Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  ‘Well,’ I responded, trying to move the conversation along, ‘I’m interested in looking at the place. I’ve been to the High Desert many times, but I was wondering, where exactly is Boulder House?’

  Boulder House was, and remains, located at the very end of Coyote Road, which, as most readers will know, snakes south from Roadrunner Rut and Gamma Gulch. It forks backwards through the High Desert from Pipes Canyon Road — a tributary, if coming from the south, of either Pioneertown Road or Rimrock Road. From the east it diverges from the even better-known thoroughfare of Old Woman Springs Road. For those less intimate with the higher reaches of the Eastern Mojave Desert, it is about a two-and-a-half hour drive east of Los Angeles, a twenty-minute drive from Joshua Tree National Park, and thirty minutes due north, into the mountains, from Palm Springs.

  Boo was visiting Australia, and I had talked my mate Ed into taking the trip out of LA to the High Desert, deeming his convertible Le Baron the appropriate machine for the two-hour drive. He had vindicated my decision, and managed to get us from LA to the tiny vale of Pioneertown, the capital city of the sparsely populated land, in an hour and a half. As Ed careened up the rutted incline, I reflected that Chrysler had not produced this car for outback driving.

  To call Coyote Road a road is being rude to roads, even dirt roads. We left the blacktop of Pipes Canyon and passed, with great care, through two great granite boulders that brought to mind a vehicular version of the Rocks of Gibraltar. Joshua trees, or Dr Seuss trees, as they are fondly known, contorted this way and that like some rubbery comedian who has just received a powerful electric shock. They waved at their more sober cousins, the giant yuccas, and the granddaddy of the High Desert, the ancient wind-twisted juniper. Roadrunners and quail darted between a botanical garden of cactus, dodging cottontails and jackrabbits. Great jumbles of giant rocks beckoned us forward. Each seemed to have a personality of its own, and many had faces that seemed familiar. I pointed out two members of the Supreme Court huddled together with Bugs Bunny and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, all laughing their heads off. Not to be outdone, Ed promptly located Darth Vader watching, disapprovingly, from a rocky outcrop nearby.

  After a quarter of a mile, the road started to rise, and Ed steered cautiously towards a precipitous incline that was actually a pass through cliffs that towered hundreds of feet above. The cliffs resembled a mediaeval fortress, but one sculpted by a supernatural hand. If a band of Comanche had appeared upon the top of this buttress, it would almost have been a cliché. Giant trees, pinyon and pine, grew almost as high as nature’s great wall, fed no doubt by the run-off from the cliffs. Halfway up the rise a post had been erected long ago and the words DEAD END had been crudely hand-painted in dripping red paint. It left the distinctly chilling appearance of having been written in blood.

  A small, apparently deserted cabin stood on a ridge to our left. Its windows were battened down, and it had a grim quality. But I hardly noticed either it or the dark dormant volcano that towered above it, because the road suddenly swerved to the right, down a gully, through tall, black iron gates and into a circular driveway surrounded by adobe buildings that formed a sprawling compound. The adobe was the exact colour of the rocks, blending into the land. We pulled up before the main house. It looked huge, and seemed to have been built directly out of the rock — which, we were to discover, it had.

  As Ed and I marvelled at the wonder of the place, a stocky, well-weathered man came forward to meet us.

  Bill Lavender was proud of his erection. Boulder House, fortified from behind by towering boulders, commands a front view of the valley below, stretching to the foothills, and beyond, to the San Bernardino Mountain Range. As it was constructed in the early 1980s when the Soviets were still willing, it might have been built to withstand a decent army. A nuclear attack, which would certainly target the 29 Palms marine base twenty miles away, would be deterred by the granite outcrop behind the fort.

  As if to complete the picture, Bill seemed to be the product of crossing George C. Scott with a pit bull. His white hair was cut to the crop; his jaw was eternally thrust forward, as if demanding just one more punch. He was well muscled for a man of seventy-three, and the muscles were not of the kind earned in a gym. The word ‘feisty’ might have been invented for Bill. I was glad Ed was with me. Ed is a big, comforting sort of man with a background in the more shadowy aspects of the military. Even so, he’s the sort of man people instantly trust, and Bill was clearly a suspicious type.

