The Fifth Annual Desert Writers Issue

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The Sun Runner The Magazine of the Real California Desert August/September 2011—Vol. 17, No. 4 The Sun Runner Magazine PO Box 2171, Joshua Tree, CA 92252 (760)820-1222 • www.thesunrunner.com Publisher/Executive Editor:Steve Brown publisher@thesunrunner.com Founding Editor Emeritus: Vickie Waite Theatre/Film Editors: Jack & Jeannette Lyons Literary Editor: Delphine Lucas Music Editor: Judy Wishart Calendar Editor: Lynelle White

The Sun Runner The Magazine of the Real California Desert

August/September 2011 – Fifth Annual Desert Writers Issue

Inside this Issue:

Dry Heat, by Steve Brown ... 9 The Tortoise Telegraph, News gathered from around the desert – at our own pace ... 10 Letters from... you ... 13 Desert Art News, by Steve Brown ... 14 Desert Writers Issue Special Section ...18-33 On a Street With No Name (North Joshua Tree sestina), by lalo kikiriki ... 19 Contributing Writers Letter from the suburbs of Death Valley, by Mike Cipra ... 19 Lorraine Blair • Steve Brown A Joshua Tree in Wonder Valley?, by Ron Brault ... 20 Carlos Gallinger • Lou Gerhardt Dinner for Two, by Russ Kohn ... 21 Jack Lyons • Seth Shteir Judy Wishart Pig Eye, by Maureen Gilmer ... 22 Desert Writers Issue contributors Hiking Alone with Bighorn, by Guy James Rowley ... 23 listed in contents and on page 18 Ghost Dance, by Ruth Nolan ... 24 Contributing Photographers & Artists: Desert Queen, by Angela de la Agua ... 24 Ron Brault • Steve Brown Howard Derrickson • Lalo Kikiriki As Above, So Below, by Cynthia Anderson ... 25 Mike Lipsitz • Karin Mayer • Bruce Miller Johnny Lang’s Dream, by Kathleen Seeley ... 25 Kimberly Nichols • Patricia Quandel Ocotillo Lady, by Deenaz P. Coachbuilder ... 25 Judy Wishart The Straggler, by Scot E. McKone ... 26 Advertising Sales: Sam Sloneker, Ryan Muccio, Allison Simonis Along the Arid Trail, by Caryn Davidson ... 27 Desert Writers Issue Book Reviews, by Delphine Lucas Advertising Sales Support: Planet Mojave: Visions From a World Apart, by Ridge Writers ... 28 Christina Dooley • Isha Jones Planet Mojave Excerpt – Loss, A Love Story, Distribution Manager: Sam Sloneker

by Donna McCrohan Rosenthal ... 28 The Sun Runner Magazine features desert Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization, arts and entertainment news, desert issues by Samuel Milham, MD, MPH ... 30 and commentary, natural and cultural history, Walking Fish (and an excerpt), by Joanne Bodin ... 31 columns, poetry, stories by desert writers, and Desert Country, by Edwin Corle .... 32 a calendar of events for the enormous CaliSand in My Shoe, by Helen Bagley ... 33 fornia desert region. Published bimonthly.

MAGAZINE DEADLINE: September 19 The Ways of Things: The Desert Bighorn Sheep of the Mojave Desert, for the Season Premiere Issue, for advertis- by Carlos Gallinger ... 34 ing, calendar listings, & editorial. To list a A Tale of Three Women: Joshua Tree National Park Celebrates desert event free of charge in The Califor- Its 75th Anniversary, by Seth Shteir ... 36 nia Deserts Visitors Association Calendar, please send your complete press release to Ramblings From Randsburg, On the Trail of... Randsburg’s Soup Kitchen calendar@thesunrunner.com, or mail to: and the Owner’s Sandwich, by Lorraine Blair ... 37 Calendar, c/o: The Sun Runner Magazine, PO Desert Theatre Beat, by Jack Lyons ... 38 Box 2171, Joshua Tree, CA 92252. Please Film Talk, by Jack Lyons ... 39 include all relevant information in text format. Notices submitted without complete Hi-Desert Music News, by Judy Wishart ... 40 information or in an annoying format may Rita Coolidge in Concert for Joshua Tree National Park, by Steve Brown ... 42 not be posted. Event information absolutely Positive Living: Tom Huls, by Lou Gerhardt ... 43 will not be taken over the telephone or tele- Hot Picks from The Sun Runner Calendar ... 44 pathically.

The Best Places to Dine in the Real Desert ... 45 SUBMISSIONS: By mail to the address above; by email: publisher@thesunrunner. The Best Places to Stay in the Real Desert ... 47 com, or stop us when we’re at Roy’s in Amboy like everybody else does.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: $22/year U.S.A. ($38/ year International, $38 trillion Intergalactic) Copyright © 2011 The Sun Runner. Permission for reproduction of any part of this publication must be obtained from the publisher. The opinions of our contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the magazine, which is an inanimate object. We have made some effort to be accurate, but we are not responsible for errors or omissions in material submitted to us, nor claims by advertisers. Advertising, press releases, and public service announcements are accepted at the mysterious discretion of the all-knowing publisher.

8 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Cover Art — Joshua Tree National Park,

by Steve Brown A determined Joshua Tree, bent over near Cap Rock, keeps reaching for the sky. This shot was taken after a light snowfall this past winter, on a beautiful, crisp day. Joshua Tree National Park is an excellent place to find creative inspiration in all seasons.

Do you have photos and information about major desert events?

The Sun Runner is launching our Desert Premiere Issue this October, with coverage of events throughout the desert from OctoberSeptember. This will be a yearlong guide for desert locals and visitors to plan their activities. If you have event info or photos, please send them to publisher@thesunrunner.com.

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hen I joined The Sun Runner over seven years ago, the vision I had for the magazine was that of an updated Desert magazine. Not the recent Gannett publication that now owns the name of the desert, filled with ads for country club living, glitzy jewelry, plastic surgery and diets, covering the Coachella Valley while once again seeming not to notice much of the desert lying beyond the golf courses and walled communities. Instead, I envisioned something more along the lines of the first 1937 issue that was nothing short of brilliant. Randall Henderson, the stalwart editor of Desert magazine, was at the helm from that first issue, which included a calendar of events, poetry (Nellie N. Coffman was featured in the first issue), editorial commentary, and stories on nature, science, personality, history, travel, art, photography, mining, development, books, fiction, and more.

Henderson called the process of publishing a magazine about the desert “a great adventure,” and indeed it is. I didn’t realize, until I recently re-read his inaugural column, that he referred to the desert I love—the one with its expansive vistas, raw natural beauty, ever-changing balance of light and shadow, lonesome winds, playful dust devils, silent arroyos, vibrant life, scraps of human history that often pose more questions than they answer, and deep, dark nights—as the “real” desert, just as I chose to do when I put it on the cover of the magazine.

Just as I do, Henderson saw the people who chose the desert as their home as good people, but with a difference that sets them apart from the millions to be found nearby now in the crowded morass of southern California.

“The truth of the matter,” Henderson summed up, “is that the real people of the desert are warm-hearted and generous and thoroughly civilized—but not too civilized.”

I feel honored, and humbled, to follow—at a distance—in Henderson’s footsteps, civilized, but not too civilized. The desert, when Henderson began publishing, was a much different world, but while things change, the need to communicate, share, inform, and act, has not changed. If anything, there is a dire need to connect those of us who care about the desert more now

than ever before. The challenges and changes the desert faces are numerous and ominous. The desert is being manhandled, and for the most part, changes underway will further degrade the environmental, historical, and cultural wealth of the region.

As I write this, protests continue at the geoglyph sites in Blythe being erased by an industrial solar power project. It is clear that no longer will polite protests suffice to protect the desert’s natural and cultural resources. With agencies such as the BLM willing to ignore their duty to provide the public with information while managing the public’s own lands, more drastic action is required. The agencies charged with responsibility for overseeing our lands are mostly responsive only to political agendas from Washington, D.C., sweeping any vestige of true public process aside, rendering public input meaningless; their final decisions foregone conclusions before the first speaker at a hearing utters an opening syllable.

To maintain the desert’s health, it takes journalists and activists, local and regional government, musicians and artists, teachers and students, non-profits and businesses, naturalists and historians, writers and poets. It takes all of us, ultimately, to express our care for, and love of, this land that is our home.

We all bring something to the table, our own unique piece of the puzzle, connecting the dots and completing the picture.

I want to thank each and every contributor who has submitted work over the nearly 17 years of this magazine’s history for proving that the desert is vibrant and filled with natural—and human—inspiration. I thank all of you for bringing me back to the point where I still feel my love of this place, and the desire to share its beauty, depth, and greatness, with others who see and appreciate the real desert.

As Henderson wrote, back in 1937, “We would like to feel that these pages will impart to their readers some of the courage, the tolerance, and the friendliness of our desert—that this issue and every issue, will be the cool spring of water at the end of the hard day’s trek—and that you will go with us along the desert trail and find the journey worth while.”

That tradition continues here—and now. June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 9

Becket’s birthday bash We honored Marta Becket as a cultural treasure of the California deserts in last December’s Desert Treasures Issue, then covered the growing controversy surrounding operations of Amargosa Opera House, Inc., the non-profit organization overseeing operations of Marta’s opera house, hotel, and the town of Death Valley Junction, in February as part of our Desert Travel Issue.

We’re sorry to say that as Marta turns 87 this month (August), the controversy appears to not be coming anywhere near to a resolution, and her cultural legacy that took decades of strongwilled creative spirit, ingenuity, talent, skill, and perserverance, 10 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

may wind up crumbling, as many reviews of the hotel at the site seem to unfortunately indicate.

Court actions in Inyo County’s Superior Court over ownership of the Amargosa Cafe business and much of its restaurant equipment, filed by Larry and Theresa Cantwell (owners or hotel employees, depending on whom you believe) who were evicted by Rich Regnell, director of operations for Amargosa Opera House, Inc. (it gets complicated here - the former board of directors, known by some as the “legitimate” board, evidently wants Rich removed, while the current board of directors that is either legitimate itself, or usurpers, depending on who you talk to, backs Rich in that position), have left the fate of the business in limbo.

There is documentation that supports the Cantwells’ assertions that while AOH, Inc. owned the physical building where the cafe is located, the Cantwells owned the actual business, and much of the equipment located inside. And while Regnell has claimed that the copy of the lease provided to me by Cantwell is a fake, he, and the law firm he has hired to represent AOH, Inc. and himself, have not provided any information or documentation to the contrary.

According to additional documentation provided by Larry Cantwell (and others) over the past six months, the court has ordered both the Cantwells (as plaintiffs), and Regnell (as defendant) to follow certain orders of the court until additional orders are issued or a final resolution is determined. The Cantwells have alleged that Regnell is not following the orders that may result in the damage or loss of the equipment that, according to the inventories and documentation provided to this magazine, appear to belong to their business.

While Regnell has stated that Theresa Cantwell operated the cafe as an employee of AOH, Inc., there are written statements allegedly made by former employees at the Amargosa Cafe that appear to directly contradict his claim. In addition, there are copies of various supporting documents, such as the Application for Food Service Facility Food Permit, apparently made back in 2009 when the Cantwells began operating the cafe, that list A-Valley Enterprises LLC, the Cantwell’s company, as the business owner, long before controversy erupted (the application also lists AOH, Inc. as the building owner and Regnell as the emergency contact).

The California Office of the Attorney General has reportedly been investigating the sad case of the Amargosa Opera

House, Inc., while another reported investigation by the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office has apparently stalled. One board member (from the initial board of directors) has evidently alleged Regnell has misused corporate funds, such as $10,000 from a fundraiser for the AOH, Inc. “museum fund,” to help purchase a truck (reportedly registered in the name of AOH, Inc.), to help pay tens of thousands of dollars of back child support, and to purchase equipment for an “unauthorized” algae farm in Death Valley Junction.

We’d like to report without the “allegedly” and “reportedly” qualifications, however both boards have not provided information necessary to solidly support their version of events, or to establish precisely who made what decision when, or didn’t make the decision at all. This makes it extremely difficult to state for certain where the rather convoluted trail of evidence leads, that is, other than to note that as AOH, Inc. funds are limited and opportunities for preservation of the cultural legacy that Marta Becket built at the Amargosa Opera House since 1967 are up in the air, the future of this magical artistic oasis in Death Valley Junction is very much in doubt, and is not at all the kind of birthday gift we’d like to see presented to Marta at age 87.

Building Block Bricks One of the best museums in the desert is also one of the littlest (here at The Sun Runner, we are huge fans of the desert’s museums—big and small). But what the Town of Yucca Valley’s Hi-Desert Nature Museum lacks in square footage, it makes up for with great exhibits and a wide-ranging selection of programs, events, and activities that would be impressive even for a much larger urban museum.

The Hi-Desert Nature Museum has launched a buy a brick campaign. Purchasing a commemorative brick in the entry way of the museum helps support the museum’s exhibitions, minizoo, and educational programs. Each brick is mounted with a customized copper plaque with your own message for $200 for a limited time. These are good-sized bricks and a fine way to honor someone special, a business, or organization.

If you’d like to support the museum’s fundraising drive, visit their website at www.hidesertnaturemuseum.org for details and the Buy-a-Brick form.

Power Right on Over the People These days, you may go outside to enjoy your morning cup of coffee only to find that overnight someone stuck a solar power plant on every flat parcel of vacant land nearby, and windmills soar more than 100 yards into the sky from atop every formerly pristine hill or butte.

It would be absurd, if it weren’t so true. But unfortunately, if you live in the California deserts, especially the more rural areas, it can happen to you.

The Cascade Solar/Axio Power Holdings/Sun Edison proejct in north Joshua Tree is moving ahead to place an 18.5 MW photovoltaic solar power proejct on around 150 acres of private land in north Joshua Tree (we’re hearing about lots of things that may be coming to north Joshua Tree these days, ranging from country clubs to Super WalMarts—and solar power projects, of course). We’ve walked the land, and while it isn’t untouched virgin desert, and we didn’t find signs of tortoise, we did find an enormous number of little holes indicating there are quite a few little critters living there who may not enjoy having their homes buldozed (something nicely and euphemistically described in so-called environmental impact statements as “take” since frequently the lives of the critters who live in the buldozed homes are taken).

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Of particular concern are the burrowing owls known to live in the area that may be killed during the construction process.

The project, with the first phase costing up to $40 million, is designed to provide (both phases) 18.5 megawatts, which is more than the hi-desert currently uses. Southern California Edison is reportedly purchasing 8.5 MW from the first phase of the project.

Get more information on this project from The Morongo Basin Conservation Association at: www.mbconservation. org/cascade.html, and Axio Power’s website at cascadesolar.axiopower.com/faq.

Then there is the Black Lava Renewables LLC (a subsidiary of Element Power) project that will transform the Pioneertown, Pipes Canyon, and Yucca Mesa/Flamingo Heights skyline (as well as that of portions of the Town of Yucca Valley) from a natural series of buttes evocative of the Old West, into a Banning Passish mess of giant wind mills.

No more will Pioneertown provide a useful backdrop for movie and television portrayals of the Old West. Now, should this project go through, windmills will stand tall, dominating the valley below, with access roads and power lines crossing what once was a magical vista.

Oh sure, you can say that’s all NIMBYism (NIMBY being “Not In My Back Yard” for those of you lucky enough to not be subjected to, well, awful projects being sited in your backyard), but a project like this will permanently impact the Old West flavor of the Pioneertown area and will eradicate the Old West/Hollywood silver screen ambience of Mane Street and surrounding areas. Now, the Pioneertown Posse and Gunfighters for Hire can shoot it out while enormous turbines chug around nearby.

There are reports of Native American cultural sites to be disturbed, and pristine habitat to be mangled, but wait!

The Bureau of Land Management is in charge! They wouldn’t let Native American cultural sites or valuable habitat on public lands be destroyed, would they?

Of course they would! They, along with their overlords at the Department of the Interior (ie: the Obama administration), actually gather and celebrate the destruction of Native American sacred and cultural sites, just like they did this summer in Blythe.

Oh, and it seems, according to initial reports we’re receiving, that the BLM also doesn’t think it needs to inform the people who reside in the area around the proposed project of anything either.

But then the BLM has stonewalled our

information requests on “green” power projects for a year and a half, so I suppose the fact that they ignore property owners, Native Americans, and the rest of the public, along with the media, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Evidently, at least some residents of the Pioneertown area found out about the proposed wind project when helicopters flew overhead with parts for four towers being constructed on Black Lava Butte and Flat Top that will measure the wind.

So, while that project has been underway since 2007, somehow residents didn’t get included in the process until helicopters began strangely appearing in the skies overhead.

