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.

 

COMMANDO WALKING

 I discovered Anaïs Nin the way many people do, via Henry Miller. I haven’t read either of them for a very long time and haven’t felt any need to, but as I recall the attraction of Nin was that really liked and really wanted sex, at a time when few women of my acquaintance felt that way.  Yes, I was young and green in judgment, but at least I never put a birdcage on my head.

 

The one thing I missed at the time as I read Nin’s diary and her ‘erotica’ was that she was a walker, but I know this now thanks to Kerri Andrews’ Wanderers: A History of Women Walking.

 

Andrews writes, ‘For Nin there was an important link between sexual experience, sexual confidence and the development of her literary voice, all of which were bound up with the ways in which she walked through the city.’

 

That all sounds fair enough, but there’s more.  Andrews also writes ‘Walking the streets of Paris in this hyper-aroused state seems to create within Nin an almost-orgasmic connection with everything she encounters ...’

Please note that’s ALMOST orgasmic, or in other words, not actually orgasmic at all, and the paragraph continues, and here’s the beauty part ‘These sensations  are enhanced by way of the state of partial dress, with little by way of underwear, that Nin describes as “walking poor”’  

I missed that at the time and as far as I know I’ve never previously heard that expression.

 

I haven’t been able to find an image of Nin walking poor, or walking any way at all, but here she is as a Spanish dancer.

 

And here she is on one of those quotation sites.

WALKING WITH WELLIES

 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

So we walked, the four of us, Jen, Jonathan, Caroline and me (Caroline took the picture above which is why she's not in it but she's in the one below), on the foreshore of the Thames, between Bermondsey and Rotherhide.  The tide was low but gradually coming in.  It was a short and only occasionally tricky route but it had a lot going for it. I’d never previously set foot on the foreshore, had only vaguely thought about it, but Jen, the instigator of the expedition, was quite the aficionado.  It was a great walk.  And I was glad I had my wellies.

 

The foreshore was full of curiosities, both natural and man made: rocks, oyster shells, eroded bricks, tires, driftwood, and rather less plastic detritus that I’d expected.

Somebody had built a sandcastle,

Somebody had left or lost a boot

 

Of course when you’re on the south side of the Thames you stare across the water at the architecture on the north side 

but there were one or two architectural wonders on our side too, such as this nice bit of streamlined modernity:

 

Now as you know, I’m a great picker up of trifles, or souvenirs, or rubbish, on my walks.  But the fact is, you’re not allowed to remove things from the foreshore without a permit, and we didn’t have a permit so we took only photographs, left only footsteps, as the saying goes.

 

The woman above did have a permit, she said (we didn’t ask to see it) but she also said she hadn’t found anything very interesting.

There was even a sign in one spot, possibly not official, that said, ‘don’t move the stones’ but since the simple act of walking made stones move this was hard to obey.  And you know there weren’t any cops patrolling the foreshore, unless they had some secret and inscrutable method of surveillance.

 

However I did find this:

 

Another Caroline Gannon shot

It was a small glass jar with what appeared to be a wet and tattered five pound note around it, held in place by rubber bands.  

I picked it up and the five pound note looked real enough though probably too tattered to be legal tender. But I removed the fiver and found what appeared to be two genuine and perfectly intact Chinese bank notes under it, also wrapped around the jar.  

Suspecting contraband or, say, a trafficked human pituitary gland, inside the jar (though I suppose a human pituitary gland is a kind of contraband), I opened it up, and as far as I could tell it contained only river water.  What it had contained previously is anybody’s guess. And obeying the law of the foreshore, I wrapped the notes around the jar again, replaced the rubber bands and put it back among the rocks more or less where I'd found it.  It was the right thing to do.  

Nevertheless it’s the kind of thing I’m going to be thinking about for years.  I mean, who wraps English and Chinese bank notes around a glass jar and throws it in the Thames?  If we’d been living in a novel this would have been the start of a great and rip-roaring adventure.  As it was, we went to the pub.

 

       Then we went back to Bermondsey tube station for some fairly hard core Brutalism.  London, she’s exhaustible, innit?

 

 

MEANDERING IN EDEN

I was thinking about the viability of my ‘walking in gardens’ project, and how to make it interesting, when I had an idea.  Since walking in gardens is a low key, low intensity activity, I reckoned that what was needed was some added rigour.  

 

I wondered how it would be if, instead of just wandering around a garden, going wherever your feet and your eyes take you, you went to a somewhat well-known location, say the RHS garden at Hyde Hall, in Essex, set over 360 acres of more or less rolling hills, and made your walking schematic.  Now obviously there are different kinds of scheme and rigour that could be applied but I thought I’d begin simply enough, by walking systematically down every single path in the garden.  Fortunately there was a map.

I’d been to Hyde Hall before and found one or two favourite spots; the Dry Garden and the Winter Garden especially, but this was no time to back favourites.  As far as the walk was concerned one place was as good as any other, the Rose Garden, the Global Growth Vegetable Garden, Sky Meadow, the Queen Mother’s Garden, the Floral Fantasia, the Sky Meadow, and so on, all had to be treated as equals as I walked the paths.