  Bill’s apparently hostile presence was not leavened by the activities of four extremely large Rottweilers. The largest of the Rots, Chopper, Bill’s main non-female companion, was more than capable of scaring the unwary. In the background, his friends hurled themselves on the steel fences that constituted their elaborate runs, adding something of an air of menace to our arrival. I noticed the personalised licence plate on one of Bill’s cars, ‘DOMOTD’, and figured it was an anagram for some military order. But Bill informed me sharply the letters stood for Dirty Old Man Of The Desert.

  Bill didn’t show us the house. He introduced us to it. It took some time. The front door opened into a small study that, in turn, opened into a large expanse of red Mexican terracotta tile. The walls were blackwood, and the area bereft of windows. It was just possible to see stairs reaching up into the darkness above. Darkness was the order of the day. It was so dark that I wondered if we shouldn’t be joined by ropes in case Ed got lost. We felt our way into what one might describe as a den.

  Dens are something of an American phenomenon, and are rare in Australia. They are a place where men, back in the days when we endured a separation of the species, could don gowns and slippers, and study Playboy. But this was a den in the biblical sense. The sort of one that Daniel might inhabit.

  Bill had forsaken lions — not that the property was devoid of them — for dogs. Light from a window revealed that a good part of the den’s walls were of raw granite.

  We had heard that Boulder House was built into the boulders, but I hadn’t quite understood that the boulders were an integral part of the house. The den even came equipped with a cave, of sorts. It was actually a dog run that ran out to a courtyard. It seemed like a large run, and in the gloom I wondered whether a human could use it. It occurred to me that the house had been built for the dogs first, and humans a distinct and distant second. If dogs could design and build a house, I expect this is about what they would have come up with.

  At the end of the den was another staircase, this one spiral. Dogs have trouble climbing spiral staircases, so obviously they hadn’t been involved in this aspect of the construction. If the raw rock walls were a surprise, the first upstairs room was a shock. Its walls and floor were entirely enclosed in the natural granite faces, giving the impression of standing in a large cave — a cave where unseen things lurked. In the centre was a huge waterbed, perched atop a one-metre high, enormous flat boulder. Above the bed was a skylight. One could drift off at night staring at the stars.

  Bill was fortunate getting the floor cut. Back when the CIA was helping the Mujahideen clear the Ruskies from the Khyber, and the other passes of Afghanistan, when they were our ‘sons of bitches’ and we could help build a Muslim utopia in that fortunate country, they sought the help of the Bechtel Corporation. Machines were brought in to cut caves in the rocky passes where the fighters could flee to safety after shooting their Stinger missiles at the helicopter gunships and SU70s that would fly low past the cliffs on their bombing runs. One such rock-cutter found its way to the nearby 29 Palms marine base, and Bill, not a friend of the communists, and close to some of the senior men at the base, managed to have the device brought to Boulder House. He was rewarded in his fight against international communism by having a floor cut into hard granite, the base for a magnificent rock room. All that was missing was Barney Rubble.

  Bill, meantime, was expounding his dislike for the modern state, of which communism had been the most dangerous an
d extreme manifestation. My suspicion that Bill had built this fort with the view to making a last stand against the commie rats was fortified. That would also explain the artillery and tank shells that were in evidence, and I decided not to mention my brief flirtation with communism in my youth. Instead, I moved the conversation to the woes of the Democratic Party. Bill has an abiding hatred for the social engineers that comprise social-democratic parties.

  I had expected that on the question of the greatest of all American social interventionists — the unimpeachable American, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who saved the world from the Depression, the Japanese, and, according to US folklore, the Germans — we would be united.

  It was not to be.

  ‘That son of a bitch brought in the child work laws,’ Bill hollered as we made our way from the rock room past what appeared to be two bathrooms, towards the library.

  Though unfamiliar with some of Roosevelt’s policies, I conceded that his attacks on child labour exploitation were part of some legacy — or words to that effect.