Hmmmmm..... sounds like the way a monster just won’t die in a horror film. You know, it sounds a little Green Path-ish to me. Remember when the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power had their helicopters flying their survey crews around putting in LADWP survey markers and then denying they had anything to do with it? Never mind I ran the license numbers from the side of the helicopters through the FAA database and to nobody’s surprise (except possibly the DWP’s), found they were registered to who? The DWP! Well, now we have helicopters showing up once again, delivering towers to the tops of these buttes, arriving unannounced. But while the 200 foot high towers may have become a temporary de facto installation on top of these buttes, the arrival of football-field length (or taller) windmills, does not have to be predetermined.

There’s a new grass roots group that has formed to battle this project. They’re called Save Our Desert and you can find them at www.saveourdesert.com.

Meanwhile, it’s become apparent we could double the size of the magazine by covering all the projects going forward across the desert, from industrial scale solar and wind, to geothermal, transmission corridors, water thievery, dumps that won’t die, environmental groups that aren’t, even hydroelectric projects!

We’re exploring some grant opportunities to help fund an increase in our environmental reporting across the desert as we don’t have quite the resources of the federal government (which has a lot, despite their ability to lease our land to enormous corporations for ridiculously low rates like $1 per acre per year). If you have story ideas, desert issues, and unbelievable-yet-true stories about happenings across the California deserts, please contact me at publisher@thesunrunner.com. – Steve Brown

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Links for Life: Connecting Joshua Tree National Park Thank you for bringing attention to the importance of keeping open the connections that allow wildlife “room to roam” in our communities. Local residents have expressed how much they value sharing their desert backyards with the plants and animals that make the Morongo Basin a special place to live and visit.

To give credit where it is due, the linkage designs shown in the map that accompanied the “Links for Life” article were developed by Kristeen Penrod and her colleagues at SC Wildlands in studies available as reports on their website at www.scwildlands.org/reports. Those studies are: “A Linkage Design for the San Bernardino-Little San Bernardino Connection” and “A Linkage Design for the Joshua Tree-Twentynine Palms Connection.”

This work has been invaluable in informing local collaborative planning efforts for open space connectivity that is helping our communities make good decisions about where and how we grow.

Stephanie Weigel Regional Land Use Planner Morongo Basin Open Space Group Sonoran Institute Thanks Stephanie for bringing the map creators to our attention. Their work is invaluable in understanding how open space and wildlands interact and connect throughout our part of the desert—and beyond, and just how important it is to consider these connections in our current and future planning.

Words From a Desert Writer on A Powerful Haunting Nightmare Thought you should know: I was so impressed with your most recent news account of me, that I wrote it, saved it in PDF, and posted it on my website on the MEDIA EVENTS page. Today, about a month later, I found it during a Google search.

Charles A. Carroll Author, Hard Candy Thanks Chuck! Your book, and your activism on behalf of those trapped in institutions with little voice and the inability to protect themselves from predators, is commendable.

For those readers not familiar with Chuck’s autobiographical book, Hard Candy, it has won several awards, and has been ranked in the top three on several genre lists at Amazon.com. Though it is a difficult book to read due to its disturbing and distressing true story, it is an important book and we highly recommend it. Learn more at www. hardcandyblog.com.

Do you have something we should know about? Something we missed, or something we got wrong?

We love hearing from our readers!

You can send us your letters to the editor (preferably pertaining to desert issues and/or the magazine), at: publisher@ thesunrunner.com.

Please keep letters under 300 words, include contact information, and remember we may need to edit them for length or the odd libelous attack, on occasion, but we edit your words as little as possible.

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Howard Derrickson, To Eat a Peach

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here to start with art news for the desert? Even with temps cracking the three-digit mark on a routine basis, it seems that the artistic spirit, while it may be a bit sweaty, isn’t entirely on vacation. In fact, at the moment, it seems to be ramping up for this fall.

We’ll begin with the Yucca Crater project, which is planned to be part of the High Desert Test Sites annual event this fall. The HDTS folks invited Ball Nogues Studio to create a 24-foot high “engineered oasis and climbing structure” out in the desert. It looks a bit like the paper part of a snow cone turned into a swimming pool/climbing wall, with supports to keep it upright.

Plans are to take the form used to create another project, Talus Dome (installed on the embankment of a freeway in Edmonton, Alberta), invert it, and adapt it to Yucca Crater, in essence, recycling the form for creation of one art installation into its own work of art. Yucca Crater is designed to be a “hands-on” participatory installation, allowing visitors to climb and then descend into the crater to relax in the cool pool of water below (too bad it isn’t already here—we could use something like this in August).

Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues are the creative spirits behind this unusual installation, and they are raising funds for it online. They only have through August 26 to reach their goal of $15,000 (the project is receiving some matching funds to cover its costs), so if you’d like to help bring Yucca Crater to realization this fall, check out www.unitedstatesartists.org/ project/yucca_crater.

High Desert Test Sites is scheduled for October 15 & 16 this year, curated by the McCarthy family, Robert Stone, and Brooks Hudson Thomas.

The organization, with its headquarters in downtown Joshua Tree (closed in August), has welcomed Aurora Tang as its new administrative director. Tang also works with the Center for Land Use Interpretation as program manager, and has recently worked with the Getty Conversation Institute, and 14 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

the Dia Art Foundation. Tellef Tellefson has created a new website for HDTS, helped by Suzanne Calkins, and Mette Woller, the HDTS intern from Denmark.

Check out Blast Site: A Field Guide to Excavating our Future Failures, led

by Danielle McCullough and Gabie Strong, November 12 & 13.

High Desert Test Sites is seeking “sturdy, responsible” volunteers to help with the October event. To apply, contact aurora@highdeserttestsites.com.

In Yucca Valley, The Sun Runner Magazine is hosting an art show/benefit, Drawn From the Desert, September 24 through October 31 at Tamma’s Magic Mercantile. The show, sponsored by this magazine and Glitter Bitches Handmade, is a benefit to help local artist Kim Mayhew of Ant Farm Studio (you really have to check it out at www.gotants.com), who recently endured uterine cancer surgery and treatment. Artists, both locally and across the country, are contributing works in support of Mayhew. Donations will help cover existing and future medical expenses.

Artists are invited to submit original works depicting, or inspired by, the desert. The size limit is 16” by 20” for two dimensional works, and 18” by 18” for three dimensional pieces. Pieces priced to sell under $150 are best, and works must be ready to hang.

Donations of 100 percent are encouraged, but there is a minimum 35 percent donation required.

Work must be delivered to Tamma’s Magic Mercantile, 55727 Twentynine Palms Highway, in Old Town Yucca Valley, on September 15 & 16, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Out of area artists may ship their works directly to The Sun Runner. For more information: publisher@ thesunrunner.com.

Drawn From the Desert will have a reception concurrently with The Sun Runner Magazine’s Desert Writers Celebration, Saturday, September 24, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Tamma’s. Please join us in supporting one of our own local artists.

The fifth annual Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency Exhibit opens with a reception on Saturday, August 20, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Joshua Tree Art Gallery (JTAG). The gallery is in a new location at 61607 Twentynine Palms Highway, still in downtown Joshua Tree, near the Red Arrow Gallery.

The JTHAR Art Exhibit is slated to run August 19 & 20, featuring the works of Wendy Given (Portland, Oregon), Betty Hagerman (Seattle, Washington),

Lola Ramona Lanxinger (Los Angeles), Cyrus Lemmon (Chico), and JoJo Luzhou Li (Brooklyn). The artists began their stay on July 10 with specific projects outlined for each. Previous participating artists have come from Argentina, Brazil, England, Austria, and across the U.S. Elsewhere in Joshua Tree, a special 75th Anniversary exhibit featuring photographs and album art by Grammy Award winner Gary Burden, along with photos by music photographer Henry Diltz, is on display at the Joshua Tree Visitor Center (no closing date was given). The exhibit, curated by Burden in partnership with Joshua Tree National Park, features images of the groups America and the Eagles taken during the early 1970s inside Joshua Tree National Monument.

It is refreshing to see the National Park Service finally acknowledge the strong connection between Joshua Tree National Park and musicians such as Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, and others. The park has long downplayed the connection, reportedly mostly because of the drug use of the musicians, which led to Gram’s death and subsequent legendary outrageous Cap Rock cremation.

Drug use or not, the park has played a vibrant role in pop music and culture, and it is high time that it is officially acknowledged. (Now, if we could only find the scrolls Elvis reportedly left in the park.....)

Burden (not to be confused with our own Eric Burdon, another music legend in the desert), is a pioneer in album cover art (hey, maybe he should contact Burdon - last time we spoke, he was talking about producing a vinyl album project to include album cover artwork - a facet of the whole album experience lost in the world of downloads), began his career as an architect, designing a house for Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Poppas.

Cass got Burden interested in album art design and over the decades, he has produced album covers for the Doors, the Eagles, America, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and even Richard Pryor.

Burden’s work with Neil Young and Jenice Heo on The Neil Young Archives, Volume 1, a box set, led to his Grammy win (he has received three additional Grammy nominations). Throughout his 40-year career, Burden has created artwork for more than 120 albums.

In addition to Burden’s work, Joshua Tree National Park artist-in-residence Naida Osline will have her work on exhibit until November 16. Osline stayed in the park both in the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011. Her photographic work

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reflects the different seasons, with her approach to digitally incorporate pictures into constructions that resemble 17th century Dutch still life painting and the fantastical botanical illustrations of that era, using desert materials and contemporary elements.

“On first glance, when I arrived in the fall, the landscape looked deserted,” Osline noted.

“Initially, it appeared to me as if there had been a huge plant party and I had just missed it… Later, on my second visit, spring was moving in and spreading out. Spring is all about awakening and reproduction, which is an active time for all species. The desert has its own unique version of that.”

The Joshua Tree Visitor Center is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 6554 Park Boulevard, downtown Joshua Tree.

You definitely should check out the new Mike Fagan and Wes Simms exhibit on display at the 29 Palms Inn. Fagan, from the Mojave Pot Shop on Yucca Mesa, is known for his pottery, but in this show, he exhibits his photographic work, while Simms, from Twentynine Palms, is known for his metal work, but has also included a collection of his woodblock prints in this show.

The show runs through October 1 at the 29 Palms Inn, 73950 Inn Avenue, near the 29 Palms Art Gallery and the Old Schoolhouse Museum in Twentynine Palms.

Over at the 29 Palms Art Gallery, The Summer Show continues, featuring more than 100 works of art by Twentynine Palms Artist Guild members inside this beautiful, historic adobe. The gallery’s season begins with an art reception on Sunday, September 4, from noon to 3 p.m. (check our calendar for details soon).

TWENTYNINE PALMS ART GALLERY AND GIFT SHOP Desert Art Native American Jewelry and Southwestern Gifts 74055 Cottonwood Dr. (off National Park Dr.) Twentynine Palms, CA 92277 www.29palmsartgallery.com (760)367-7819

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Not far away on the highway in downtown Twentynine Palms, the Public Arts Advisory Committee has put out a call for artists to submit their work for desert-themed exhibits slated for the Visitor Center & Gallery 29 Palms. Upcoming shows include The Pioneering Spirit, September 1 to October 31, in honor of Pioneer Days. Artists are invited to enter a piece of original or historic work in remembrance of area homesteaders.

Deadline is August 17. Digital submissions with a photo of the piece are acceptable at publicarts@29palms.org.

Following The Pioneering Spirit is Keys’ Ranch, a show honoring the historic images or remnants of the homesteading and gold mining days of Bill and Frances Keys and their Desert Queen Ranch, from November 1 to December 31.

For information on submitting to these shows (and those that follow), contact Larry Bowden at (760)367-7562, or visit www.29palms.org and go to the Art in Public Places page.

The Joshua Tree National Park Association has announced the winners of the Joshua Tree National Park 75th Anniversary Photo Contest. The Grand Prize winner is Rocky,

by Tom Parash, of Beaumont. Two other winners were selected: A New Beginning, by Jeremy Long of Yucaipa, and A Glimpse of Patience, by Raini Armstrong, of Joshua Tree.

Winners receive a canvas print of their winning image from YPOC.com, and the grand prize winner also receives a trophy designed by R&W Creative Group, and will have his image appear on the 2012 Joshua Tree National Park Annual Pass.

In Palm Springs, the Palm Springs Art Museum recently announced it purchased the historic 1960 Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan building from Wessman Holdings LLC. The majority of the initial $2.8 million raised for the project came from the Edwards-Harris Family Trust and Trina Turk

16 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

and Jonathan Skow. Additional funds riased will be used to restore the building to its original mid-century modern design, based on the architectural working drawings by E. Stewart Williams. Marmol+Radziner Architects of Los Angeles, known for their restoration of the Kaufmann House and the Ship of the Desert, are providing their services pro bono to produce architectural drawings and provide expertise for the restoration.

“We are thrilled to add this architecturally significant building to the museum’s collection,” said Steven Nash, executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum. “This building will be devoted to architecture and design and provide excellent exhibition, program, and archive study space. The main museum building, also designed by E. Stewart Williams, has long needed additional space to support the growing architecture and design collections and archives. The addition of this important building will allow the museum to significantly expand our architecture and design programming.”

Though the museum has mysteriously been doing a poor job lately of announcing new exhibits, they have several excellent exhibits underway. Blast from the Past: 60s and 70s Geometric Abstractions, with many works either rarely exhibited or on view for the first time, runs through December 23. Simply Masterful: Picasso and Artists of the Modern Era runs through September 4, while Ransom: An Art Installation by Lewis de Soto is on display through the end of the year. Comic Art Indigene runs through September 18, while Contemporary Glass and Contemporary Works from the Permanent Collection, are ongoing.

One note for our military personnel: You and your families are able to enjoy free admission to the museum on an ongoing basis. For more information visit www.psmuseum.org.

The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and Mt. San Jacinto State Park recently joined forces to update interpretive panels and exhibits at the Interpretive Center. Work includes a 30foot mural designed and painted by Margarette Johannes.

Johannes was recently inducted into the Vail Ski Museum for her public artwork on Checkpoint Charlie. Work is expected to be completed this summer.

Up in Ridgecrest, the Maturango Museum is hosting an opening reception for a poshumous retrospective of Howard Derrickson’s art exhibit, A Retrospective of the 90s, at 7 p.m., Friday, August 26. The exhibit includes paintings, mixed media, and bronze sculpture.

Derrickson was born in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1928, but lived the last 40 years of his life in the Rand area near Ridgecrest. Ron Walker’s work is on display through August 24, with Derrickson’s work on display August 27 through October 12, followed by the museum’s annual Open Studio Tour show.

Also up in Kern County, Michael Millar has been hired as executive director of The Arts Council of Kern. Millar fills the position previously held by Laura Wolfe, who acted as interim director for the first six months of 20011. Wolfe now returns to her former position as fund developer for the council.

— We are seeking a qualified Desert Art News columnist for The Sun Runner to compile news about arts events and artists from around the California deserts. Please contact us at publisher@ thesunrunner.com if interested. Always send us your desert art news and photos, to: calendar@thesunrunner.com.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 17

18 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Letter from the suburbs of Death Valley

On a Street With No Name (North Joshua Tree sestina)

The ramada has fallen by degrees – a dozen 2 x 4s splayed at different angles, as if the house were a bird with a broken wing, lying huddled, crippled in the sand.

And still its chimney is a monument, pristine and perfect, to some intrepid builder.

I met a girl whose father was a builder; they had ten acres north of the Monument.

Her dad was a union man, schooled by degrees, but he, undoubtedly, knew all the angles; he staked out a foundation on the sand – a ranch style, single story, with a porch wing.

They framed it in in three days, with the wing.

How fortunate her father was a builder – he could construct a house upon the sand.

Even in heat of ninety plus degrees, the place was cool within its sheltered angles and had a gorgeous view of the Monument.

Their picture window framed the Monument, where rocks ranked flat as feathers in a wing.

And, as the sun advances, deepened angles set off the stones in patterns that a builder might lay, at interesting odd degrees, rounded and polished by the blowing sand.

Once she used to hike these streets of sand, up to the border of the Monument – the temperature as much as ten degrees cooler, where the boulders, like a wing, enfolded undeveloped land some builder abandoned, all his fences splayed at angles.

There, in the mountains shady, sheltered angles, she drew her own dream houses in the sand, simple, but fine, and she would be the builder from stone collected near the Monument.

A central fireplace and a solar wing – she raised her masterpiece up by degrees.

Now, fallen by degrees at other angles, her broken porch wing splays into the sand, only the chimney a monument to its builder. lalo kikiriki in lives on Cobalt Road in Joshua Tree and shares a studio with Jenifer Palmer-Lacy on Sullivan. lalo’s poems have appeared in apa’s and anthologies and been featured at readings throughout Southern California. previous collections include Old Movies/Other Voices (with Lynn Palmer), New Stuff, and Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.

