Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  The lion also loomed large in my thoughts. We were moving into his territory, and cougars had taken women in the mountains west of San Diego in recent years. Those mountains were only a few hours away. Bill Lavender had cheerfully recounted sharing a beer with his son when they spied a lion at the top of a fifteen-metre rock face. They viewed it with awe as it prowled, some one hundred metres from the benches in front of Boulder House. Then Bill had noticed his small granddaughter was missing. The two men sprung from their seats and raced towards the rock. The last they saw of the lion was the flicking of its tail as it disappeared into the caves beyond the main outcrop. At the foot of the rock, the child was playing, oblivious to the death that lurked above.

  Then there were the packs of wild dogs. Locals had warned me that they represented the greatest danger. Servicemen posted at the marine base would, when it was time to go, drop their dogs off here in the High Desert. Many were taken in, and people commonly had three dogs. One woman was reputed to have seventy. But there were limits to the largesse of the locals, and packs as large as eight would form. They could do a lot of damage before being shot.

  ‘A pack of dogs is more dangerous than a pack of wolves,’ Tony, who spent the summers in rural Wisconsin and knew something about wolves, told me as I sipped my beer. ‘They have no fear of man.’

  A comforting thought.

  ‘And the marines tend to have big dogs that can fight. Shepherds, mastiffs, pit bulls,’ he added.

  Medical facilities hardly rivalled Cedars-Sinai. I had heard horrendous tales, and been warned of the nearest medical centre. Many people reported treating themselves. The local animal feedlot was a popular pharmacy, animal antibiotics being cheaper than the human variety, and, as no prescriptions were required, doctor’s costs were eliminated. One gentleman treated his arthritis with WD-40. He swore by it. Modern medicine’s great advances had not reached Pioneertown — let alone Pipes Canyon.

  Most alarmingly, our nearest neighbour, Danny, from the brooding cabin, would be out of jail within a year. He was finishing up a five-year sentence for shooting a local. I wondered quite a bit about Danny. He would not come out of the Californian prison system a better man.

  Perhaps it was the utter madness of the scheme that was driving me to it. Boo and I had both lived in country towns as children, and moved across worlds to ever-greater cities. Each move had been judged by friends and loved ones as folly. Each time we had survived, if not conquered. But this was the folly absoluta.

  Mostly, I worried about my ability to keep the huge house running. I knew next to nothing about most technical functions that I would need to know to keep us from boiling, freezing, or burning in our beds.

  Neither of us had done a scrap of serious physical work in years, and now we were considering taking on the High Desert. Pretty much alone. Alone in a strange new world, as far from the places we had inhabited as the moon, which, as Ed and I trudged to the Pioneertown Motel, rose with such brightness that the stars were subdued. The moon lit the granite golden. Venus hung on the other side of the night sky. A wind whipped through a pine, the only noise save our shuffling boots in the dirt. Peace, perfect peace, passing understanding.

  We sat outside our room and watched the meteors burn. Soon, the moon grew smaller and the stars brighter. They were as bright as they were in the Australian bush when I was a little boy, and the air was as sharp. Before us was the dark butte that separated the little town from Pipes Canyon and Boulder House. Did the future lie on the other side, in silence?

  6

  ‘Well, you wanted a place among the boulders, and tomorrow you shall have them,’ I told Boo as we departed LAX for Venice. I imagined she would require a few days in the city to recover from the long flight from Sydney, but she seemed invigorated by the trip, and demanded that we head for the hills and Boulder House immediately.

  An hour and a half later, three weeks into the last year of the millennium, we forked off the 10 freeway and onto the 62. In twenty minutes we made it to the Pioneertown turn-off, to the steep six-kilometre climb through the jagged outcrops and into another world — the apparently tranquil world we were in the process of beginning to begin to make our home.

