17

It was to the great four-poster cypress bed that we repaired the next evening, and it was here we were to stay.

It had a mediaeval feel, but we were to discover a post-modern comfort level. Though not blessed by a skylight, the room looks onto one of the many courtyards, and one could lie in bed admiring the rising sun bathing the rocks — in particular, Hamburger Rock, dubbed thus for very obvious reasons by Adam Edwards when he would camp out here as a little boy twenty-five years before. Hamburger Rock — two great buns and a giant patty — would be, if it were a hamburger, sufficient to feed the multitude. A blue jay takes up residence on top of the top bun each morning, admiring the world and wondering what is for breakfast.

The well had produced no water during the night, but Bill had left us the numbers of all the relevant help, including the two water-delivery services. Wishing only to be diplomatic, we called both as the water tanks were good for twenty thousand gallons, and the water trucks carried only two thousand. This for $40 a load. They were vague about when they could come out, but assured us it would be as soon as they got through with their other deliveries. As that could be another day off, it was necessary to drive to a store on Old Woman Springs Road, some four miles away, for bottled water. The toilets could be flushed with water from the pool (the ice was cracking), and it was too cold to contemplate a shower.

We returned, made tea, and heard yet another truck pulling up. Rodney and Harriet arrived, bearing more extraordinary gifts — two chandeliers, from the old Pioneertown sound stage. Rodney, who knows about such things, having spent his life in construction of one form or another, deemed that only our house was big enough for the monsters, and was built strong enough to hold them. They had been made down in Mexico, and had featured in old Western movies depicting saloon scenes until the Western wore out its welcome. Since then, they had sat idle in the cavernous 800-square-metre sound stage that was slowly crumbling on Mane Street.

We unloaded them in one of the five garages that grace Boulder House, as I figured there were more immediate tasks ahead than importing scaffolding and support beams, and installing these black, wrought-iron objects of illumination. Given they were a metre and a half in circumference, one metre high, carried over forty lights a piece, weighed more than a hundred kilograms, and had been collecting dust for sixty years, I figured they could rest a little longer while Tony and I got the house shipshape. Besides, Boulder House already sported a chandelier, albeit a modest one.

Rodney, a huge, hearty man with the walrus look that seems to be a popular personal statement in these climes, was delighted to be taken on a tour of the house. He builds houses and designs gardens, and I felt more than a little pleased when he declared it to be the best house anywhere in the region.

The conversation soon turned to water, as most desert conversations will. Rodney can design things, has a superb eye for interiors and exteriors, and has handled big operations, casinos and the like, in Las Vegas. He had long learnt that the secret to success in the desert was abundance of water. As ours clearly had none, we would have to try an alternative approach to desert living. I told Rodney I was ordering the household to shower less frequently, suggesting Tuesdays as a suitable day for washing the entire body. After all, Boo had spent much of her life in England — whose people commonly go their entire lives without the aid of a shower, and the deserts of England are few indeed.

‘Americans are picking up diseases because they are no longer exposed to dirt and germs. They lack the immune systems of their forebears,’ I announced.

Rodney has the heartiest laugh in the High Desert, and wasn’t particularly concerned about his immune system. He had been working in dirt, dust, and sand for a good forty years, and no doubt had the constitution of an ox — which in girth he faintly resembled.

‘But the expression “cleanliness is next to Godliness” has clearly been distorted upon translation from the Hebrew,’ I continued.

Rodney, spotless in a crisp white-linen starched shirt that set off a magnificent wide-brimmed Mexican hat, looked blankly back at me.

Boo and Harriet were touring the house, and I heard Harriet from upstairs insisting that Boo would need a maid.

As originally framed, the expression meant ‘cleanliness will bring you closer to God’, I explained. Our Lord and his disciples lived in a desert quite similar to the one we inhabit, but we have no evidence that God Almighty was or is clean. Jesus, we know, once had his feet washed and did likewise for others. John the Baptist was given to frequent trips to the river. But neither is actually God. God (The Father) is probably clean. It’s hard to imagine him up there in his many mansions all filthy with a matted beard and dreadlocks, and looking like John Walker. God (The Spirit) is no doubt spotless. Anyway, if avoiding the shower does increase one’s life span, I may live to see Baltimore win a Super Bowl. Or even longer.

The question of bathing was one long close to my heart, and I had been heartened to discover that the British writer Frank Muir had written a history on the subject — an item that Boo had brought back from her last trip.

I try to remind locals, incessantly complaining about the cost of water, of the strictures of the sixteenth-century English proverb to ‘wash your hands often, your feet seldom and your head never’.

Facts are facts. Of the seventeen million people living in Southern California, some sixteen million live in a desert. Deserts are defined by the absence of water. Yet Californians are showering as never before. A far-sighted leader would order residents to shower perhaps twice a week, thrice during summers. The order could easily be enforced by providing incentives to children to inform teachers if their parents were ignoring the edict. The teachers could report offenders to a Water and Power Czar, who would sentence them to labour in the state’s marijuana fields.

Such a system would crush the power and water cartels, save everyone thousands, and wipe out much hair loss, a product of applying unnatural amounts of water and absurd concoctions to the head. Perfume, an age-old and pleasant alternative to body odour, could be freely dispersed at street-corner vending machines.