 

My trusty amanuensis and I started in a section known as the Birch Grove and there was a rather poetic introductory sign that included the words, ‘Meandering paths immerse you in an airy woodland, dappled and cool in the summer sun.’   

In fact it was autumn, but even so that sign set me thinking: here it's the path that meanders, not the walker. And I wondered if you walked rapidly along a meandering path could you still be said to meander?  I admit it isn’t one of life’s greatest questions.  

 

And so we walked.  And inevitably we walked in places we might otherwise not have.  I’m sure, for example, I’d have avoided the Children’s Play Area and yet there was the Grand Bug and Pest Hotel.

 

Who’d have thought there were fans of Wes Anderson at the RHS?

We covered the ground and the paths. NB - that isn't us in the picture above. There were no Keep Off The Grass signs and occasionally we did stray off the path.  There were also one or two desire lines and you might well ask whether a desire line can be construed as a path, and I’d say it probably can, though I wouldn’t fight about it, and in any case we avoided them: the desire lines not taken.

 

To be honest I think by the end, as our resolve faltered, we may have missed a few short stretches of path but for a first expedition it wasn’t too bad.

 

There were others walking too. As a cross section of British society it was hardly representative but as a snapshot of the kind of people who like to walk in gardens it was probably typical – mostly older, mostly couples, mostly though not exclusively white, a few parents and children, some of the kids looking bored, others looking dangerously excited.  Nobody else seemed to be walking rigorously.

 

And somewhere in the course of the walk I started to wonder whether this could be considered a form of psychogeography. And you know, after deep reflection, I do believe it could. Debord says psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’  And heck, a garden of any size is full of varying geographic elements and full of specific (and sometimes vague or downright ambiguous) effects, as you move from one part to another.  At Hyde Hall the ‘feel’ of the Birch Grove was very different from that of the Dry Garden, the Floral Fantasia was very different from the Global Growth Vegetable Garden.  So hell yes, walking in gardens may be considered a form of psychogeography. Whether this makes my walking in gardens project any more viable, remains to be seen.

PRO BONO PUBLICO

 

I’ve been talking to Stefan van Norden about being on his podcast titled ‘Nature Revisited.’ Stefan is also a gardener and a filmmaker, perhaps best known for the documentary Negotiating with Nature about the natural world, gardening, connection and disconnection.  Walking inevitably comes into it. This is the man himself:

 

He wants to do a podcast to be called something like ‘Walking In The UK.’  He’s based in the States in New Hampshire, and his line is that British walking culture is very different from any other in the world.  I’ve been pondering whether and how this is true, and naturally I dug out a few volumes from the Nicholson Pedestrian Library to see what others had had to say on the subject. The one that seemed most on the money was The Magic of Walking by Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode, in which there’s a section titled ‘Walking, British Style.’  

Part of it runs, ‘Wherever we may set foot (in Britain), some eighteenth-century essayist or nineteenth-century poet walked there before us.  When Thomas Gray whose ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ we all read in school, walked the Lake District in 1769, after a long day’s walking he found the inn’s best bedroom dark and damp, and went sturdily on for another 14 miles to Kendal and another inn that pleased him more, before he stopped for the night.’  

I’m not sure that this is especially British, and it does seem a bit like showing off.

 

 

         Stefan is particularly fascinated by our system of Public Footpaths. He’s thrilled by the idea that you see a sign that says Public Footpath and you know you can walk freely there, across or through other people’s land, and who knows where you’ll end up.  That part I absolutely agree with.  I have quite a collection of photographs I’ve taken of Public Footpath signs; this kind of thing:

 

And when I see one pointing to a footpath like this, I often feel compelled to go down it.

 

I was able, to a limited extent, to explore this further last week when a mixed group of fellow trudgers came to Manningtree; 3 from London, one from lower Essex, one from Brazil, to do the somewhat familiar walk to Dedham, in Constable Country.  Here we are looking like a little-known but still surviving prog-rock band.

 

There was one woman in the group, who took the above picture.  She looked like this, while admiring a mound of sheep’s wool.

 

We didn’t have any great sense of urgency or purpose in our walk, and even with detours and meanders we probably only covered about 7 miles:  Thomas Gray would have laughed at us, but we passed a considerable number of Public Footpath signs in their various forms:

 

And at my instigation we did discuss British notions of walking versus hiking versus trekking, and how these might be different elsewhere in the world.  We found the ‘rambling’ especially interesting.  The British Ramblers Association has been around since been around since 1935.  Looks like it was a great way to meet babes.

 

And we certainly discussed how different English rambling is from American rambling.  I’m still singing the Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ not least because of its lines

My father was a gambler down in Georgia

And he wound up on the wrong end of a gun.

As Stefan and I had discussed, if you stray from a footpath in Britain you might possibly get yelled at by an angry farmer, but in general you’re unlikely to get shot. In America it can be a little different.

I suspect the Allman Brothers weren't great walkers.