  We had arranged to meet Bill Lavender at the house the following morning. When we set out on the eight-kilometre drive, Boo was excited and I nervous. Bill was a formidable man, and though into his seventies appeared to be something of a sex maniac. We travelled down Pipes Canyon Road, and I stopped the car to point out the house from a kilometre away. Although I knew I was staring straight at the large dwelling, it was nowhere to be seen. Before us lay a plume of boulders a kilometre long and hundreds of feet high. But Boulder House seemed to have disappeared amongst them. ‘It’s up there somewhere,’ I muttered, hoping that to be the case and wondering if I had finally lost my senses. We drove on.

  All the way from LAX and on the phone in Australia, I had told Boo of the wonders of the place, emphasising the positive — all she wanted to hear. She was behaving like an excited virgin, and I was wondering where the place had gone.

  But I kept my fears to myself and turned onto Coyote Road. We travelled a few hundred yards, threading our way through the massive boulders until we came to a place utterly desolate, a place where the land appeared to have been skinned. All life had been removed, and even the soil had been scraped, and we looked out over naked, almost polished granite. I hadn’t seen or noticed it on the previous visit, but, as we drove on, we observed a large modern home that looked so antiseptic it might have been a contemporary church. Which is exactly what Boo thought, as our hearts sank.

  ‘I’ll bet it’s some Christian retreat,’ she suggested to our collective horror. Those parts of the West not occupied by the armed forces, we have noticed over some years, are settled by Christian groups intent on teaching children the sort of country values that make the Republican Party so exemplary when it comes to family values.

  Boo knew, and I knew she knew, that the possibility of me finding peace anywhere near a Christian retreat was as remote as Coyote Road.

  After a few more hundred yards, the land returned to its exquisite self, almost as if the desecration had not happened, and our spirits lifted. As did the road.

  But Boo’s suggestion rang loud. Only Christian fanatics could possibly commit ecocide on such a grand scale, and coexistence with such people was out of the question. The ‘and when ye have tamed the land, ye shall salt it’ type of Christian was capable of producing in me a blind fury that might lead to gunfire.

  But that was all soon behind us, and we passed through the towering rock face, away from the land of the dead and into Boulder House.

  Bill was a different man. In the face of beauty, he became a charming, kindly, and finally erudite gentleman. He almost bowed as he met Boo, and soon they were in earnest conversation.

  I was still shaken by the possibility of Christian neighbours, and remained unusually quiet. Boo must have noticed because she quickly asked Bill what had happened back on Desolation Row.

  ‘That old man …’ Bill returned to his more natural self, and stared towards the desolation that was blocked from sight by the great granite wall. ‘That old man,’ he repeated with a growl, ‘likes to use his bulldozer. He scrapes the land bare. Calls the plants weeds.’ Bill changed the subject, realising that such a presence was not a great selling point.

  But we were so delighted it wasn’t a Christian retreat that we forgot all about the man we would come to know as The Blade Runner.

  Bill was hard at it, attempting to charm the pants right off Boo, and I followed the pair through the house. Boo liked it, loved it, even more than I did, so I decided to leave them and to further explore the land. I wandered past the amphitheatre, up a ridge, and along a natural rampart, high above the yucca-strewn valley floor to my right.

  Hard beside me on the left, the boulders gave way to a cliff face that rose, almost sheer,
over one hundred metres higher and which, if I could climb it, would take me some two hundred metres above a valley that was itself more than one thousand metres high. The climb would have challenged Sir Edmund Hillary, and I turned back to see Boo mounting the ridge.

  At least, I thought, she’s not mounting Bill Lavender. Boo was thoroughly enthralled, and we explored the rocks, finding all manner of vegetation, including at least a dozen different cacti. Caves abounded, and she recounted Bill’s story of his son finding an intact Indian pot containing seeds. The sun was conquering the cool, and we returned to Boulder House and Bill, who had perched himself on a bench in the shade, from where he could admire our progress.

