NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO WALK

 So I went walking in Death Valley last month.  It’s something I do every two or three years, and of course I see the ironies of complaining that it gets ever more crowded and less wild each time, but it’s what I do.  And I’ve been going there for 30 years, long enough to be able to justify some grumpiness about change and decay.

There was snow on the high ground in Death Valley when I was there this time, and some of the main roads were closed, and some were still washed out from last year, which made the various trails and attractions that were accessible more crowded than ever.

Echoing Edward Abbey, I have been known to rail against “industrial tourism,” not least because it reduces vast, diverse landscapes to a series of sites and trails, scenic overlooks, points of interest, and so on.  You’re told what to look for; you’re told what to see.  Giving these things names – the Devil’s Cornfield, Dante’s View, Zabriskie Point - only adds to the problem. The “attractions” become a kind of checklist that you can tick off and have done with.

    So yes, visitors flock to these designated sites but more than that, it means that a lot of visitors see nothing except those sites; the 3 million acres of Death Valley are perceived simply as territory you cross on the way to the next attraction.

    Now, I’m not a complete misanthrope, and when I’m walking in the crowds of New York or London I’m very happy to consider myself part of teeming humanity.  But when I’m in the middle of 3 million acres of desert then I think it’s reasonable to want a little space to myself.

But the beauty part of this form of industrial tourism is that if you choose to go somewhere that hasn’t been designated as a tourist site then chances are you’ll not see another soul.  And so I found myself stopping the car in various unmarked bits of land, pulling off the road and parking, then just walking off into the desert, walking for as long as seemed natural, and then turning around and walking back.  I was to say “walking off into some unremarkable bit of desert,” but the fact is, all of Death Valley is remarkable.  You’d have to be as insensate as a rock (or a moody adolescent) to set foot in Death Valley and not experience a profound sense of the gorgeously threatening grandeur of the earth.

 I ended up here:

      And here:

And here:

    I think I could probably just about find my way back to these places, but maybe I couldn’t, and in any case it doesn’t seem to matter so very much.  It is, as they say, all good.  The fact that these places don’t have names – Nicholson’s Loop, for instance – is all to the good, if you ask me.

Still, I think there are some questions to be asked about whether a walk needs a destination; and I don’t have an absolute answer.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good journey’s end, a peak or a ruin or a scenic overview, I do: but they never seem either necessary or sufficient for a good walk.  And in my miscellaneous walking this time in Death Valley I did find myself thinking about two lines from the Dylan song Isis “She said where you been?/I said no place special.”  But maybe that line doesn’t apply to walking since there’s no such thing as “no place special,” because all places are special one way or another, although that’s not to say that they’re all equal, or equally interesting. 

A walk around the rim of a volcanic crater whether alone or in the company of others probably has more going for it than a walk round the parking lot at K-Mart, but that’s no reason only to walk around craters. 

You can see how a man might tie himself in knots with these matters.

Anyhow, on the way back from Death Valley, coming through Yucca Valley, I did a walk I’d been promising to do for a while, in the Pioneertown Mountains Preserve, which consists of a “modest” 25,500 acres, and the walk was modest too, about two miles in each direction up through Pipes Canyon to something known as the Olson Ruins. The map you pick up at the Ranger station has them as “Olsen Ruins” but most sources have the name as Olson.

I think you know I like walking in ruins, though I hadn’t done any research about these particular ruins.  And so I walked up a clearly marked and perhaps slightly too well kept trail  (a ranger told me they had high school “volunteers” to keep it in good condition), past petroglyphs, Joshua Trees that had been burned in the Pioneertown fire some ten years back, past willow beds, through small scattered patches of snow. 

Compared with Death Valley the landscape was tame, and there were one or two other walkers but fewer than you’d have found on any recognized trail in Death Valley.

And in due course there were the ruins, picturesque to a degree, and a reasonable journey’s end, but nothing on the grand scale – just somebody’s house, the roof and windows gone, and most of the walls gone too, though there was one room you could actually walk into, that was completely intact, and the corners of the cabin were more or less solid - you could see the chicken wire construction.

As I said, I hadn’t researched the Olson Ruins, but once I got home, I did. The story goes that the cabin belonged to an onyx miner named John Olson who’d been mining since the 1920s.  He was still there in 1945 and one day he encountered a young man living rough in the desert, a man in his early 20s (sources seem uncertain about his exact age) named Edward E. Emmery, a soldier recently returned from Burma who had just (oh the irony) deserted from Fort MacArthur.

Olson, in his mid 70s, invited Emmery to stay in the cabin, and conditions must have been crowded, and the two guys must have been in each other’s way.  But that doesn’t seem much of an explanation for why, a few days later, Emmery shot Olson and fled the scene, returning to the open desert, taking food from the cabin with him..  

Four days later Olson was still alive and was discovered by friends and taken to hospital, but he died there. Emmery was caught a few days after that.  Emmery claimed the shooting was accidental, but nobody believed him, and he was charged with murder.  I haven’t been able to find out what happened to Emmery.

A cabin makes a good destination for a walk (there are quite a few in Death Valley – and indeed a book about them), a ruined cabin is even better, but a ruined murder cabin – ah, that’s the stuff.  I’m sure they’d get more visitors if they named it The Olson Murder Ruins, but I’m very glad they don’t.

