CSI Palmdale

Learning How to Read All Over Again

In writing an email to UC Berkeley's Robert Hass, a MacArthur "genius" grant winner who also has been U.S. Poet Laureate, I thought that before I chastised him too much for getting his palm tree facts confabulated in an essay on art, I should first make sure my own biological literacy was up to speed. So with my dog Lucy showing me where to go, I decided to take a Labor Day morning walk and see what a piece of Palmdale scrubland could tell me about my own neighborhood.

More than I expected, as it turns out.

I've been here before --- some land south of the aqueduct off of Barrel Springs Road --- but noticed more this time now that I had a camera than I normally do, when usually I am just stumbling along and muttering to myself, "Where has that darn dog gotten to?"

Humans leave a lot of evidence, as archaeologists have shown us many times before. What will some future generation make of this?

Construction waste obviously, and some of the green panels turned up elsewhere in the area, apparently having been used as planking in a rut when somebody's truck had gotten struck.

The most obvious place to start is with footprints on the ground. Usually most of us can do basic tracking. Since it has rained in the last week, it was easy to see that there has been a mountain biker passing through recently --- and I would guess a good one by the implied speed that his very direct tracks revealed. Slower you huff and puff, the wobblier it all gets. And he (she?) was able to hold a very lean, efficient course, since the outbound tracks neatly overlaid the inbound ones.

And there were recent motorcycle tracks, a quad, and a light truck. Look at this: horses, too.

Not many coyotes today, though more about them later.

One thing to remember about that attitude of "it's just desert, who cares if somebody dumps trash" (or releases unwanted dogs, or shoots inside city limits) is that if God loves us all equally, so too is all of this land His --- or if not the god of Christianity, then it belongs some Great Spirit or another. We are just his or their stewards. Another thing that ties in with this problem is how degraded this desert has become. This scene would have looked odd to the original Native Americans.

Cheat grass is now the common "yellow" grass of the Antelope Valley, and indeed, most of the American West. Native to Europe and North Africa (same home as the basic city pigeon, by the way), it has displaced the native bunch grasses. A Native American would look out and see Joshua trees and junipers, but the lesser understory, including the kinds of forage that sustained the antelope of the Antelope Valley, all has changed.

(Cheat grass is briefly green of course after a wet winter; it burns easily and so deprives native plants a chance to re-establish themselves --- get get burned out with the yearly fires that now blacken our inter-Valley roadsides and immediate hill lands.)

We all leave tracks, even the ants. They are not native either (experts tell me that to find "pre-White Man" insect regimes, one needs to go out to the Channel Islands), but they often develop similar patterns of land use. Almost always you can find seed hulls and darker debris on the downhill side of ant colonies. Their debris fields look just like the mine tailings one sees spilled downhill from mine shafts around Randsberg or Mojave, just scaled several orders of magnitude smaller.

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson would say that they live in their own sensory universe, just as we live in ours; they may not have Country Western music, but they have a sense of community that we might envy if we truly could experience it.

Ants change the world, not that we mind much (unless they're in the kitchen, or at AVC, in my office, as they are now). Erosion may be natural but often careless land use accelerates it. I studied this small arroyo, certain that it's bigger than it would be naturally. The juniper roots sticking out and the abandoned rabbit warren shows us that something (fire? removal of brush? changing of drainage patterns?) caused much more unchecked flash-flooding to rip down this sandy wash than used to happen, and as the water came and went, it undercut a big chunk of hillside.

This sand below looks like it's natural but it's been dumped from the back of a truck --- left over from the matrix necessary to mix concrete, or maybe part of a child's backyard playground that never got built. It is recent enough that the cheat grass has not found a way to recolonize the stifling layer that was dumped on top of it. Littlerock and Santa Clarita are the closest quarries for sand in construction, so it's possible this small pile is not far from its pit of origin.

Next on my list was something related to the sand pile but that I think is called washout: the leftover plaster or cement at the end of a project that is hosed out of the hopper and left on bare ground to dry and crumble.

I think that is what we have here, but sometimes when abandoned panels of drywall erode, they begin to crumble back into fractured slabs of plaster, especially once the paper finish weathers off.  Pretty darn ugly (and pretty loutish behavior), either way.