  ‘Yeah.’ Bill turned on me like a snake. ‘I was eight years old. And I had a job. That damned commie took my job.’

  The library was blessed with another skylight, presumably to facilitate reading. There was plenty of scope for that. Bill had six thousand books, many first editions, and almost all of the masters were on display: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Twain, the Greek classics, the French, as well as popular writers like Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Inevitably, there were hundreds of books on war and military history, and Bill explained he had reviewed military works for the LA Times. Wherever he went, he carried a pad with the titles of works he had to acquire to complete his collection, and he thrust it at me, telling me these were the titles he sought.

  Not content with a book collection that would honour a public library, Bill had put his hand to collecting films, accumulating thousands of them. I can pass on films, but I do like books. However, Bill made it clear that the collection did not come with the house as we exited the library to find ourselves on a large landing.

  As we passed a sign on the wall that read ‘A DULL WOMAN KEEPS A TIDY HOUSE’, I figured that Bill’s views on female suffrage might be unique, and inquired after his opinion on emancipation. It was not so much voting rights or jury service that he most begrudged. ‘Shoes,’ he growled. ‘They should have never given them shoes.’ Bill’s head jutted forward in indignation.

  We took another stairway down into the dark depths of the first floor, and soon found our way into the main bedroom. It was huge: twelve metres long, and almost seven wide, larger than the dwellings that many of the world’s inhabitants enjoy. It was dominated by a bed too large to move — three metres across and as many long, encased in great bolted black Cypress beams that rose three metres above the floor. While Bill’s books might be going with him, this was a bed that was staying in the house. The scale of the bed, and Bill’s licence plate, were convincing evidence that Bill was still an active man.

  The walls were mostly bare, whitewashed with blackwood trims. The house, inside and out, lent itself to the California look — that is, the style of the elegant masters of California prior to the mass arrival of Europeans. There was, of course, another bathroom (I counted five in all), and the greater bedroom led to one of the courtyards, which housed a Jacuzzi. We negotiated a maze that took us out to the back and into a confusion of courtyards. There were three, four, even five of them — depending on how one defines a courtyard. The whole back of the house was enclosed by rock faces that soared, almost sheer, some twenty metres above. One courtyard was encased in concrete — part of a dog run that was joined, through the tunnel, to the ‘dog room’ or den.

  It was cold out there, and we returned inside. Bill figured he’d done his bit by showing us the house, and left the exploration of the property to us. I guess he figured the landscape spoke for itself.

  The driveway rolled out past a good-sized swimming pool and accompanying pool house into an acre-sized amphitheatre. Here, the flat land was punctuated by spiky yucca, Joshua trees, some pines, junipers, and a dense floor of brush. And cactus. The property was mostly rock, with great seams of rimrock — furrows of granite that looked like man-made brick walls — running in broken streams through the terrain like a stone hedge. About three hundred metres from the front porch, the land fell away into what was once a small swamp. A battered bridge stood over the outline of a creek, but the stream was now dry. Halfway up a short ridge stood the stark skeleton of a large pine that apparently had been struck by lightning. The charred wood had burnished over the years, and much of the tree had turned gold.

  ‘It looks like a hanging tree,’ Ed remarked.

  ‘It’s the ten years ago tree,’ I decided. Ed gave me an odd look.

  ‘Ten years ago on a cold dark night.’ I sung a line from the old Band classic.

  ‘There’s nothing in that song about a tree,’ Ed remarked.

  ‘It’s not the words, it’s the mood,’ I replied.

  Ed stared at the gnarled but golden dead pine, and nodded.

  Neither Ed nor I had any idea what seventeen and a half acres, the land that came with Boulder House, actually comprised, and as the rock face plunged and soared all about us, seventeen acres on a map didn’t correspond with seventeen acres on foot. Soon Ed was tired, and so was I. The experience, Bill, the house, and the rock-climbing demanded respite, a few cold ones, and a game of pool at a nearby bar — The Palace.