A WALK IN THE FIRMAMENT

Had you been in Ridgecrest, California on the afternoon of Saturday, January 21^st you might well have seen a small group of people walking south down the narrow sidewalk of China Lake Boulevard, occasionally spilling into the road.  The group was mostly, but by no means all, women, and one of the walkers appeared (I say appeared because you don’t want to be dogmatic about these things) to be a very tall man in a wig and fishnet stockings.  This was, as you’ll have guessed by now, one more anti-Trump demonstration, officially described as the Women's March to Petroglyph Park, followed by a candlelight vigil.  The photo below is by Jessica Weston of the Daily independent.

I didn’t join in because I wasn’t sure of the etiquette of some out of town, sis-gendered male infiltrating a women’s march, but I waved and cheered as they went on their way.  It was a very good-natured march.

In fact I was going to the Murango Museum, which I knew had the Gladys Merrick Garden, and a labyrinth, but I hadn’t been expecting a “planetary walk” a long outdoor path depicting the solar system, the sun represented by a small football-sized yellow sphere, the other planets represented by spheres of appropriate size and positioned at the proper scale distance from the sun. Pluto (which perhaps they still regarded as a planet: info was thin on the ground) was some two hundred yards away along the path.

In fact it was cold and raining in Ridgecrest by the time I got to the museum but who could resist a walk to the end of the solar system?  You walked out there, past earth:

past Saturn:

past all the rest, and when you got to the end (well before you reached the mall with the Marshall and Jo-Ann stores) you looked back across the planets at a now barely visible sun.  

You could also make out some white structures related, I think, to astronomical observation; one of which had been burned since I last visited.

I was deeply impressed by this planetary arrangement. I’d never seen or done a planet walk before, though I now gather there are plenty of them about, and many are much longer than the one I did.  The walk at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont, is 1.6 miles long.  The one at the Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma is two and a bit, though the latter has the planets set at intervals along a winding trail.  The joy of the walk in Ridgecrest is that it’s straight and flat (the way you imagine a diagram of the planets to be).

Ridgecrest is on the edge of the Mojave desert, and I often get annoyed by people who describe the desert as a “lunar landscape.”  Nevertheless, I dreamed that night that I was walking on the moon.  I didn’t have an oxygen tank but I could breath without any problem.  There were also trees on the moon, actually bristlecone pines.  This picture is by Ansel Adams (but you probably new that).

I’d only vaguely heard the name until that day, but there was a photographic exhibition about them in the museum – wonderfully gnarled, twisted things, and they are, by most accounts, the oldest living organisms on earth, some of them about five thousand years old. 

I determined that come spring I will make an expedition to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest which is just up the road from Ridgecrest.  (It closes for the winter).  The bristlecones grow between 5,600 feet, which is not a problem, and 11,200 feet, which makes me think an oxygen tank might be a useful bit of equipment for that part of the hike. 

WALKING IN WIGS

Here’s some fairly minor walking lore relating to James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), a Scottish judge, linguist, and (I suppose you’d have to say) philosopher, one of the early theorists of evolution. On no obvious scientific basis he posited the notion that men were descended from apes.  He’s even mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewick.

He seems not to have been taken all that seriously by contemporaries.  According to a piece in The Herald and Genealogist, Volume the Third, 1866, “it is said that Lord Kames, to whom he would on one occasion have yielded precedence, declined it, saying. ‘By no means, my Lord, you must walk first, that I may see your tail’.”

That's him below on the far right, Lord Kames on far left, Hugo Arnot in the middle: the etching is by John Kay:

And he's the fellow second from the right in this one:

There’s another walking story about Monboddo that I have yet to fully fathom.  On one occasion he came out of court to find it was raining.  A sedan chair was waiting for him but he declined to use it, calmly placed his wig in the chair, and walked home in the rain.  Some sources say this was because he employed the methods of “the ancients” to keep fit, but that hardly seems a complete explanation.

IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK

I was listening to variant versions of Chuck Berry’s song “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”  - sometimes brown-eyed gets hyphenated, and sometimes it doesn’t.  It’s an interesting song.  As I’m not the first to observe, at this point in history you inevitably hear it as a song about race: he’s really singing about skin color, not eye color.  The fact that the song could be a hit in America 1956 is some measure of its double-coding and perhaps of its deniability.

I can’t find a great Chuck Berry live version, but here he is performing the song with Robert Cray (no, I can't work out how to put the video itself on my blog):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg9EdOCE1zI

The lyric that interests us here comes in the second verse

Flying across the desert in a TWA,
I saw a woman walking across the sand
She been a walkin' thirty miles en route to Bombay
To get a brown eyed handsome man
Her destination was a brown eyed handsome man

*

Well, Bombay (or Mumbai as we now know it) is of course a pretty good place to find a brown-skinned or indeed brown-eyed man, though I don’t know that there’s a lot of sand in precisely that part of India.  

Now, the song has been much covered by people of varying eye and skin color – Buddy Holly, Paul McCartney, Lyall Lovett – they all sang the line about Bombay; but Waylon Jennings in his own countrified version sings it thus, in 1970 – yep he really dressed like that in 1970, but he got over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ5DlUe8bNE

The lyrics in question:

Flying cross the desert in a TWA
Saw a woman walking cross the sand
She’s been walking thirty miles en route to L.A. to get
A brown eyed handsome man
The destination was a brown eyed handsome man

Now obviously you get a very different class of brown-eyed man in LA than you do in Bombay, and you’re in with a better chance of finding sand.  The song also works perfectly well when sung by a woman, Fontella Bass sang Bombay (it’s a great version), and Tanya Tucker sang LA.

So, a question: did Jennings change the line in the interests of topographic accuracy?  Or did he think that walking to Bombay was just too darn exotic, maybe even Orientalist, for his country fans?  I’m guessing the latter.