Beds and mattresses can last a long time in our arid climate: judging by the coil springs, that's what this first item was once, maybe even as long ago as forty or fifty years ago, and down wind, maybe from this bed but probably from more recent cushions, some synthetic batting had snagged on a Joshua tree.

We've not run cattle in Palmdale since the 1950s, so far as I know. (Maybe into the 60s? I doubt it.) Different rainfall patterns and different and higher levels of ground water allowed the High Desert to have a brief cattle boom, and into the 1930s, range cattle were run on what is now Joshua Tree National Park. Where there are cattle, there are fences, and this barbed wire almost certainly is a long-since forgotten demarcation of where one ranch ended and another started.

Barbed wire can trip unwary hikers and puncture mountain bike tires, but I think for some of us, it's a sign of nostalgia, too --- a symbol of the gunslinger, spurs and cowboys American West. My father, a former ranch hand, used to have a wall display of the different species of barbed wire. It's hard though to romanticize old tires. This one looks recent. Did it demarcate the turn on a course? Was is just left as basic trash? Did somebody's car throw a wheel here? Who knows, but we may have fifty or a hundred years to look at this and figure out the rest of the story.

Holiday weekends can be risky times to be in our local recreation areas, what with forest fires, drunk drivers, loose dogs, and the ubiquitous American firearm. Most local desert patches show signs of shooting and hunting. This pallet is not left over from some now-abandoned onion farm or Rite Aide warehouse, but was the platform for target shooting.

 

Some of the things under our feet are not just one symbolic emblem of a single moment in time, but reveal a layering of multiple histories. Here in another eroded ditch we have a Modelo beer can implying that the drinker was (possibly) Hispanic, along with a buckshot-riddled target bottle and a stray plastic housing that could have been from a mystery household appliance. (Are the local dump fees really that high, to prevent somebody from taking household trash all the way to the landfill? If you pay your trash bill, you get free vouchers to use the landfill without cost.) Some scorched earth shows there was a small fire here, maybe started by a cigarette but able to burn itself out without spreading. Here's the shot of one of those combination piles.

Fire may explain this shot below, a stunted branch on an otherwise healthy Joshua tree. The tips of the lower spikes were all chewed off, except nothing eats Joshua trees any more, and in fact, nothing has for 10,000 years. It clearly looks like fire damage, except nothing else showed any presence of a recent fire. Perhaps this fire was as long ago as ten years back --- the soil has turned over, the cheat grass has flourished, and only the slow-growing Joshua tree bears witness to yet another forgotten brush fire. Is that the story of mankind? We come, we burn, we leave.

Wearing hiking shoes and wool socks I don't have much contact with the ground directly, but Lucy has a great way of telling me when we've come to a damper, better shaded, and more cool stretch of earth --- she sprawls out to rest, pressing her hot belly against the cool sand.

English teacher Santi Tafarella has taken to calling my dog either "Hound" or "Hooper" (or both), for reasons perplexing both to the dog and me. "How's it going, Hooper," he asks, setting down on the sofa. She doesn't mind what he calls her, so long as he tunes into her telepathy, which usually is saying, "Go open the fridge and see if any of those enchiladas from lunch are left over. Create a distraction so people are confused, then bring them to me."

Junipers are a native plant of the West, but related species grow in Europe and Africa. Traditionally, gin is flavored with a type of juniper berry, juniper being a root word for the term "gin" itself. This only works in the Old World; our native variety has no alcoholic properties. Native Americans used shredded juniper bark for wigwams insulation, made cooking utensils out of the aromatic and durable wood, and sometimes collected the berries to grind into a type of cornmeal or protein flour. The berries can be eaten raw (or cooked, stored, and eaten cold as a snack); for me they don't do much, but maybe if I had a few gin and tonics first I might be more open minded.

Here we see all the stages of a Juniper --- the dead wood being from a tree that was alive when condors and grizzly bears filled the Antelope Valley.

Our hills still have abundant coyotes, and in fact I saw one on my residential street at 9 in the morning a few weeks ago. Usually hiking I see their tracks much more often than the critters themselves, or, as here, can see the state of the rabbit population by how many they've caught recently.