Dear Mom, the speed bump coming into my trailer park is huge, like a holy asphalt mountain, so when you come to visit, you must slow your tiny car to the speed of the desert tortoises who wander the washes west of this ruined meridian.

The children who jump the speed bump on bicycles have strength in their legs and dirt in their hair—they are so beautiful on a Saturday afternoon, shining when I return from the liquor store with a 12 pack in the trunk and a list of adjectives in the mind, soaring, glorious, lost, amazing, inspired by the pair of eagles that fly in circles over the trailer park’s septic pond, but in fact applicable to any life form thriving here.

It is a strange existence, punctuated by late nights of writing and frightened glances from neighbors in the morning.

Nothing here is normal except the proselytizers who come door-to-door on a regular schedule to save souls, regardless of whether the souls are lonely or poor or drunk or beaten by husbands or just plain out of luck, there are many, many churches willing to sign you up.

I haven’t fooled around too much with Jesus just yet, but if I do, I’ll have more friends than I can count.

While I was preparing this very letter, the insistent tapping of Jehovah’s witnesses woke me from the couch, where I was passed out beside empty beer cans and a pen leaking blue ink. Don’t worry, I am not drowned by words or liquor or irony or what other people think, and every day I watch the sun go down on the desert, turning our sky into something violent for a while.

I miss you, Mom. Tell Pop I miss him too, and tell him I am working hard on my book.

The words come easily some nights and are more difficult other nights, unpredictable as the wind which fans a smoldering trash fire at the county dump—a conflagration of waste that has been burning steadily for three weeks. According to a disc jockey on the country radio station, this here trash fire could last all summer and fall, until the sadness of heartbreak puts it out.

The talk radio host on the competing religious frequency predicts fire until the absolute end of the world.

Longer even. Every day, I touch the end, I get it under my nails and in my hair, I drain gallons of used motor oil, the fossil blood of the earth scorched in the metal hearts of motor homes and SUVs, and although I believe in no god that can slow our consumption, I pray to him, believe me Mother, every word I write to you is part of my prayer.

Mike Cipra is a poet and author of fiction who lives in Death Valley, California. He has worked as a park ranger at Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Mesa Verde National Parks.

When Mike lived in Indonesia, he acquired a tapeworm and was hugged by a wild orangutan.

The tapeworm died after a night of heavy drinking. The orangutan is still out there, we hope. To learn more about Mike’s published fiction and poetry, please visit www. mikecipra.com.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 19

A JOSHUA TREE IN WONDER VALLEY?

W

onder Valley begins a few miles east of Twentynine Palms. Tourists, campers, boaters, bikers and semitrucks motor through the valley on State Route 62 on the South side, and Amboy Road to the North. Scuttlebutt has it that Wonder Valley was so named because people “wonder” why anyone would live in such a desolate place. No stores, no fast food, no motels and no gas. Nothing but seemingly endless desert. Traveling East on SR 62 the highway sign reads “NEXT SERVICES 100 MILES.” Denizens of Wonder Valley appreciate the stark beauty and solitude of its awesome emptiness. We are living at civilizations last outpost. Surrounded by jagged mountain peaks it’s kind of like living on the moon. You can see for miles and the colors of the mountains and sky are constantly changing with the sun so you are never bored. It’s sort of like being out at sea. Looking out over the valley from my homestead I have a million dollar view in all directions, and it only cost me fifty-three-hundred. Viewing the vista allows my soul to fly, and I am ruler of all I can see.

The predominant plant is the creosote bush with a smattering of silver or golden cholla, and a few smoke trees abode in the washes. The Joshua tree is found only at higher elevations. So why is a Joshua tree growing in Wonder Valley?

Being an aficionado and collector of desert fauna there was 20 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

one species the homestead had to have, a Joshua tree. The adoption program didn’t seem like a good idea with all the paper work and moving fees, and many of the trees do not survive the ordeal. The logical course of action was to grow a Joshua tree from a seed. I began the project 26-years ago.

The “experts” warned that a Joshua tree will not grow at the lower elevations, and that the soil, water and climate are not suitable. Undaunted, while inYucca Valley I picked-up a handful of seeds lying on the ground. At home I separated the “bad ones” that had holes in them, from the “good ones” that didn’t have holes.

The seeds were planted in two clay pots, one seed in each pot. Weeks went by and nothing happened. Okay, how about three seeds in each pot? Weeks went by and nothing happened. As an incentive, the seeds were treated to commercial potting soil, and watered with distilled or rain water and Shultz fertilizer. Nothing! Maybe the experts were right.

Maybe you can’t grow a Joshua tree in Wonder Valley.

What the heck, I thought, lets plant some “bad seeds” with holes and see what happens. Voila! Within a week there were infant Joshua trees poking their heads through the soil.

There is a dedicated Joshua tree moth that lays eggs in the seed pods. The larva bore through the seeds and fertilize them. Seeds without holes are sterile and will not germinate.

It’s amusing to see Joshua tree seeds for sale that are void of holes. Lots of luck getting these to grow.

Young Joshua trees look like two blades of grass growing together. They grew in the pots for about a year until they were about six-inches tall and began to take on the rough texture of a Joshua tree. They were transplanted into the ground with a protective cage made of hardware wire. One of the trees didn’t survive the transplant so it’s probably best to plant the seed directly into the ground.

As the years ticked by into decades, I waited patiently for the tree to grow arms, but it never did. It grew straight up to a height of 20-feet then curved over. I recently discovered that there is a dedicated Joshua tree beetle that eats and destroys the end of the tree. It stops growing vertically and sprouts arms. Since there are no Joshua tree beetles in Wonder Valley the destruction must be done artificially. Thankfully, I don’t have to wait another 26-years to have a Joshua tree with arms.

The original tree has sprouted 14 “pups” and are growing fast.

Mom and the pups are doing fine on the salty Wonder Valley well water, soil and climate. If a Joshua tree will grow in Wonder Valley they should grow most anywhere. If you decide to grow a Joshua Tree from a seed, plan on sticking around awhile.

Ron Brault is a full time resident of Wonder Valley and has been in the area for 32 years. He is the author of: Secrets From The Antediluvian World “The magical wisdom of Atlantis.” The book is classified in Germany as “controversial knowledge.”

Dinner For Two

“Rabbit.

Over there. “

The coyotes crouched low and bulls-eyed the jackrabbit through the creosote sitting in the sand. About ten strides and a jump and dinner would be served. A fine dinner indeed after a scant and scrounged winter; the taste already sitting on their tongue.

Go! They went! The rabbit, too! Paws digging, running, digging, running on the sand, the coyote pair a-hunting for a feast! Bounce and jump and push and jump, the jack-abounding for its life! Right, left, right, and round! Straight and furious, hearts-a-pounding, sand-a-scattering! Running for life, running for food, running for life! Right, left, right, and straight between two rocks only a jackrabbit can fit through.

Coyotes stop and scratch and growl and scratch. Jackrabbit breathes and breathes and breathes and breathes as fast as it ran. And still breathes. Coyotes pant and scratch and pant and scratch.

“Dammit.” Coyotes scratch and pant and scratch. “Dammit.”

The breeze of an early spring cools the coyote hide. So close was the meat on their teeth, so far the food from their belly. Sniff, sniff, sniff, the whiff of jackrabbit still sticks in their snout. Scratch and growl, sniff, sniff, sniff. “Dammit.”

Jackrabbit crawls deeper into the rocks, farther from coyote snout. Sniff, sniff, cackle, sniff, sniff, cackle. “Dammit. Let’s go.”

The coyotes trot away, heads and tails low. Through rocks, big and small, smooth and sharp, oval, odd, sheared and shiny. Paws pressed and up and down and spreading sand as they search for dinner once again. ‘Round creosote and cholla and yucca and manzanita, eyes peering for movement and meal. Listening for sounds and smelling for smells. Food, food, food. Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.

“Rabbit!”

Off and running, kicking sand and chasing rabbit. Run, run, right, left, run, run, and stop.

“Where’d it go?” Rabbit gone. No sight, no sound. Rabbit gone. Peering right and peering left. No sight, no sound.

Rabbit gone. Looking right, looking left, and looking straight ahead. Looking across the desertscape, through the brush and bush, rabbit gone.

“Let’s go.”

Coyotes continue their search for food. Where, oh where, could their dinner be? Is it burrowed in the many holes cast within the sand? Is it flying up above as they wait for it to land? Is it hiding in the rocks only coming out for water? Is it nestled in a nest within the branches of the smoke tree?

Where, oh where, could their dinner be?

Across the wash, and back in the wash. Through the wash and in the wash they trot and search and look and smell.

Ocotillo on the left-- tall and reaching, bursting, blooming, fire nails on giant fingers. Yucca on the right-- firm and strong, erect and proud, shiny, mighty, gallant, and green. Leaving paw prints in the sand, they search and search and search.

“What’s that?”

It’s the hissing, shaking, maracas-making music on the tail of a devil-horned serpent. Coiled and cocked, sand-land disturbed, it warns the visitors, “ssssstay away, sssssstay away.”

The coyotes stay back, sizing and sniffing the coiled, cold, creature. It’s live and edible. It’s there and delectable.

This could be dinner or this could be death. Coyote’s front, right leg moves closer and lunge! Serpent strike and back-jump coyote! Wide mouth and sharp fangs leaves breeze-only across coyote snout. Back-jump again and eyed the recoiled reptile, “Sssssstay away, sssssstay away.”

“Dinner?”

“No.”

Off again upon the sand, away they’ll stay from the devilhorned serpent. On again across the wash, eyes peered, still searching for dinner. Bellies rumbling, hunger growing.

Shadows casting from the setting, spring sun, painting the city of Joshua trees longer and bigger across the desert floor.

Where, oh where could their dinner be?

The cold critters crawling to their self-dug caves. The warm ones awaken as night begins to rise. Two four-legged hunters still searching for dinner. As the moon peek-a-boos from behind the east, rock mountains, coyotes call and howl and yip and howl, greeting the night-light rise. “Ah-ooooooo, ah-ooooooo!” “Yip-yip-yip, yip-yip-yip.” “The-moooooon, the-moooooon!” “Yip-yip-yip, yip-yip-yip.” “Ah-ooooooo, ah-ooooooo!” Celebrate the rise and begin the night!

Their sights still steady and searching for something.

Something moving, something living. Something cold or something warm. Something they can chew and tear and rip and swallow and fill their not-full bellies. Eyes peered and focused for dark. Looking for movement, looking for critters.

“Rat!”

Scramble toward rodent. Rat ran into borough. Follow and pounce and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Stop and sniff and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Growl and sniff and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. No rat. “Where’s rat?” Dig, dig.

“Where’s rat?” No rat. “What’s that?”

“Rabbit!”

Run at rabbit—straight and right, left, right and straight and right and left and jump. In the air and down, two paws land on sand and two on leg. Cottontail twitching from coyote claws. Rabbit tumble, coyote roll. Before another breath, coyotes’ teeth sink deep into rabbit neck and clamp and shake.

Rabbit shriek and rabbit cry. Shake back and forth and side to side, and side to side, side to side. Silence. Rabbit limp, rabbit dead.

Coyote front paws hold the rabbit while their teeth tear the carcass and open the belly. Teeth sink and pull and chew and chew and chew and chew and swallow. Thrusting snouts and teeth into belly and legs, and rip and tear and chew and chew and chew and swallow. Rip and lick and taste and chew and swallow. Tearing to the bone, clearing the meat from the hide. Taste and chew and chew and chew and swallow.

Coyotes licking their teeth and chewing the gristle.

Bellies become full.

“Ah-ooooooo!”

Dinner for two.

Russ Kohn is a resident of Long Beach, and owns five acres and a cabin in Wonder Valley. He says, “I have been coming out to the property for six years now, as a weekend getaway from work and life in the big city. My wife and I come out as much as possible, which is about every other weekend (sans the summer months), and have become quite in tune with the moon, the stars, and the sun, the horizon and the critters. We are fortunate to have met, become friends with, and been inspired by many of the artists and musicians in the Morongo Basin. I am also a singer/songwriter who performs by the name of Vik Russ.”

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 21

Pig Eye

H

by Maureen Gilmer

e heard them go that morning so Glen feigned sleep to avoid his father’s sad eyes that spoke of his most promising son’s fall from grace. When it was quiet again he remembered so vividly what his life was before that saddle bronc went endo and broke him all to hell. His shoulder would never swing a rope again and the doctors said and he’d always walk with a limp.

The desert air felt good after so many weeks shut up indoors after he kicked the drugs, and he could feel the drag, the fatigue and the pain weighing him down. He mourned the loss of that spark that drove him since he was just a kid to be the best, to push the envelope, to swallow the fear. But that was a distant memory fading in the wake of that hideous wreck and the addiction that left nothing but an empty hole inside him. They still whispered the promise of a single little pill that instantly made him large and whole again. He’d already been arrested once and just the thought of those few claustrophobic days at County made his skin crawl.

Glen hobbled out to the pasture where a handful of yearlings grouped around a bathtub water trough. As he turned to go back to bed, movement drew his eye beyond the colts. A ghost from his past stood alone quietly watching him, a horse he thought long gone. Pap had taken him as payment from a customer too broke to pay the bill but that was hardly a bargain. When the ramp came down they found a colt nubbed up short in the trailer, its tiny eyes rolling wildly in panic. “You get him Glen,” Pap said to his oldest son, the best horseman of them all.

Glen stepped in just as the colt slammed backward into the side of the trailer, sitting down, then scrambling to his feet, banging loudly as he cow kicked the metal slats. When the sun bleached sorrel was finally on solid ground both he and Glen were dripping with sweat, the horse’s coat caked in mud, oversized mule ears laid flat back, the tail stained with red dirt and wound into a single enormous ball of hair.

Glen jerked on the stud chain so the rank colt wouldn’t dare strike out at him.

They all knew this was a throw away horse that should have gone to the slaughter house. He was pig eyed, a fault that could limit peripheral vision, making him spooky and hard to train. The front end was just wrong, Glen had thought, a chest just one hand wide that meant his lung capacity was limited, heart likely undersized. “He’s just what you boys need to practice bareback riding,” Pap said studying the sorrel. “He’s young and strong enough that I believe he’ll teach y’all something.”

With his good arm on the top rail, chin on his wrist, not moving a muscle, Glen watched Pig Eye turn and slowly make his way along the fence line, steering clear of the younger colts. As he came closer Glen could make out the scars, so 22 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

many of them linked to making Pig Eye buck like crazy. They’d get one brother up on the horse then chuck rocks at it from behind to get him started up again until he finally got so tired he’d just lay down in the dirt and pant.

About ten feet away, Pig stopped, those small eyes studying the man with great suspicion. Pig Eye remembered all right, Glen knew.

They stood there for quite some time, neither moving except for Glen’s continual rearranging his body that pained him every day. His ribs had been stove in when he laid in the rodeo dirt and the bronc came down on him hard, collapsing a lung. After many months healing, Glen tried to come back to pick up the pieces of his shattered career. But he’d found Oxy, and it became his best friend, erasing the pain and the overwhelming sense of loss. Rodeo faded into a haze of ghost memories.

There at the sun drenched rail in front of Pig something in Glen sparked, the first true emotion he’d felt in a long time. It made his chest tight, his breath a bit short as he remembered the sacking out. The feeling was something like pity woven into admiration for the throw away horse that managed to survive just has he had, making it through the pain and the fear and the wanting to go far away from the world without dying. Pig Eye didn’t have Oxy. Pig Eye had to take it over and over without any comfort.

Glen managed to step through the pipe coral into the pasture, Pig Eye backing up a few steps to keep the distance.

He clicked and the mule ears moved forward, but the horse didn’t budge. He could see Pig’s lips were pursed tight, with wrinkles standing out from the tension.

Glen dropped his own eyes to the ground and waited.

Pig didn’t budge. Glen stepped and the bad ankle buckled, but Pig held his ground. Glen turned his back and took steps away, turned and stood there quietly, eyes down, hands at his sides. That was when Pig took a first tentative step, then another and another.

He finally stood inches away licking his lips. Glen bent over painfully and breathed into the horse’s nostril, Pig inhaling the scent of the man that had so deeply hurt him. They stood just that way for a long time, not touching, but simply sharing breath in the silent language of recognition.

Glen’s tears fell into the powdery fine ground, each one raising a tiny tuft of dust as it hit. Pig Eye brushed across Glen’s cheek, the fine hair of his nose soft as silk, more like a puff of air. And then the sorrel gently licked the tear trail and chewed, the sound of huge molars grinding in Glens ear.

