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.

 

THE BOOKISH DESERT

  

I can’t tell you exactly how much of a walker Alberto Manguel is.  Most photographs of him, as above, show him sitting or standing surrounded by books. But we know he certainly walked in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a terrific piece for the Guardian about Ahasverus,the Wandering Jew. 

Even as a child, says Manguel, ‘The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I didn't feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly … above all, to be able to read any book that fell into your hands …

‘And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong … it is hard to believe that a merciful god would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting-room without reading material.’

Here is Manguel, not walking but at least photographed outdoors, so I suppose he must have walked to get there.

 

In his book The Library At Night Manguel talks about the way in which, unless you’re a wanderer, you never have enough shelving for your books.  You find you’ve too many books and so you buy a new bookcase but the moment you get the bookcase, it fills up and then you need to buy another one and so on and so on.

 

I never doubted this was true but the point has been driven home since I bought myself a shiny new, and I’m quoting here, ‘Vasagle Bookcase, Bookshelf, Ladder Shelf 4-Tier, Display Storage Rack Shelf, for Office, Living Room, Bedroom, 80 x 33 x 149 cm, Industrial, Rustic Brown’

 

I hoped this would give me loads of extra shelf space and free up some room in other bits of the house, and now of course it’s full.

 

    Manguel also talks about the problems of arrangement, or perhaps more correctly classification.   I have a lot of books about walking and a lot, though not as many, books about deserts, so I thought I’d put all my books about walking in the new bookcase, so that I could put my books about the desert in a smaller case on the other side of the room, but then the walking books more than filled the space I’d allotted to them, while the desert bookcase still had a bit of room in it.

 

    Now, it so happens that I own some books that are about walking in deserts, so these made a move across the room out of the walking bookcase into the desert bookcase, which doesn’t seem ideal but it’ll do for now.  Reclassification is always a possibility, in fact a necessity.

 

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about walking and deserts is because I’m not quite sure when I’ll next be walking in a real desert. But recently, mostly by chance, I did find a pretty fair simulacrum of the desert in Norfolk, in the garden of the Old Vicarage in East Ruston, the lifetime project of Alan Gray and Graham Robson. This is them, suited up:

The simulacrum is an area they call the Desert Wash designed to resemble parts of Arizona, a place neither of the gardeners has been, apparently.

 

This was my favourite spot: the sculpture is by Ben Southwell.

 

And there, in amidst the rocks the cacti and succulents, keeping his eye on things was (unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am) Graham Robson himself.  He was not chatty, but why should he be? 

     Of course it wasn’t a walk in a real desert, but on a damp and chilly day in Norfolk it wasn’t bad at all.  

I bought a guide book obviously – now, where to shelve it?

 

INCANDESCENT WALKING

 As you may have worked out by now, I like walking in the desert, and I like deserts even 

when I’m not walking in them, and I have a tendency to buy books about the desert and 

then leave them unread on the shelf for a few years.

 

And so, very belatedly, I’ve been reading my copy of The Desert Is No Ladysubtitled ‘Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,’ edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk.  It’s great.

 

There’s a chapter in it about about Nancy Newhall titled ‘Walking on the Desert in the Sky’ – you can see why I was drawn to it.

 

Wikipedia says Nancy Newhall is best known for writing texts to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, which is fair enough, though she was also a critic, designer, editor, and a very good photographer in her own right.  These are a few of her photographs:

 

The texts that accompanied Adams’ and Weston’s works weren’t just prefaces or introductory essays but poetic utterances.  Some of the pages look like this:

 

The perfect balance between words and images always seems like a great idea but offhand I can’t think of many (OK, any) books where the text and the photographs have equal weight and importance. And the proof of the pudding may be: Adams and Weston are still regarded as great photographers. Nancy Newhall is not regarded as a great writer.  I don’t think this is entirely the fault of patriarchy.

 

Still, I find myself fascinated by some lines of Newhall’s This Is The American Eartha book she did with Adams:

‘you are shut in by distances of light.  You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays.  You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. …

‘Night clings, paling to your body, until once more day is limited, and you are walking in the desert in the sky.’

 

I alternate between thinking this is a bit too artsy fartsy, and then thinking this is a very wonderful description of walking in the desert.

I shall continue to think about this, sometimes while walking.

DESERT DRIFTERS

 One of the cool things, possibly the only cool thing, about being me is that people send me 

free books from time to time.  The most recent is a book of photographs by John Brian 

King titled Ghost Variations.

 

         

The images are the results of King walking through the Coachella Valley desert at night, carrying a basic instant film camera loaded with black and w

hite film, and from time to time taking a picture using the built in flash.  In fact to my eyes the end results look less black and white than varieties  of dark grays and blues.

 

         Rocks, boulders, scrub, a couple of palm trees, a fallen branch, are caught in a cone of light with dark, distant shapes looming and lurking in the distance. The pictures are sometimes mysterious, aften ambiguous, sometimes very dark, sometimes washed out.  If you’re so minded you could consider these things metaphors for the desert itself.