  By the time we arrived, we had agreed to make an offer. All my night-time doubts had been dispelled by the bright morning light.

  And so we did.

  Bill seemed sceptical. We were, after all, city folks. But we were also Australian, and although Australia, after Israel, is the most urbanised nation on earth, the popular conception of us as a hardy outback people seemed to have infected Bill, an otherwise sensible man.

  What, Bill asked, changing the subject from monetary matters, did we think of the other valley?

  ‘What other valley?’ I inquired.

  ‘The one over there, the box canyon,’ said Bill, waving at a rock outcrop that ran from the side of the house to the amphitheatre below. We clambered up the steep hillside that ran behind the house and stared at the sight before us — a breath-taking hidden valley rimmed on one side by towering rocks, and on the other by a rolling landscape of boulders that crested high above us before falling away a thousand feet to the canyon floor.

  The valley floor, once a creek bed, was well grassed, and it was apparent that a good number of families of coyote lived in the grass under juniper and pine, in considerable comfort. A more sheltered and secluded place could hardly exist, and as we walked the valley we realised why the road was named after the coyote. In the cliffs above, a ledge provided a very large bird — a golden eagle, Bill informed us later — with a bird’s eye view of the Hidden Valley. The face of the cliff was stained by the eagle’s droppings, and from that perch it could pick off the hares, cottontails, and squirrels and snakes that were in abundance.

  As we departed Coyote Road, we swung past the brooding cabin, and I told Boo about what we soon dubbed ‘the murderer’s cottage’. She didn’t mind. It just made it all the more interesting.

  She wanted to buy Boulder House. There was no other house like it anywhere on earth, and though something even vaguely like it — on seventeen acres — would cost a good $10 million in LA, it was a mere two hours from that metropolis and one-hundredth of the price. Our dog could run free, liberated from the leash laws of LA, where all dogs were judged by the standards of the worst fighting pit bull. We could even have more dogs, Boo enthused. And a horse, she added. Her friend in Malibu had just spent $250 on one single boulder for her garden that did not even approach the beauty of our rocks, and we must have some millions of them. We could leap from a bed that would have easily accommodated Henry VIII and all his wives in the same instance, into a Jacuzzi. We could farm tequila. All the fears and reality checks of the past were swept aside in a rush to judgement, and soon we were burning rubber to The Palace to toast our decision.

  To my relief, Tony was on hand, having arrived from Minnesota a few weeks before. Tony might be the strongest man, pound for pound, between Pioneertown and Nova Scotia. In the summer, he cuts down trees and carries huge boulders around the Great Lakes. In the winter, he tears up cactus and carries huge boulders for anyone in Pioneertown who can deal with his fanatical work ethic. Today he was suffering cheerfully from a dental complaint that had gone unaddressed until his face was horribly distorted. The infection had occurred in Minnesota, where he had been carrying huge boulders for one of the bosses at Harley-Davidson. He had ignored the pain until his employer ordered him to leave the site and seek treatment, and by then it was almost too late. Twelve months later, I would threaten to call the police if he did not stop work at Boulder House after six fourteen-hour days had led me to the brink of hospitalisation. But on that winter evening we sat at the bar, and, avoiding the ghastly spectre of his face, I could inform him that we were looking seriously at buying a place and employing him.

  I stared at his hands, big hairy things that extended from unusually long arms — a product, I would later deduce, of lifting things (usually boulders) that humans should leave where they were.

