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

TOO MUCH TIME, WITH AND WITHOUT THE CAPTAIN

Suffering from insomnia, and not wanting to become entirely Ambien-dependent, I found myself between 3 and 5 am the other morning reading Mike Barnes’s biography Captain Beefheart.  It did not put me to sleep.

Now, as we know, tales of Don Van Vliet as a desert rat are often exaggerated, but in the book I found references to a promotional interview Beefheart did with one Meatball Fulton in which Beefheart takes about being a ‘trangent’ (his own invented word as far as I can tell), about bunking off school and going out walking in the desert with the trangents outside Lancaster in the Mojave desert.  He explains, ‘Well, what’s a “trangent,” do you know what I mean?  Someone who likes to go for a walk farther than somebody who is a resident.’

Well, I’m certainly no resident of the Mojave desert but I do go there once in a while, and the week before last I was walking there, not really all that far, in the scrubby parts outside Yucca Valley, and not in the company of anyone else, trangent or not, but I definitely walked farther than some, in the sense that I didn’t see anybody else while I was walking.

In some ways, you don’t have to go all that far to find a “Clear Spot” in the desert but I suppose it all depends on your definition of clear, and in any case that wonderful Beefheart song with its mentions of “Sleepin' in a bayou on a old rotten cot” obviously isn’t referring to the desert at all.  Still, for some of us, when we walk in the desert, the Captain is always with us in spirit.

The notion of the pristine or virgin or clear desert is always problematic.  Much of the American desert is under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management or part of a National Park, which is a fine thing, but there’s nothing strictly natural about that.  Otherwise much of the desert belongs to private individuals who may not do anything with it, but that doesn’t keep it looking pristine or even good, let alone clear.

Obviously houses get built in the desert, more and more of them, and sometimes houses get burned to the ground.

And there’s a whole category of people who think of the desert as a non-place (and we don’t need to get all French and philosophical about this, though we certainly could), or perhaps they think of it as a place that doesn’t matter, as a place where you can shoot your guns and dump your furniture.  Like this:

Clarity comes in many different forms. Here are some people who, one way or another, have found their own clear spots.