway, that John Ruskin was quite a collector of rocks, displayed in the museum like this:

They seem to have a very adequate cataloguing system

WALKING WITH TOM AND THE LORD

 Tom Waits is always with us, and he’s especially with me whenever I walk in a garden and I remember his song ‘Way Down in The Hole’ with the lines that run,

‘When you walk through the garden

You gotta watch your back’

As close as I can get to a picture of Tom Waits in a garden.

 

I assume this refers to the Garden of Gethsemane but I think perhaps it applies to walking in many, perhaps most, gardens.

 

         Of course I knew that the Garden of Gethsemane was where Jesus prayed the night he was betrayed by Judas and where he experienced his ‘agony.’  But lately I discovered there are at least four potential locations for the Garden of Gethsemane.  All of them are near the Mount of Olives, but the Catholics reckon it’s the garden at the Church of All Nations built over the ‘Rock of the Agony,’ or maybe it’s by the Tomb of the Virgin Mary to the north. The Orthodox Greeks reckon it’s to the east.  The Orthodox Russians place it in the orchard adjacent to the Church of Mary Magdalene. I think I’ve got that right but I stand to be corrected by true believers.

Now, I don’t imagine I shall ever walk in the Garden of Gethsemane (though I gather there are plenty of bus tours), and for that matter I don’t think I’ll be following Waits’ advice that ‘If you walk with Jesus, he’s gonna save your soul.’ However, I have been walking among sculptural representations of the Lord, in the Desert Christ Park, on Sunnyslope Drive in Yucca Valley, and I have least peered into an artistic representation of the Garden of Gethsemane.  I shall explain.

      Now, one of the things I sometimes think about while walking in gardens, is what’s the difference between a park and a garden: and OK I agree its not one of humanity’s most pressing questions. However the Desert Christ Park had me thinking again.  

The name would seem to define it as a park, but their mission statement reads, ‘To provide a desert sculpture garden of hope, prayer and beauty; by sharing the Peace of Christ through art.’ So does that mean the place is simultaneously a park and a garden.  Maybe.

 

The Desert Christ Park was established 1951 when a single concrete statue of Jesus was placed there.  The statue was by Antone Martin, sometimes described as a sculptor-poet, who looked like this, which is pretty much the way you'd want him to look:

 

 He’d wanted to have the statue installed at the Grand Canyon but the authorities wouldn’t go for it.  However, the Reverend Eddie Garver who was pastor at the Yucca Valley Community Church, and had acquired five acres from the government to form what he hoped would be a Christian theme park (or I suppose garden), was happy to have the statue on his patch.  

 

Over the next decade Anton Martin made many more statues, most of them created in situ.  Jesus is consistently portrayed as a good looking feller, long hair swept back, a beard, mostly with very serious though a smile seems to occasionally to play about his lips. He does, of course, look very white.

 

Many of the statues are part of tableaux; Blessing the Children, The Last Supper, Sermon on the Mount, and of course the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus on his knees praying, while the disciples Peter, James and John are asleep.  This kind of thing:

 

Though in fact you can’t get very close because of this stern bit of signage.

 

I’ve been going to the Desert Christ Park once in a while for over two decades now, and there was definitely a period when the place went into decline.  The concrete is formed around armatures of rebar.  Some of the ‘flesh’ on the fingers had fallen off in places off over the leaving Jesus with metal spikes for hands.  To be fair this did have a certain grim appeal.

But when I was there a couple of months ago, a lot of repair work had been done, though there was still the occasional chipped or missing nose, which seems forgivable.

     Contemporary and historic photographs show the Garden of Gethsemane to be dense with gnarled olive trees – some of them reckoned to be 900 years old.  And the Desert Christ Park has some glorious olives trees.  

Some of them are also bedecked with wonderful, architectural birdhouses, an idea I may steal for my own unreligious garden.

 

Now in some ways it’s hard to take the Desert Christ Park entirely seriously.  There is something faintly absurd about the enterprise. And Antone Martin is no Michelangelo. But then who is?

 

On the other hand, having walked around and among Anton Martin’s statues, I find it impossible to find the concept entirely ludicrous. The place is rich with belief, sincerity, spiritual commitment.  You emerge, or certainly you can emerge feeling good, feeling charmed and uplifted. I didn’t even feel that I had to watch my back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DESERT BEACHES

I’m not surely exactly when I ‘discovered’ the Salton Sea, but I know it was some time in the 1990s and I’d driven out there from Palm Springs, not knowing what I’d find.  Of course the Salton Sea didn’t (and doesn’t) need any actual discovering, though it does seem to be one of those places that’s constantly being reinvented and reimagined.

 

On that day twenty some years ago, I arrived in North Beach at the top end of the sea.  I was part desert rat, part dumb tourist and I found myself in a Ballardian landscape; empty motel, abandoned swimming pool, pelicans on the water.

 

And I especially enjoyed the shuttered North Beach Yacht Club, designed by Albert Frey, which I understand has since been restored at considerable.  Back then it looked like something from the future of the past.  

I thought I’d set foot in one of the most wonderful places on earth.

 

The Salton Sea is a Johnny-come-lately of the California landscape.  It came into existence in the very early part of the twentieth century when canals were built, diverting water from the Colorado River into the dry lakebed of the Salton Sink, and for a while the land became fertile and agriculture thrived.

 

But then the Colorado River burst its irrigation channels and vast amount of its water went into the Salton Basin; a disaster for farms and the farmers who lived there.  It took a while to sort that out.

 

Much, much later, in the 1950s, there was Salton City, intended to be a swanky desert resort, but with water. That worked for a while but then flooding, pollution, and high salinity made the Salton Sea a much less appealing holiday destination.

 

Of course none of this deterred a certain kind of desert lover and desert dweller.  Not so far away from this ‘planned community’ was and is a community of a different kind: Bombay Beach which is a sort of ghost town and a sort of hippy exclave: though now according to sources it’s an ‘art hub.’

So that’s where we went.  We walked on the beach, we looked at the art, we talked to a few other walkers, we observed some dangerous looking black smoke on the horizon. Without being too intrusive we looked at the various curious ways people live there.  It was great.

 

And later, not wanting to do the same old same old, we went to Salt Creek where I hadn’t been before.  It looks like an unspoiled stretch of desert shore, and naturally you want to walk across the sand and shingle and fragmented fish bones to the water.

 

I tried but I didn’t quite make it.  The land seemed perfectly solid underfoot but before long my feet went through the top crust into the mud beneath.  That was fair enough and much as expected, and I could deal with that.  I’d done it often enough before.  But then a little further on my feet through the mud into some hideous black tar. Once your foot went in you needed colossal strength to pull it out against. It was impossible to walk there. We turned back, returned to the sand and gravel, feeling like failures.

 

Pic by Caroline Gannon, as are all the ones below.

And then I looked at my shoes.  They were not a pretty sight.  In fact I didn’t think I could ever wear them again, certainly not to go out to the martini bar I had in mind for the evening.  

So I schlepped to the thrift store in Palm Springs and bought some decent looking shoes that cost all of 3 dollars and looked like this:

And they lasted all of three days before one of the heels came off.

 

The desert, she’s a tough mistress, and very hard on the shoes.