  5

  As Ed broke the pool balls, I pondered the sense in even contemplating buying Boulder House. I pondered it to the point of losing the game, and sat watching Ed display his skills to the locals. In theory, Boo and I could, through the internet, still have residence in the wilds and write, edit, make documentaries et al. McLuhan had argued, thirty years ago, that ‘going to work’ was a thing of the past. But the way I saw it, pretty much everyone still went to work.

  Who were we, two isolated individuals with tenuous careers and a single dog, to try to prove that one could live and work anywhere in the world?

  I stared at my Miller Genuine Draft, and contemplated the madness of buying Boulder House. Barely technologically competent, we would have to assemble all the high technology that might help keep the wolf from the door while attending to life in a world where the nearest light at night shone from a house a mile away. We would be able to see the stars in all their glory, but little else. We would be going a long way from the cities of our lives — Sydney, London, Melbourne, and Los Angeles. We would be passing into a world of wells and rodent control, of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and bullets, of solitude, of wild and unruly people we hardly knew. A place where everything was designed, through ten billion years, to poison and to kill. To a land where hardship was king, and death his maidservant. To the end of the road. Of Coyote Road. A right turn in the dirt off Pipes Canyon Road, once called Rattlesnake Canyon Road, out of Pioneertown by eight miles. We would be at a dead end in the middle of nowhere.

  I remembered, with a shudder, that Boo had once jumped out of a moving car because one of the occupants was a moth. Someone had told me the moths out in the High Desert were big enough to eat. The Australian Aboriginal feasts on the Bogong moth when it is in season, but I couldn’t see Boo doing so. She is a brave girl who has faced perils all over the world, but her fear of moths is all-consuming. I would be taking her into a world where ‘if it don’t bite, or sting or scratch, it don’t belong out here’, as I heard a local boast. That was before I heard about the bats.

  Bill had commented that life was not ‘all shits and giggles’, and life in the High Desert certainly wouldn’t be.

  Boulder House was forbidding, straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson. The house was huge, but the rooms were maze-like and dark as the future. There were tiny recesses that gave way to tinier ones. In two hours we hadn’t fully explored the house, but it was evident that walls wou
ld have to be torn out, wiring and plumbing redirected, and more skylights installed, and that a million other tasks unimagined awaited me. Our budget did not run to employing an army of tradesmen. I would have to do most of the dumb, hard work myself.

  The threat of fire was not to be dismissed; but, as most of the property was granite, I doubted brush fires would be a great threat. Boulders tend not to burn. As a kid and later as a journalist, I had felt the heat of bushfires roaring sixty metres high through eucalyptus forests — fires that advanced on eighty-kilometre fronts, jumping ravines and exploding rather than burning. So I sneered a little at fire warnings. But there was brush all round the house, crawling out of the cracks in the rock, and if it caught, the house would be threatened. The place was mostly wood inside, and if a few sparks reached the interior, the exterior would cease to be.

  Water was also a problem. The well didn’t produce enough water to shave with. We would have to haul it in, at the mercy of an ancient water truck, whose owner’s eyesight was reputedly failing at about the same rate as his truck.

  I pondered my abilities. Axes and chainsaws and all manner of tools that I had not used in years, if at all, would be my charge. I wasn’t even a handyman; I was a journalist. Boo was even worse equipped, with no knowledge of the challenges I knew would be our daily lives. She had seen rattlesnakes in the canyons of LA, but she hadn’t lived in colonies of them. Many species of rattler inhabited the area, including the Mojave Green, a nasty viper with a temper, whose venom attacks both the central nervous system and the heart. If one of us was to be bitten while exploring the property, we might have to hike a tortuous half-mile to get to the car. That would set the blood racing. Then it would be a twenty-minute drive to the third-world medical treatment now available to most rural Americans.

  As a kid, I was never happier than hunting the red-bellied black snake and its brown cousin, both of which were deadlier than anything America had to offer, but that was forty years ago. We were in a different land, and I was almost a different person. I had killed a lot of them, and their American cousins had every reason to take revenge. Rattlers were known to winter in numbers, maybe as many as a hundred. If any place on earth existed where they might be found in such multitudes, surely it would be the tumultuous jumble of wildness that surrounded Boulder House. Falling amongst a few score angry rattlers would be curtains.