Glen straightened and raised his head to the clear turquoise sky, wiping tears from his eyes, then stroked the throw-away horse’s poll. It was that moment when he finally understood what they’d told him in rehab about finding his Higher Power. In that horse that he’d beat up and ignored and hurt so bad was a definite power, a living essence that was so strong he coughed, then cried out loud for the first time since that horrible wreck. He sagged, lamenting in a deep groan all he’d lost, settling into Pig Eye’s too narrow shoulder and hanging onto the knife edge neck and its sparse mane. Still the horse didn’t move.

In that bright morning sun Glen understood the true nature of forgiveness. It felt as if a new page was turned, and all the past pages darkened by blood and bruises and disrespect for the not so perfect horse had been torn out of the book.

If Pig Eye could do that, Glen realized, if that animal that had every reason to become a fire breathing dragon could find peace in the aftermath, then perhaps once again, as his father said, he indeed had much more to learn from that horse.

Hiking Alone with Bighorn

T

his is the Low Desert. You hike. You avoid the sun by being on the trail as soon as you can see to walk. You don’t waste shade. You hydrate well. What you yourself do wrong is this; you hike alone. You don’t fit in that well.

For you, the benefits outweigh the risks.

You’d started up this trail one time before. There is a dike to cross, a half-hour up, and at its base you’d seen some bones. It was a spinal column, pretty much intact. You’d thought it might be human right away and had the creeps… but then thought; no, it’s probably a bighorn… dragged here by coyotes. You’d shrugged it off. You hadn’t had much time.

A half-hour later you had skirted past the bones on your way down.

Later on that same day someone else had seen the bones and poked around… and found a skull. The bones were human: the remains of a young man. He’d disappeared some months before: the day before he was to testify in court.

That’s all you know. It’s been a while since you crossed that dike, but now you cross it again… and now it’s behind you.

You fall into a steady rhythmic pace: and step and step and step and step and step. It moves you right along, and up you go. The trail is not a trail: it’s just the bottom of a gorge.

Its walls are sometimes high and narrow sometimes wider.

Where it’s wide the grade is almost flat. It’s easy walking: mostly course-grained sand. When it narrows you climb up a series of dry falls. They’re slopes of water-polished granite: smooth. Most are small but some are high and nerve-wracking to scale, but once on top their dangers fade behind you. It’s fun: more fun than it is dangerous… and no, it won’t be hard to get back down.

At the base of some of the dry falls are seeps where water pools or runs a bit then sinks back through the sand. These spots are where the bighorn drink. You see their tracks, their spoor, and you can smell their musk. You start to slow your pace between ascents. You listen and you scan the canyon walls. They could be in plain sight where you don’t look.

They could be where you look but you don’t see. What you do see is pristine wilderness: an Eden.

Flowering shrubs and cactus crowd the bases and the cracks of stacks and spires and slopes of heat-glazed boulders.

Vast hills and ledges of them pile up and up. Palms punctuate their hidden gullies. Sometimes high and snowy mountains peek between their slopes. You want to see what’s up beyond each ledge and bend ahead. Eventually, you just don’t take the time to look for bighorn anymore.

You’re jazzed: you’re on a hiker’s high, so on you go and up until you finally hit a ledge that you can’t scale. You check for routes around it but… it’s far enough. You know you’re getting tired. Your water is half-gone. With some relief, you turn and head back down.

You’re halfway back, self-satisfied with where you’ve been, endorphins are still pumping through your veins, and the descents below are of little concern. You’re almost underneath the bighorn herd before you even know they’re there. But they don’t bolt: they’ve watched you come from up above you on the canyon walls. Some have stopped to stare, but when you stop and stand awhile they, one by one, go back to feeding, working their way down, and down is closer.

You focus on the closest one. You watch her chew a cholla cactus branch from top to base just like a youngster nibbles

down a churro, and the thousand spines go down like sugar glaze. The cholla-eater’s group is not 200 feet away. You count two-dozen bighorn all around you. Some of them are skittish and they stop to stare again… but you’re alone and quiet. You sit down on a desert-varnished rock, pretending to be calm, and one by one they break their stares and go back to their browsing.

You haven’t known their beauty until now. Their sheen and strength exude an art-like awe: a sense of health and unaffected grace.

Oh! And there are lambs; three little lambs, immaculate, with long and eager prancing legs exploring every step, jumping for joy. They’re so darn cute, you think, and then you think about your kids when they were small. You think about yourself when you were small. You feel alone. You are alone. You want to hike back down and share what you have seen with someone else. You have to leave. You stand.

By now the herd has drifted to the far side of the wash: a wall of granite. When you move, one spooks. One spook - all spook and up the cliff they go en masse. They seem to seek the steepest face, and as they bound up its invisible steps they kick loose clattering rocks and pebbles and little puffs of dust, as if on purpose: as if to show you how you’d fall if you were to pursue. Within a minute all of them: rams, ewes, and lambs are up at deadly height, scattered across the impossible face of vertical rock. They pause and perch: one here, one there, one stop, one go. They watch to see you leave… but you’re transfixed again. The spectacle, the wildness, strength, and grace of it won’t let you go. You know you risk their lives by being there, but this is yours to see and keep and you won’t leave it: not until it’s gone: not until they’re all atop the cliff and out of sight… and soon, of course, they are.

This is the Low Desert. The sun is in the canyon. Your water is low. You use what shade you can as you go down… and only stop one time: to poke around the dike and look for bones.

Guy James Rowley: I am a resident of Palm Desert and have been so for 20 years. I am a Professional Land Surveyor, retired just over one year. I was born and raised in Parowan, Utah and attended nearby Southern Utah University in Cedar City. I earned a BA in English Literature there in 1976, but I had learned Land Surveying from my father and I made that my career. I have continued reading and writing as a hobby over the years and am happy now to be able to devote more effort to those pursuits. To that end I joined the Palm Springs Writer Guild as soon as I retired and have since written a dozen 500 word stories, a few articles, few poems, and several 3,500 word short stories for their competitions. I also share with my daughter, Rebecca, an interest in film and drama and have recently completed writing a one-half-hour play. Hiking in these amazing desert hills is my other hobby. I do that almost every day.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 23

Photo by Kimberly Nichols.

Ghost Dance

--a poem for Willie Boy, Southern Paiute/Chemehuevi Indian Runner who may or may not have been killed by a San Bernardino Sheriffs’ posse on his long run through the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree in Sept.-Oct., 1909.

He is one of us living on both sides living on his second wind living in Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, singing of palm tree revivals, singing of lizards sipping at faint oases, of a mid-day sun tearing flesh from breasts, of an early-morning hangman’s noose of the visions of an in-between world-running through Joshua tree forests running past the shotgun marks on rocks running beyond where night finds day He wears his deerskin shirt, immune to bullets, immune to railroads and gold immune to words I inhabit this town I am blind The arrow flies Ruth Nolan is professor of English at College of the Desert, where she teaches California desert Indian literature and creative writing.

She is editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts. She collaborated on a film about Joshua Tree produced by the UC Riverside-California Museum of Photography and is contributing for a documentary, Solar Gold. She was a speaker at the 2010 Western Wilderness Conference and is featured on the 2010-11 California Legacy “Nature Dreaming” radio project. Her poetry recently appeared in New California Writing: 2011.

24 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Desert Queen My dry heat will make you thirst You‘ll need water because of me My landscape, both flat and soaring You‘ll be lost without my trails If you don‘t watch your step, my quiet cacti will catch your flesh You won‘t be able to remove me easily Pitch black ravens in the sky will be watching you Do you think you are alone?

The ravens are my eyes If you find it is too hot to breathe, I‘ll unleash a thunderstorm My flash-flood will drown you Either way, I will fill your lungs When you become too comfortable, my rattlesnakes will wake you When I see you’ve tread too close to my jagged desert edge, my wind will turn you around I‘ll throw you back in Call me your Desert Queen as the wind bows you down to me

Angela de la Agua is a poet, musician, and artist originally from the Los Angeles area. When not working, she spends her days chasing her black cat away from ground squirrels and jackrabbits, and her nights staring at the stars in a hammock. She currently lives in Joshua Tree.

As Above, So Below Cynthia Anderson It’s not easy to fathom a landscape of boulders.

Uncountable, they stretch to the horizon, tumbled in mounds and heaps.

Their towers defy gravity, their juxtapositions tempt fate.

Deep earth dwellers, they surfaced on a trek of nine million years.

It will be millions more before wind and weather reduce them to dust.

Over time, an observer learns to go rock by rock, allowing each to assume the role of protector.

Certain and most true, granite is the gist of what matters, the bedrock of existence.

Never static, it gathers the force of all forces, astounding under the sun, whose glow warms the crowded slopes as far as the eye can see.

Johnny Lang’s Dream I shall never see the ocean now, its broad blue and cooling waters not, for the first time in my life.

I have remained in the high desert, have made my home here, my gold buried deep, deeper yet in dry heart of far mountain.

My dancing girl left years ago. Not again shall a lady’s hand move across my skin quietly caress me into sublime compliance.

Ocotillo Lady (Dedicated to Ruth Nolan, passionate gate keeper of the desert) An ocotillo rises from the arid soil.

Tall, with willowy arms swaying in the parched breeze, covered with crimson blossoms, their lobes curled back into clusters, lures for bees and swooping hummingbirds, she lives beside a wash where flood waters create deep crevices in the floor of the Mojave desert.

A young mesquite spreads its mahogany brown branches in a rainbow arc. Saguaro, old and majestic, provide shifting shade, beside unmarked sacred sites lain there for thousands of generations, asleep in the ancient earth.

Winding through this sandy neighborhood is a worn stone strewn path. Dark brown curls bobbing as she leaps over giant valleys, her fist clutching a twig to ward off desert dragons, not far from watchful adult eyes.

Suddenly, she stops before Ocotillo Lady.

Her wide golden eyes reflect the throbbing red heart of the desert queen. The wind stills.

Slowly, Ocotillo Lady reaches out, branches straining to kiss glowing cheeks in an acknowledgement of kindred spirits.

Year following year, the blazing sunset streaks the sky in peach, turquoise, gold and magenta.

Lady Ocotillo’s woody, spiny, whip-like dry branches still seek out the sky.

Blossoms no longer appear after a spring shower.

A sapling of a woman deftly hikes the trail that winds close by Ocotillo Lady. Curly hair tucked under a crimson beret, she stops abreast of the dying lady.

A sudden shiver transports her back to dragon filled canyons and a sun drenched meeting so long ago, instantly binding them together in an eternal magnetic circle.

Insects make a humming sound.

Slowly, the Eastern sky darkens.

My skin is as dry as the adamantine wind whistling among the Joshuas, howling through the yuccas coming down across Lost Horse Valley.

Kathleen Seeley holds graduate degrees in English, Writing and Spiritual Psychology. More importantly, she understands that until Homo sapiens recognize the parity of all beings, they will continue to subsist in a violent culture. Cesar Chavez says it well: “Kindness and compassion towards all living beings is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival, dog fight and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become non-violent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves.”

Deenaz P. Coachbuilder has been a resident of the Riverside area since 1981.

She received a Doctorate in Theater Arts from Brigham Young University, and an M.S. in Communicative Disorders from Utah State. Deenaz is an educator, artist, poet and environmental advocate. She is a retired school principal, a professor in Special Education at California State University, San Bernardino, past president of Committee for Community Action and Environmental Justice, and a consultant in speech pathology. She is a published poet in the U.S. and India, exhibits her paintings in oil, enjoys reading, gardening, going for long walks, relationships with family and close friends, staying involved in the Indian American community, and particularly cherishes being a wife and mother. Deenaz is currently working on a publication of her poems.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 25

from the muddy sanctuary of his hole, Benjamin was removed from the destruction of the battlefield and placed aboard a transport ship with the other wounded.

With memories of battle to haunt his mind for a lifetime, and barely functioning lungs a constant physical companion, the transport chugged across the Atlantic, homeward.

Discharged and deemed a disabled casualty of war, Benjamin boarded a train headed west, towards the southwestern desert of the United States were doctors claimed the dry desert climate soothed the wheezing lungs of gas attack victims. He thought otherwise: Was this the army’s way of ridding themselves of wounded veterans? * * *

S

urveying the terrible expanse of no-mans-land, the soldier in the trench wondered what was glorious about dying in this Great World War – a slaughterhouse of a war with trees aghast, blackened with shattered limbs, and bodies of men, twisted and torn, grossly entangled on rows of barbed wire.

As the intermittent flash of cannon fire cast the pall of the night, the man wasn’t sure if the dead men hanging on the wire had souls, and if they did, did they remain to wander the Earth or did they go to some other place?

Without knowing what fate awaited him, PFC Benjamin Whitehouse hunched closer to his comrades seated in the trench beside him.

Unrolling the small canvas rag in his lap, Benjamin removed the sandals and glimpsed the material: Laces, strands of fibrous yucca woven tight, adorned with shells gathered from the Lower Colorado River Basin, and soles, tanned chuckwalla hide, tough as alligator skin, able to resist the puncture of a cholla spine, rough enough to grip the smooth rock indigenous to the area where the sandals originated.

Handed down from his father with the promise they would keep him safe on the field of battle, and their mystery someday to be revealed, much as the magic of Cinderella’s slipper, they spanned the generations: Handed down from his father’s father, and his father’s father, and their fathers before them, long before the white man claimed the land as his own.

Gently rewrapping them in the cloth, Benjamin placed them in his blood-spattered, army issue pack and leaned back against the wall of the trench. Fatigued, muddied and frightened, his eyes were nearly closed when the explosion of a popping canister in the distance was followed by another and then another. Spewing from the cracked canisters, the lethal poison gas approached like a yellow fog, clinging low to the ground, spilling into the trench, where its thickness, like fingers, crept silently through the crevices of the trench, much as the rats did. And his comrades, unable to scream with blistered eyes telling their plight, one by one fell.

Holding tight to his pack and without reason to go in the direction of the enemy, Benjamin clawed his way through the carnage of twisted bodies in the trench, and scarcely breathing with singed lungs, found a blown-out shell-hole in the earth where rolling to the bottom, he found the air clear, away from the gas.

At sunrise, with guns silent and field of battle clear of gas, temporary truce flags fluttered in the morning breeze; a brief respite from the killing where warring sides gathered their wounded and cut the dead free of the barbed wire. Dragged 26 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Several days later, after crossing the railroad trestle spanning the Colorado River, she towered into view: Mt. San Jacinto, regal, standing alone, her severe north-facing wall jutting two miles high above the bare desert floor below; Benjamin’s soul stirred familiar, calmed with the sight before him.

Riding the train to a stop at the depot in Banning, Benjamin stepped onto the platform, and finding a seat in the open bed of a supply wagon, he slung his pack and held tight to its rail as it carved its way through the steep and narrow canyons of the Little Morongo Mountains with the deepening shadows of Mt. San Jacinto fading in the background.

Two years after his journey began on that conflicted continent of Europe, Benjamin arrived at his destination, somewhere near the present day entrance to Joshua Tree National Park where hostile aggressions of war were replaced by shy packs of coyotes foraging for food and the even red glow of his warm evening fires.

Though struggling for breath, and traveling only as far as damaged lungs allowed, he ventured away from the security of his camp and discovered remains of Indian camps from centuries earlier, places that today have given names: Coyote Hole, Barker Dam, Wonderland of Rocks, Indian Cove, Key’s View, Skull Rock, all places depicting their history with the art of petroglyphs etched in the rocks.

For weeks, with lungs not progressing as the doctors promised, he sat by the fire late one evening, contemplating his father’s words: “The sandals will keep you safe,” but safe from what? Survive the battlefield only to suffer in life? And the mystery will be revealed? What mystery? There is no mystery for a man with a pair of burned-out lungs that made him a cripple; suicide was a fleeting thought…. * * * Later, as the glow of his fire dwindled, Benjamin startled when its embers brightened and scattered with a passing whirlwind. Mixed in the swirling embers, a group of figures appeared, a small band of native Indians, first six, and then a seventh.

Unconcerned with Benjamin’s presence, they passed slowly by, single file, while the seventh, covered by a mangy animal hide, straggled behind.

Benjamin had seen the straggler’s face before in a thousand distorted ways on the battlefield: The dead, with hollowed eye sockets and rotting skin exposing bare-boned skulls, and his comrades, the victims of the gas, struggling with vomiting mouths for their last gasp of air as they too died.

Benjamin felt the stare of the man as he passed, as if tugging him to join their world. Even though his earlier thoughts of suicide were still fresh, he was not ready to cross that line to

the spirit world that he was seeing. Or what was he seeing?

