by David Hirst
The grass, almost white when the sun is high, turns golden as the light plays upon it from an angle. By late afternoon, the clumps take the appearance of thick stands of half-grown wheat; and where the stuff is thick, a newcomer could be excused for thinking he or she was driving through wheat fields, albeit ones dominated by the yuccas. As the gamma is the plant most devastated by cattle, it seems that nature has returned the last of her players to the field and that this tiny section of the West looks like it might have when the Serrano Indians wandered the land, oblivious to the coming holocaust. Some say that with the going of the grass the creek beds disappeared, choosing, I expect, to flow underground now that there was nothing left to tie the water to the land’s surface. Perhaps the water will return to the surface. Either way, the golden gamma brings yet another touch of beauty and completeness to the land.
We passed the place where Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, and one of America’s most prolific writers, lived, and I mused on how the return of the gamma grass would have pleased him.
He had described the place well in one of his modern Westerns, Pay Dirt:
There it lies, miles on miles of it, dry lake beds, twisted mountains of volcanic rock, sloping sage-covered hills, clumps of Joshua trees, thickets of mesquite, bunches of giant cactus. It has the moods of a woman, and the treachery of a big cat.
Gardner’s name is linked to the neighbourhood for another reason — his rescue of one of the High Desert’s best-known and most loved historical figures, Bill Keys.
Keys came out from Arizona, where he had been cowboying in 1903 after a gun fight, and found his way to the Desert Queen Mine, the remains of which now rest in the midst of what, nearly one hundred years later, William Jefferson Clinton would dub the Joshua Tree National Park.
The mine was being run by the notorious McHaney brothers, whose rustling activities had taken them into the hidden valleys far above — two days’ bullock drive — to the fledgling town of 29 Palms. A miner had located gold a few miles from where they had relocated some cattle, and the McHaney brothers shot him ‘in self-defence’ and claimed the claim. It was probably the richest of the many High Desert gold mines, but the McHaneys managed to blow more money than it made. When it was worked out, Keys claimed it for back wages.
In 1917, Keys obtained the keys to the Desert Queen Mine. He wasn’t as interested in what was left of the gold as in a stream that ran through the section. After marrying Frances Mae Lawton in 1918, he established a highly productive farm. His wife was equally productive, and soon the family numbered seven. The authorities, never happy when someone establishes a life away from its prying eyes, demanded the family move to a township where the kids could get schooling. Keys searched the statutes, and found that it was the responsibility of the state to send him a schoolteacher once the number of souls requiring education reached five.
‘Not true,’ said San Bernardino County.
The law stated they need provide a teacher only if there was a schoolhouse. Keys would have to move his bairns into town. Instead, he proceeded to build a school, and a reluctant county despatched a teacher.
But trouble was in the offing. Our Christian president exhorted us to love our neighbours like we would like to be loved. This is easy enough in the cities, where one typically barely knows one’s neighbour, unless he is the Man with No Brain. But in the High Desert, while it is impossible to not know one’s neighbour, it can be hard to love him or even her.
Worth Bagley was a man deemed too violent to remain in the LAPD, which in the late 1930s was something of a distinction — as it remains today. He was pensioned off, and took his ninth wife to the now national park, and promptly went to war with the only target on the horizon, poor Bill Keys.
The issue was, superficially, cattle and water rights. Bagley proceeded to slaughter sundry livestock belonging to Keys and then, in 1943, lay in wait for him with a pistol, opening fire while Keys was reading the details of a ‘no trespass’ sign that Bagley had erected. Bagley’s shot went wild and he ran towards Keys, who in turn ran to his old jalopy and his rifle. Keys aimed at his assailant’s gun arm, which he hit, a remarkable feat. But the bullet deflected into the body cavity, causing considerable shock and death.
Evidence that Bagley was stark-staring crazy was not admitted, and his wife, who told all and sundry (save the jury, before whom she was never allowed to appear) she had left her husband because of his incessant threats to kill a perfectly peaceful neighbour, was likewise ignored.