  Tony, who had only worked twelve hours that day, was keen to start immediately when I mentioned Boulder House, but I suggested that he wait till we had actually bought the place. I didn’t think Bill would take kindly to him lifting boulders for the sake of proving it possible, but Tony seemed anxious to begin lifting things and flexed his long and winding arms. I stressed that Bill was something of a hermit, that guns were in evidence in every room at Boulder House, that ammunition boxes doubled as garden beds, that tank shells made for doorstops, that Bill was ‘forted up’, and that, while Tony might be capable of flinging a few of the finest fighting Rottweilers bred in the US from Bill’s cliffs, we should bide our time and go through the dreary process of paying Bill hard money for Boulder House before we caused the gravel in his driveway to be unduly disturbed. A light went on somewhere in Tony’s brain. He studied his beer, and it was clear he was giving the situation some thought. His hopes for an immediate assault passed as he contemplated the cold, hard fact that there are a lot of people in rural America, particularly in the West, who are to be treated with the utmost of care. We exchanged glances — knowing glances. Tony knew that part of America which gets painted red on election night better than I did — and I was not altogether ignorant of the America not confined to the seaboard.

  7

  Boo and I had come to know the West in a voyage of discovery that had taken some fifteen years and led to Bill’s big iron gates. We had been fortunate in that the mention of Australia has a quite dazzling effect on Americans, especially men.

  Many veterans, long retired to the West, experienced the fighting qualities of Australia’s troops in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The very first time we visited the desert, in 1984, we stopped at a store on a bleak section of Highway 62, about halfway between LA, the Colorado River, and the Arizona state line. An old man, sporting white hair and beard, interrupted me while I was buying supplies and asked whether I was Australian. When I acknowledged I was, he extended his hand, saying, ‘Son, I just want to shake your hand. Best fighting man in the world.’

  Deeply embarrassed — my only fighting during the Vietnam War was against police in anti-war demos — I left, and never discovered the circumstances from which he drew this conclusion. His looks suggested World War II, but it was hard to tell. In the desert, people age fast.

  In one bar, a local proudly announced to his mates that ‘these Aussies have fought with us in every war’. I agreed that this was largely true, but reminded patrons we had, unfortunately, missed the War of Independence, it precluding white settlement. I added that it was doubtful that many Australians had fought in the Civil War.

  But this peculiar affection, steeled by battle, remains, and I will admit to unwittingly adding to the Aussie myth myself.

  In our journey through the West, Boo and I found ourselves in the town of Cody, Wyoming. We had intended to stay in Utah, but changed our minds when we sat down for a meal in the late afternoon somewhere north of the Zion Monument. I had asked for a wine list, and from the reaction of the waitress might have asked for the Manifesto of the Communist Party. She curtly informed me there was a store for registered alcoholics some thirteen miles to the north. I curtly asked her what was the fastest way out of Utah, and she suggested I consult a map.

  We drove, and found ourselves in Wyoming, where I was gratified to see a sign twinkling through the gloaming and the thin sleet that read ‘COCTAILS’. There is something profoundly
settling about that sign in a nation with the most confusing quilt of dry and wet states and counties.

  We finally arrived in the town of Cody. Cody was dubbed after one of the men responsible for the buffalo slaughter, Wild Bill Cody. It maintains an excellent museum. Much of Wild Bill’s guns and clothes are on display, along with the headdress of Sitting Bull, and Annie Oakley’s pistols. We spent an hour or so studying the stuff and gleaning bits of history before I repaired to a bar, and Boo set off to check out the local thrift stores.

  Most Western bars are dark. This was as dark as the inside of a dog in a cave. I ordered a beer, and was approached by a few drinkers and asked, inevitably, if I was from Australia. Discovering I was, they invited me to join them at the gaming tables. (Another advantage of being Australian is that one is most unlikely to be an undercover cop.)

  The game involved rolling five dice from a special cup with a leather bottom onto the table. Each player gets three rolls, and must accumulate a six, a five, and a four before the other dice can be counted as a score. The highest score wins the dollar or so that each player must pay to play.

  The drinkers were cowboys. Two were rodeo hands who had taken leave from their troop due to injuries. One had a broken leg; the other, some sort of spinal problem. Nothing that could prevent them drinking and gambling. The game was, of course, illegal, having been banned about the time women were given the right to vote. I joined them, and in a few moments had won a hand — the game only requires enough skill to be able to count.