Was he conscious, was it a dream, was it a vision, or was it the place where dead soldiers go as he had once wondered?

Carrying their meager belongings, and as silently as they entered Benjamin’s camp, the band drifted out of sight, out of the glow of the fire, into the darkness, with extinguishing embers following…. * * * In the morning, Benjamin found not a footprint of the visitors’ presence, but there, in the sand, something flashed, caught in the rays of the sun: A shell, the size of a quarter, concave, with a tiny hole in the center, and the surface, shining as bright as mother of pearl, closely matching the shells adorning his own sandals. Were his prior nights guests His people, His ancestors, people whom his father rarely shared the history of?

The next night and the following night and on nights clear to winter, the band reappeared. Sometimes passing by briefly, and other times, staying long into the night near an out-cropping of rocks where quietly and efficiently they toiled: Weaving containers of narrow willow gathered from washes, fastening to tips of arrows, points of red jasper, and seeds, ground into meal within shallow bowls formed in the boulders of granite. And the straggler, while always there, sickly, sat away. * * * With the winter rains came the clouds, and under the strain of heavy humid air, Benjamin’s lungs worsened. Struggling for breath, he ventured a short distance away with pack in hand to the peak of Key’s view, where on a clear day, the view stretches hundreds of miles south to the mountains of Mexico, and to the west, closer, the towering Mt. San Jacinto.

But this was not a clear day, and as the thick blanket of clouds pressed moisture against his skin, the straggler emerged.

Facing the straggler, Benjamin eyed the man’s feet, wearing sandals, adorned with shells, except for the left one, missing the center shell, about the size of a quarter.

Benjamin dug in his pack, and revealed the missing shell.

The straggler’s gaze fell back to Benjamin’s pack. Haltingly, Benjamin removed the sandals, and unfurling the rag holding them, found the left sandal also missing the signature shell. Holding the sandals out to the straggler, Benjamin was led deeper into the blanket of clouds, and emerging from the other side, Benjamin found himself alone with blue sky, and crisp air.

Turning, he retraced his steps back through the lifting clouds and with sandals fully adorned with the signature shell, and the mangy hide covering replaced with garments in hues of manzanita and sage, Benjamin breathed deeply and filled his lungs with the smell of damp creosote as he joined the others amongst the mammoth-sized boulders of granite and thick stands of juniper as his ancestors did before him.

And there, left behind in the sand along with Benjamin’s memory of war, the tattered and torn edges of the bloodspattered pack fluttered in the calm desert breeze…..

Scot McKone is a writer, Old West re-enactor, and woodworker who lives in Yucca Valley with one of the fattest cats we’ve ever seen.

Along the Arid Trail Stop and stoop, scoop up a handful of grus, Set your loupe over it.

Peer at the calamitous array of

Detached quartz—clear or vaguely clouded,

Flakes of biotite, golden, glistening bronze,

Weathered feldspar, the color of butter or flesh.

Flecks shed like dead skin from the granite blocks, Once the roiling contents of the mantle’s gut, now Peeling and piling, splitting, forming mineral compositions:

Looming knife blades

Stacked vertiginous columns

Hollow caverns.

Step towards the lichen panel, a Pollockesque display splashed across the shaded rock face: Mauve, ocher, chartreuse, slate-gray colonies clutch the inert surface as your loupe travels over their

Sinuous contours, conjuring brain coral,

Serpentine kelp beds swayed by currents,

Ferns spread across the forest floor.

Feel the stony gaze of the chuckwalla track your movements as it Basks on a warmed slab, its mottled scales mimicking the grainy colors of cooled magma: copper, brick, and beige.

Come at last to the arch—

Elephant or eagle, causeway or

Casual curve—set your lens aside.

Notice the hole worn in the smooth pediment, Lie down and release your presence to the rock.

Listen: Now the wind lifts a handful of gravel, Small pebbles clatter down the diagonal wall.

Gaze at the calamitous array of clouds: Grizzled camels, woolly mammoths, furrowed contrails, a drifting length of lace.

Is that the way back?

Or is this the way back?

Or, now, is there a way back?

Caryn Davidson is a park ranger at Joshua Tree National Park. She has worked in the education branch there for 13 years, presenting environmental education programs in classrooms in the Morongo Basin and the Coachella Valley, and conducting hikes with students in the park. She has hiked from Palm Springs to the top of Mt. San Jacinto. This epic effort was the peak of her hiking career.

Editor’s note: Thanks to all who contributed to our fifth annual Desert Writers Issue. We wish we had pages enough to publish everything we received, including the overwhelming number of books we received for review (we’ll get to them, just give us time).

We hope all our contributors, published or not, will join us on September 24 for our annual Desert Writers Celebration, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Tamma’s Magic Mercantile in Old Town Yucca Valley. If you would like to read your work, or would like to set up for a book signing at the event, please let us know at publisher@thesunrunner.com.

– Steve Brown June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 27

Desert Writers Issue Book Reviews, by Delphine Lucas The pictures show a wide variety of perspectives of life in and around the northwest Mojave area, past and present, of people and of landscapes.

The stories and poems are eclectic, and reflect the diverse ways people interact with the desert and the way the desert interacts with people. A pervasive theme throughout the book is the wind and its effects on the mental state of desert dwellers.

Many of the poems and stories describe what the wind does and what it sounds like.

As people who live in the desert, we share a huge geographical area. However, our ways of connecting with our shared spaces are infinitely varied. In this collection, you have a bicyclist testing his endurance in Death Valley races, a young mother trying to keep up with dusting a desert house and keeping her sanity, high school students who designed and tested out their rockets in 1943, and a woman who mourns the death of her beloved husband as she remembers the two of them watching the night sky. There are also short biographies of remarkable people who impacted the northern Mojave in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as interesting people who impact the same area today.

An aspect of this collection that makes it unique and “That s not a thumbtack you just stepped on, it s a goathead.” delightful are two stories written by children, and a section of – Margaret Lamb poetry written for children. The wonder of children’s views are his important piece of information is included in the list of More Rules For Desert Living, in the compilation connected with the beauty of the desert. It is highly unusual to of stories, poems, travel information, and photographs see the work of children and poems for children in books and that make up Planet Mojave, the book, published by the Ridge publications targeted for adult audiences.

The one recommendation I have for future collections is Writers, a group of approximately 30 published and aspiring that the writers challenge themselves to write stories and articles writers living in and around Ridgecrest. They formed the East Sierra Branch of the California Writer s Club in 1996 which that go psychologically deeper. It could mean longer pieces and possibly not include as many writers. now holds monthly meetings.

This is the kind of book that is already a piece of history, Contributing to this book’s charm is the multitude of photographs that accompany the poems and short writing pieces. and it is the kind of book years from now that will be read by people looking for common experiences tying them to desert dwellers of the past. It is a fast fun read.

Planet Mojave=

“...a fast fun read”

T

Loss: A Love Story

by Donna McCrohan Rosenthal

D

ave could have drawn a line from a cactus to a planet and between those two points taken in the totality and intricacies of the universe. He knew the stars not just by name but, I like to believe, by their first names.

I met him in the Phallic Temple in the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico, in 1997. That’s a story for another day except, suffice it to say, the odds against our ever finding each other stood at easily several million to one.

I’d flown to Mexico to work on a magazine article. Dave had immersed himself in an archaeoastronomy project, in other words, photographing celestial phenomena to document their importance to Mayan architecture.

He lived in Ridgecrest and I, in New York. Of course, I moved, whereupon he immediately vowed—without consulting with me, mind you—that he’d introduce me to the beauties of nature and the heavens that surrounded us.

He owned the sky, both as an astronomer and as a National Guard pilot. He flew it. He knew it.

I’d always adored schmaltzy musical romances. In Dave, I saw all my songs come true.

When doctors diagnosed him with Stage IV colorectal cancer in 2002, he said he couldn’t understand why the uni28 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

verse did this to him when he loved it so much. After two less satisfactory tries, we located Dr. Charles Wiseman, a remarkable oncologist with a promising cancer vaccine. Dave entered the program. The tumors stopped growing. We had another five good years when Dave otherwise most likely would have died in 18 months.

We dealt with occasional bad bouts of cancer-related infection, yet kept on exploring more of the Yucatan, traveling Alaska and Western Canada and visiting the polar bears on the tundra in Manitoba. We wrote about our adventures, and he photographed them, for magazines and newspapers.

He died in 2007.

Then the universe betrayed one of its darker secrets, the one about little deaths.

When a loved one has a fatal disease, we struggle to prepare ourselves for bereavement. But we can’t forecast everything, and eventually, the unexpected nails us, time after time after time.

For some, it’s getting letters addressed to the person we lost. Or phone calls. Or spotting an item on sale at the store and lunging for it, thinking how happy it will make our soul mate, then realizing it doesn’t matter anymore.

Actually, I managed those distresses pretty well. What felled me were, mostly, other people’s reactions.

A good friend told me to throw out every last one of Dave’s belongings, and not waste another minute before doing it, because this way I’d forget sooner. I ignored the advice and tried to imagine why I’d want to forget.

Another pal climbed up on the roof with me to help me start my swamp cooler for the summer. The appliance, an omnipresent desert fixture, generates cold by blowing air across a tank of water. This friend, like many, assumed that bereavement renders sufferers witless and, like many, concluded that his desire to do a favor trumped my having a role in the decision.

He grabbed the float and asked, “Why does this have an extension on it?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But it’s an add-on, so Dave must have had it for a reason.”

“Not necessarily,” he corrected. “And besides, you’re in shock. I’m not listening to you.” So he snapped it off and reconnected it without that six-inch wire arm.

The next afternoon, I switched on the swamp cooler.

Without the arm to hold it at a distance from the side of the cooler, the float had snagged and didn’t register the water level. This unleashed a flood on the roof. A serious, major flood. It took me an hour to fix it.

A year later, another buddy had an inspiration. He washed my car windows, inside and out, in the process removing my dog’s nose prints from the window near her favorite backseat space. She’d died seven years earlier. Cassie, Dave and I had had all of three years together. I missed her, and seeing those nose prints had always given me such joy. Now they were gone.

Shortly after Dave’s passing, I’d mentioned to different folks on several occasions that our dual-control electric blanket saddened me. “We got it in the winter of 2006,” I’d explain. “It pleased Dave no end. He could set his temperature and I could pick mine. But he only got to use it a week before he went to the hospital in Los Angeles and never returned.”

Invariably they responded by laughing hysterically. Not just smiling or giggling, but laughing hard.

Then there was the day that I showed a friend a tree that hadn’t been doing well when Dave and I left for that final trip. “I doubted that it would survive our two months out of town,” I began. “When I came home, it didn’t have a leaf on it. But the next morning, it had bloomed. Not one leaf or two, but loads of them. It sounds silly, but I had this great sense of assurance that Dave and the universe had bonded.

The following year, though, it died.”

My friend guffawed, rocking with glee, but nonetheless got the words out. “Now it reminds you of Dave because he’s not coming back either.”

Little deaths.

Sometimes our friends with the best of intentions seem

determined that we should relive the pain, the sharper and more abrupt, the better, and we die little deaths, one by one by one. Oh well. I rebounded.

I bring this up as a cautionary tale. One day it might have value for you if you remember to stop yourself to recognize the distinction between heartbreak and a big joke.

But there’s more. I have a revelation to share. Oh boy how I wish my roof hadn’t flooded. Oh boy how I treasured those nose prints and that tree.

Yet what Dave urged—what defies obliteration—conforms precisely to that 1997 vow of his. It stays with me as a soundless voice, revealing nature’s beauty everywhere—when the setting sun turns cumulus puffs from pink to gold… when the moon rises fat and tangerine orange behind a cholla cactus… when wisps of virga clouds strain downward to not quite wet the land… when I consider the people I love here (their odd replies notwithstanding), who are part of Dave’s gift to me… above all, when wildflowers pop up in the spring, each a gem of intricate design and luminous color.

I fully intend to see Dave again. He’ll greet me with, “As I was saying before we were interrupted…,” then he’ll show me the rest of the universe. Technically, he never limited his vow to Earth.

The little deaths that once hurt so much will drop into perspective. Until then, I have the desert and the sky. There’s no contest. They’re more than enough.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 29

Dirty Electricity By Sam Milham=

T

his book was brought to my attention by a friend in the Pacific Northwest who concerns herself with healthy living.

The author of Dirty Electricity, Samuel Milham, was an epidemiologist for the State of Washington. He worked for the State Department of Health in Olympia, for 24 years and retired from there in 1992. He received his MD degree from Albany Medical College and an MPH (Masters in Public Health) degree from Johns Hopkins University. During his career as a chronic disease specialist, which spans over 50 years, he has published over a hundred peer-reviewed articles. Epidemiology is the study of the distribution of diseases in populations. Milham is also concerned with disease etiology, or causes.

Since Milham is a snowbird who winters in the lower desert, he happened upon a newspaper article written in February of 2004 concerning a epidemiology expert who discounted what appeared to be a cancer cluster at La Quinta Middle School.

Milham, who did some background work and analyzed the same data as the expert, discovered the teachers were correct. There were a lot more cancers present in the teachers at the school than what would normally be expected.

To make a long story short, he found that by using a meter invented by Graham and Stetzer which plugged into electrical outlets, he was able to measure the high frequency voltage transients, or dirty electricity in the school s classrooms. Every room had high levels. His hypothesis was that the dirty electricity level might have originated by a defective utility station about a mile away. The end result, after much obfuscation by school district officials and experts brought in by the district, 30 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

was that a small fortune was spent to shield one of the rooms in the building from high magnetic fields. Milam says that for around $5,000 they could have used plug-in capacitor filters throughout the building and substantially reduced the transients.

In this book there are stories of leukemia clusters involving children, an account of a tumor in a colleague apparently caused by sleeping with an electric alarm clock next to his head for years, police getting testicular cancer by holding radar devices on their laps, and many references to the squelching of research that has been done on the use of our favorite toys: computers, cell phones, ham radios, and other electronic devices. Throughout his career, Milam has been able to show relationships between residential electrification and cancer.

He also points out that the Russians and Europeans have been at the forefront of research for years and have very strict EMF exposure standards, unlike the U.S. Milham is busy now in his retirement years. He is involved with another school in Palm Springs, and recently met with Steve Brown, publisher of The Sun Runner. You can reference the article Steve wrote in the April/May issue.

This book is not only cutting edge and a fascinating read at less than 100 pages, but for me, it was a call to action. Steve borrowed one of the Graham-Stetzer meters, tested our home outlets, and I tested the outlets in my classroom as well. Since readings should be about 50, we were dismayed to see readings from all of our home outlets to be in the 200 range, and the ones in my classroom over 600. We are now using the plug-in filters throughout the house, and I use two in my classroom.

The readings are now substantially reduced. These filters are power conditioners. Larger versions are standard equipment in factories that use industrial equipment.

The only criticism I have of this book is that I wish that Milham had made more effort to explain the technical terms he used in a more user friendly way. It could have made the book 25 pages longer, but it would have made this book more accessible to the average reader, who would not have to focus as much to understand it.

I

can’t help but think that the last page of this book should have been the first page, because this is where the story really begins. The book itself was background for the real story which could have been consolidated in half the pages.

The best part takes you back to the sixties, when Joshua Tree National Park was the Monument, and some of our generation got high and naked there. Bodin captures the spirit of that time when the essence of life was free and pure, and every wonderful possibility lay ahead for the young like a road to heaven. This excerpt is reprinted in this issue of The Sun Runner.

Unfortunately this innocence becomes ammunition for Talia s conventional ex-husband when her five year old daughter, Sophie, reports her lovely evening in the park with her mother and friends to her father and his new wife. In a custody hearing, Talia is declared an unfit mother, the father is awarded full custody and Talia is only permitted to see her daughter with a court appointed supervisor. Bodin should have added more details about the judge, because judges of those days were notorious in their unfair treatment of women in divorce and custody cases. It would have further anchored the reader in that time period.

Talia doesn’t like having supervised visitations with her daughter. It cramps her style. She justifies taking off for New Mexico to pursue her art by the fact that her husband’s new wife loves her daughter and her daughter is attached to their new baby, never mind the fact that Talia and Sophie were as bonded as a mother and daughter could ever be up to the time Talia decided to take off. Bodin communicates that very well to us.

Over the next 20 years Talia finds herself a new female lover, having also abandoned her first love in California on the way out the door to New Mexico. The story plods on involving an unconvincing coincidence with her new lover’s grandson with one of the people she got naked with at the Monument.

Perhaps this subplot could have been more compelling and effective in the story had Bodin found a good editor. The awkward disjointed writing in this section make it unbelievable.