Keys went to prison, and may have died there had Gamma Gulch’s celebrated writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, not come to his aid. The two men were friends, but could hardly have been more different. Gardner, a lawyer, employed as many as six secretaries at a time as he churned out novels, screenplays, and novelettes by the score. On a good day, he would dictate fifteen thousand words, and over fifty years he wrote eighty-two books featuring Perry Mason, out of a total of one hundred and fifty-five published books. He also knocked out hundreds of articles and travel tomes. At the height of his popularity (in the mid-sixties), twenty-six thousand of his books were sold — every day.
In the meantime, he had visited China and come to speak fluent Chinese, maintained an ardent involvement in fishing, boxing, archery, tennis, and golf, raised his horses and cattle, and became an authority in, amongst other things, geology, blank-to-the-face archeology, engineering, astronomy, forensic medicine, and the breeding grounds of the California gray whale.
This amazing reach made him a superb lawyer, and, aware of the injustices of the US legal system, he established the Court of Last Resort, where he would study and fight to reopen cases he considered unjust.
Keys had been in jail for some years before his wife, not one to ask favours, wrote to Gardner, telling him of the plight of his old friend he had lost touch with.
Keys had been offered immediate parole on arriving in jail, but would only accept a pardon, and Gardner went to work to achieve just that. This great champion of social justice let lose a large team of legal experts, and Keys was pardoned by Governor Goodwin J. Knight on 26 July 1956, after serving five years. Keys joined seventy other innocents freed because of the work of Erle Stanley Gardner.
The rancher returned to his homestead in the rock-bound canyon. There he was buried beside his wife in 1969.
Today one can visit his old ranch, the Desert Queen, but only on restricted tours. Bill would be surprised to discover a sign at the entrance informing visitors that they too would be off to jail (for six months) if found trespassing.
As we swirled through the fine sand of Gamma Gulch, I hoped the Wild West would be better personified at the Parsons Ranch — our destination.
I had heard talk of Parsons Ranch in the past, and assumed it was the ranch of one of the far-too-many parsons in the area. I had avoided it in the same way that right-wing Republicans and Democrats try unsuccessfully to avoid sin.
But Tony informed me we were heading to a ranch occupied by one Jean Parsons, an elderly lady who lives at the last of the outlying High Desert settlements. She is, Tony explained, the stepmother of Gene Parsons, who found fame and fortune with the popular sixties band The Byrds, and less of both with the Flying Burrito Brothers.
This was all a little confusing. I knew only of Gram Parsons, who also played with both bands and introduced The Rolling Stones to the steel guitar. They, in turn, allowed him to record ‘Wild Horses’, or he allowed them to, depending on whom you believe.
Gram Parsons overdosed on morphine and booze in 1973 at The Joshua Tree Motel, a pretty little whitewashed adobe hotel fifteen miles down the road. It was there that Gram took his last hit. Room number eight is now something of a shrine, and fans, before they visit the Joshua Tree National park, a favourite haunt for Gram and the gang, stop and leave flowers, poems, and other tributes at a little shrine.
Gram spent a lot of time in Joshua Tree teaching
the Stones, particularly Keith, country music. When the greatest show on earth finished ‘Wild Horses’, Gram was given the honour to be the first to record it.
I knew a good deal about one of the Parsonses, but could remember almost nothing about Gene, who was, I think, the drummer in The Byrds. It struck me as odd that I was about to visit the stepmother of the one I didn’t know about, whose Christian name was pronounced the same, while all three shared the same surname.
So much did Gram love the rocks and yuccas, and maybe the gamma grass, that he and his road manager, Phil Kaufman, had sworn, while at the funeral of ex-Byrds guitar player Clarence White two months before, a solemn pact with each other. The last one standing was to burn the other’s body in the Joshua Tree National Park.