William Vaughan observed around the turn of the sixteenth century (in Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health) that the head should be bathed with hot lye made with ashes four times a year. He was, by the standards of the day, somewhat obsessed with washing. Vaughan also made the sensible suggestion that the application of cold water following the quarterly lye hair-wash keeps back baldness and quickens the memory.

There is also the question of lost time and productivity. Our current mania for cleanliness can be dated to the later part of the nineteenth century, and the idea of bathing alone is even more recent. The concept flourished when America became an industrial nation and most engaged in manual labour. Regular bathing was suitable for those such as coalminers, people working in offal factories, the oil industry, mechanics, and the like. Unhappily, these people were often so poor they could scarcely afford plumbing, so dirt and stench were so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Thus the absence of dirt or of smells was seen as a sign that one was from the better classes. Only the very rich and powerful — Howard Hughes comes to mind — could afford to be dirty. Balzac’s ambition in life was to become so important that he could fart in society. But I digress.

Seventeen million people spending, say, ten minutes a day in the shower represents a loss of 170,000,000 minutes. The widespread disappearance of the bath means that this time is entirely wasted, as the productive functions that can be achieved in a bath — reading being the most obvious — are eliminated. It is possible to read a newspaper in most showers, and I usually fold the Los Angeles Times along the glass and read a feature from the bottom of the op-ed pages. If the bottom of the op-ed page is a piece written by someone from the Heritage Foundation on the need for more nuclear-attack submarines, one simply puts the shower off for the day and waits for a Robert Scheer or even an Arianna Huffington article to appear in the right spot.

Perhaps the oddest justification for washing comes from Mark Twain’s mother, Mrs Clemens, who wrote that ‘people born to be hanged are safe in water’. That might be true of hanging, but, as John the Baptist discovered, is ineffectual when it comes to beheadings. Besides, if one had to spend one’s entire life in water, hanging might seem a good career move. Mark himself called the Turkish bath a ‘malignant swindle. The man who enjoys it is qualified to enjoy anything repulsive to sight or sense.’

Bathing can lead to other unpleasant experiences, even if one doesn’t actually take the bath.

Lillie Langtry, while visiting an English earl, was asked whether she might cavort in a bath of white wine while he and his landed companions watched. The good lady complied, and playfully splashed around to the delight of the audience. The earl ordered the wine, believed to be an Esterhazy-Pierpont-Gluckhauser (a hock) to be served with the salmon mousse that evening. It was greatly enjoyed, but after the meal the earl was approached by his butler and told that while he had poured eight bottles of the wine into the bath, he had bottled eight-and-one-half.

Plutarch tells us that Archimedes, the genius who gave us geometry (or quite a bit of it) had to be dragged to the tub by his servants.

We don’t exactly run to servants, but if we did I’d give them little chance of getting me to tub or shower. We are fortunate enough to have both, but the bath, a nineteenth-century steel affair with claw feet, is yet to be troubled by water, or wine for that matter. It resides in the old ‘bordello’ bathroom at the foot of the stairs, painted red to match the red-flocked wallpaper and other bathroom features from days gone by. One always expects or hopes to see Claudia Cardinale soaking in it, bubbles rich around her breasts.

All this was probably double-dutch to Rodney, a man who works hard physically and earns his shower rations. But he knows his water, and, like Buzz, is a master storyteller. As we wandered the grounds, he recounted landscaping Sly Stallone’s mansion in Malibu, an area devastated by fire every decade but always rebuilt in time for the next inferno. Sly wanted his house to be surrounded by high-pressure water jets that would blast a wall of water into the foliage around the mansion at the first sign of a spark. But Rodney was forbidden to consult a water diviner, even though he and many others swore by this method of deciding where the well should go. In fact, one of the recurring themes of desert conversations is the usefulness of employing a water diviner or ‘witcher’.

People one would normally place on the practical side of the ledger are commonly great believers in this mysterious practice, and Rodney, as practical a man as one could meet, was a firm believer in witching, and in particular the prowess of one particular old Indian.

Sly Stallone, very much a product of the Enlightenment, was not. He forbade the construction crew from consulting the old Indian. Sly’s brother was building another mansion across the road. He had consulted the Indian ($100 was the going price), and the man had arrived in the back of a big white Cadillac with his wife doing the chauffeuring.

The Indian was blind, but he alighted from the caddy and said, ‘Squaw, fetch me my rods.’

‘The old Indian walked around for a while, the squaw directing him, and suddenly started to shake all over, and the copper-wire rod just seemed to bend and drag his arms down to the ground,’ Rodney recounted.

‘That’s where he said the water was, and that’s where they found it. Plenty of it.’

Sly’s crew continued to drill, consulting maps and geologists, and coming up dry every time. As wells are expensive to drill — about $20,000 a shot — knowledge of the whereabouts of the water was extremely useful.

‘We waited until Sly was gone, and brought in the old Indian,’ Rodney continued, laughing like a naughty schoolboy.

‘The next time we drilled, we hit water, and Sly got his wall of water.’

I wished Bill Lavender had done the same. Bill’s well goes two hundred metres into the granite, and produces about enough water to provide a comfortable shave every other week.