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 would 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.

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?