It’s not easy to burn a body in the middle of the national park under the best of circumstances — especially when the corpse has already been taken to LAX and is in the hands of Continental Mortuary Air Services. These folks do not make a habit of handing over stiffs, especially to a couple of drunks wearing touring jackets with ‘SIN CITY’ emblazoned on their backs. But Kaufman — or ‘The Road Mangler’, as he is more fondly known — having borrowed an ex-hearse from a friend, had somehow convinced a clerk to free Gram into his sweaty hands.
With a mate called Martin and a bottle of Jim Beam, he took the body back to Highway 62, past the motel where Gram had died a few days before. In the dead of the night, they drove to a place called Cap Rock, not because of its supposed spiritual significance (the myths were to come later), but because they were both too drunk to go any further. Besides, it was the middle of the night, and neither had the slightest idea where they were.
The coffin slid out on the hearse’s wheels and crashed to the ground. Gram was inside, naked, save for a strap that covered the slit on his chest where his organs had been removed. Five gallons of high-octane petroleum were applied, and Kaufman recounts the effect:
When high octane ignites, it grabs a lot of oxygen from the air. It went whoosh and a big ball of flame went up. It was bubbling. You could see it was Gram and then as the body burned very quickly, you could see it melting. We looked up and the flame had caused a dust devil going up in the air. His ashes were actually going up into the air, into the desert night. The moon was shining, the stars were shining and Gram’s wish was coming true. His ashes were going into the desert. We looked down. He was very dead and very burned. There wasn’t much left to recognize.
Headlines around the world screamed things like ‘Rock Star’s Body in Ritual Burning in Desert’, but, as Kaufman points out, it was merely ‘a couple of piss-heads taking care of business for their mate’.
I told Tony some of this as we skidded along the long, sandy, deserted road, and he was suitably disgusted. So I got back to the more wholesome matter of tools and asking him how a visit to this woman’s ranch would assist in replacing the worthless tools Tony had broken.
‘You’ll see,’ was all he said.
And see I did.
We finally came to a large iron gate that Tony had called ahead to have opened, and wound down a ravine to find ourselves in a glen. Here every imaginable object from the industrial age had been deposited, apparently by Jean’s husband, Gene’s father, before he passed away in the early 1990s.
Trucks dating from the 1920s rested in the sun. Bulldozers, long decrepit, stood beside them. Old windmills lay on the ground, their wings still elaborating, in faded paint, their origins — ‘Chicago Illinois’. On one wing drenched in seventy years of sunlight, the faded yellow, red, and blue face of a clown smiled up at us through weeds. When we left, I took him home.
A few acres were covered in a jumble of machinery, winches, pulleys, old iron gold carts, and tools — hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them.
Mrs Parsons emerged from a cottage little bigger than a desk, and offered us beer. She was a sporty woman, well into her seventies, kept fit and hale by the actions and spirit that come with surviving at the end of a road that makes our humble dirt affair look like the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.
We can, from Boulder House, see the lights of a few neighbours and friends, and that is a comfort. The only lights that Jean can see are the magnificent crowning lights of the firmament. She has no electricity and no neighbours. The ravine towers some three hundred metres above her tiny settlement of the little house and even littler outhouse. The escarpments that surround her do provide something more essential than all the things she lacks — a constant supply of the purest water.
Around the settlement grow great cottonwoods that shade her outdoor tables with dappled light, and a continuous breeze wafts through the ravine, air-conditioning her home. She owns a section, a square mile, and on it is gold and fine quartz. The quartz mine is abandoned, but Tony and I climbed the cliffs, and found its remnants and some fine quartz. The quartz is valuable, and at times Jean has had to stare down half-drunk would-be miners hoping for an easy penny. It’s a hard life for a well-spoken graceful lady.
The three of us wandered through the acres of steel. The collection seemed to end at about World War II, and included primitive Geiger counters and short-wave radios. It is a collector’s paradise, but we had come for tools. Tony quickly located two enormous shovels once used to fill furnaces with coal, which Mrs Parsons believed came from a train line. She wasn’t sure about the antecedents of the pieces, as her husband had been collecting them from before their marriage.
