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.’

I told him I figured we were snowed in, and he found it hard to believe we could be snowed in by two inches of snow.

‘You sure it’s snow? Is it white?’ Buzz asked.

‘I’d be damned worried if it was black,’ I replied. ‘We could be dealing with a volcano.’

‘Volcano! You’re a crazy motherfucker.’

‘I’m not saying I can’t drive in two inches of snow, Buzz. The problem is finding the road. I guess we can rely on airdrops. We are quite low on beer. Will the air force drop beer?’

‘You are one crazy motherfuckin’ Australian. It’s not the air force — it’s the National Guard. And they are sure as hell not gonna drop beer to a crazy Australian trapped in two inches of snow.’

Buzz, clearly enjoying this performance, loudly pointed out that the purpose of the markers on the edge of the road was to define the road so ‘crazy motherfuckin’ Australians’ could get their own beer.

‘Well, they’d probably refuse to drop Tecate anyway,’ I replied. ‘If they dropped Michelob, I’d tell them to take it back. I doubt even Adam would drink Michelob. I’d rather drink Lillie Langtry’s piss.’

The reference to the esteemed actress was lost on Buzz, and I left him muttering ‘motherfucker’ into the phone.

But apart from Tony’s exertions, no outdoor work would be done today. The snow made things too cold and slippery, and to my mind life was dangerous enough without challenging the howling elements. But Tony never slips or stumbles. He has no place to fall. Tony plays Seneca to the scores of Petroniuses that make up the remaining workforce. They would prefer dining with Trimalchio, and their work could well be described as The Fragments.

Instead, Boo and I decided to drive down to Yucca Valley, our nearest big town for supplies, just in case more snow did arrive. Bill had shown us photos of Boulder House under several feet of the stuff some years before when he had been cut off for days.

The back roads to Yucca are dotted with old ramshackle deserted cabins and shells of cabins that once were someone’s dream. After the Spanish war of 1898, president Harding made sections (360 acres) available to veterans, and later World War I soldiers took up parcels of the arid land. At that time, the area attracted victims of TB and poisoning from mustard gas. The remnants of a TB clinic remain a few miles away where Pipes Canyon Road meets Pioneertown Road.

These men and women replaced the cowboys, the cattle, and the cattle-rustling that dominated the economy after the passing of the Indians until the Depression of the 1890s, when beef prices fell so low that the game was not worth the candle. But in the boom years following the gold rush, when a single beeve could fetch seventy dollars, knowledge of water sources and familiarity with the scores of hidden valleys turned a pretty penny. Cattle could be stolen in Mexico, eighty miles to the south, or from the Ranchos based in Los Angeles and San Diego, driven through the passes, hidden in land where whites had scarcely travelled, and then herded north. Alternatively, stolen cows and horses from the Californian settlements could be given fresh brands in the hidden valleys, and then driven to Mexico for sale. In Mexico, rustlers deployed an early time-and-motion technique, stealing Mexican stock and running it north. Some of the poor beasts spent much of their lives being chased back and forth across the border.

Reading through the history of the early days, one is struck by the numbers who met an early and violent death. Like in the rest of the West, rustling, hard drinking, and gambling were practised by men openly brandishing hand guns or shooting irons, but today the churches are far more numerous than the bars, and far better attended.

In fact, the Desert Christ Park became a leading tourist attraction after Christ’s first physical manifestation in this part of the Eastern Mojave.

Taking the back road into Yucca to avoid the ugly strip, we passed this extraordinary park, one of the desert’s great blessings. Boo insisted on inspecting it.

It is perhaps appropriate that the Christ Park and the Cholla Park are adjacent, as some argue that Our Lord’s crown of thorns was manufactured from cholla — proving that when Christianity is involved, people will invent any manner of things. The Christ Park became a leading tourist attraction after Jesus’s first physical manifestation in this desert, in 1951.

A God-fearing pattern-maker from Inglewood, Frank Antoine Martin, had ‘sculpted’ a three-metre, four-tonne statue of Christ in his driveway in 1947, intending it to be placed at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Due to the extremely liberal position that the National Parks Service took at the time, this truly inspirational and wondrous monolith was deemed to contravene the division of church and state — the park being the possession of the feds. Martin argued that a cross was displayed at Easter sunrise services on the Canyon Rim, but the secular authorities countered that the cross was taken down after this annual service. Raising and lowering the 2,800-kilogram, ten-foot Christ might have proved to be as difficult a task as the resurrection itself. So the ten-foot Christ was rejected of men, a statue of sorrow, and, as Martin liked to tell newspapers and magazines, ‘not wanted’.