The book ends with a road trip to memory lane in Desert Hot Springs with her lover, whose dog she complains about all the way from New Mexico to California. She doesn’t seem to be any more caring about her lover and her lover’s dog than she was about her own daughter.

Children are physically and psychologically abandoned everyday by their natural parents in America, often resulting in severe damage to them. Many of these children end up burdening their teachers, classmates, and society in general. They do not turn out lovely and talented as Sophie, no thanks to Talia or her ex-husband who, by the way, also took off, leaving the girl in the care of strangers. The book is full of justifications and excuses for Talia s choices. Never once does it occur to Talia that to be a good artist, she would need to be responsible for her actions. A person’s selfish spirit does not create quality work. The walking fish used as a metaphor to describe Talia s survival spirit was misplaced. It more aptly describes Sophie who had both mother and father abandon her.

I would have loved to have heard the conversation when Talia gets really talking with her daughter whom she meets up with at the end of the book, and then find out what happens to their relationship. I doubt it would have been as pretty as the splash art Talia spent the last 20 years making in New Mexico.

Walking Fish won the USA Book News 2011 award for Gay/Lesbian fiction, and it was chosen as a runner-up in the Fiction category. The book was self-published and considered one of Outskirts Press’ top 10 books of the year.

Walking Fish

By Joanne Bodin= An excerpt from Walking Fish, by Joanne Bodin: The sun was behind the horizon by the time they were finished setting up camp. Darlene started a campfire and made some hot chocolate. She took a coat hanger out of one of the boxes, bent the end, and put a marshmallow on it. “Here Sophie, this is for you.” She held the marshmallow over the fire. Sophie reached for it. Darlene pulled off the sticky hot candy and handed it to Sophie on a paper plate. “Careful. It’ll burn your mouth. Wait till it cools.”

Sophie licked the burnt crust of the marshmallow and was just about to bite into it when she noticed the moon coming up behind one of the massive boulders. “Look at the moon.” Everyone turned around to look as the moon began its ascent behind the rocks. “Is it going to be a full moon?”

“Looks like it is,” Sergio answered. “Hey, before we eat, let’s go on an adventure hike in the moonlight.” He started to take his clothes off. “Come on. Don’t be shy. No one knows about this place yet. It’s private.”

Darlene shot him a glance and nodded in Sophie’s direction.

Despite her look, he stood up and undressed. Then Malka took off her clothes. Darlene turned toward Talia. “Are you okay with this?”

Talia was smiling the whole time. She looked over at Sophie who had already started to undress. “Guess so.”

Malka and Darlene ran barefoot up the smooth stone surface of the boulder as if they had done this before, while Sergio limped behind them using his cane for balance. Halfway up he turned around, held his cane up toward the moon and said, “Sophie, if we hurry maybe you can actually touch the moon. Look, it’s right at the top of the mountain now.”

Without so much as a glance at her mother, Sophie took her shoes June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 31

Desert Country by Edwin Corle=

I

was introduced to the writer Edwin Corle, last spring when I read No Place For a Puritan (a wonderful collection of the literature of the California deserts reviewed in The Sun Runner, Aug./Sept. issue 2010). The book had an excerpt from Desert Country, and since it was my favorite piece in the collection, I ordered the book. I wanted to find out what happened to the man who was bit by a sidewinder in a desert wash.

Edwin Corle was a known and somewhat prolific writer during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, having authored many books about the California deserts, specifically the Mojave. He had several pieces published in the New Yorker and even had a radio program back in the 30s. He truly loved and respected the desert and shares this love in his writing.

Desert Country is a collection of stories about the desert in the later part of the 19th century as well as stories about the present, 1940. Corle looks back 70 years from his present day vantage point and makes comparisons. The early days were rough and raw, and Corle tells stories of early mining settlements and what happened to them. Seventy years later, the reader of the 21st century gets to look back 70 years and see Walking Fish excerpt, continued...

off, then the rest of her clothes. Talia started to undress, but couldn’t take her eyes off Sergio. His naked body seemed so fragile against the sturdy surface of stone. Sophie tapped on her mother’s thigh to hurry her up, but Talia’s gaze didn’t waver. Her world seemed upside down now. What would Dan think if he found out she and Sophie were running around naked in the desert? And hell, she was having an affair with a woman? And what about Sophie seeing a naked man—hopefully for the first time? She doubted Dan let Sophie see him naked.

But Sophie didn’t seem to notice Sergio was naked. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice anyone’s nudity—just that they were running up the huge boulder toward the moon.

Sophie ran ahead of her mother. “Mommy, hurry up. I want to 32 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

through Corle s perspective. What a fascinating tour of places known and unknown to me!

He writes about Twentynine Palms when it began as a town. The streets were beautifully laid out in a grid, with the houses evenly spread out, a mile apart. He predicted the town was going to be as beautiful and as popular with the Hollywood crowd as Palm Springs.

Corle spent a great deal of time traveling in the deserts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and was interested and knowledgeable about desert Indians. He did personal research as well as book research on the Native American tribes of the desert and includes fascinating information about their languages, tribal character and characteristics, and relationship of one tribe to another. There is a section on Indian petroglyphs and their meanings, which can be taken or left, but interesting nonetheless. He is an excellent storyteller and shares many legends, including a 200 year-old “Twenty-Nine Palms” Indian legend I have never heard before.

One of my favorite parts of this book is a story of Jack Mitchell, for whom Mitchell Caverns was named, and his descent on a rope and chair into a dark hole in one of the caverns in the mountain. If you have ever read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, you get the idea. Mitchell gets separated from space and time and lives to tell about it. Corle visited Mitchell when he opened the caverns as a tourist attraction.

Steve and I enjoy looking for places that are referenced in old books and travel guides. I am particularly interested in finding the town started by a retired Los Angeles firefighter, George Bright, an African American that Corle writes about.

Bright got a government homestead site of 250 acres and gave away free parcels to people who wanted to become part of the town. He build a grid of roads which he named after the days of the week and months of the year, and also built a three-story mansion with colored windows for himself and his bride-to-be.

I wonder if this town went back to the desert, or if it sits as a ghost town.

My only complaint with this book is that, as a product of his time, Corle, a white man, was not culturally or racially sensitive at all towards blacks, Chinese, and sometimes even Native Americans, whom he did care about. Because of this attitude, I occasionally questioned the validity of some of the information in the book seen through his insensitive filter. However, at the end of the day, I deepened my understanding of the beginnings of many places that I have been to in the desert, and became acquainted with places I can hardly wait to visit. I am sure I will be reading more Corle in the future, and maybe find out what happened to the man who was bitten by the sidewinder.

We don t find out in this book either. touch the moon.”

Talia watched Sophie’s tiny body shimmering in the moonlight.

How could this be wrong? Sophie was so happy. She was so happy.

With a sigh, she unbuttoned her blouse and tossed away her jeans and panties, feeling the cool night air on her naked body. Sophie grabbed her hand, and they ran to catch up with the others waiting for them at the top of the boulder. Darlene called out, “This is Mother Rock. It’s from an old Indian legend.”

Sophie echoed, “Mother Rock, Mother Rock.”

“There’s a cave nearby,” Darlene whispered into Sophie’s ear.

“It’s hard to find the entrance. That’s why we’re the only ones here.

Nobody knows about this spot except us.”

Sophie took Darlene’s hand, while her other hand gripped Talia’s.

Sand In My Shoe

by Helen Bagley=

A

really good book can either be a book that deepens your understanding of what you already know and care about, or it can shift mental paradigms. This book did both for me. Sand in My Shoe is Helen Bagley’s story about her experiences as a homesteader in Twentynine Palms, before there was a Marine base, before there was electricity, indoor plumbing, or paved roads.

During the late 1920 s, many World War I veterans and people suffering from asthma came to Twentynine Palms, under the recommendation of Dr. Luckie of Pasadena to homestead.

At the time the government was offering a quarter section of land, 160 acres, to anyone who was willing to build at least an 11’x12’ building. It didn t have to have a floor, and you had to live in it for at least seven months out of each of three consecutive years, and be able to prove that you did, in order to keep the land. Many people tried to make a go of it. Some succeeded and some didn t.

The three of them walked over the top of the boulder in search of the cave.

“There it is,” Darlene called out.

They climbed down a crevasse into a small cave. Moonlight filtered through a narrow opening at the top of the cave and flooded the sandy floor below. There was barely room to stand, so they all sat down on the cool ground. Talia watched Sophie draw in the sand with her tiny fingers. Sergio leaned against the rocky wall. Malka and Darlene lay down in the cool sand directly under the moonlit crevasse. Inside this ancient womb of stone Talia felt a surge of warmth, but not from heat.

It was more like something inside her burst open and for the first time since her days at Berkeley she felt so alive, so hopeful, so free.

Helen and Frank Bagley arrived in Twentynine Palms in 1927 with three small children. Frank sufferered from asthma.

He and Helen, both natives of the Pacific Northwest, built a structure which was basically a garage, to live in and set up a tiny general store. They brought in supplies from Banning and later San Bernardino and Riverside, marking them up 25 percent to sell. Initially, they would roll up all their bedding and put it outside during store hours. Eventually, they had an adjoining tent to sleep in.

Helen tells how the people of the town built their first school and got their first teacher, even before they put in some decent dirt roads, and they had a high school before Palm Springs. Because of the store Helen and Frank knew everyone in the area, including prospectors, miners, and the people who wanted to be pioneers. The store became the community center of sorts because as time went on, the building served many purposes besides being a store. It housed the first telephone switchboard, post office, and Frank was the person who was the official prover, the person who sent in the documentation of people who met their residence requirements. He was also an unofficial counselor, giving advice on just about anything.

Eventually, as one of the town movers and shakers, he helped raise money and organized the building of the roads some of us use today. Helen and Frank raised their three sons in Twentynine Palms, and her book was published in 1978.

This book was written with love and compassion for friends and neighbors. Helen tells Bill Key’s story, one I had heard before in bits and pieces, not knowing what parts were true and what parts weren’t. She writes of friends with serious mental illness and how those issues were handled. Helen does not romanticize the life of the homesteaders. She is honest about the problems people faced daily, often because these individualistic sort of people were difficult people, and she is honest about their sorrows and disappointments as well. The sense of pride in meeting these challenges with humor and resolve, however, made this book inspirational reading for me.

These homesteaders had next to nothing materially, but their spirit and perseverance gave them an adventurous and meaningful existence. They also gave us the town, and later the city, of Twentynine Palms.

This is an excellent book to read in conjunction with Joshua Tree National Park’s 75th Anniversary.

Recommended Reading – books we’ve received and been reading but didn’t have either time to fully digest them, or the necessary room to review them (yet).

Consider If You Will, by John Manesis. A book of poetry by this part-time Palm Desert resident, that re-examines, delightfully and successfully, nursery rhymes, children’s stories, and myths. www.jmanesispoetry.com.

Tell Me What You See, by Major Ed Dames and Joel Harry Newman. Newman, from Morongo Valley, has put together what seems to be an excellent book on Dames’ career with the U.S. Army as the world’s premier psychic spy.

History of Humanity Engraved in Granite, Vol. 1, by Jaques-Andre Istel. The mayor of Felicity, and the man behind the Museum of History in Granite, has compiled this book that documents the engraved panels of his museum. Fascinating.

Desertwalk, written & illustrated by Audrey Schumacher Moe. A colorful and informative look at the desert around us. A beautiful and useful book for anyone who loves the desert.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 33

Photo courtesy of the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep, www.sheepsociety.com.

T

he desert’s bighorn sheep are one of the very unique species we have in the Mojave Desert. They’re the desert’s largest inhabitants, but there is much more to the species than just their size. If you have been fortunate enough to witness a large ram scurry up a an impassable mountain side, then you know what I mean.

Some years ago, while hiking in a local mountain range, I found a dead ram. A short time later I had found yet another dead ram. It was from that point forward that I began searching this mountain range for bighorn sheep. While I learned a lot by tracking and following game trails, it took me almost six years to see a living bighorn sheep in this range. The difference between those early years and now is knowledge. Knowledge not only of this particular mountain range, but of desert bighorn sheep in general. In my years, I’ve found that some of the sheep’s behaviors are quite amazing and difficult to believe at first. It is also these behaviors that make them so difficult to find.

One unique characteristic of the bighorn sheep is their ability to survive without water for an extended period of time.

When the desert has received a fresh supply of precipitation and the temperatures are cooler, bighorn sheep can survive for months without drinking water. However, in the driest and hottest times, they still must drink almost daily. While that may not seem to be a long time, try to survive without water for a day or two in the desert, in August, and you will see what I mean. When sheep do go in search of water, they employ amazing strategies to get in and get out safely.

In California, bighorn sheep live as high as 12-13,000 feet in elevation, as they do in the White Mountains, or as low as 200-300 feet in places like the Chocolate Mountains. Some make their homes in the forest like those in the San Gorgonio wilderness. It is the extraordinary ability to adapt to a variety of often extreme conditions that make them so fascinating.

By following sheep in their daily lives I’ve learned a lot more than just how they survive in the desert. To learn about sheep, one must also learn about the desert in its entirety.

For example, sheep often have a very strong bond to their herd and once, while in the Mojave Desert, I saw an example of this bond and was quite amazed.

34 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

I happened to be riding down a wash on a motorcycle when I saw a mountain lion run right in front of me and proceed to my right. It was getting late and the sun had begun to set. I stopped to watch the lion for awhile and after he reached the top of a small hill, he stopped and watched me. After just a few short minutes, I started to take off and it was at that moment I glanced down to see a dead Bighorn Sheep.

It was a full grown ewe that had just been killed and recently enough that the mountain lion had not started eating it. I gazed at it for a few moments and continued home. Intrigued by the kill, I devised a plan for further investigation once daylight returned.

Early the following morning I arrived at the location of the dead ewe and settled in about 500 yards away with some high powered binoculars and a spotting scope. Suspecting the mountain lion had probably had the ewe for dinner the night prior, I was hoping to catch another glimpse of the lion somewhere in the vicinity. The sun rose and an hour passed.

Nothing.

Then, to my surprise, out of nowhere a group of ewes were slowly making their way down the wash. Using my 20 power binoculars with an 80 mm lens, I was able to view the sheep very well. The sheep appeared a bit nervous as they were making their way down the wash and were moving toward me at a cautious pace. I wondered if the dead ewe belonged to this herd or if it happened to be a coincidence they were in the area. The answer became more evident as they got closer and closer.

This particular group of ewes numbered about eight to 10.

As they closed to within 30 yards of the dead ewe, the herd bunched up, as sheep often do in times of danger. After another few moments, nervously, two left the group. One appeared to be a much older ewe and the other much younger, perhaps this year’s lamb. They walked very carefully up to the dead ewe and looked at her for a minute or two. Then, they turned around and walked back to the group that had been patiently waiting then proceeded back up the mountain, at a somewhat hurried pace.

To my surprise, the horrendous death and terror the mountain lion had inflicted didn’t stop the sheep from checking up on one of their own. When the herd discovered there was nothing that could be done to save the deceased ewe, they simply walked off. Once the herd departed, I walked up to the kill site to find that that lion had fed well the night before.

And this…is just The Way of Things in the desert.

I hope you have enjoyed reading my experience. If you would like to learn more about the desert and the desert’s bighorn sheep, I welcome you to visit my website: www.thewayofthings.org.

Find out what happened between the ram and the bobcat in the photo above in our next issue!

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 35

Elizabeth Crozer Campbell

I

n the beginning, there was only water as far as the eye could see, according to the Chemehuevi Indians, who once traversed the rocky peaks and steep slopes of what is now Joshua Tree National Park. Ocean Woman, afloat on a woven boat with wolf, mountain lion and coyote, created the land by rubbing dead skin from her body and sprinkling it over the sea.

In this ancient story, a woman creates the desert land from her own body. In contemporary times, three women worked tirelessly to understand and protect what is now Joshua Tree National Park. This year, Joshua Tree celebrates its 75th Anniversary. To celebrate the anniversary is to honor the contributions of these three women.

Elizabeth Crozer Campbell There is no evidence that Elizabeth Crozer Campbell received formal archaeological training, but that didn’t stop her from becoming an archaeological pioneer. Campbell moved to 29 Palms in 1924 with her husband Bill. He was a WWI veteran and a victim of a mustard gas attack who thought the desert would improve his health. The Campbells built Roughley Manor, an elegant home located just north of Joshua Tree National Park’s Oasis Visitor’s Center, now a popular bed and breakfast inn.

Elizabeth and Bill’s passion for archaeology led them to explore archaeological sites in what is now the park and to the establishment of the desert branch of the Southwest Museum, where Elizabeth served as director. During one trip, they discovered an arrowhead, flecked with brown, sand and cream tones, along a desiccated ancient water channel in the Pinto Basin. This distinct triangular point and other associated artifacts found in the wash were believed to be between 4,000 and 8,000 years old and indicated the presence of a culture of nomadic hunters who did some seasonal plant gathering. They came to be known as the Pinto Culture and are the oldest presence of humans in Joshua Tree National Park.