 

The results are eerie, indeed occasionally ghostly.  And I can imagine that some people would find them scary or disturbing, but I suppose it all depends on how you feel about deserts. Personally, with the occasional I’ve generally felt at home in deserts, found them a source of wonder, beauty and solace.  Great places to walk and take (often not very good) photographs. But I know that other views are possible.  

I thought Ghost Variations was a great idea, beautifully executed.  It made me want to go wandering through the desert at night with an instant camera, even though I know it’s already been ‘done.’

 

         Thanks to all involved for sending me the book.  Publication day is May 5^th,  published by Spurl Editions.

 

Ghost Variations becomes part of what I realize is a small, not quite randomly accumulated, collection of what we might call books of desert photography.

 

There’s Ansel Adams of course, and especially his book Manzanar, about the Japanese internment camp.

 

There’s John Divola’s Isolated Houses

          Lee Friendlander’s The Desert Seen

           Richard Misrach’s Bravo20, the Bombing of the Ameirican West.

 

Mark Flett’s Saguaros, a giant book of giant and wonderfully strange-looking saguaros.

 

All these books I assume involved the photographer in doing a certain amount of walking, although I also assume that John Divola’s Dogs Chasing My Truck in the Desert involved no walking at all, and that’s one of my favourites.

 

I wish there were more women in the collection, but that’s my bad. I can name plenty of great female desert photographers: Karen Halverson, Wander Hammerbeck, Michelle VanParys, Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves.  I just don’t own books by them.  

 

Karen Halverson

All these photographers look at the desert with different and very selective eyes.  The desert is an inexhaustible subject but then I suppose all subjects are.

 

I learn there is also a recent book (which nobody is likely to send me) titled Georgia O’Keefe, Photographer, edited by Lisa Volpe.  O’Keefe is an interesting case because according to Volpe ‘she didn’t pick up a camera until she was in her late 60s.’ 

 

Obviously she was a walker long before that. Volpe quotes her as saying ‘I don’t wale to get places.  I walk to be inspired.’ I’ve never thought that these two things are mutually exclusive.

 

Below is the first picture I ever took in anything that could even vaguely be thought of as the desert.  It’s somewhere in California.  I was hitchhiking across the States, as was the style at the time, but we’d stopped for a walk to stretch our legs.  They were good guys. They didn’t understand much of what I said, but who does?

(Obviously I don't own copyright in any of the above photographs except the one of my own - I hope nobody sues me, cos I ain't got nothing.) 

A SHORT LONG WALK

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Richard Long - walker, artist, sometime walking artists, sometime land artist, sometime sculptor.

Some of his best work – and his best walks - involve “interventions” in the landscapes.  Sometimes these might involve stamping out an “intaglio” on the ground, or he might move rocks into patterns.  

Very early in his career he went up Kilimanjaro, and made a kind of sculpture there.  “I was very proud of the fact I had probably made the highest sculpture in the world, ” he said in a recent interview with the Guardian.

If I’m walking in the desert or some isolated place I often see that somebody has rearranged rocks, and I always say to myself “Maybe Richard Long was here,” but I never really think he was.  And occasionally I myself have been known to rearrange rocks – in which case it’s definitely not a Richard Long, but I suppose it might be “School of Long.”

Long’s work also sometimes involves transporting pieces of rock or slate from natural settings or quarries, and then arranging them in art galleries or in outdoor sculpture parks.  An exhibition of these kind of sculptures titled Land and Sky: Richard Long at Houghton just opened at Houghton Hall, near Fakenham, in Norfolk, England.

Part of the coverage included that article in the Guardian which quotes Long as saying that he’s walked every piece of Dartmoor, but avoids pilgrim routes and old ways. “I made a conscious decision that there’s so many ways to walk in new ways or original ways. I was quite proud of the fact that no one has walked across Dartmoor in a straight line before.”  He’s referring to works like these:

I have definitely walked on Dartmoor – a long time ago, not sure I’d even heard of Richard Long at the time.  I definitely didn’t walk in a straight line and if I walked on pilgrim routes I certainly didn’t know about it.

Long says, “Ideas can last forever …  I’m one of the artists who realized a journey – from a straight path in the grass to a 1,000-mile walk – could be a work of art.”

Of course It’s in the nature of art that it changes the way you see the world, so when you’ve got Richard Long in your head and you find yourself, as I did the other day, walking in Los Angeles along Wilshire Boulevard, past a building that houses a Wells Fargo Bank and a slightly distant outpost of Cedars Sinai hospital, I was amazed to find this sea of rough but carefully arranged slabs of red rock. 

I’m as sure as I can be that these are not “real” Richard Longs, but who’s to say that the landscape architect wasn’t familiar with his works?  Maybe he or she too belonged to the School of Long.