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.

UNDER THE PAVING STONES, MORE PAVING STONES

Two quotations for your consideration (as Mr. Rod Serling might say):

ONE: “If I do not walk I cannot make a work of art.  The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.”  Hamish Fulton.  That's him below, and yes, that's a map of Paris - stay with me on this.

TWO: “Under the paving-stones, the beach!” which is the translation of a graffito seen on the streets of Paris in May 1968, and I suppose for some time after that.  I wonder when they cleaned it off.  It also happens to be the epigraph of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

Frankly I’ve never been very sure I understand all the nuances of what “sous les pavés, la plage” really means, and perhaps that very ambiguity is the reason it’s had such wide currency, why it’s become such a hit.

Certainly we all know that some of the paving stones of Paris were dug up and thrown during the events of 1968, but as images from the time show, there was no beach beneath them, which of course we all knew anyway.  Paris – believe it or  not - was not built on a beach.

The slogan does fit a little better with Pynchon’s novel set in the fictional Gordita Beach which bears a striking similarity to Manhattan Beach, just 2O miles down the road from Hollywood, and where Pynchon lived in the late sixties and early seventies while writing Gravity’s Rainbow.  I’ve walked there and it’s a good place to walk but I think very few, if any, early-career novelists can afford to live there these days.

As for the Fulton quotation, well, after you’ve read and thought about Hamish Fulton’s heroic walking activities, any walk you’re likely to do in your own daily life is likely to seem a bit trivial and timid.  At the weekend, for instance, the Loved One and I were in Yucca Valley, and we went up to Landers, driving, walking, poking around in ruins, including a walk partly up and partly around Goat Mountain.

Walking and poking around is what I do (it may even be my “art”) – but I’m always aware that certain walkers would turn it into something more thoroughly programmatic - maybe ten circular walks around Goat Mountain at different times of the day, at different phases of the moon, stopping and taking a photograph or picking up a rock every hundred yards.  Well, why not?

And something that occurred to me while I was in Landers: I like walking in cities and I like walking in “nature” but I actually think I may have done the majority of my walking in suburbs.  Now, I think that suburbia is surprisingly hard to define, but I know it when I see it, and I’ve seen plenty of it.  I grew up in various suburbs in Sheffield.  Vast swathes of London, where I lived for a long time, are by any measure suburban, and Los Angeles where I live now is, by many accounts, the most suburban city in the world.  You might think I’m attracted to suburbia.

And it so happened that the motel where we were staying in Yucca Valley was right next to a thoroughly suburban subdivision.  My knowledge of Yucca Valley is patchy, but as I remember it this suburbia scarcely existed even ten years ago: it was just naked desert.

And so these suburban bungalows and ranch houses have descended on the desert like alien presences.  I can’t say I found it especially horrible (though it would surely have been better left untouched), and as I walked around the sidewalk-free streets there was always something interesting to look at, some interesting architectural features, some quirky gardens, and what you see in most cases is a willingness to let the desert show through – to celebrate the desert, within the confines of a domestic plot.

Some of this, admittedly, seems less than authentic. I did see a few garden-bound saguaro cacti, and I think no saguaro ever got to Yucca Valley except on the back of a truck. 

The gardens with Joshua trees seemed a little more “natural” but even here I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the trees had been, at least, moved around and transplanted for the sake of the picturesque (see John Ruskin, op cit).  The presence of desert quail and jackrabbits was far more convincing.

At the time I was walking, early morning, people were leaving home and going to work – some in very clean trucks, some in surprisingly fancy cars, and one or two of them seemed to slow down to take a good look at me to see if I was up to no good, but maybe that was just my paranoia: an honest enough Pynchonian trait.

Would I like to live in a desert suburbia?  Well no, not much, since in the case of Yucca Valley there’s no adjacent “urbia” where I could go to get my city-boy thrills.  The desert fantasy is to own 100 acres of sand and scrub, big enough that a couple of laps of the boundary would constitute a reasonable walking expedition, though I’m sure some would still find that trivial and timid.

On the other hand, I’d quite like to walk a few laps of this place, though I can’t tell you exactly where it is.  The photograph is by Christopher Gielen and is titled (as it were) “UNTITLED XXXI Arizona” from the book Ciphers.

Under the desert, another damn desert.

A WALK ACROSS MY SHADOW

Well, the desert is getting a little cooler and so the Loved One and I went off  for a not especially adventurous weekend in Yucca Valley.  I had no great walking project in mind, but I had simple plan to drive along Skyline Ranch Road (not the worst name for a road) until I found a likely looking place to pull over and park, and then we’d walk for a while.

And that’s exactly what we did.  On the maps Skyline Ranch Road looks pretty much like a real road - and it is at first, but on the ground it rapidly turns into a dirt road, then a dirt road with deep gouges, and then it becomes no road at all.  I liked that very much obviously.

It was late Friday afternoon, the sun was going down, the sky was full of interesting patterns, though with nothing resembling a “sunset” and it was one of those walks, the best sort really, that didn’t have to be some intense cosmic experience: it was just a walk.

We did however come across this very appealing rock formation, which I’m sure is well known to locals, with a tree growing in its midst, with holes and gaps running through it so that the wind howled and moaned.  If you were the kind of kind of person who worshipped landforms you could do much worse than worship this one.

Yucca Valley still has one of my favorite used bookstores, the Sagebrush Press Bookstore, a place ever more crammed with stock, some of it decidedly pricey, some of it not, and I can never go in there without buying a book or three.  This time, among others, I bought a copy of Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across America published in 1979, a book that I’ve been aware of for years, but have never really settled down with and read.  That night in the motel in Yucca Valley I could do exactly that.

In fact the title is a bit of a misnomer.  The books tell the story of Jenkins’ walk from Alfred, a town in New York State, to New Orleans, an impressive feat for sure (1,273 miles according to Google maps) but not “across” America in the ordinary sense of the word.  Jenkins wrote a second book, with his wife Barbara, titled The Walk West (1981) which covered the journey from New Orleans to Florence, Oregon: which is rather more of a crossing it seems to me. Arthur to Florence – it has a certain understated majesty to it, no?

Reading Jenkins today, he seems in some ways, to be ahead of his time, fretting about what is being done to America by corporate interests, but at the same time he’s part of that long tradition of writers who go off in search of America and themselves, and find them both pretty much wherever they look.

One of the fascinations of the book as far as I’m concerned is that Jenkins' journey took place at very much the same time that I was making my first trans-America trip, from Toronto, Canada (long story) to Santa Barbara, California, and although I was hitchhiking I inevitably did plenty of walking.  Like Jenkins, I experienced much warmth and much generosity from the people I met, such as the boys above, and only the smallest amount of occasional terror, also from the boys above.  This was pretty much the end of the hippie era, but hippie ideals and down home all-American values are by no means entirely at odds.

         In his book, Jenkins does from time to time have a tendency to drift into a kind of all-purpose Zen/National Geographic spiritual wisdom : “My main purpose was to be where I was,” for example, but heck, it was the times.  

          This is what Peter Jenkins looks like these days: