The Sun Runner Magazine's Annual Desert Writers Issue

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 3

W

hen the desert’s steamy and broiling in late summer, there’s no place like the mountains for a quick, easy getaway. With a scenic drive of an hour or two, you can get away to our nearby mountain communities where the breeze that blows between the pines is refreshingly cooler than down below.

While we love the desert in all her seasons, it’s still good to pay a visit to the mountains that frame our horizons, no matter the season. You can fish, hike, boat, and play, and when you’re tired of that you can shop, walk, enjoy local art and music, dine, and stay for a night. In late summer, when the monsoonal moisture moves into the desert, waking up to the cool velvet of mountain air makes one feel like a rich man surrounded by invaluable treasures and revitalizes the hardy desert soul.

Of course, there’s music, and in the case of Idyllwild, the nation’s best jazz music, during their annual Jazz in the Pines festival. This small festival, on the attractive campus of the Idyllwild Arts Academy, comes on the last weekend of August each year. This year marks the 19th annual Jazz in the Pines festival, which promises three stages serving up everything from a little zydeco to sizzlingly hot jazz and swing. Smooth jazz makes it into the mix too, giving everyone something they can enjoy under the tall pines.

When you’re not at the festival, Idyllwild is a welcoming town, with art, shopping, and dining that’s a real treat. There are places to stay ranging from rustic, well equipped cabins to the most romantic bed and breakfast inns for that special getaway.

4 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

Here in the desert, we are blessed with having something so completely different so close at hand. We can head up to Big Bear Lake and Lake Arrowhead, Idyllwild, Ponderosa, and Kernville and Lake Isabella, and in a short time, be enjoying an entirely different world, and all the recreational opportunities the mountains offer through every season.

Whether it’s discovering some truly fantastic craft microbrews at the Kern River Brewing Company (our favorites are the Just Outstanding IPA, an incredibly unique India pale ale, and the Class V Stout, that, while “not for the timid,” is for those who love a good, smooth stout with an exceptional finish), or exploring Nobe Young Falls among the giant sequoias and enjoying a delicious breakfast and heartfelt hospitality at Mountain Top B&B, shopping lakeside in Lake Arrowhead, or wandering The Village in Big Bear Lake, the mountains offer a great escape for us desert dwellers and visitors, that is nearby, affordable, and an entirely different experience.

For those who ride, check out the upcoming 17th Annual Run for the Grizzlies, in Big Bear, and for family fun, pay the Big Bear Alpine Zoo (formerly Moonridge Animal Park) a visit as it continues to grow. These folks do a lot of animal rescue work, and there are opportunities to take everything from an ice cream safari, to experience feeding time at the zoo. The Big Bear Alpine Zoo makes for a great stop on a day trip or overnight weekend getaway to Big Bear.

For more mountain ideas and lodging suggestions, visit the travel section of our website at www.thesunrunner.com.

Desert & Mountain Hotels, Restaurants, Shops Attractions & Distractions – Don’t miss out on our October/November Desert Travel Issue and our December/January Desert Road Trips Issue Distributed at the LA Travel & Adventure Show 760-820-1222 advertising@thesunrunner.com

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August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 9

The Sun Runner The Magazine of the Real California Desert August/September 2012—Vol. 18, 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 Asst. Publisher, in memoriam: Barbara Buckland Theatre/Film Editors: Jack & Jeannette Lyons Literary Editor: Delphine Lucas Music Editor: Judy Wishart Calendar Editor: Lynelle White Contributing Writers Steve Brown Jack Lyons • Judy Wishart Contributing Photographers & Artists: Steve Brown • Dan Barrie Karin Mayer • Judy Wishart Advertising Sales: John Cucchiara, Senior Sales Manager Sandra Nightingale, Account Representative Distribution Isha Jones • Jim Fox Sun Runner Team Support: Christina Dooley • Isha Jones Lynelle White The Sun Runner Magazine features desert news, desert issues and commentary, arts & entertainment, natural and cultural history, columns, poetry, stories by desert writers, and more, for the enormous California desert region. Published bimonthly.

MAGAZINE DEADLINE: September 24 for the October/November issue, for advertising & editorial. To list a desert event free of charge in The Sun Runner’s online desert events calendar, please send your complete press release and event information (preferably with photos) to calendar@ thesunrunner.com, or mail to: Calendar, c/o: The Sun Runner Magazine, PO Box 2171, Joshua Tree, CA 92252. Please include all relevant information in text format. Notices submitted without complete information or in an annoying format may not be posted. Event information absolutely will not be taken over the telephone or telepathically (it hurts!).

SUBMISSIONS: By mail to the address above; by email: publisher@thesunrunner. com, or stop us when we’re at the JT Farmers Market like everybody else does.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: $22/year U.S.A. ($38/ year International, $38 trillion Intergalactic) Copyright © 2012 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, or even the contributor (when lucid). Honest. We have made some effort to be accurate, but we are a desert publication after all, and 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-seeing publisher.

10 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

The Sun Runner The Magazine of the Real California Desert

August/September 2012 – Desert Writers Issue

Inside this Issue:

Getaway to the Heights of Summer Fun Special Section ... 4 Dry Heat, by Steve Brown ... 11 The Desert Writers Issue Special Section 29 Palms, by Maureen Gilmer ... 12 Book Review Section – By Delphine Lucas A Bird as Black as the Sun, Edited by Enid Osborn and Cynthia Anderson ... 14 The Spirit in the Desert, by Brad Karelius ... 14 (Review by Steve Brown) Desertwalk, by Audrey Schumacher Moe ... 15 Desert Reckoning, by Deanne Stillman ... 16 In the Mojave, by Cynthia Anderson ... 16 Ghosts of Ide County, by Kurt Schauppner ... 17 Muir Roots: At One With the Wild, Photographic Tales by David Jesse McChesney ... 18 Ricardo Breceda: Accidental Artist, by Diana Lindsay ... 20 Opaque Traveler, by Brian Michael Tracy ... 21 (Review by Steve Brown) Tell Me What You See, by Major Ed Dames & Joel Harry Newman ... 22 West, by Lars Strandberg, Lars Aberg & Ronnie Nillson ... 24 JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan, by Robin Maxwell ... 25 An Excerpt from JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan ... 26 Literary & Poetic Selections Memories of the Sun, by Melissa Spurr ... 28 Spring Stream, by Naomi Lake ... 28 Blue Tattoo, by Ruth Nolan ... 29 The Last Bird, by Deenaz P. Coachbuilder ... 29 Receding Moon, and The Wild Inside, by Cynthia Anderson ... 30 Wreckage, and More Wreckage, by Don Kingfisher Campbell ... 30 Respecting our Desert Elders—Ancestors of the Leafy Type, by Robin Kobaly ... 31 Desert Theatre Beat, by Jack Lyons ... 32 Film Talk, by Jack Lyons ... 33 Hi-Desert Music News, by Judy Wishart ... 34 Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen in concert at Indian Cove Amphitheatre, Joshua Tree National Park ... 36 The Best Places to Stay in the Real Desert ... 39

Cover Art — Jane & Tarzan, by Steve Brown.

Author Robin Maxwell and her “missing link” husband, Max Thomas, camp it up at the Oasis of Mara to celebrate the release of her new book, JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan (see page 25-27).

Want up-to-date advertising information about The Sun Runner Magazine, The Stumps Monthly, the new Sun Runner website, and our specialty publications? Call Senior Sales Manager John Cucchiara at (760)992-0838 or (760)808-3297 (Coachella Valley), or Sandra Nightingale at (323)314-5919 (hi-desert) for our media kit and current advertising specials.

Or call us at (7600820-1222 for the latest advertising opportunities.

“The other Desert—the real Desert—is not for the eyes of the superficial observer, or the fearful soul or the cynic. It is a land, the character of which is hidden except to those who come with friendliness and understanding. To these the Desert offers rare gifts: health-giving sunshine—a sky that is studded with diamonds—a breeze that bears no poison—a landscape of pastel colors such as no artist can duplicate—thorn-covered plants which during countless ages have clung tenaciously to life through heat and drought and wind and the depredations of thirsty animals, and yet each season send forth blossoms of exquisite coloring as a symbol of courage that has triumped over terrifying obstacles.”

– Randall Henderson and J. Wilson McKenney There Are Two Deserts, Desert magazine, Volume 1, Number 1, November, 1937

Our thanks to: AdventureCORPS for sponsoring our AdventureCORPS Desert Voices Contest, and thanks also to our 2012 Desert Writers Issue Judging Panel: Delphine Lucas Ruth Nolan Mary Sojourner and Scot McKone, and to all our desert writers & poets!

F

or me, this has been the summer of the Oasis of Mara.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the oasis and the 29 Palms Inn this summer, and I’ll be back again soon for our Desert Writers Celebration on Saturday, September 29.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. I love the oasis and the Inn, and even chanced across this wonderful heron while scouting the oasis for our cover shot of author Robin Maxwell and her husband and supporter, Max Thomas. The two “jungled” it up in celebration of Robin’s latest book, JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan, that will be published by Tor this September, with the full support of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., as part of the official Tarzan Centennial.

I have to say, I loved JANE. It had me hooked from the start, and if it had a fault, it was that it read like a book that just couldn’t wait to be made into a movie (deservedly so). If you were hoping to find an adventurous female equivalent of Indiana Jones, you get it with Robin’s Jane. Robin has never served up a wimpy heroine, and wasn’t about to start now.

This issue is all about celebrating our literary creative spirits across the desert—our poets, authors, and writers of all spots and stripes. And on Saturday, September 29, we’ll be at the 29 Palms Inn, celebrating their creative contributions to the culture of our desert. There will be food, drink, writers and poets, African dancers, and much more, so I hope you—our readers—will join us. All desert writers and poets are invited to attend, read their work, and sign and sell their books.

My favorite part of our annual celebrations is getting to meet our writers and poets and enjoy their work in person.

This year, we’re adding another dimension to the process. We have invested in a new website this year that allows us to host bloggers from all across the desert region. We have launched

the AdventureCORPS Desert Voices Contest online to recruit bloggers from across the desert region, and across the spectrum of interests found in the desert.

Our goal is to recruit bloggers from Calexico to Ridgecrest, Shoshone to Palm Springs, Indio to El Centro, Borrego Springs to Needles—you get the idea. We want to turn our website into a desert-wide community, a location where desert locals and visitors can find useful and lively insights into desert culture, happenings, issues, personalities, and more. When you combine that with the ability to include video, sound, and photos, to list your business or organization for free on the site, to enter your events for free in our online calendar, and all of our content can be shared on social media, commented on or rated, and used to help promote desert businesses and organizations via social media, you’ve got a powerful tool for bringing people together.

We’re not stopping there. Together with Leanna Bonamici and the superb crew from Coachella Valley Entertainment, we just finished filming our pilot episode of The Sun Runner’s Real California Desert TV show—at the Oasis of Mara and the 29 Palms Inn, of course.

The Oasis of Mara in Twentynine Palms has been welcoming travelers for more than 9,000 years, and continues to welcome them today. That’s a heck of a track record, and the oasis, while it continues to change and evolve, remains a source of life, activity, and beauty. If you’ve been to the Inn a hundred times, or especially if you’ve never been there, I encourage you to come join us for the Desert Writers Celebration and to enjoy an evening with some very creative people at the Oasis of Mara. Thanks to the 29 Palms Inn, the City of Twentynine Palms, and AdventureCORPS, for their support of our creative efforts on behalf of our desert region. August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 11

H

e wanted a beer but it was too early in the morning. He always craved it after a night lying awake, the silence like that of Iraq just before the shit storm of body parts and blood mist. He looked down at the black bands tattooed onto his arm to remember the ones he’d lost. The Goddamned IED threw him off the top of the Hummer to land flat on his back in a dune. The rest of his unit died inside the vehicle.

Winds blew in the desert around the Marine base bringing voices that whispered in the dark. They whimpered in pain and shock, then louder cries and explosions wove in and out of the dry gusts as sand spattered the walls like buckshot.

The shrink had sent him out to a remote desert horse rescue for PTSD therapy before she’d clear him to re-up. A middle aged woman greeted Warren at the front gate as three ranch dogs raised the usual ruckus. “I’m Casandra” she said, holding out a hand. He shook it, surprised at the rough texture and calluses. Her eyes pinned him from under graying hair with the intensity of insurgents. She opened the gate. “We are so glad you’re willing to help.”

He didn’t see it as helping. It was just another mission, this one to convince Doctor Adduci that the silence didn’t put him on edge and that the winds never spoke to him in the voices of the dead. No, he was just going through the motions to get back to where he belonged, in the field of battle where the tension was familiar and each day had one simple goal: to stay alive.

“We take horses nobody wants,” Cassie began as they walked toward the large pasture. “That’s Lucky over there under that gelding. He does all our shoeing and trimming and generally takes care of everything I don’t have time for.”

Cassie picked up a box of brushes and led Warren into the big pasture where a massive dark mare stood taller than he was. After Cassie wandered off, Warren let his hand wander through the mare’s thick winter coat to check for spines. The herd milled around close by where Warren noticed a few skeletal horses that seemed hardly alive. Ghost horses he thought.

“We brought them in from an SPCA call.” Cassie said, startling Warren out of his gaze. “Their owners went back to Mexico and left them to starve.” Warren felt his chest tighten because the eyes of the ghost horses shared the same sense of surrender he saw in those of so many Iraqi children. “Horses are 12 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

very subtle creatures, you know,” Cassie went on in her rambling way. “They speak with body language.” That’s how we were on patrol, Warren thought, slow and deliberate with every move.

“Take that little appaloosa over there,” she said, pointing to one oddly speckled horse. It stood between a mound of hay and three other horses, his ears laid flat back, the eyes slits and teeth bared. “You don’t need a book to know what’s going on.” Just then he lunged toward the others, forcing them to scatter, snorting loudly in frustration.

A week later Warren returned to find Cassie had gone north to pick up more horses. Warren went out to the mares where the same spotted horse now stood beside one of the starved abandoned horses sleeping in the warm morning sun. The appaloosa’s head was low to the ground, hovering close to the sleeping horse’s ears. Warren could recognize a familiar vigilance, almost as though it was standing guard. Gently the spotted horse nudged the sleeping one. There was no response.

He did it again and still nothing. Warren focused closely on its ribs and realized they were not rising and falling as they should.

The downed horse was dead.

“We’re waiting for the truck,” Lucky said as he approached Warren in the pasture. “Isn’t it odd that the appy is protecting him.”

“How do you know that?”

“You just get a sense about it. They told us that appy came to us from Border Patrol. He belonged to an agent ambushed by drug smugglers alone in the desert. They shot him right off that horse’s back. The smugglers left him there to die, and it took awhile according to the report. That horse stayed right there for days, fighting off the carrion eaters. Poor thing nearly died of dehydration. Any other breed of horse would have, but he’s an appaloosa and they’re mighty tough. By the time they found the agent’s body that horse was plum loco and they had to blindfold it to get it away from the remains. That’s why he ended up with us. Nobody could manage him. See, he’s confused and now he’s repeating it all over again hoping for a different outcome. But that’s how appy’s are.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, appaloosas are more than just spotted coloring.

They were Nez Perce Indian war ponies. The Indians rode them into battle without a bridle or saddle. Appaloosas were good ranch horses too because they walk out fast with a special gait they call the Indian shuffle. Only the pure bloods do it though - that’s how you know an authentic appaloosa.”

“But why does he keep doing that guarding thing?”

“My grandmother married into a Nez Perce family. She told me that appaloosas descended from a Wind Horse, which is supposed to be able to share the feelings of people - some kind of special sixth sense. It made them really sensitive to their rider’s emotions and they would bond with them completely.

It’s why they were so successful in battle. That appy there, he’d bonded with the border agent and the man guarded our boundaries, it felt that and can’t detach from the incident.”

Lucky wandered off to call for a truck to haul away the carcass. Warren never thought of horses so bonded with people that they’d protect a fallen rider like that. But he’d done it too after they hit the IED, after he’d found the men. Their faces were bloody, eyes empty in death, but he remained with them fading in and out of consciousness from a head injury. Semper Fi. Never leave your men behind.

Iraq had taught Warren how to be silent, to sit or stand for hours on end waiting for the first sign of insurgents. When he was sure the appy saw him he devised an experiment to find out if this was indeed a Wind Horse.

Warren visualized himself wiping the blood off the driver’s ruined face as the breeze brought their voices crying in pain.

He recognized the black kid from New Orleans with the wicked sense of humor. There was his sergeant’s New Jersey accent too. The one he missed the most was his best buddy, the stocky California surfer who joined up rather than do time. He let their voices enter his head, the ache in his chest made it hard to breathe.

Then he felt the presence behind him, a pressure on his back so light he spun around, vigilance kicking into high gear. There stood the appy, its peculiar human eyes peering directly into his own. Warren stepped back and the appy stepped forward to remain close. Its pinkish mottled nostrils gently sniffed the black tattooed bands, then nuzzled him there.

Warren didn’t dare believe that the horse could read his thoughts, but his experiment had certainly lured the appy to him. As Warren gathered his brushes he was amazed to find the appy following every step through the sand with its own footfalls matching his. Testing, Warren walked this way and that, the appy reflecting every move.

When the truck came to take away the dead horse Warren stood next to Lucky watching the grim scene, and behind them the appy stood watching too. “That’s a curious thing you know, that horse. I do believe he’s feeling you.”

Warren understood. He realized that day that every time he heard voices in the wind, the appy would perk up as though he heard them too. In between gusts when it was dead calm that crazy horse would walk around him in a circle as though it wanted all his attention.

“What should I do about him feeling me?” Warren asked.

“When a horse like that comes to you it means he’s hard wired into your brain, my friend. Perhaps you should ride him.

My grandmother told me that riding a Wind Horse can draw darkness out of your soul. It’s like all of the ugliness, sadness and hurt travels from you, through that horse and down into the Earth.”

After the truck left, Lucky showed Warren how to tack up the appaloosa and Warren climbed aboard. After they’d circled a half dozen times the appy suddenly sped up into the Indian shuffle, his head bobbing with each step as the ground moved along beneath them. With each foot fall Warren felt the grief drain away, his mind clearing, his body relaxing to move with the horse as if they were one being. Even though Warren had never ridden before he felt as though his body understood what it was all about, perhaps it was muscle memory from a former life. In an odd way it was almost like a man and woman making love.

Cassandra returned a week later, her trailer full of new horses. After she watched them process into existing herd she stopped short and turned to Lucky. “Where’s the appy?”

Lucky pointed out into the open desert. “That one is a Wind Horse. He could feel the soldier.”

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 13

A Bird Black As The Sun California Poets on Crows and Ravens Edited by Enid Osborn & Cynthia Anderson

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14 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

C

rows and Ravens are the allpervasive birds found everywhere inhabited by humans—and everywhere not inhabited by humans. These are the “in-your-face” birds, big, loud, and black—very black. These birds are metaphors for poets, those people who watch, listen, and try to understand the forces of nature, magic, time, and color, and use juxtapositions of words in our slippery English language to paint pictures of a frozen moment in time, a feeling of a moment of time and of timelessness.

Who are these birds? What do they mean? Where do they come from and what are they part of?

In this anthology on ravens and crows, you will enter into the thoughts and experiences of nearly a hundred poets on these elusive birds. These poems were categorized by the editors of this collection. They read submissions for a year and divided the poems into Awakener, Enigma, Muse, Beloved, Omen, Presence, Likeness, Joker, Messenger, and Night-Bringer.

Some poets shared experiences of being annoyed by these birds, some shared their friendships with them and spoke as if they were the birds themselves, others shared their fear, and still others were simply entertained by them.

As all good poetry and literature does, it invites the reader to participate, to look at oneself and ask the question, what does this mean to me?

This summer I spent time in high places in Joshua Tree National Park removing graffiti from rock art sites, sometimes watching the ravens above and below me in flight. How do they make me feel?

Read this book. I’m not a poet, yet I love the poetry of language and its power to give us incredible meaning in our lives.

I like to let the poets do it for us, to tell us about crows and ravens.

– Delphine Lucas

The Spirit in the Desert Pilgrimages to Sacred Sites in the Owens Valley

T

Brad Karelius

he desert has always been a place for mankind to seek spiritual renewal.

In The Spirit in the Desert, Father Brad Karelius continues that tradition, sharing some of his locations for his personal spiritual retreats in the Owens Valley.

This book shares his personal and family trials that often revolve around his son’s health, and offers some insight into how, on a personal level, Father Karelius has forged a spiritual connection with the desert. He provides numerous quotes from others on the topic as well, and takes the reader to some inspirational locations (some of which I intend to visit). I would have liked to see more exploration of the spiritual aspects of these pilgrimages, but the book remains a good guide for taking your own spiritual retreat. – SB

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Desertwalk A Search for Secrets of the Desert Written & Illustrated

by Audrey Schumacher Moe

D

esertwalk is a story of Audrey Schumacher Moe’s personal encounter with wildlife and Native American artifacts in the Colorado Desert. By its appearance I thought the book was a coffee table type book, one to pick up to glance at pictures and read a few descriptions now and again, and I did just that, while it sat on my coffee table for a year or so. This book deserves more than just an occasional glance, as I found out one day when I took more time to read the text and study the drawings. It is a hand-illustrated journal of Audrey’s life and exploration of her new home in the Cochella Valley, attractively presented.

Audrey and her husband own a large property in the Cochella Valley, where she has time to be alone and reflect on her encounters with wild animals, birds, insects, snakes, flowers, pottery sherds, and the other things on their desert property she comes in contact with, as she directs her hired hands to assist her in turning their property into a personal paradise.

Every couple of pages, Moe focuses on one animal, bird, plant, etc, and describes her personal experience with her subject. She includes her own watercolor paintings and drawings to accompany her writing. Often she turns her subject into a focus of further study and includes some interesting, and sometimes fascinating information about what she learns from her

research. She adds facts not commonly known to most people, so the descriptions are informative, and meaningful for people who love the desert.

This book will now be a reference for me on the desert animals and plants that are included. I plan to refer back to it when the subject, of let’s say, ravens, comes up in conversation, and I will also use it as reference for the review of poetry about ravens in this writer’s issue.

The watercolor paintings in the book are artistic and quite detailed, on closer examination, adding a meditative quality to the book. I thought the watercolors were lovely and the text interesting enough to give the book as a gift to a family member who likes nature and enjoys visiting us in the desert.

Occasionally, the writing is truly beautiful and lyrical. I was taken with Audrey’s description of the painted lady migration and wished more of her writing was in that vein, because this is the kind of writing that captures the essence of desert experience, its poetry. She entered into the mystery of the desert with the butterfly migration.

At the end of some sections she shares her personal reflections and lessons of what she is learning about herself as a result of living in the desert, her relationship to things and the material world.

Unfortunately, I found these insights somewhat banal and distracting within the book. It was as if she stepped out of her spirit of connection to the desert and went outside, and it was not a place, as the reader, I wanted to go with her.

I am certain Moe, as an artist and writer, will observe the natural world around her no matter where she goes. I hope she will enter more deeply and continue to share her love of creation with us.

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All Desert Writers & Poets are invited to read their work, sign & sell their books at The Sun Runner’s Desert Writers Celebration Saturday, September 29 at the 29 Palms Inn August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 15

Jelly’s death from a heroin overdose, Don’s mind quickly unraveled. It’s hard to figure out how to live when you lose a child. He dug his own grave on his property. After he shot Sorenson, he went into hiding for a week in self-dug tunnels and managed to elude the biggest high tech man hunt in California history for an entire week before he was taken out.

He knew how to survive in the desert.

The story is compelling. Stillman juxtaposes the characters of the two men in such a way that the reader sees the essence of who they both were. They belonged to the desert.

I saw myself through these people.

After twelve years of living here and opening my heart to the desert, I also belong to the desert. The desert dweller can find a part of themselves in this great book. Desert Reckoning is a must read.

Desert Reckoning

By Deanne Stillman

A

s a relative newcomer to the desert in 2001, I read Deanne Stillman’s first book, Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave. I had just quit a teaching job after a one year contract in the junior high school in Twentynine Palms. I read the book hoping for some illumination of what I had got myself into by moving to the desert. It gave credence to something I had discovered: the desert had an edge to it.

I also liked the fact that the book was controversial in Twentynine Palms and hoped we would hear more from Stillman. I liked her writing a lot.

Eleven years later, after she wrote two more books about the desert, she now gives us a compassionate rendering of a true crime story that took place in another part of the Mojave Desert: the Antelope Valley. Amazon Books listed it as one of the best books of July, 2012, along with eight others, and I couldn’t agree more.

I read it in two days.

It took eight years for Stillman to write Desert Reckoning. The book began as an article for Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. The research took time. In order to get the information she needed to write the story, she had to keep opening her heart to the desert, to let it take her in and breathe its spirit into her. This is the way of the desert. People in the desert, as well as other things in the desert, reveal their secrets in their own time, in their own way.

Stillman delves into the lives of Steve Sorensen, the town sheriff, Donald Charles Kueck, a solitary desert dweller, and Don’s son, Charles Donald, referred to by friends and family as Jelly.

Throughout the book she follows their connections to the desert; how they ended up here, what they did here, and how they changed by living here. From Stillman’s desire to truly know these people and what happened to them, she comes back again to the Mojave.

The story begins with Donald Kueck, a man who lived alone far out in North Los Angles County. He was a bright guy who liked to read. He found the places around his travel trailer that had water, so he could be self-sufficient and also irri16 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

gate his marijuana plants and his beloved pear tree. He became friends with ground squirrels (possibly the last surviving family in the area), ravens, and rattlesnakes.

For fun he built and tested out rockets.

In 2003 Sorensen, the sole deputy of the area arrived on his doorstep and Kueck blasted him to pieces. To this day, no one knows exactly why.

Sorenson, like Kueck, was a desert transplant, and he didn’t live far from Kueck. He lived in a house with his wife and children, and like Kueck, looked out on the view of the Three Sisters Mountains from his property. The sheriff was a revered member of the community.

Thousands went to his funeral after he was killed, and many people told stories of his acts of kindness. He helped old people by doing their yard work, he told kids to hang out with a better crowd, and he bought groceries for shut-ins, just to name a few things he did for the community.

Jelly, Don’s son, is also a big part of the story. He came to the desert as a teenager to reunite with Don after years of estrangement and eventually to live with him. Suffering from serious drug addiction and many other problems, Jelly had probably arrived too late to be able to undo the years of damage. Even though it was good to be with his son, Don, used to being alone with his animal friends, and who never had the disposition to be a parent, was getting burned out on having his son around. Jelly headed up to Seattle and got involved with the heroin and punk scene, becoming a hard core junkie. That was his undoing.

During the two years following

In The Mojave

Poems by Cynthia Anderson Photographs by Bill Dahl

C

ynthia Anderson moved to the hi-desert in 2008 and began her desert life. One thing that is interesting about the desert is how one ends up here. For some it’s the end of the road, for others it’s a quiet place to write or paint, and for the spiritual seekers, it is a connection to the mysteries of the heart and soul.

When a person chooses to interact with the desert it will open itself and reveal something beautiful and life affirm-

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fter struggling through the first hundred pages of this nearly fourhundred page book, truth be told, I almost gave up. I then told myself, a local author wrote this and I want to give it more of a chance.

I’m glad I did. It was worth it.

At the beginning of the story, the reader is introduced to the community of Clemons, California. It seems like a town in the mid-west, not a real happening place, and the people were not interesting or engaging to me for the first hundred pages.

Yet this book sneaks up on you. Suddenly you realize that these are people like ourselves, the kind of people who love their children so much, it’s painful. While children need love like this in order to thrive, it is irrelevant to their self-absorbed worlds. It’s all too familiar.

The story spans three generations of Clemons’ families in a place where if anything exists, it’s stability. Entertainment in Clemons consists of an occasional auction, ecumenical church celebration, or involvement in other peoples’ business.

Things finally begin moving along when the townspeople decide to raise money to help Mrs. Madison who is having a difficult pregnancy. They have fallen in love with baby Knoll even before he is born.

One of the things this story does is examine the collective consciousness of the people in this particular place, how they come together to pray for, help, and love one another when the need arises.

It is also the story of how things can go terribly wrong, particularly when a

persuasive group of people in the town tell the story to the next generation of children of what happened the day their beloved Knoll vanished without a trace.

The consciousness of the locals changes in light of, or should it be said, in the darkness of their ignorance. Knoll’s older brother, an autistic boy who doesn’t speak, and a homeless man who lives in the park are accused of murdering the boy. The accusations have tragic consequences into the third generation. The town changes from a caring supportive group of people to a town without pity, very much like the lyrics of the Gene Pitney song from the 60’s.

Once, you get into this book, there’s no putting it down. Schauppner is a gifted writer. His writing style is unique and delightfully nuanced, and his humor is dry and witty, which makes for enjoyable reading. The description of the ecumenical gathering of the town’s churches was hilarious. I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes.

The book needs some editing and proof-reading. It would be good to have a faster pace at the beginning. With some changes, this book will be great.

– DelphineLucas

ing. This happened as Anderson observed the desert around her; the animals, plants, landscapes, and the change of seasons over a one year period.

Anderson expresses the subtle moods of her observations of these living and non-living desert elements in her poetry. She organizes them in the book by seasons, and included with each season is a black and white photograph taken by her husband. The photographs are a

lovely addition to the book.

The final section of the book contains poetry written about a visit to Little Petroglyph Canyon, a canyon filled with hundreds of petroglyphs, located in the Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake.

I recently went on a tour to this site. When I read these poems I retraced my steps as I was led through the lava fields, through the Joshua tree forest, and into the canyon itself. It was a guided trip experienced

through through the eyes of a poet into the mystery of this particularly beautiful and spiritual area of the desert. What a wonderful way to revisit the area again, through Anderson’s poetry.

This section of the book contains her strongest work. She captured the canyon’s essence by her understanding and ability to express something deeper than what is seen only with the naked eye.

She observed with her heart and soul.

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 17

Muir Roots At One With the Wild Photographic Tales

By David Jesse McChesney

D

avid Jesse McChesney is a master wildlife photographer.

His photographs of animals and birds are second to none. The quality of each photograph is stellar.

He is a master of using natural light to highlight the fur, scales, feathers, and colors of each creature to show them to their best advantage. The fur of the bobcat and cottontail looks thick and plush, the bird feathers soft and colorful, and the scales of the tortoise are like an ancient mosaic. His love of animals and his spiritual connection to them is apparent in every single wildlife shot. The animals allow him into their space to be photographed, and it is obvious that a relationship does exist between animal and photographer.

McChesney also photographs landscapes. The best are the landscapes that include wildlife because he understands the relationship between animals and their habitats. My favorites of this type are the two-page spreads of wolves crossing a snowscape in Yellowstone and the literally thousands of snow geese congregated in a valley in New Mexico.

The book is organized by habitat for the most part; the southwest, the northwest, Gulf Coast and his favorite area, Canyonlands, where the photos are landscapes.

He also has a section on waterfalls from anywhere he finds one he likes. It is an odd way to put a book together. The section devoted to the waterfalls is an aberration. The photos look lurid and fantasy-like because their color appears to have been enhanced. The purples, blues and yellows in the water look as though there were toxic waste spills at nearby chemical plants, and they ended up in the waterfalls.

The strength of the other photos in the book is their naturalism, and if they have been enhanced, it is not obvious. In other words this particular section sticks out like a sore thumb, both in the table of contents and in the middle of the book.

The writing in the book is another story. It works well when McChesney shares his personal stories. He tells how he came to be a nature lover as a child due to his grandmother’s influence, and he tells us at times what the animals were doing when he photographed them.

I wish there had been more information about what it is like to be a wildlife photographer. Does he camp? How long does it take to find a wildcat to photograph? Is he always alone?

What is this talented man’s story?

It would have been great to have an enlargement of himself with the bears right at the beginning of the book, instead of what seemed like an afterthought, on the back cover. A couple of poignant quotes from John Muir, one of his very distant relatives, strategically placed in the book would have been more powerful than numerous quotes placed helter skelter throughout, some of which weren’t so great (“Nature has always something rare to show us.”). Providing small amounts of information about some of the animals next to the animals’ pictures, much of which is obvious to most people, didn’t work well either.

18 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

And the physical constructs of the book itself proved to be a detraction. What can I say? The first time I opened it and looked at it, it completely fell apart in my hands. Now I have so many calendar pages. So much again for things made in China.

In a perfect world, I would like to see these beautiful animal photographs in a hard cover edition with a full-sized enlargement of the “Blue Heron Fights Wild” on the inside cover because this particular photo is a work of art and would enhance the book. This book needed more outside critique before it went to press. Input from an artist or designer would have been invaluable. – Delphine Lucas

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 19

Ricardo Breceda: Accidental Artist

By Diana Lindsay

D 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

Open: 12 to 3 PM Wednesday–Sunday Summer Hours: 12 to 3 Friday-Saturday-Sunday

20 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

iana Lindsay gives us a biography of a wonderfully talented artist, Ricardo Breceda. Perhaps while you were driving on the 215 past Perris, California, you saw his Perris Jurassic Park, huge metal sculptures of prehistoric animals looking out over the freeway.

This is not just your everyday biography. The book itself is a work of art. Its design, layout, colors, writing, and photographs taken by the author are lovely. Diana Lindsay, according to her bio on the Sunbelt Publications site, went into the desert in 1966 and never came out. Her books are about the areas in and around Anza-Borrego, my favorite part of the California desert. Ricardo Breceda, with much trepidation, allowed Diana Lindsay to learn about his life so she could write his story in a three month period. She visited Durango, Mexico, his birthplace, to interview his family, and she also visited the remote village of Los Berros where he once was a school teacher.

After coming to the U.S, Breceda followed a common immigrant path; restaurant work, construction jobs, and selfemployment, selling imported boots before he became the Accidental Artist. One day he traded some boots for some welding equipment, thinking he would never use it, and one day he did.

He made his daughter a dinosaur. Soon he began a whole new life.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I happened upon several enormous metal sculptures outside the town of Borrego Springs. There were signs posted near the sculptures welcoming visitors and even allowing camping on the property for up to three days. We drove from one creature to the next, never making a connection to the workshop we passed on the 215. The previous fall we were given a copy of this book by the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce, and during a torrential rain storm I read it in a hotel room. It turned out the book, besides being a biography of a genius artist, is also a guide to all the unbelievable magical sculptures he made, commissioned by Dennis Avery in Borrego Springs. They are now referred to as Sky Art because they are part of the desert landscape and lie under the desert sky.

Dennis Avery funded the drawings for another Sunbelt Publication, Fossil Treasures, a book about Plio-Pleistocene fossils previously unearthed in the Anza Borrego area, and he had also driven past Breceda’s workshop on the 215. In 2008 Avery asked Breceda if he was able to make a sculpture from one of the fossil drawings. The rest is now history. These men work well together. Each time Breceda makes a sculpture, he wants it to be better than the last. He continues to make them for the area, and there are a lot of them to see when you visit Borrego Springs. A friend of mine who leafed through the book said they reminded her of the sixteenth century sculptures in the Bomarzo Monster Park in Italy, where there is also a dragon.

The last part of the book explains how Breceda makes the anatomical details of these extinct animals so perfectly, what he does to the metal, and how he constructs the teeth,

claws, and feathers. The photographs and writing in the book deepened my appreciation for the sculptures that I had already fallen completely in love with. I also found many more in the book that we missed on our tour, some of the best ones of all, including the dragon. You have to see the dragon.

Accidental Artist, itself, as a work of art stands on its own, but read in conjunction with a visit Breceda’s sculptures in Borrego Springs, it is a miracle. At least it was for me.

– Delphine Lucas Note: It is with sorrow that we must report the death of Ricardo Breceda’s sponsor in Borrego Springs, Dennis Avery. Avery, a philanthropist and active supporter of the Borrego Springs community, died this July. An heir to the Avery-Dennison office supply/label fortune and a successful businessman, was known—and loved—for his support for charities, Borrego Springs, and the arts. Dennis Avery embodied the best of the spirit of the desert, and was a true desert treasure. We are grateful for his worldwide philanthropy, and the gift of Ricardo Breceda’s fantastic Sky Art in Borrego Springs. Our sincere condolences to his family and friends.

Opaque Traveler A Dream Sequence in Verse Brian Michael Tracy

I

n Opaque Traveler, Brian Tracy invites us into his world of dreams, a nocturnal realm of fantasy, personal mythos, and swirling, colorful, ethereal visions.

This isn’t a book you read with, or for, your intellect. Like our own dreams, it’s best to experience this book by letting it settle into your personal pool of unconscious wanderings. You’ll find it’s imagery remains long after the book is read. –SB

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 21

Tell Me What You See Remote Viewing Cases from the World’s Premier Psychic Spy

By Major Ed Dames & Joel Harry Newman

E

ven for us diehard readers, those of us who would rather read than do just about anything else, it happens only every couple of years or so that we find a book we can’t put down. This is one of those books.

It was sent to us by the author, the late Joel Harry Newman, who lived in Morongo Valley before his untimely death this year. I read it on a road trip. I pulled it out of my bag every time my husband stopped to fill up for gas, in the hotel at night, and every chance I got in between.

The book is not only well-written, but the topic is unbelievably compelling. It is a autobiography of sorts, written in Dame’s first person voice, and recorded by Newman, the biographer, about the life of a psychic spy, as if it were even possible to write a biography of a spy.

Spies are close-lipped. They slide in and out of different realities and lead you toward assumptions that may not be real.

At least Major Ed Dames does. It was not easy for Newman to write the book because Dames volunteered little about himself, and the author had to figure out how to fill in the gaps. According to Newman, when the book was completed, Dames adopted the story as his new identity, one that had slightly shifted.

As a former cold war spy for the U.S. in Russia, Major Ed Dames should know about shifting, or shape-shifting, because this is what he does. He is a remote viewer. He was put in charge of a highly secret remote viewing unit by the United States government whose mission it was to gather information in places none of them had ever been before in person. It was accomplished by a technique that allows the unconscious mind to travel across time and space, gathering impressions that are turned into sketches. These sketches show the location of objects or people. This information was collected without leaving the office. Dames taught a select group of people a very specific step-by-step technique and among their tasks, for example, were to look for weapons of mass destruction in the middle east.

Dames has retired from government service. He got tired of working with incompetent psychics brought onto his team by the government. He is now using his remote viewing skills to help find missing children, both in the United States and in the Ukraine, where he spends time with his Ukranian wife. The book includes an account of the search for Christina White, a child who disappeared several years ago in eastern Washington.

He describes in detail the method he and his team used to look for her. In the book are the sketches provided by team members of the place where they saw her bones.

The author of the book, Newman, was a staff reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and has contributed articles to some mainstream magazines we all pick up from time to time. He comes from the “old school” style of journalism; 22 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

smart, passionate, irreverent, and honest. In other words he was real. My husband and I met him at a party in Yucca Valley and we clicked immediately. He asked us if we would like to meet the spy, although he might be difficult to find.

Some time passed, and my husband and I met Newman at the end of December, 2011 at Ma Rouge in Yucca Valley to have him autograph a copy of his book for a gift. I found out later this was the last time he appeared in public alone. We had no idea he did not have long to live.

Not long afterwards we attended Joel’s memorial service, a gathering of Joel’s, and his wife Feryat’s friends and family, at his Morongo Valley home. While having a lengthy conversation with an innocuous gentleman, my husband suddenly grabbed me as I walked by and asked, “Do you want to meet Ed Dames?”

Major Ed Dames is the sort of man that I would never notice. I hadn’t noticed him at the party talking to my husband, and I wouldn’t have noticed him in a restaurant or anywhere else for that matter. I had never met a spy before and couldn’t wait to talk to him. He was charming, somewhat of a ladies’ man, actually, and was open to answering questions. I asked, “What are you doing now?” “Do you still teach remote viewing to people who want to learn the technique?”

Dames told me that he is using his skills to find gold stashed in the desert and using the sale of the gold to fund his searches to find missing children. And yes, he gives workshops on remote viewing in Reno for those of us who might want to learn the technique.

– Delphine Lucas

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 23

West

Lars Strandberg Lars Aberg Ronnie Nilsson Photographer Writer Designer

I

loved this book! Three Swedish men share their adventures in the American West using photographs, lyrical prose and design as the mediums to convey their love affair with America’s breath-taking western landscapes and ways of life.

They have traveled in the U.S. since the 70’s, and recently collaborated on this coffee table book project. They bring to us high quality artistic photographs and poetic writing in a book simply called West.

West is a snapshot in time of the early 21st century western U.S., what it looks and feels like to travel through the open spaces of Washington, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and Arizona (mostly). The focus of the book is on lifestyles and the creation of ways of life of people who have chosen the west as their home. The Swedes’ greatest love, however, is the lifestyle of the disappearing American cowboy and cowboy poetry.

Many Europeans are magnetically drawn to the cowboy’s relationship to the land and their horses and freedom from a materialistic lifestyle, and these three men are no exception.

They bring their modern European artistic sensibilities to give us a truly magnificent book.

Each photograph in this book is a work of art on its own.

Many of the photographs are portraits of cowboys and cowgirls, many of whom are middle-aged and elderly. There are photographs of abandoned hotels, buildings, and signs.

The photographer, Strandberg, focuses on the shabby, rusty, rustic, and formalist elements of these objects, works of art left out for the traveler to peruse on the American landscape.

And the color! These pictures celebrate color photography at its best. On so many levels this book gave me a visual feast.

I liked the writing even more than the photos, although neither is meant to be separated from one another. They are individually stronger presented together. What drew me into the book was the imagery of the words chosen by the writer to 24 The Sun Runner

show us why people head west.

So many books and movies embrace this theme, that just anyone taking it on can make their work come across as tired and cliche. Lars Aberg, West’s writer, is not just anyone. Not only is he an extremely gifted writer in a second language, to boot, but he is Sweden’s foremost film-maker, an artist (he designed the textiles for the Stockholm Metro’s seats), and a musician, who plays in The Electric Banana Band formed in conjunction with a famous children’s program that he created.

He is one of Sweden’s creative geniuses.

I felt as though I was a traveler accompanying these artists to places I had not heard of or have been to before, as well as seeing familiar places again through different eyes. I was especially intrigued by the writing about the experimental village of Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s creation north of Phoenix, and Elko, Nevada, home of the largest yearly cowboy poetry festival anywhere, featured in the book. I love to seek out places that come to me incidentally, as a reader. Arcosanti and Elko are both places I will add to my travel list.

The third person involved in this book project is the designer, Ronnie Nilsson. Just opening the book and seeing the inside cover, which is usually empty white space in most books, is a visual delight. It is a photograph of the desert, and I am still not sure if it has been manipulated by some editing and enhancement software. That thought, on it’s own engaged me, wondering how the work was created. It is an incredibly beautiful picture of the desert, yet something about it is not quite like a real photograph. Yet, for many of us, the desert is deceptive in portraying reality.

It feels like the publisher who provided us this book to review sent a real treasure, down to every detail. Even the ribbon bookmarks are a gift. A superb book! – Delphine Lucas

Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan

By Robin Maxwell

L

ocal hi-desert writer, Robin Maxwell, author of O, Juliet, and many other popular works of historical fiction, has written a book about another famous pair of lovers, Tarzan and Jane. The story focuses on Jane, a brilliant strongminded woman and her relationship with apeman Tarzan.

Maxwell had to contact Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. to get permission to write her book. The estate is very protective when it comes to copyright issues. She used her expertise in writing historical fiction and her life-long interest in paleoanthropology and history to create the storyline she presented to ERB. Her ideas were well received and Maxwell began extensive research to write Jane. The book will be released this September, in the centennial year of the original Tarzan story.

Now, one hundred years later, Jane is given the role in literature as a budding paleoanthropologist and pioneering scientist. She is a dynamic part of a relationship instead of an unknown two-dimensional character who swings around the African jungle on vines following Tarzan.

The story begins by placing her in historical context, in early twentieth century Edwardian England, a time when the roles of women were starting to change from the Victorian period. Her father supports her as the only medical student in Cambridge University, and invites her to accompany him on another one of his African expeditions where he will continue to search for a missing fossil link.

Jane’s relationship with her father is close. She holds him in high esteem and he has nurtured her intellectual abilities since childhood. He is the most important person in her life.

Highly influential in Maxwell’s creation of the Jane character was Mary H. Kingsley’s late 19th century autobiographical travel book, Travels in West Africa. Kingsley traveled alone to West Africa, to continue her late father’s research on native spiritual practices, and she too had been exceptionally close to her father.

Ral Conrath, a sexy, self-serving, unscrupulous con-artist, attends one of her father’s lectures, and he convinces them that he knows the location in the Gambia where they can find their fossils. Jane’s father, taken in by him, turns over all the preparations for the expedition to his expertise. Conrath uses this opportunity to finance another trip to West Africa where he was recently expelled for his dirty dealings. Jane, dealing with her own sexuality as a young woman, comes to terms with their lustful attraction to one another on the ship bound for Africa.

The real adventure begins in Africa. The plot unfolds quickly and reads like watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jane is attacked by a leopard and her father is later presumed dead, Conrath abandons Jane in the jungle, and Tarzan rescues her and brings her back to health and well-being.

Everything seems to be grounded in reality and is believable, except for the fact that Jane never seems to go through a real grieving process once she discovers her father is dead.

Once healed of her wounds, she and Tarzan develop a system of communication, and evolve into a powerful couple. Their jungle adventures take them into the locations of the Mangani tribe, the living “missing link,” and another tribe who leads them into their spiritual underground labyrinth, based on a real Egyptian labyrinth, where they have their final encounter with

the evil Conrath.

Jane wants to return to England to share her discoveries to the scientific community, and she wants to bring Tarzan back with her. She has to get him ready, though, to meet polite society. No more loin cloths or eating raw animal kills. When she instructs him in making polite conversation, what to wear and how to interact, it is hilarious. On the morning they plan to leave for England, Jane wakes up to find Tarzan has bailed on her. She has to choose between getting on the ship and returning home alone, or staying in Africa with Tarzan. Is it possible to have both, a life with Tarzan and a career in England as a scientist?

One of Robin Maxwell’s strengths is thoroughly researching her subject matter. The Man Who found the Missing Link: Eugene Dubois and His Lifelong Quest To Prove Darwin Right was instrumental in her creation of the the Mangani tribe.

Maxwell’s greatest strength in her writing is her ability to create a story with complex plot developments that do not get bogged down and move along at a pace appropriate for an adventure story. At times, especially at the beginning of the story, she tends to tell the reader about Jane’s personality and character, rather than show the reader through dialogue and other writing devices, making some of the work seem more suited to a movie script. Perhaps Maxwell’s book will be turned into a movie, as the trend in cinema tends to be now, movies based on books. This did detract somewhat from the book’s strength as literature, keeping the reader more emotionally removed from the characters. Nonetheless, Jane is extremely creative, and a worthwhile and fun read. – Delphine Lucas August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 25

“There is no Tarzan without Jane.”

John R. Burroughs

An excerpt from JANE: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan Chicago, April 1912

G

ood lord she was magnificent! Edgar thought. Infuriatingly bold. He had many times fantasized about women such as this Jane Porter, but he honestly believed they existed only in his imagination. The vicious heckling she had endured for the past hour in the darkened room would have broken the strongest of men, yet there she stood at the podium casting a shadow on the startling image projected by the whirring episcope on the screen behind her, back straight as a rod, head high, trying to bring order back into the hall.

Her age was indeterminate—somewhere approaching thirty, but her presence was one of striking vitality and selfassurance. She was tall and slender beneath the knee-length suit coat of fine brown wool. Her honey-colored hair was tucked up beneath a simple toque of black felt, not one of those large frivolous feathered creations that these days hung perilously cantilevered over a woman’s face. Emma wished desperately for one of those freakish hats, and Edgar was secretly glad they were still too poor to afford it.

“These claims are preposterous!” cried a man seated halfway back in the crowded room. He had the look of an academic, Edgar thought.

“These are not claims, sir. They are the facts as I know them, and physical evidence, here, right before your eyes.”

There were hoots of derision at that, and catcalls, and Jane Porter’s chin jutted an inch higher.

“This is clearly a hoax,” announced a portly bearded man who brazenly walked to the table in front of the podium and swept his hand above the massive skeleton displayed on the table before it. “And a bad hoax at that. Why, you haven’t even tried to make the bones look old.”

The audience erupted in laughter, but the woman spoke over the commotion with more equanimity than Edgar thought humanly possible.

“That is because they are not old. I thought I made it clear that the bones came from a recently dead specimen.”

“From a living missing link species,” called out another skeptic. The words as they were spoken were meant to sound ridiculous.

“All you’ve made clear to us today, Miss Porter, is that you should be locked up!”

“Can we have the next image please?” the woman called to the episcope operator.

“I’ve had enough of this claptrap,” muttered the man sitting just in front of Edgar. He took the arm of his female companion who herself was shaking her head indignantly and they rose from their seats, pushing down the row to the side aisle.

This first defection was all it took for others to follow suit. Within moments a mass exodus was underway, a loud and boisterous one with rude epithets shouted out as hundreds of backs were turned on the stoic presenter.

Edgar remained seated. When someone threw on the electric lights he could see the episcope operator up front in the center aisle was wordlessly packing up the mechanism of prisms, mirrors and lenses that threw opaque images up on the screen as the speaker began her own packing up.

Finally Edgar stood and moved down the side aisle to the front of the meeting hall. He rolled the brim of his hat around 26 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

in his hands as he approached Jane Porter. Now he could see how pretty she was. Not flamboyantly so, but lovely, with an arrangement of features – some perfect, like her warm brown almond eyes and plump upward-bowed lips, and some less so, like her nose, just a tad too long with a small bump in it – that made her utterly unique.

She was handling the bones as if they were made of Venetian glass, taking up the skull, shoulders, arms and spine and laying them carefully into a perfectly molded satin receptacle in a long leather case.

She looked up once and gave him a friendly, close-lipped smile, but when he did not speak she went back wordlessly to her task. Now it was the lower extremities that she tucked lovingly away, using special care to push the strange big-toe digits into narrow depressions perpendicular to the feet.

Edgar felt unaccountably shy. “Can I give you a hand?”

“No thank you. They all fit just so, and I’ve had quite a lot of practice. London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin.”

“I have to tell you that I was completely enthralled by your presentation.”

She looked at Edgar with surprised amusement. “You don’t think I should be locked up?”

“No, quite the contrary.”

“Then you cannot possibly be a scientist.”

“No, no, I’m a writer.” He found himself sticking out his hand to her as though she were a man. “The name’s Ed Burroughs. “ She took it and gave him a firm shake. He noticed her fingernails were pink and clean, but altogether unmanicured, bearing no colorful Cutex “nail polish,” the newest rage that Emma and all her friends had taken to wearing. These were not the hands of a lady, but there was something unmistakably ladylike about her.

“What do you write, Mr. Burroughs?”

He felt himself blushing a bit as he pulled the rolled up magazine from his jacket pocket. He spread it out on the table for her to see. “My literary debut of two months ago,” he said, unsure if he was proud or mortified.

“All Story Magazine?”

“Pulp fiction.” He flipped through the pages. “This is the first installment in the series I wrote. There was a second in March. My pen name’s Norman Bean. It’s called `Under the Moons of Mars.’ About a Confederate gentleman, John Carter, who falls asleep in an Arizona cave and wakes up on Mars. There he finds four-armed green warriors who’ve kidnapped `the Princess of Helium,’ Dejah Thoris. He rescues her, of course.”

She studied the simple illustration the publisher had had drawn for the story, something that’d pleased Edgar very much.

“It really is fiction,” she observed.

“Fiction, fantasy....” He sensed that the woman took him seriously, and he felt suddenly at ease. It was as if he had always known her, or should have known her. She exuded something raw and yet something exceedingly elegant.

“When I was ten I came home from school one day and told my father I’d seen a cow up a tree,” Edgar said, startling himself with his candor with a complete stranger. “I think I said it was a purple cow. I was punished quite severely for lying, but nothing stops a compulsion, does it?” When she shook her head knowingly, he felt encouraged. “A few years later I moved to my brother’s ranch in Idaho and stayed for the summer. By the time I was enrolled at Phillip’s Academy I could spin a pretty good yarn about all the range wars I’d fought in, the horse thieves, murderers and bad men that I’d had run-ins with. It was a good thing my father never heard about them.”

A slow smile spread across Jane Porter’s features. “Well, you’ve shown him now, haven’t you. A published author.”

“I’m afraid my old man has yet to be convinced of my myriad talents.”

She snapped both cases closed and took one in each hand.

“Here, let me help you with those.”

“No thank you. Having the two of them balances me out.”

“I was hoping you’d let me take you out to dinner. Uh, I’d like very much to hear more about your Ape-Man.” She stopped and looked at him. “Honestly?”

“Yes.” “You must pardon my suspiciousness. I have been boo’d and hissed out of almost every hallowed hall of learning in the world. This is the last. I tried to have my paper heard at the Northwestern and Chicago universities, but I’m afraid my reputation preceded me and they said absolutely not. That’s why you had to listen to my presentation at a meeting room at the McCormick Building.”

“So will you come out with me?”

The woman thought about it for a very long moment. She set down her cases and walked to the man at the episcope, quietly conferring with him and returned. “It’s really not a good idea for us to talk in public, but my hotel is nearby. You and I can go up to my room.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Edgar said. “Chicago police keep an eye on even the nicest hotels. They might arrest you for soliciting. But my apartment’s not too far. The wife and kids have gone to her mother’s for the weekend. I mean…. sorry, that sounds…”

“Mr. Burroughs, you’re apartment’s a fine idea. I’m not afraid of you. But don’t you care about the neighbors?”

He eyed the woman’s bulky luggage. “I’ll tell them you’re selling vacuum cleaners.”

She smiled broadly. “That will do.”

They were largely silent on the taxi ride across town to his Harris street walk-up, except for the exchange of pleasantries about the lovely spring weather they were having, and how April was almost always horrible in England.

It was just Edgar’s rotten luck that the only neighbor that saw them come in was the landlord – a true shit of a man who was looking for the rent, now more than a week late. He was relieved to get Jane Porter up the three flights and inside, shutting the door behind them, but he cringed to see the empty cereal bowl and box of Grape Nuts that he’d left on his writing desk. There was a pile of typewritten pages on letterhead lifted from the supply closet of the pencil sharpener company he worked for, a mass of cross-outs and arrows from here to there, scribbled notes to himself in both margins.

“It’s a novel I’m writing, or should say re-writing…for the third time. I call it Outlaw of Torn.” Edgar grabbed the bowl and cereal box and started for the kitchen. “I turn into a bit of a bachelor when my wife is away. By that I don’t mean…”

“It’s all right,” she called after him. “You have children?”

“A boy and girl, two and three. Why don’t you sit down?

Can I get you something to drink? Tea? A glass of sherry?”

“Yes, thank you. I’ll have a cup of water. Cool, please.”

When Edgar returned from the kitchen his guest was sitting at the end of the divan in an easy pose, her back against the rounded arm, her head leaning lazily on her hand. She had taken off her suit coat and now he could see she wore no stiff stays under the white silk blouse, those torturous undergarments that mutilated a woman’s natural curves. She wore no jewelry save a filigreed gold locket hanging between shapely breasts, and it was only when she was opening the second of the two cases holding APorter Pithecanthropus that he saw she

wore a simple gold wedding band. He could see now where she had meticulously pieced together the shattered bones of the apelike face.

He set the water down and sat across from her. Now she sighed deeply.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Edgar asked, praying silently that she did.

“Well, I’ve never told this in its entirety. The academics don’t wish to hear it. But perhaps your `pulp fiction’ readers will. I can tell you it’s a story of our world – a true story, one that will rival your John Carter of Mars.”

“Is it about you?”

“A good part of it is.”

“Does what happened to you in the story explain your fearlessness?”

“I told you, I’m not frightened of you. I…” “I don’t mean me. You took an awful lot of punishment this afternoon…and in public, too. You’re a better man than I.” She found Edgar’s remark humorous, but grew serious as she contemplated his question. “I suppose it did toughen me up, my experiences.” She stared down at her controversial find, and he saw her eyes soften as though images were coming into focus there.

“Where does it begin?” he asked.

“Well, that depends upon when I begin. As I’ve said, I’ve never told it before, all of it.” She did some figuring in her head. “Let me start in West Central Africa, seven years ago.”

“Africa!” Edgar liked this story already. Nowhere on earth was a darker, more violent or mysterious place. There were to be found cannibals, swarthy Arab slave traders, and a mad European king who had slaughtered millions of natives.

“It just as well could start in England, at Cambridge half a year before that.” She smiled at Edgar. “But I can see you like the sound of Africa. So, if you don’t mind me jumping round a bit…”

“Any way you like it,” Edgar said. “But I know what you mean. It’s not easy figuring out how to begin a story. I think it’s the hardest part.”

“Well then… picture if you will a forest of colossal trees.

High in the fork of a fig a great nest has been built. In it lies a young woman moaning and delirious. Her body is badly bruised and torn.”

“Is it you?” Edgar asked.

Jane Porter nodded.

“I have it in my mind. I can see it very well.” Edgar could feel his heart thumping with anticipation. He allowed his eyes to close. “Please Miss Porter…” there was a hint of begging in his voice. “Will you go on?”

Yes, please do. We encourage our Sun Runner readers to join us, and author Robin Maxwell (plus Max Thomas, her husband and missing link to so much in life), at our Desert Writers Celebration, Saturday, September 29. Please come celebrate the release of JANE, and listen to Robin and a host of desert writers and poets read from their stories and poems.

Enjoy African dancing, a Tarzan yell competition, and mingle with all our desert authors and poets!

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 27

Memories of the Sun pounding hammers… scraps of insulation line the cactus wren’s nest The housing boom has advanced inland from the coast, bringing the rumble and bleat of bulldozers to our bucolic desert community. In almost every vacant lot, houses are built with jackrabbit quickness and sold before their dun-colored stucco coats dry. In a few years, scores of these new homes will stand as empty and forlorn as the abandoned gold mines that pock the Mojave—windows cracked, yards strewn with cast-off furniture, kitchens reeking with the putrid-sweet stench of sour milk and despair. But for now, recessed lights reflect like stars on polished granite countertops, real estate signs blossom alongside wildflowers.

No money down! beer bottle shards glimmer in the dust To make way for new homes, contractors clear a collective forest of Joshua trees, the rangy, kink-limbed yuccas that have flourished here since the ice age. Most of the displaced Joshua trees are unceremoniously dumped in the landfill; the few that are transplanted struggle to survive. “These trees remember where the sun comes up,” a tree mover says, “You have to be sure and plant them in the ground just the same way they grew, or they get confused and die.”

“And it’s not just the trees that get mixed up,” he goes on, “One time, I hauled a Joshua tree eighty-five miles out to Barstow, and would you believe a bird followed me the whole time? Saw it in my rearview, flying right along behind me, and when I got to Barstow, that bird set down and panted like a dog, its little chest puffing in and out. Couldn’t figure why it’d followed me ‘til it flew over to a nest that was still in the tree. It followed its nest. All that way.” empty tortoise shell wind moans through the mouth of a mine shaft

Author Bio: Melissa Spurr is a writer, marketing specialist, photographer, web designer, poet, artist and tinkerer who lives in Joshua Tree with her husband, two dogs, and a crotchety old cross-eyed cat.

Spring Stream

by Naomi Lake Excerpt from Bones, Feathers & Pottery Shards: Stories of the Anza-Borrego Desert (D’Nomi Press, 2011).

A clapping cloudburst created an instant stream in Palo Verde Wash: a small gush of water with a tenuous life span. With one strong breath the cloud fled, leaving the birthing steam.

I sat by the newly created brook, which had awakened after a long hibernation. Although it had been here before, the brook chose to meander a slightly different path this time. “This is my home,” she said, “but today, I go this way.” I heard rhythmic trickles, as the water moved over smooth stones and dry roots.

I listen to her story. She is born about once a year. And as she travels, she sings her song. Her song is her life history; an autobiography. It is repeated joyously over and over. It is the history of this place; here, she is inseparable from the Earth.

“My ancestors are from the Colorado River,” she says, “and my descendants are in the Salton Sea. I have been here for millennia. I will travel this way again and again, and my sand brothers and sisters will come with me to our final home.”

This melody is repeated in a mesmerizing chant, soothing and hypnotic to the ear.

If you are ever by a desert stream, stop and listen to her story.

If you feel a deep sense of peace and a loss of time, you have heard the river’s song.

Photograph by Don Barrie

28 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

Blue Tattoo based on the true story of Olive Oatman we took care of her, the white girl the grandson of the last traditional chief of the Mojave Indians told the crow in 2012, at the 13th celebration of the victory of Ward Valley-no radioactive waste facility here this valley is where our deceased follow the Milky Way to the sacred peak at Spirit Mountain, avi k’wame the white girl chose her own pattern of tattoos we burned into her chin, the blue lines, the river, so near, we are the people who walk along the water she swims among us now.

– Ruth Nolan

The Last Bird In the trees, along the lake, countless water birds breed in the winter months.

Snow-white egrets resting beside soot-black cormorants, the mighty open bill storks lived peaceably next to the small white ibises, the purple night herons.

The common sparrows twittered, busily hunting for dry seed and nesting twig.

In the autumn, after the rains, beyond the yellowing grass gleams the rich dark green of the lofty sal.

The fiery blossoms of the flame of the forest disappear.

May-awe screams the peacock, displaying its splendid feathers, fanned out before adoring hens.

Those forgotten sparrows bathed in the dust collected beneath overhanging branches.

Mumbai city attracted the screeching parrot that scolded from the burnished brown of the gulmohor tree.

Grey pigeons goodo-goed, awkwardly encircling each other along dusty ledges of rusted windows.

Crows held a caucus in the evening gloom.

Sparrows drank off muddy water gathering along the dripping eaves.

Then the river waters rushing through Manac’s spectacular gorge dried.

Sanctuary grasslands that sheltered the chukor partridge and the sarus crane lay waste.

Leaves of the city’s gulmohors cracked, the garden guavas, house of the green totas stripped, denuded.

And then the birds were gone.

Ruth Nolan is a native of the Mojave Desert and a former California Desert District/Bureau of Land Management helicopter hotshot and engine crew firefighter. She is now professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert, and a California desert literature scholar. She is also a widely published poet/writer/photographer focused on writing and lecturing about California desert cultural and conservation issues, and is editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts, published by Heyday Books in 2009.

She is a regular columnist contributing desert feature stories online for Heyday Books and KCET Artbound, Los Angeles, a judge and contributor for The Sun Runner’s Desert Writers Issue, and blogs about life in the desert at ruthnolan.blogspot. com. She lives in Palm Desert and can be reached to at runolan@aol.com.

Only the dull sparrows, unnoticed amidst the dustbins sang a last faint song.

– Deenaz P. Coachbuilder “The Last Bird” intersects with my own life in an eerie way.

We are so fascinated with the beautiful birds of India, that the common sparrow that twitters unnoticed, is ignored. That was what the poem was about, on one level. Then! A few years ago, you may have read about this, the vultures in India, and many other countries, began to dwindle in numbers, and have almost disappeared from Mumbai city. Over the last couple of years, the sparrows are decreasing in Mumbai! – Deenaz August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 29

Receding Moon They say the moon is receding bit by bit, like a person who needs to be elsewhere and wants to break it to you slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice.

You are blinded by that full light over the landscape, bright enough to see it all except the source, which is somewhere behind the ridgeline of the house.

MORE WRECKAGE in the school bus converted to a “house bu s” WRECKAGE

faded paper Christmas orn aments from Akrons

for an adventure d we drive 12 miles off roa

in a taken out dresser drawer

in a desert 75 miles from L.A.

The light creates expectation.

You sense something will happen, a vision, a sign. You look for a totem, animal motion in the spotlight, but see nothing.

Still, the shimmering silence calls you. You want to step inside it like stepping inside a photograph.

All the colors are silver.

You don’t ever want to leave.

There you stand, at the window, a chambered nautilus in a world of pearl, immersed in what you long for until the sun comes up.

The Wild Inside I know it’s time to clean house by the grains of decomposed granite underfoot. They track in on the soles of our shoes, then needle our bare feet on the tiles. I can’t seem to keep up, between that and the leaves and dirt from our five-foot potted ficus, where the cat jumps up and digs in.

The low angle of light makes us all feisty, alert. Chimney swept, firewood delivered, we’re braced for the onslaught of cold, that great clarifier of desert air, our regret over summer’s exit etched on our faces, another year older as the Mojave has its way with us, weathering and shaping us into something that we weren’t sure we would become.

Cynthia Anderson lives in Yucca Valley. Her latest book of poems is In the Mojave, and she is co-editor of A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens. Both books are available at Rainbow Stew, in Yucca Valley, and online at Amazon.com.

30 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

on the same desert compound

g

a local’s playful brown do finds us follows the car to a lonely compound of abandoned vehicles rusted fuel tanks scattered possessions a motorhome with an attached porch takes in sun

ndows wind through glassless wi ards bo cup en op in glasses still the stove a white buddha statue on on tile lie s oto ph on ati curled vac bedroom closet negatives in the opened a notebook and a folded torn out of letter on the floor dated Febuary 16, 1993 neatly littered with spelling mistakes

unhip jackets still hang in an open closet black D batteries left in an opened nightstand dra

wer

two dusty Los Angeles ma ps on the dinette below that table a drawing by J. Perry on lined notebook paper dated May 3, 1983 of gold and brown rollin g with line birds flying ov hills er marker blue haze a setting orange and yellow

sun

with birds for eyes and mouth and a copied page 30 completed on Equal Fractions and Redu cing How many pieces in the pie

strewn amidst insurance forms breaks up with an abusive husband of thirteen years the last six months here ’s someday...

“I hope we can be friend Jo” Jo s, Love alway’

– Don Kingfisher Campbell

“Respecting our Desert Elders— Ancestors of the Leafy Type”

W

By Robin Kobaly

hen I was in grade school, I used to walk from the bus stop to my family’s rural desert home every day after school. I remember passing one big, majestic plant native to our area called Wild Plum or Parry Abrojo (Ziziphus parryi). It was about 15 feet tall and wide, with a trunk nearly two feet across. I sort of befriended that plant and the California Thrasher that always sang from its upper branches as I passed by. When I went off to study botany in college, I sort of forgot about that touchstone of my early childhood.

Years later, I ended up moving back to the same Morongo Valley neighborhood, and there waiting to greet me was that same wild plum in one of the few lots that was still undeveloped. It looked exactly the same. By that time I was in my forty’s, and noticeable changes had occurred in me, but the wild plum had not changed. I started wondering how old it must actually be if 40 years made no difference in its stature. If it were already full grown when I was a tot, then it must be no less than eighty years old, but likely much more.

Could this sentinel of my neighborhood be over a hundred years old?

The way I found out broke my heart.

One morning I awoke to the sound of a bulldozer down our street, and I looked out to see my familiar wild plum being ripped from the earth. I ran down the street to see what remained of that majestic plant.

I ended up salvaging the uprooted trunk, and realized I could count the annual growth rings exposed in the split wood.

Over 350 rings. It amazed me, even after studying desert plants for my master’s degree. How much longer might this ancient plant have lived? Even the bulldozer operator felt bad, and said he could have easily gone around it, as it was in a location that they couldn’t build on anyway.

He said he wished he had known.

This one experience influenced the next chapter of my life. That very day, I decided to develop a new program called “Saving The Ancients” under our environmental education non-profit, The SummerTree Institute. I ended up chasing bulldozers to salvage the trunks of as many desert plants as possible, had them sliced, sanded, and polished so ecology students could help us count the annual growth rings of as many sizes and species of native plants as we could find. In this way, we could get an idea of how the size

of a given desert plant relates to its age, without having to cut it down or use a core boring tool to count its annual growth rings to determine its age.

We were astonished. Junipers over 1000 years old, wild plums over 400 years old, oaks over 500 years old, ironwood trees over 800 years old, and even the smaller creosote bushes several hundred years old. But because none of these plants reach great size in order to survive the extremes of our arid climate, no one realizes how old they are. When one of these ancients is removed from its community, it takes five centuries or more to replace their contribution to that ecosystem. And yet we think nothing of blading tens of thousands of acres of these ancient desert plants for a renewable energy project whose lifespan is optimistically up to 20 years. With this technology changing so fast, by the time they finish building one of these massive projects, the technology will already be out of date.

Invariably, the organisms that make the biggest impact on any ecosystem are those that live the longest. We are just realizing that the anchors of our desert ecosystems are the long-lived plants that we see above ground, and the long-lived, complex soil community connected below ground to those ancient desert plants. It is not the plants’ roots that absorb most of the water and nutrients from the soil, but the microscopic soil partners that live on those roots that do the work. This is a life-long relationship, and if the host plant dies, the root partners die. These root partners are part of a host of lower organisms that also cement soil grains together to create a crust across undisturbed desert soils, and prevent choking dust storms whenever stiff winds blow. Ancient plants supported by ancient soils, and ancient soils supported by ancient plants. One cannot survive without the other, and breaking that living connection between the two requires many centuries to reform.

So what? Who will know or care if thousands of acres of ancient plants and their ancient soil partners die in some remote stretch of desert? There’s lots of desert out there, plenty to spare. Remember when we used to have so much water that we let the faucet run the whole time we brushed our teeth? There was so much water—then! And there’s so much desert—today…

So little value is put on our remaining stretches of California desert because we are so little aware of its contributions. But contribute it does, from carbon sequestration by its ancient soil communities, to the erosion control of its intact soil crusts that prevent PM10s from whipping up into

the desert air we breathe, to the centuries, even millennia of food, cover, and homes provided by just one individual ancient plant across its lifetime for all manner of wildlife, from bighorn to bunnies, and to the solace of a pristine landscape that stretches as far as you can see.

It is not a stretch to say the blading of thousands of acres of pristine desert for one 25-year energy project removes an ancient community that will take at least 1000 or more years to recover, if ever, depending upon rainfall. We risk destroying a 1000+ year resource for a project that we know will be obsolete in 25 years or less.

It just doesn’t make sense. So how do we meet our renewable energy goals without destroying valuable landscapes while our technology catches up with our needs? Put the same effort and money into something like roof-top solar. The ground under our existing roofs has already been bladed, and these roofs are “solar fields” in waiting. The transmission lines are already in place. Roof-top solar units can be quickly changed out as the technology improves, all without any more impact to the desert landscape, and all leading to many long-term jobs dispersed throughout each of our communities. And the residents who live below these future “roof-top solar fields,” from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, can continue to take their children out to the still-pristine Mojave and Colorado Desert wildlands for the next 1000 years to view a landscape full of ancient plants, and to find solace, stars, beauty, and renewal.

Robin Kobaly is the executive director of the SummerTree Institute, and a biologist.

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 31

Desert Theatre Beat

By Jack Lyons Sun Runner Theatre Editor

I

f this column looks “different” this time it’s because we’ve switched the column format a bit. Instead of listing theatres and production titles and play dates, as in past issues of the last eight years, future issues will now focus on, and feature more, preview and interview columns with those talented people responsible for presenting the many outstanding productions available to readers of this column and the magazine.

With our new website and desertwide online calendar, you can check all the upcoming productions online, while delving deeper into desert theatre in the pages of this magazine.

The Palm Canyon Theatre of Palm Springs gets the nod as the first live theatre venue in the valley to be featured.

With that settled, my next order of business was to seek out play director Scott Smith and get his thoughts about his upcoming September 7-9 production of the classic comedy “Harvey,” by Mary Chase. I caught up with Scott while he was driving his car and we agreed to a call back once he was off the road.

JL: Scott, as the director of “Harvey,” a classic American comedy (1,775 performances on Broadway) written by Mary Chase during World War II, do you feel the play will resonate with today’s Palm Canyon Theatre audiences?

SS: I thought about that a lot. The play was written in 1944, during WW II, as a result of a conversation playwright Mary Chase had with a “Gold Star” mother who just learned of the death of her soldier son. Chase said at the time, ‘I just wanted to write something that would make her smile as a way to help heal her grief.’

Our country is once again involved in war, and our society is in turmoil with our young people and the recent shootings…

Yes, I feel our show will help in easing our collective pain. It’s a gentle, warm, funny and entertaining piece of theatre.

JL: Are you planning to update any of the story elements?

SS: No, we’ll perform it as written. It’s

32 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

a case of who are the crazies here? Is Elwood P. Dowd (the lead character) crazy because he has a 6-foot 4-inch rabbit he pals around with that no one can see but him?

Or is the rest of society a little off-kilter because they don’t see and don’t want to believe? The play’s gentle message is a subtle, sly look at ourselves.

JL: Who are playing the principal roles ?

SS: Luke Rainey is playing the affable Elwood, with Suzie Thomas Wourms as his sister, Veta Simmons. It’s a fun cast. I wish we could have more performances, but everyone who attends will certainly enjoy themselves.

“Harvey,” directed by Scott Smith, opens at the Palm Canyon Theatre Friday, September 7 at 8 p.m. and performs Saturday, September 8 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, September 9 at 2 p.m.

Following “Harvey”, PCT brings the wonderfully wacky musical “Spamalot” to the theatre. The musical, written by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, is being directed by Dane Whitlock. Whitlock, last seen as an actor in “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” was also the director of the highly successful PCT musical “Hairspray,” this year. I tracked him down in Ashville, North Carolina, as he was cooling off in the lovely Blue Ridge Mountains.

JL: What draws you to broad, over-thetop material and shows like “Hairspray” and your upcoming production of “Spamalot?”

DW: Comedy has always come easy to me. In college and in summer stock, I found that I was a pretty good mimic. In comedy, if you don’t have good timing, you better not quit your day job. With a show like “Spamalot” it’s all about comedy timing and having a good time.

I love the zaniness of this show, which I hope will transfer from the cast to the audience.