Not wanted by all accept Eddie Gardner, a desert missionary who was later to achieve national fame as the Desert Parson. Gardner found it fit to base his ministry at the head of Yucca Valley, at Apache and Santa Fe trails. And with the flair of an early Pat Robertson, he saw in the four-tonne statue a chance to draw attention to the spiritual needs of the folks of the desert and, perhaps, to himself.

Moving Christ to the desert was a more complex operation than the Son of Man’s efforts prior to his Temptation. In fact, it required the skills of the harbourmaster of Balboa Bay, Los Angeles — one Tommy Bouchey, who brought in cranes and heavy rolling stock to raise up Our Lord. By the grace of God, on 28 March 1951, Christ was lifted up once again in the wilderness, hair and robes flowing, arms somewhere between beseeching and crucifixion. After being dragged fifteen metres up a steep incline behind one of the scores of churches, he was placed upon a knoll in time for the 1951 Easter sunrise service on 8 April. Life and Time magazines both featured the miracle, although Time noted that Christ’s finger had broken off during his move. This would seem to diminish the statue’s spiritual status, as the Bible makes much of the prophecy that ‘not a bone of his body be broken’, and definitely does not suggest that an entire finger be lost.

But so taken were the people of the desert that Mr Martin immediately moved other artistic endeavours, including moving ‘Jesus Blessing the Children’ from Inglewood to the more biblical desert environment. The works, which can truly be described as ‘larger than life’, soon spread to cover five acres of hardscrabble desert.

Over the following decades, Martin created a virtual New Testament down on the Pioneertown side of Yucca Valley. His works multiplied until he had, in hundreds of tonnes of wondrous cement, recreated ‘The Betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane’ (lest anyone wonder where he was betrayed), ‘Christ at the Home of Lazarus’, ‘Mary and Martha’ (who apparently lived together), ‘Christ’s Blessing of the Little People’, and ‘The Scene at the Holy Sepulchre’, replete with three mourning women staring into a tomb that Martin had dug into the hillside, and where he sculpted ‘The Shroud’. Martin further beautified the desert with what has been described accurately as his ‘most magnificent and ambitious work’, a carved facade of the Last Supper with the head of Christ, framed in an open window, cut in three dimensions. The remaining figures are in bas-relief, and the whole box and dice, the facade, stands three storeys high and nine metres wide.

A nation aching for meaning during those days, when Godless communism threatened from within and without, poured cash into the work, and donations reached $3,000 a month. All manner of scenes from the New Testament soon dominated not just the hillside but a good part of the township.

But all was not well in the new Holy Land. Perhaps it was the surprise appearance of Eddie Gardner, the Desert Parson, as one of the twelve disciples that caused a rift amongst the true believers. Rifts, akin to that of the nearby San Andreas Fault, appeared not only in the ‘immortal’ concrete statues, which stand gleaming white in the desert sun to this day, but also in the flock. Due to a ‘misunderstanding’, one parishioner bought the five acres upon which the handiwork had been brought forth, and proceeded to sell it back to his parish at a decent profit. The Reverend Gardner was described as ‘very saddened’ by this turn of events and left the parish, preferring to live and die on the Navajo Indian reservation in northern Arizona than remain in the world of filthy lucre.

Alone, with nothing but a cement mixer, Anton continued his work tracing the Biblical fables, from the manger almost to the cross. But the constant effort, in boiling heat and icy winds, caused Anton to sicken and die on this hillside so far from Galilee. A mile or so from the Christ Park, he sculpted a sabre-toothed tiger by the highway. The stark beast is truly fearsome, in contrast with the meek and mild figures of Christ, the Apostles, the Wise Men, Mary — everything but the crazed swineherd — that stare ‘Christlike’ down at the highway. All are overlooked by today’s connoisseurs of fine art who would prefer the works of Mapplethorpe to these uplifting scenes.

So overlooked, so unwanted, are they that, though built to endure the blast of an atomic bomb, they have been unable to withstand the march of time. Heads of the apostles have rolled, and outstretched arms as big as a child have had their cement and rebar steel exposed. The children that Our Lord is beseeching to ‘come unto me’ seem to be suffering from terrible nappy rash, and look somewhat flyblown.

Unhappily, on sultry summer nights, sordid things happen, even in this place of innocence.

Young men, and men not so young, seeking not salvation but sex, are drawn to the place. Holier visitors began hearing noises coming from the men’s toilets. The park ranger commented that Christ Park had become a veritable ‘Sodom and gonorrhoea’.

The police chase them away, through the nativity scene, past the manger, and into the cholla thickets.