Jean left us to scour for objects sharp and blunt, and we later found her under the cottonwoods, sipping red wine. She produced more beer and some of her stepson Gene’s latest CDs, as well as some remixes of the original Byrds albums. As I knew next to nothing about Gene, I asked her if she knew anything about Gram.
She recalled that not long before he died, she was invited to go and listen and hang out with Gram and company at some Joshua Tree gig. She called Gene in Northern California, and asked whether she should. Gene replied that she shouldn’t mix with that crowd, and she took his advice. As well she might.
Having exhausted all we had in common, at least as far as the musical Parsonses were concerned, we got down to business. A good shovel, if such a thing can be obtained, costs a good fifteen dollars. The huge things Tony located had lasted sixty years, and were going for two bucks. I snapped them up. We filled the truck with enough equipment to bring a gleam to Tony’s eyes, and after an hour of gossip we made our way to Boulder House and some serious work.
19
Some places — Melbourne, Australia, comes to mind — enjoy all four seasons in a single day. Here in the valley we can experience them at the same time. A few days ago, the sun shone in all its glory while heavy snow fell. Here we are in the High Desert looking at what are damn near alps. Snow and sun have mingled delightfully for weeks now, and already, a few months into the year, more rain has fallen than in all of last year — which is not saying much, as last year was as dry as an Englishman’s towel.
Working outside is intolerable to all bar Tony, who last week I observed toiling away in the snow and freezing wind. I didn’t stop the F100, considering it too cold to wind down the window, but Tony, under his snowy crust, waved and smiled cheerfully. The rest of the workforce — if that is not too strong a word — were ensconced with their bourbons and beers in The Palace, huddled around the various stoves. One is an old square steel contraption and the other a large steel drum, and both, to Harriet’s consternation, were being fed and re-fed with costly avocado wood — an excellent fuel producing great heat and virtually no ash. Rodney arranged for six cords (at $170 a cord) to be delivered, and I snared one, which I figured should last the winter. Which it didn’t, but winter had a peculiar fury that year — the year Our Lord was to smite us down for failing to see the great portents and flee in the face of Y2K.
During the Y2K scare the radical Christians and the radical hippies spent small fortunes — up to $30,000 — on self-sufficiency.
Solar panels, generators, wind power, all of which are not entirely ‘sufficient’, do provide for a certain smugness (common amongst those who were right for the wrong reasons). But both radical hippies and God-bothering militia types are as one in the belief in the coming apocalypse, and I kept a close watch on my tongue when the ‘logic’ of leaving the grid altogether was expounded. And expounded it was. One had to be careful to avoid all manner of folks until well into May, when even the most determined of the fanatics conceded that the whole matter might be related to Our Lord’s arrival some years after his estimated time of arrival circa 2000 BC–AD?? or thereabouts. And by then rumours of something odd in the largely unknown world (unknown to the denizens of the desert) of dot-communaires were causing ructions as the pigs and goats and rabbits were purchased by yours truly and eaten in a great feast where Buzz Gamble and the Daily Blues played till dawn before one hundred or so debauched locals who cared neither for the Y2K scam nor the biggest rip-off on the dot-com front.
Meantime, it was best, I considered, we keep connected to the grid and called my friends at Enron.
The night after the biggest snowfall in years (a pretty paltry affair by mountain standards), it was still snowing in the mountains beyond my ‘office’ window while sunshine rendered the rest of the valley and foothills a glorious white.
I called Buzz early at his early opener. He is supposed to spring the locks on the Joshua Tree Saloon at 8.00 (a.m.) but likes to get there at 7.00 to warm the place up and cater for anyone particularly needful of an early drink — himself. I asked Buzz how we should handle the ‘blizzard’ (a whole two inches of snow), and Buzz, obviously playing to the bar — at 8.00 a.m. he might have five or six drinkers — bellowed, ‘Hell, that ain’t no blizzard. That’s just Texas Tea.’