JL: Where does the musical’s title come from?

DW: It’s from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Naturally, it’s a highly irreverent parody of the Arthurian legend and boasts a line from the movie, which goes: “We eat ham, and jam, and spam a lot.” Well… who could resist?

JL: Ouch. I’m sorry I asked (just kid-

ding).

DW: The show will be ‘Monty Python heavy’ with their brand of goofy humor and I’m sure the audience will jump right on board once the curtain goes up.

JL: Who are the actors in this musical spoof ?

DW: The wonderful Mark Almy portrays the blissfully unaware King Arthur, and Bobbie Eakes is his “Lady of the Lake.”

Erik Bradley perfectly portrays, “Patsy, the Squire.” Kelly Peak is the squarejawed Sir Galahad, Rod Thethal plays Lancelot, Anthony Nanini plays the Minstrel and Prince Herbert, and manages in between, to choreograph the show, and Anthony Meyers plays Sir Robin. The set is being designed by resident scenic design wizard J.W. Layne, with musical direction by David McLaughlin.

JL: Sounds like it’s going to be “ETicket Ride” when those people get going. Thanks for letting me interrupt your reverie and the Thomas Wolfe book you’re obviously reading at the moment in Ashville.

“Spamalot,” the musical, opens at the Palm Canyon Theatre on October 12 and performs Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays, at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. through October 21.

For reservations and ticket information for both “Harvey” and “Spamalot,” call the Box Office at (760)323-5123.

T

he HOT issue here in the valley, other than the weather, is the upcoming Big Bear Lake International Film Festival taking place just up the road in the cool climes of Big Bear Lake. Mark your calendars! The festival begins Thursday, September 13 and runs through Sunday, September 16.

The festival, which keeps getting bigger, bearier, and more prestigious in movie circles, is a personal favorite of mine for a couple of reasons. One, it’s one of a few festivals that recognizes and honors the creative effort and input of the cinematographer. Without this creative artist, no film would ever appear on a movie screen. BBLIFF has been featuring the work and expertise of the world’s finest cinematographers for years. The culmination of this on-going recognition is the annual presentation of their Lifetime Achievement Award for Cinematography. This year, the 2012 honoree is the late, great, cameraman and director of photography, Jack Cardiff.

English writer, producer, director Craig McCall, whose documentary film “Cameraman: The Work and Life of Jack Cardiff,” became the basis for the posthumous award, will accept the honor on behalf of Cardiff’s family. This prestigious award is being presented by Monika Skerbelis, festival co-president and film programming director. In addition, Hollywood director of photography John Bailey, last year’s Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, will be present to add his personal anecdotes and commentary about his friend, Jack Cardiff and Jack’s many accomplishments in a career that spanned 90 years!

The second reason this festival is high on my list of film festivals to

Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Tom Schulman, will be honored at this year’s Big Bear Lake International Film Festival.

We hear rumors that Missed Connections, top right, an award-winning independent film featuring Kenny Stevenson and Dorien Davies, will be screening at the festival!

attend is their continuing honoring of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Screenwriting. Sandy Steers, festival co-president and screenwriting competition director, has announced Academy Award-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman as recipient of the 2012 Festival Honoree for Screenwriting. Screenwriting is another discipline that fuels the creative arts machine.

As they say... “In the beginning was the Word.” Blank pages like blank canvases remain just that—blank, unless the creative urge and talent take over.

Tom Schulman is a most deserving honoree. He became an Academy Awardwinning screenwriter with his first effort, “Dead Poets Society,” starring Robin Williams. He’s also penned “What About Bob?” starring Richard Dreyfuss and Bill Murray, “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” with Rick Moranis, as well as, “Medicine Man,” “Holy Man,” and “Welcome to Mooseport.”

Schulman also has a busy TV writing and producing

career with such projects as HBO’s “The Anatomy of Hope” pilot.

The Big Bear Lake International Film Festival is a must-see event for fans of wonderfully written and gorgeously filmed movies and screenplays.

For information on festival tickets call (909)866-3433 or visit www.bigbearfilmfest.com. See you at the festival!

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 33

B

illboard Magazine has finally realized something that locals here have known all along. They have named Pappy and Harriet’s as one of the top ten Hottest Spots, Must Plays and Hidden Gems in the United States!

It has been nine years since Robyn Celia and Linda Krantz put on their first show with Lucinda Williams on November 15, 2003. I remember the day they gave me a flyer for that show while attending the Coyote Fest and I still have it. I can not even begin to tell of all the great musicians I have seen there and want to thank them so much!

Warm wishes and bright healing light goes out to Eric Burdon who is scheduled to undergo back surgery as I write this. Another great I have seen play at Pappy’s and a warm and friendly human being, we love you Eric!

It has been 10 years since the passing of our beloved Fred Drake who was really the start of what has become our musical Mecca out here. A tribute CD is in the works with so many great musicians covering Fred’s songs. I was fortunate enough to get to meet Fred, who’s legacy still lives on. You can read more about Fred, The Rancho De La Luna, Ted Quinn and others in the upcoming book by Ruben Martinez “Desert America-Boom and Bust in the Old West.”

Kate Pierson of the B52s has opened “Kate’s Lazy Desert,” her Vintage Airstream Hotel in Landers. It sure looks cozy and a lot of fun. Kate was also spotted in town picking up a couple 34 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

Debora Iyall on stage at Pappy & Harriet’s, left, and with Judy, above.

The late Fred Drake, with Ted Quinn (left), and Tony Mason (right), top.

Tim Easton, opposite page, top, and There Be Pirates!, opposite page, bottom. Desert musicians—do you have music videos to share? Send us the YouTube embed code and we’ll share them on our website!

of Shari Elf T-shirts!

David Newton of the English rock band Thee Mighty Lemon Drops, stopped by for a visit to Ted Quinn’s local music show with his new band, Thee Mighty Angels. Great to have you in town David!.

There Be Pirates! put on a swashbuckling show at the Yucca Valley Summer Concert Series and they got a great response from everyone. It was so fun to see so many people stay after the show to have their photos taken with the pirates!

Wally Ingram has been off to Japan to play the Fuji Rock Festival but will be home in time to play the Joshua Tree Roots Fest at the Joshua Tree Lakes on October 12-14. This year’s line up includes Sean Hayes, Amy LaVere and Shannon McNally and the return of our own Tim Easton! This festival is going to be amazing so get your tickets early.

It is almost time for another of my favorite things, the Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven Campout at Pappy and Harriet’s, September 13-15. Special guests this year include Chris Shiflett (Foo Fighters) & the Dead Peasants and Gram Rabbit!

Speaking of Gram Rabbit, they sure have been busy. They were mentioned twice in one week in the New York Times and have a new video out for their song “Desperate Hearts.. The song was also featured in a Fruit of the Loom commercial that aired prime time during the Olympics! Not too shabby—you guys rock!

Debora Iyall (Romeo Void) returned to Pappy’s for a reunion show in June. I first met Debora in the 80’s when Romeo Void appeared on the rock and roll game show I worked for.

We reunited again during an art show when she moved out here.

She still has quite the spunk and spark and we are so happy for her in her new home, teaching career and marriage!

Zulluu has been creating quite a stir with his new video and his star party out at the Joshua Tree Lake Campground.

With fire spinners and guitar from Clive Wright, you should catch them when you can.

Steve Lester and Boby Furgo have been working on a project entitled “My Secret Life.” Can’t wait to hear it.

There was also a reunion at the lakes from the Thrift Store All Stars! I spent many a Sunday night with them at Pappy’s and was so happy to see them reunite.

There are many more things happening in our desert community and you can check The Sun Runner’s website for more details.

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 35

Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen In Concert At Indian Cove Amphitheatre, Joshua Tree National Park

L

egendary Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, Chris Hillman, along with master musician Herb Pedersen, recently performed a “nostalgic stew” of music from the Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, the Desert Rose Band, and other individual selections from careers spanning almost 50 years.

Hillman is the last living member of The Flying Burrito Brothers and treated the audience to his reflections of the park as well as former band-mate Gram Parsons. Herb Pedersen has backed up Emmylou Harris, Dan Fogelberg, John Denver and many other legends in the music business and it was quite obvious that he and Chris have played together for years.

Hometown favorites, the Shadow Mountain Band, opened for Hillman and Pedersen and their set reminded audience members of just how talented they really are.

The event was presented by the Joshua Tree National Park Association as one of their annual cultural music productions in the park. Last year’s concert featured legendary songstress, Rita Coolidge and the series of musicians with ties to Joshua Tree National Park is becoming a much anticipated annual event.

The Sun Runner is looking for bloggers from around the desert and mountains to share music news from your communities.

Join the AdventureCORPS Desert Voices Contest going on now through the end of September and blog for The Sun Runner Magazine! Not only will we promote your writing, along with events and people in your community, but we’ll also pull some of the best blogging and put it into print in The Sun Runner’s print editions. Reach over a quarter million readers per year in print and online, share your talent and interests, help build our online desert community, and be read and enjoyed by thousands of readers across the desert, and beyond.

Check it out at www.thesunrunner.com. Just look for the AdventureCORPS Desert Voices Contest and become one of our respected and well known desert voices! We’re looking for bloggers from all across the desert (and mountains too), who want to write about their communities, their interests, their particular expertise and passion. Don’t just post on Facebook or your own blog for 100 or 1,000 readers—post on our website, then share it on social media—and reach tens of thousands more!

36 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 37

The Sun Runner Magazine

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August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 39

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

40 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

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

Do you run a desert hotel, motel, inn, lodge, bed & breakfast, vacation rental, getaway, retreat, escape, trailer glamping ground, campground, hostel, guesthaus, or long-term rental?

Advertise it in The Sun Runner

and connect with a quarter million readers per year.

It’s economical, effective, and has a long shelf life, plus you support our work to preserve and promote the desert’s natural beauty and culture.

Call (760)820-1222 for information

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

August/September 2012 – The Sun Runner 41

The Sun Runner is a proud member of the: oCalifornia Deserts Visitors Association oTwentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce oJoshua Tree Chamber of Commerce oDeath Valley Chamber of Commerce oBorrego Springs Chamber of Commerce oRidgecrest Area Convention & Visitors Bureau oIdyllwild Chamber of Commerce oKernville Chamber of Commerce

42 The Sun Runner – August/September 2012

Hotels, Motels, Inns, B&Bs, Vacation Rentals, Lodges, RV Parks, Campgrounds, Restaurants, Cafes, Nightclubs, Shops, Malls, Events, Attractions & Distractions – Don’t Miss Advertising in our Desert Travel & Desert Road Trips Issues!

That’s right – TWO BIG Desert Travel Issues packed with Desert Destinations and distributed at the country’s largest travel show - the LA Travel & Adventure Show!

Call 760-820-1222 today!