Coming across such spoor as this causes my dog to leave her own prodigious efforts as well, side by side, in companionable effort. Later, after dusk, when the coyotes patrol past, should I guess what they will think, checking out Lucy's contribution to the library of the trail? Maybe they will pity her that she lives in such a rabbit-poor back yard, or, on the other hand, maybe they will say, "Man, enchiladas again? We always miss out on the good stuff!"

Quilts, Kettlekorn, Fire Codes, and Steve Buffalo's Grandkids

AVC starts this week --- and so does the AV Fair

That time of year again: the Perseid meteor shower, long lines in the bookstore, weeks on end of 100+ degree days --- and with parades and Ferris wheels, the AV Fair has came back again too.

This past Saturday on Lancaster Blvd we had the traditional small-town, good-time, come-one-come-all parade.  Here's a sampling of life in America, 2012.

It used to be that as an evening instructor, I had a lot of requests come Fair time --- my students were showing animals in 4H events or had appearances as Miss Rodeo Buckle or some such, and needed permission to miss class. Now that I have shifted to be more on the online teaching side of the equation, I don't get to know who raises sheep or whose sister needs a ride after the concert. I still feel connected though: the fair is a good place to see old students, meet Vietnam Vet beekeepers, or take pictures of a Board member's grandkids playing with the giant chess pieces.

Again, moving on from parade to the full Fair itself, let's take another visual tour. The ride's sign says "Alien Abduction," though in some respects, you don't need to pay to take that ride to end up on another planet.  And so here we go....

 

 

 

The sign said "henna tattoos," and having seen real henna tattooing in India, this product seemed to me more like a different kind of India, as in, India ink, not henna.  Lovely design though, I will say that, even if there was a bit of false advertising at work.  That's okay.  Who comes to a Fair expecting drab reality?  The whole point is to escape back into Never Never Land.  We eat luridly colored food, we fling our bodies into dangerous and vomit-inducing poses, and we try to win immensely overstuffed prizes.  (Man, did my wife beat the pants off of me at Skee-Bowl this year!)  The AV Fair is a chance to wear cowboy boots and a denim mini-skirt (if a gal), or (if you're a kid) to ride a pony or play with chess pawns nearly as big as you are.  I'm just sorry that it only comes once a year, since it is a good way to take one's mind off of grim reality . . . such as how long the wait lists are for English 101 and Math 60.  Speaking of which, I had better go clear out my voice mail and my email's in-box.  "No, sorry, I know the computer shows an opening, but that's an error.  The class really is full --- trust me, I am the instructor, and I was there.  In that room we are right up against the edge of the fire code as is, so no, sorry, I can't take even one more person."

Hmm, this will be a long day.  Maybe I should run get just one more order of funnel cake, to see me through . . . .

Waiting for a Plane, Waiting for a Class

Patience and Expectation and looking Out the Window at LAX

It seems to be a waiting time, an anxious time, for many of us.  I don't have the enrollment numbers but as a broad guess, would assume that as of now, a week before the start of fall term, about 3,000 students must be on wait lists for classes at AVC.  That means they are not IN a particular class, just on a priority list to be notified if somebody drops out.  It is a grim place to inhabit, and yet they are the (somewhat) lucky ones --- they at least got a place in line.  A few thousand more have tried to sign up for this or that class only to find that not only has the class itself been full for a month, but the wait list has been closed for weeks too.

Teachers too are waiting; speaking for myself, my final fall schedule remains potentially in flux.  I am waiting to hear from admin if it will be changed.  And I suspect that all the folks over in Building and Maintenance are waiting to see if the new Health and Science Buildings will be finished on time, and the bookstore is waiting to hear if our schedules change what that will do to pending book orders, and so it goes, up and down the launch sequence.

And then separate from campus, so much of life means waiting for a bus, for pay day, for the elections finally to be over, waiting for the lady ahead of you in line at Wal-Mart to get it together and actually manage to figure out how to use a debit card.

We think of art as being about classical themes and elevated beauty, but artists have to stand in line too.  The Velvet Underground, that Andy Warhol-era New York rock band, has a song titled "Waiting for the Man," about trying to hook up with drug dealers. The speaker needs a fix and the man, his connection, just ain't there. (Apparently drug dealers are not very reliable. I wouldn't know, personally.)

And not all waiting is bad, of course: we can be waiting for something good, as I was tonight at the airport, waiting for my wife to come home after a few weeks away, or we can merely be learning a slow, important lesson about patience, such as waiting for the soup to cool rather than rushing ahead and burning one's mouth.

Before going to the airport, I had done what I could on my side for this next juncture --- I had cleaned house and fed the pets and watered the tomatoes and had bought (and arranged) flowers.  Just waiting now for that darn airplane!

At LAX, watching the others wait too, I was thinking about the body language of waiting, one thing that artists really need to get right in order to make a convincing portrait.

Here is Salvador Dali, a painting I first saw in Madrid. He painted it in 1925.

The original is in the Sofia Reina Museum but there was a poster of it in my small hotel.  Somebody had scratched out her bottom and called her bad words (in Spanish) --- is this really that provocative? Surely the Surrealists have done much more sexualized works than this?  Her full figure apparently bothered somebody.

Another waiting picture, less well known, is in the Portland (Maine not Oregon) Museum of Art. It's a very subtle and successful oil by Winslow Homer.

Again, he captures the wistfulness -- or is it pure boredom? --- of this somber woman.  Life is outside, green and bursting, but something keeps her inside, in the dark shadows. That arrangement reminds me of something in a similar tonal range but a bit earlier, Caspar David Friedrich's wife at a window of their home by a canal, watching a passing boat.

Brighter in tonal range than either of these (and painted in Nice, in the South of France), Matisse offers a painting that also has a waiting woman in it.

She seemingly has turned to look at us as we enter the room.  Have we kept her waiting long? Matisse isn't afraid to let the carpet be as red as blood, nor to hesitate with her house dress, which seemingly is some type of architectural element in itself. You can almost smell the beach air coming in the propped-open, slated window covers. Matisse painted this in 1921; according to one reference that I checked, Matisse had discovered his model, Henriette Darricarrere, working in Nice as a film extra. She was a dancer, a violinist, and a pianist, so her time here, posing, may have been dull indeed. She is certainly waiting --- waiting for him to hurry up and finish his painting, so she can go out and do something on the esplanade.

It seems from this visual survey that only women have to wait. Where are the men? Off doing their drug buys with Velvet Underground's John Cale perhaps, or getting drunk in bars and forgetting their car keys. Of course it's not all fighting dragons and jumping motorcycles over the Snake River if you're a man. We have to wait as much as everybody else, and I doubt that there's a single person, male or female, who doesn't know that war is not about glory and gunfire, but instead, mostly about waiting. Where are the men in these pictures? They've been drafted, and they are in the army, waiting.

This painting by Rodrigo Moynihan was done in 1943, during World War II.  The Medical Officer shuffles papers, treating the men themselves with no more attention than he gives the forms themselves. Notice the jaundice yellow light that he has chosen to portray the scene under: no Matisse here and no lady dancers who can play the piano, just the grim monotony of having your life and your soul reduced down to being a number on a list.

If I was inhabited a mixture of boredom and anxiety while waiting at the airport, of course so too were all of the human sardines flying coach class back from Pittsburgh with my wife. I had checked the radar map of their flight map (thanks, United!), to see what delays they might be having. The drought in the Midwest at least made for smoother flying, and I imagined the small towns of the American prairie east of Denver as my wife passed overhead, the clusters of towns and truck stops and crop duster airfields that roll past outside the window.  These are towns without names, just junctions of lights intersecting in the blackness of the American night outside the droning monotony of a trans-continental flight.

It is hard to write about this kind of experience, though some people have tried and done quite well. The French aviator Antoine de St Exupery (the one who wrote The Little Prince) has a book titled Night Flight that is very much worth knowing. A sad footnote to the above medical painting is that the author of the Little Prince died in World War II, when his P-38 Lightning crashed into the sea. The wreck has recently been recovered; Wikipedia summarizes the events and the (probably false) claims of those who have said they shot him down. The true circumstances remain unknown.

I end my forthcoming book on Antarctic aviation with a somewhat mystical and surreal description of my exit flight from Antarctica back to New Zealand, the details of which will be covered in another post.  Until then, the poem "Flying at Night" by Ted Kooser is one of my favorite night-flight poems.  I will close by quoting it in its entirety:

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like

his.