The discovery of the Pinto Culture is only a small part of Elizabeth and Bill Campbell’s legacy. During the 1920s through 1940s, the Campbells revolutionized theories on desert cultures and discovered archaeological sites yet to be fully analyzed.

Their artifact collection, which consists of field notes, photos and 65,000 lithic, ceramic and organic artifacts, tell scientists a great deal about the prehistory of Joshua Tree National Park.

Minerva Hoyt Around the same time, Minerva Hoyt, a wealthy Pasadena socialite with a green thumb, fell in love with the desert landscape.

Hoyt was captivated by desert plants’ remarkable adaptations 36 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

that allowed them to thrive in a land with little rain and harsh sunlight. Minerva traveled throughout the California desert and observed firsthand the widespread destruction of cacti and Joshua trees by vandals and people who sold these iconic plants for gardens in urban areas.

She founded the International Deserts Conservation League to build support for creating desert parks that would protect unique desert flora and fauna. Hoyt was also appointed to serve on the California State Parks Commission, although there was little doubt she wanted a national park unit to protect the scenic California desert. Minerva hired well known ecologists and biologists to prepare reports on the natural resources of what was to become Joshua Tree National Monument. After being introduced to President Roosevelt, the president asked the National Park Service to prepare a recommendation. On August 10, 1936 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the 100 mile-long and 50 mile-wide Joshua Tree National Monument.

Senator Dianne Feinstein Over 50 years later, in 1992, Dianne Feinstein was elected a California senator. She recognized the California desert’s remarkable biodiversity, spectacular scenery and outstanding recreational opportunities and promised her first action would be to introduce the desert bill which had previously been championed by former Senator Alan Cranston. The resulting California Desert Protection Act of 1994 created the Mojave National Preserve and transformed Death Valley National Monument and Joshua Tree National Monument into national parks. It also designated 3.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management wilderness and added 234,000 acres to Joshua Tree National Park.

The list of protected lands was vast, but even more incredible was the tenacity displayed by Feinstein, Congressional advocates, environmentalists and other supporters in the face of fierce opposition. It’s a long story that begins with desert grassroots advocacy—organizing, countless media tours, stunning landscape photography and even introducing desert tortoises to legislators—and ends with a pitched battle and subsequent passage of the legislation on Capitol Hill.

Feinstein’s bill has proved to be visionary. It has done more than preserve the landscape, it has transformed a region.

Specifically, the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 addressed regional planning, left a conservation legacy for future generations and is the source of a powerful economic engine.

According to the report The Economic Benefits of California Desert Wildlands: 10 Years Since The California Desert Protection Act of 1994, the benefits of the bill are more than preserving species and scenic landscapes, but include recreation, off-site benefits, scientific research values, educational benefits, ecosystem service benefits, and passive use values and are estimated at a value of more than $1.3 billion per year in the California desert region.

Joshua Tree National Park’s history is replete with birth, growth and creation. According to the Chemehuevi, what was once the dead skin of Ocean Woman was transformed into the starkly beautiful mountains and canyons of this national treasure. What was once unprotected land is now preserved for future generations. In contemporary times, three women understood the value of what is now Joshua Tree National Park, explored its rich history and worked to protect it. On Joshua Tree’s 75th birthday, let’s honor their expertise, vision and contributions!

Seth Shteir is California desert field representative for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Paul Smith owner of the 29 Palms Inn and president of the California Wilderness Coalition, also contributed to this article.

M

iners walk out of Yellow Aster! Strike of Randsburg Reaches Mojave! Will Tie Up All Kern County Gold Producers! Trouble Results From Refusal to Raise Wages! Mine Owners Say That the Demands of the Men are not warranted! Attorney Must Answer Miners! Randsburg is Saved—Miners’ Union is Killed—Great Yellow Aster Booms!

All those headlines hit the newspapers over a time period of less than four months in 1903.

Headlines from old newspaper articles often give us a magical connection with the past. Readers’ thoughts can firm up that link; reading vintage writing can even create something akin to movies in the reader’s mind. As ‘anonymous’ once reflected: a library card can take you further than a drivers’ license.

The rancorous Randsburg strike, instituted by Union 44 of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), was focused on wage issues. The San Francisco Call of June 11, 1903 reported “The Yellow Aster Company discriminates between the miners and the muckers [including car men and shovelers]. The miners get $3 a day, and the muckers who work alongside of them and do equally as hard, if not harder, work, receive but $2.50.” A book on the WFM, by George G. Suggs, relates that in the spring of 1903 the WFM “was the most militant labor organization in the country.” A radical labor organization existed right here in Randsburg!

Labor issues crept across the face of western mining as it shifted from placer mining to underground lode mining which required increased technology and expensive machinery largely paid for by investors. This mining transition was nearly complete by the time of the discovery of minerals on what became the California Rand. Some have termed this an “elbow in history” where an old way of life watches the birth of the new… and birth is rarely without pain.

Mine owners now found themselves as the center of a ‘sandwich’ between investors who were needed to supply capital and mine workers who were needed to unearth the product.

And EVERYBODY needed to be paid!

A book chapter could easily be written about the Yellow Aster strike even though many newspaper articles appear to be a version of “he said, she said.” Excerpts from strike accounts do provide a glimpse into what analysts have identified as the emerging “implied right of the working men to a voice in the administration of the mines.”

The actual union walkout happened at 7 a.m. on June 10, 1903 when about 300 men left the mine in a quiet and orderly way. Yellow Aster president John Singleton was quoted in the

John Singleton, right; and the Yellow Aster Stamp Mill, above right.

San Francisco Call that the mine would be shut down because “the company will not increase these wages, no matter what the union may demand…an eight hour day for a miner means six hours work and we certainly shall not listen to any demand for higher wages.” (Many western miners were paid for time spent changing clothes; going from site to site, lunch, etc.)

Twists and turns developed through the brief course of the strike including charges against Yellow Aster attorney John D. Ackerman, suggesting he imported strike breaker miners from Missouri without explaining to them the true conditions at the mine. The case collapsed without going to trial.

By the second of September the LA Times reported that the union strikers (referred to as “soup eaters” since they ate at the union’s soup kitchen) had become discouraged because of the non-union miners now employed by the Yellow Aster. Union members began to return to their old jobs after successfully passing “individual consideration.” It was also reported that the Desert Mine Operators Association had been organized with John Singleton serving as president and J.Hammond named as vice president. (J.Hammond was most likely famous mining engineer John Hays Hammond who had, by this time, returned from South Africa.)

By September 30, 1903 the LA Times wrote that ALL THE STAMPS WILL BE DROPPING TODAY as the 30 stamp mill joined the Yellow Aster’s 100 stamp mill which was already in full operation. The eerie quiet of the desert which prevailed during the strike was over.

On the third of October the LA Times revealed that the miners’ union in Randsburg had purchased a saloon in the town suggesting this was an effort by the 30 or so remaining union men to get the non-union men drunk so they would join the WFM cause! The article went on to advise union members in Los Angeles that some of their dues had been spent on such a questionable purchase.

When you next come to Randsburg, take time to walk the main street and look up at the hills where some of the (privately held-no trespassing) old mines remain. The desert and vandals have swallowed most of the Yellow Aster’s historical structures.

Fortunately picturesque historical words remain….

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 37

Desert Theatre Beat

By Jack Lyons Sun Runner Theatre Editor Summer in the hi- and low deserts often is a case of just surviving the triple digit temperatures.

Some residents flee to Big Bear, Lake Arrowhead, and cooler Alpine climes. Others head for the beaches along the coasts for respite.

This is my way of saying the “live theatre” scene is in the doldrums during June, July, and August.

Come September, we begin to see the stirrings of the upcoming theatre season (usually getting underway in October). With that said. Here’s the live theatre lineup over the next two months.

HI DESERT THEATRES… Theater 29 – Twentynine Palms Theatre 29 is the only theatre in the hi- or low desert that remains open 12 months a year. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, you can catch a live theatre performance at the John Calveri Theatre on Sullivan Road.

Their August/September production is the Dan Goggin musical comedy play “Nunsense A-Men,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson.

This comedy is a follow-up iteration of the highly successful “Nunsense” musical/comedy series, which Goggin has turned into a veritable franchise. As a matter of fact, you do not have to be a Catholic or even religious to enjoy this wacky, funny production.

The production opens Friday, August 26 at 7 p.m. and runs to Saturday, September 24. There is one Thursday show on September 8 at 7 p.m. and one Sunday, September 18 matinee at 2:30 p.m.

For reservations and ticket information call the Box Office at (760)3614191.

LOW DESERT THEATRES …

Palm Canyon Theatre – Palm Springs The Palm Canyon Theatre is just returning from its “summer theatre camp pro38 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

gram.” The first production that kicks off the 2011/2012 Season is the outrageous and hilarious comedy/farce “Sordid Lives.” This comedy is a perennial favorite with Palm Canyon Theatre audiences and has been selected as a fund-raiser production for the upcoming PCT season.

“Sordid Lives” will run only three performances: Friday, September 9 & 10 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, September 11 at 2 p.m.

If you have never seen a production of this classic comedy make sure you catch it this September. It’s a genuine hoot! For reservations and ticket information call the PCT box office at (760)323-5123.

Dezart Performs – Palm Springs In preparation for its 4th season, Dezart Performs is holding open auditions for its December production of “The Old Bird.”

“The Old Bird” was chosen as the audience favorite this past spring when Dezart Performs staged readings of seven new plays. Following tradition, the favorite is produced as the season opener in the fall. The play will run December 1-3 and 8-10.

The full length play, written by Lynn Wells Nelson, was inspired by the life of Jeanne Calment, recorded as the world’s oldest (documented) living person. The play spans 30 years and is set in Arles, France. Charles Rinaldo directs, and Michael Shaw and Daniela Ryan are producers.

The casting call will be Saturday, August 27, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Studio D, 4116 Matthew Drive, Palm Springs.

For information, please call (760)322-0179 or visit www.dezartperforms.com.

RIDGECREST THEATRES...

Community Light Opera Theatre Association (CLOTA) – Ridgecrest If you are a rugged individualist and refuse to leave the hot weather behind, then trot yourself up to Ridgecrest, just off Highway 395 in the north Mojave and check out the Community Light Opera Theatre Association (CLOTA) production of “Guys and Dolls.”

The classic musical comedy is being performed on August 5 (which is ‘sold out’), 6, 12, 13, 18-20 at 7:30 p.m, with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee on August 14.

The theatre is located at 1425 N. Inyo St.

For reservations and ticket information call the CLOTA Hot Line at (760)446-2411.

OTHER THEATRES – UNDER A TWO HOUR DRIVE AWAY… Big Bear Summer Theater Festival – Fawnskin The Big Bear Summer Theater Festival takes place two weekends this year, August 12 & 13, and August 19 & 20. This year’s festival offers the play “Clarence Darrow,” a visit with America’s lawyer.

Darrow is the legal legend who brought the working man an eight-hour workday and defended the right of a Southern school teacher to explain evolution during the famous “Monkey Trial.”

In this play, you can sit in while the famed attorney reminisces over his career—including a twist most don’t know.

Tickets go for $10, with age 6-13 half price, and kids under five, free. Proceeds of the festival go to the National Forest Association.

For tickets visit www.bigbearsummertheaterfestival.com, or call (805)807-9939. Shows take place in the large outdoor amphitheater at the Big Bear Discovery Center on Highway 38 in Fawnskin.

The Old Globe Theatre – San Diego To escape our torrid triple digit temps and still enjoy the arts, head for the cool ocean breezes of San Diego. The world famous Old Globe Theatre is in full swing with their Summer Outdoor Shakespeare Festival, held in the Lowell Davies Outdoor Festival Theatre in Balboa Park.

The 2011 Company of Players is presenting three plays in repertory in the rustic outdoor Old Globe theatre complex.

Currently running through September 25, you can enjoy: Shakespeare’s “The Tempest (starring Miles Anderson), “Much Ado About Nothing” (starring Georgia Hatzis and Jonno Roberts) and Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” (with a tour de force performance by Miles Anderson).

If you have never been to the Old Globe’s Shakespeare Summer Festival, treat yourself to one of the world’s great Shakespearean festivals. You won’t be disappointed.

For reservations and ticket information to any of the three productions running in repertory, go online at www. theoldglobe.org.

Just because the weather is hot where you live, that is no reason not to enjoy a live theatre performance this summer during August and September.

See you at the theatre.

FADE IN: The live theatre scene may be in the doldrums due to the hot, sizzling, tripledigit weather outside, but that weather doesn’t impact movie theatres. In fact, it helps box office sales.

There are a great many changes, however, that have affected the movie business in the last several years. Not the least, of which, is the changing age demographic. The 10 to 18 year-old market now influences what gets produced.

Movie ticket sales are driven not only by what the youth movement wants to see but by new technology as well. computer generated images, or CGI, as it’s known, now makes it possible to digitally reproduce, on film, virtually anything. The wilder, and the more overthe-top the story and the performances are, the better. And don’t forget about 3-D There appears to be an age-divide in the movie marketplace, as well. There are films for the young, (10 to 30) and movies and stories for the 40 and over crowd.

There are some really good movies out there and one should take advantage of the current summer crop.

Close to home, up in the slightly cooler mountains around Big Bear, the Big Bear Lake International Film Festival is preparing to get underway for its 12th season, September 15-18. The fest has been picked by MovieMaker magazine as “One of 25 film festivals worth the entry fee” and attracts around 5,000 attendees every year.

This year the festival is featuring Young Adventurers as their Sidebar Showcase—a natural fit for the resort town known for its outdoor recreation.

Helping promote the theme and to present

filmmaker awards are three well-known young adventurers: Abby Sunderland, Zac Sunderland, and Big Bear’s own Jordan Romero.

Zac was raised on a boat in Marina del Rey, began making plans for a solo circumnavigation at age 16, bought his boat Intrepid with money he earned, and set sail on his 28,000 nautical mile trip in 2009.

Over 13 months, Zac experienced storms, pirates, deserted islands, and loneliness as he set two world records, one as the youngest to sail around the world, and the other as the first to do so under the age of 18.

Zac will be presenting his documentary, “Intrepid,” at the festival.

Inspired by him, his younger sister, Abby, set sail around the world on Wild Eyes, in 2010. Her voyage received worldwide coverage when her 40 foot boat was rolled 360 degrees by a massive rogue wave that snapped its mast.

While her voyage may have ended in the Indian Ocean, she has chronicled her ecperiences in a book, “Unsinkable: A Young Woman’s Courageous Battle on the High Seas,” and a DVD documentary, “Wild Eyes: The Abby Sunderland Story.”

Abby will present her documentary at the festival.

Jordan Romero, a 14-year-old native of Big Bear Lake, will also participate in the festival. Jordan holds a world record for the youngest person to ever stand on the summit of Mt. Everest. Following his dream that began when he was nine, Jordan has ascended seven of the eight tallest peaks in the world.

In an effort to share his experience with youth, Jordan wrote, “The Boy Who Conquered Mount Everest: The Jordan Romero Story, with Katherine Blanc, and created the 7 Summits of Big Bear Youth Challenge, where kids are encouraged to get outdoors and conquer local peaks (www.sevensummitsofbigbear.org).

Another highlight of the festival is the awarding of a Lifetime Achievement Award to Oscar- and Emmy-winning film composer Michael Giacchino. Other honorees include John Bailey, ASC, who will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Cinematography.

Festival tickets can be purchsed online at www.bigbearlakefilmfestival. com, or at the Big Bear Lake Performing Arts Center Box Office, 39707 Big Bear Blvd., Big Bear Lake, or by phone at (909)866-4970.

See you at the movies soon.

FADE OUT: June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 39

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he party for the premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” desert edition was held at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs in August. What a blast it was to see Josh Homme from Queens Of The Stone Age take Anthony to all of our favorite haunts such as Pappy and Harriet’s, The Integratron, Sky Valley Swap Meet, Country Kitchen and The Rancho de la Luna Recording Studio. The crowd cheered every time one of our local characters came on screen, many doing shots of tequila with Anthony and Josh.

The program was well put together, including a psychedelic animation sequence following a sound bath at the Integratron, and ending up with the gang shooting a Jethro Tull record with a bow and arrow at the legendary Rancho. The party had live performances from Gram Rabbit alter ego The Country, Solid Ray Woods with Bobby Furgo, Jim Austin, Damian Lester, Ryan Erskine and special guest Victoria Williams. Check out the Travel Channel’s website for clips from the show.

Best wishes to Alice and Albert Williams who have opened their High Lonesome Sound Studio in Yucca Valley. They have really been through a lot so it is wonderful to see them fulfill their dream!

Congratulations to Gram Rabbit! Their song Lost in Place from their CD Music to Start a Cult to is featured on the soundtrack to the new movie Crazy Stupid Love.

There have been some amazing shows at Pappy and Harriet’s since the last issue including Thurston Moore, Peter Murphy from Bauhaus, The Fleshtones and Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs. Upcoming shows at Pappy’s include the 7th 40 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

The King of Surf Guitar, Dick Dale, shreds away on his Fender, Music News header, top far left, (see story and photo next page). At the Ace Hotel for Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations desert premiere it’s Ryan Erskine, top left; Victoria Williams and Damian Lester, left; and The Country, top . Holly Golightly at Pappy & Harriet’s is above.

Bottom left, the Rev. Bill Church renews the vows for Really Shooo’s Billy Makuta and Ellen Brenner Makuta poolside at the Desert Hot Springs Spa Hotel during one of their Friday evening performances.

Not only is Bill a real reverend, but he also blows a mean horn!

annual Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven Campout that will be three days this year on September15-17, Wanda Jackson and the Clean Air Clear Stars Festival on September 24.

The sixth annual Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival well be held on October 8-9 at the Joshua Tree Lakes and Campground.

A laid-back family friendly affair, the Roots Fest has something for everyone. This years line up includes The Stone Foxes, Abigail Washburn, Mamuse and OKA.

A speedy recovery and get well wishes go out to one of our favorite local musicians, JP Houston, who suffered a heart attack in July. JP who plays with Shari Elf and The Kittens, Palm Desert-based Waxy, and the Joshua Tree Army, moved here from Canada and is an outstanding singer-songwriter and we wish him well.

A desert double for me when my old friend Robert Butler who I knew from the 80s band The Untold Fables came out for a week to record at the Rancho de la Luna with his new band The S##T (insert your own letters). They came all the way out from Bern, Switzerland where Robert is also known as Panti Christ for his outrageous and fun underwear.

If you want some swashbuckling fun, you can join Sun Runner publisher, Steve Brown, with his band, There Be Pirates!, when they perform at southern California’s biggest International Talk Like a Pirate Day Weekend party, September 17 at The Whale & Ale pub in San Pedro.

Let’s Go Trippin’ Forever We’re pleased to note that Dick Dale, who graced the cover of our 2010 Desert Treasures Issue with his son Jimmy (see above), has been honored as a 2011 inductee for the Surfing Walk of Fame. Dick is being honored for his contributions as the King of Surf Guitar for surf culture.

The International Surfing Museum’s Surfing Walk of Fame has been honoring icons of surf culture at their location in Huntington Beach for nearly 20 years. Dick is a worthy addition to the roster. Now if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would only get their act together (I mean, you’re going to put The Ventures in, but leave Dick out? You’ve gotta be kidding). Congratulations Dick!

True Love OK, we really don’t want to tell you about this, since it diminishes our chances of winning, but the Joshua Tree National Park Association, in cooperation with R&W Creative Group, Fendeer Musical Instruments Corporation, and the non-profit Fender Music Foundation, is hosting a fundraising raffle to win one of two Joshua Tree National Park 75th Anniversary special edition Fender Telecasters (sigh...). Proceeds benefit music education programs at the foundation and the science, research, education, and outreach efforts of the association.

Raffle tickets are $20 each, or three for $50, with no limit on tickets you can buy. Organizations may not participate. Tickets are sold at park visitor centers or through the JTNPA at (760)367-5525. Tickets will be sold through November 30, with the winners being drawn on Saturday, December 3, at 2 p.m. at the Joshua Tree Visitor Center. For complete info on the raffle, visit www.joshuatree.org.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 41

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t was a magical night on June 15, under the rising moon, surrounded by the rock formations of Indian Cove, Joshua Tree National Park, and listening to Grammy Award winning singer, Rita Coolidge. The concert, a benefit for the Joshua Tree National Park Association, and part of the park’s 75th Anniversary celebration, included the unveiling of the JTNP Fender Telecaster being raffled off, an opening performance

by Tim Easton with a special appearance by Victoria Williams (see above photos for those two and the fine backdrop by artist Bobby Furst too!).

Coolidge gave a stellar and personable performance. While waiting for the moon to make its appearance over the rocks, an owl flew by unnoticed by most in the night. But Coolidge was in touch with the natural forces in play that night.

The highlight was Coolidge singing the Cherokee national anthem—Amazing Grace—in Cherokee, as the moon finally peered out over the boulders.

At this point, no more concerts like this have been scheduled for Indian Cove.

42 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

I

deliberately write about good people, honest people, strong people. I write about business people I admire and about businesses that deserve to be praised and supported.

I believe that such a man is Thomas K. Huls, proprietor of Big-O-Tires, located in the Von’s shopping center in Yucca Valley. Tom is a terrific guy, a genuine tough-minded optimist.

I liked him the minute I met him. He thoroughly enjoys life and his work. He and his lovely wife Karin live in Yucca Valley.

They have four children and 12 grandchildren and spend many hours together as a family.

Tom and the staff at his store financially support numerous community and national projects, including the Town of Yucca Valley’s Summer Concert Series. I have had more than one of our local “clean team” members tell me how Big-O-Tires accepts the tires and rims they collect when cleaning up our communities, at no charge. They also have heavily contributed to more than one breast cancer research program.

Tom has the best guarantee possible in any industry. His word is truly his bond. If you have any problem he will take care of it immediately without question.

Tom’s business continues to grow during this economically challenging time. I think I know why: He is a straight shooter, he loves people, and he is an expert at what he does.

Check out Lou’s book: Positive Living with Dr. Lou Gerhardt, A Tough Minded Optimist. You can find it on Amazon.com or through Barnes & Noble.

June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 43

AUGUST

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The Sun Runner, PO Box 2171, Joshua Tree, CA 92252 44 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Through Aug. 28 – The Summer Show. Annual Summer Show featuring more than 100 works by members of the Twentynine Palms Artists Guild. 29 Palms Art Gallery, 74055 Cottonwood Dr., 29 Palms.

(760)367-7819, www.29palmsartgallery.com.

Through Aug. 31 – Steve Flock Art in Public Places Exhibit.

Former 29 Palms mayor, Steve Flock is featured in a solo show of his photography of historic desert scenes. Visitor Center & Gallery, 73484 29 Palms Hwy., 29 Palms. www.29palms.org.

Through Sept. 18 – Comic Art Indigene. Exhibition of storytelling used in comics to express contemporary Native American experience.

Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Dr., Palm Springs. (760)3257186, www.psmuseum.org.

Aug. 1-Nov. 16 – PhotoSynthetic Arrangements by Nadia Osline. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Joshua Tree National Park artist-in-residence show.

Joshua Tree National Park Visitor Center, downtown Joshua Tree.

Aug. 4-Sept.1 – Classic Comedy Film Series. Thursdays, 6 p.m., free. Aug. 4: A Night at the Opera, 1935; Aug. 11 : The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Aug. 18: Born Yesterday, 1950; Aug. 25: Some Like It Hot, 1959; and, Sept. 1: The Graduate, 1967. Annenberg Theater, Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Dr., Palm Springs. (760)322-2930, www.psfilmfest.org.

Aug. 6 – Blues for the Zoo. 1 p.m. Annual benefit concert in support of Moonridge Animal Park's wildlife rehabilitation program. Featuring the Chicago Blues Guitar Shootout with Ronnie Baker Brooks, Lurrie Bell, and Larry McCray, Maria Muldaur and her Red Hot Bluesiana Band, and Borther Yusef. $30 advance, $35 at the gate, under 10 free.

Tickets: (909)866-4607, www.moonridgezoo.org. Big Bear Lake Swim Beach Outdoor Amphitheater, 41220 Park Ave., Big Bear Lake.

Aug. 6 – Tehachapi Food & Wine Festival. 6-10 p.m. $40. Local restaurants, regional wineries, live music, art, area farms, chef demos, Comedy Underground by Tehachapi Community Theater. Downtown Tehachapi. www.tehachapifoodandwine.com.

Aug. 10 – Joshua Tree National Park's 75th Anniversary. 8 a.m.-11 p.m. Commemoration Ceremony at 8 a.m., Art Reception for Gary Burden exhibit at 11 a.m., Guest lecture by Dr. Emilyn Sheffield on demographics and the NPS at 1 p.m., Dinner in the Desert Fundraiser at 7 p.m., Native American Cultural Presentation by the Cahuilla Bird Singers & Dancers, 7:30 p.m., Night Sky Program, 9-11 p.m. Various locations. (760)367-5535, www.jtnp75.org.

Aug. 11 – Erin McLaughlin. 7:30 p.m. Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Rd., Pioneertown. (760)365-5956, www.pappyandharriets.com.

Aug. 11-Aug. 20 – Big Bear Summer Theatre Festival. 7 p.m., Aug. 12 & 13, Aug. 19 & 20. Featuring "Clarence Darrow." $5/$10. Big Bear Discovery Center, 40971 North Shore Dr., Fawnskin. (805)8079939, www.bigbearsummertheatrefestival.com.

Aug. 13 – Perseid Meteor Shower Party. Mojave Desert Land Trust hosts this annual party, 7 p.m.-midnight. Camping available. Night sky watching, music by Clive Wright, dessert & coffee bar, sound baths.

Integratron, 2477 Belfield Blvd., Landers. www.integratron.com.

Aug. 13 – An Evening with Jann Browne. 8 p.m. California Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year. Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Rd., Pioneertown. (760)365-5956, www.pappyandharriets.com.

Aug. 17 - Benefit Concert – Tribute to Peter Allen. LIVE at LIT benefit for The Well in the Desert. $40 includes light buffet. Allen wrote and performed music for Judy Garland & Liza Minnelli, wrote pop hits and theater productions. Featuring Paul MacKey, Fabulous

Bird Award Dancers. Lit Lounge, Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, 84245 Indio Springs Pkwy., Indio. (800)827-2946, www.fantasyspringsresort.com.

Aug. 18 – Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter w/Stacey Earle & Mark Stuart. 7:30 p.m. Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Rd., Pioneertown. (760)365-5956, www.pappyandharriets.com.

Aug. 18-21 – Big Bear Cowboy Gathering. Various times & costs.

Big Bear Lake Performing Arts Center, 39707 Big Bear Blvd., Big Bear Lake. (909)866-4970, www.bigbearcowboygathering.net.

Aug. 20 – Bat Country Invasion. 8 p.m. Rikk Agnew Band, Symbol Six, Surfer Joe & His Boss Combo (from Italy), The Sibleys, The F@ gz, Piss n Blood, & Rise of the Willing. The Palms, 83131 Amboy Rd., Wonder Valley. (760)361-2810.

Aug. 20-21 – Hualapai Mountain Arts & Crafts Fair. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Hualapai Mountain Resort, 4525 Hualapai Mtn. Rd., Kingman, AZ. (928)757-3545, www.hmresort.net.

Aug. 21 – Patti Hood, Contemporary Harpist. 6-9 p.m. Patti plays the 3rd Sunday most every month. She's played with The Church, Guns & Roses, and Jon Anderson of Yes. 29 Palms Inn, 73950 Inn Ave., 29 Palms. (760)367-3505, www.29palmsinn.com.

Aug. 21 – Miranda Lambert in Concert. 7 p.m. Tickets: Essentials Gift Shop, www.hotwatercasino.com, or (800)585-3737. The Show at Agua Caliente Casino Resort & Spa, 32250 Bob Hope Dr., Rancho Mirage.

Aug. 22 – Butoh Dance Theatre. 7:30 p.m. Harrison House Music & Arts presents Artists-in-Residence Koichi & Hiroko Tamano Harupinha Butoh Dance Theater: A Big Sky (after the end of the world). $15.

Harrison House, 6881 Mt. Lassen Ave., Joshua Tree. Tickets available at Joshua Tree Health Foods. (760)366-4712.

Aug. 25 – Brown Bag Lunch Lecture: The San Andreas Fault & the Great California ShakeOut. Noon, free. Hi-Desert Nature Museum, 57090 29 Palms Hwy., Yucca Valley. (760)369-7212, www. hidesertnaturemuseum.org.

Aug. 26 – Art Reception for A Retrospective of the 90s, a posthumous retrospective of Howard Derrickson's work. 7 p.m. Maturango Museum, 100 E. Las Flores Ave., Ridgecrest. (760)375-6900, www.maturango.org.

Aug. 26-Sept. 24 – Nunsense-a-Men. Fridays & Saturdays at 7 p.m., 7 p.m. Thursday Sept. 8, matinee at 2:30 p.m., Sept. 18. Theatre 29, 73637 Sullivan Rd., 29 Palms. (760)361-4151, www.theatre29.com.

Aug. 27 – Weezer. Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, 84245 Indio Springs Pkwy., Indio. (760)342-5000, www.fantasyspringsresort.com.

Aug. 28 – New Moon Drum Circle. 7-9 p.m. $5/$10. All ages/ families welcome. Facilitated by percussionist Sam Sloneker outdoors (weather permitting) at The Joshua Tree Retreat Center, 59700 29 Palms Hwy., Joshua Tree. (760)365-8371, www.jtrcc.org.

SEPTEMBER Sept. 15-17 – 7th Annual Campout with Cracker & Camper Van Beethoven. Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Rd., Pioneertown. (760)365-5956, www.pappyandharriets.com.

Sept. 15-18 – 12th Annual Big Bear Lake International Film Festival. Various times, locations, admission prices & events. (909)8664970, www.bigbearlakefilmfestival.com.

Sept. 24 – 5th Annual Clean Air, Clear Stars Global Cooling Music Festival. Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Rd., Pioneertown. (760)365-5956, www.cleanairclearstars.com.

Sept. 24 – Drawn From the Desert Art Reception/Benefit & The Sun Runner’s Desert Writers Celebration. 6-9 p.m. Benefits artist Kim Mayhew. Art show continues through October 31. Tamma’s Magic Mercantile, 55727 29 Palms Hwy., Old Town Yucca Valley.

(760)820-1222, www.thesunrunner.com.

Sept. 30 – Santana in Concert. 8 p.m. Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, 84245 Indio Springs Pkwy, Indio. (760)342-5000, www. fantasyspringsresort.com.

For the most comprehensive event listings for the California deserts, please visit www.thesunrunner.com.

To include your desert event listings on our online desert-wide calendar, please e-mail complete event information in text format to: calendar@thesunrunner.com.

To stay in touch with desert happenings, sign up for our free Sun Blast newsletter and join our online desert community at www.thesunrunner.com.

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June/July 2011 – The Sun Runner 45

46 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

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Circle C Lodge

Private oasis offers 12 spacious guest rooms nestled in a lush garden courtyard with heated pool, spa, BBQ pit. Full kitchen, A/C, HBO, phones, continental breakfast.

AAA, extended stay available.

6340 El Rey Ave., 29 Palms, CA (760)367-7615 • 800-545-9696 www.circleclodge.com

EL RANCHO DOLORES MOTEL

A respite for desert travelers since 1940, downtown 29 Palms. Swimming pool, courtyard, A/C, direct phones, satellite TV/HBO. Refrigerators/microwaves, kitchenettes available. Ken Patel, Manager.

73352 29 Palms Hwy., 29 Palms, CA 92277 (760)367-3528 virtual29.com/a-z/dolores

48 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

Roughley Manor

Bed & Breakfast Inn. Gorgeous 1928 stone manor on 25-acre historic Campbell Ranch. Gardens, elegant guest rooms, fireplaces, grand piano in great room, fine linens, gourmet food, catered functions.

Gary & Jan Peters.

74744 Joe Davis Dr., 29 Palms, CA 92277 (760)367-3238 www.roughleymanor.com

SUNNYVALE GARDEN SUITES Condo-like suites with a touch of the “old west.”

Junior, 1 & 2 bedroom suites, full kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, private patios w/barbecues, Cable TV, DVD, patio area, playground, spa and fitness center.

Tony & Cora Naraval, owners.

73843 Sunnyvale Dr., 29 Palms, CA 92277 (760)361-3939 www.sunnyvalesuites.com

29 Palms Inn

Fine food & lodging since 1928. Lunch, dinner, continental breakfast, Sunday brunch. Art-filled dining room, bar. Heated pool, poolside patio, adobe bungalows. “Oasis of Mara” and trails, near JT National Park headquarters and visitor center.

Paul & Jane Smith, Innkeepers.

73950 Inn Ave., 29 Palms, CA 92277 (760)367-3505 www.29palmsinn.com

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50 The Sun Runner – June/July 2011

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