23

Ernie and Carole are the sort of citizens that Norman Rockwell would prize. Citizens very much in the traditional sense of the word. They care for all and sundry, especially the sundry. No matter how badly their trust is abused, they will offer more. If everyone in the world had the goodness of these two, TV stations in Somalia would be advertising weight-loss programs. When their tenant didn’t pay a lick of rent for years, she was never threatened with eviction. When she had no money for the power and water, Ernie and Carole paid for that, too. The list of those who have enjoyed their largesse is embarrassingly large. Cars are lent — never to be seen in any worthy shape again. Rooms are granted free to those they know will never pay. Carole devotes herself to historic causes; Ernie, to ‘The Gunfighters’ and the weekly enactment of Wild West shootouts opposite the bowling alley in front of the town’s Old West bank, livery stables, and saloon facades. In presenting his productions, Ernie researches the garb and guns of the Old Western fighters as meticulously as a remake of the Titanic.

Getting to be friends with Ernie and Carole was one of the smartest things we ever did. Ernie is a consummate actor who would be superbly cast as Grumpy if someone had the good sense to remake Snow White. In his one movie role, he totally carried The Howling 9, which may be the worst movie ever filmed in Pioneertown.

Their living room–cum-office is the centre of life in Pioneertown, a source of all information and knowledge. The coffeepot is always hot, and the citizenry are always dropping in for a chat, a gossip, and a piece of pie.

‘Tony will be leaving any day now,’ Carole alerts us, as she ladles out great plates of freshly baked enchiladas.

‘How do you know?’ we inquire.

‘I’ve been watching the Wisconsin weather forecast, and the ground is expected to thaw this week. As soon as it does, he’ll be heading back up there.’

Tony’s leaving is both good news and bad. It means that our weather is warming up, but the loss of Tony is a blow. Tony, as could be expected of a man who spends his life in a furious struggle to redefine nature, is politically conservative, and thus we disagree on almost everything. But he is pretty much the only person out here who closely reads the LA Times. For all its sins (employing the worst cartoonist in Christendom), the LA Times is a pretty good rag. Though not a journal of record and without the pretensions of The New York Times, it does go far and wide in covering the world and is, to my mind, a better paper than its east coast adversary. While reviling Liberal opinion Tony is at least familiar with it. And he cans the Republicans as much as the Democrats and the pro-Democrat organs. Thus conversation with Tony is as lively as one can hope for, and his disappearances are an annual blow to those of us who like a vexing conversation on national and foreign matters.

Tony does, however, disappear when the north thaws. How he does it is usually a mystery. One day he is simply gone, and will not be seen or heard from again until the cold returns. He does not say goodbye. Usually, he has bought a truck in the course of his endeavours, an old one that doesn’t have to get a smog check, and he’ll drive it to Wisconsin, work it like he works himself, and sell it for twice what he paid for it. Powerful old rust-free trucks are valuable up by the Great Lakes.

Through the winter, Tony had shown Boo how to collect the yellow sap from the huge pine trees that grace our land. They would return from an afternoon hike with great hunks of the sticky gum to burn on top of the fire — scenting the whole house with brain-blasting pine fragrance. Now, with the arrival of spring and the departure of her hiking partner, she has set up a primitive camp beneath one of the largest juniper trees in the Hidden Valley. This gnarly old twisted giant — some say it is over two thousand years old — gives off the sweetest pine scent, and is the true smell of promised warmth to come. It is also a perfect blind — the valley’s premier spot to sit and watch and not be watched — staring up at the biggest golden boulders for miles around, some thirty metres high. Here is the exclusive penthouse for the king of the skies — the golden eagle. With a two-metre wing span, it’s hard to miss him, but somehow Boo has managed each time.

Before Tony left, we were thumping along Pipes Canyon Road in my 1982 Ford 150 truck — which, having been purchased from Adam, was in a sorry state. At least the exterior was, as Adam, when he got mad, was prone to attacking his vehicles. I have never known him to hit a person. The window on the passenger side was missing, and I slowed to study what appeared to be roadkill. The golden eagle had beaten us to the scene but, startled by our arrival, decided to take off. However, it was caught between the truck and the graded dirt at the side of the road, and had difficulty getting airborne. For a few hundred yards he flew beside us, his wingtips in the truck, flapping by Tony’s face. We could see the detail of the golden feathers as we stared speechlessly until the great bird attained sufficient velocity to rise above us and make its way to a nearby Joshua tree, where it landed, eyeing us and the carrion. We left it to its meal.

Pappy was part Indian, and his animal spirit was the golden eagle. The night he died, it sailed above his house. And it reappeared the day Harriet, his widow, remarried, circling high above the guests to give its blessing, all agreed, to the newlyweds.

The saloon is still called Pappy and Harriet’s. On the walls hang paintings of Pappy — half man, half eagle — and on the bar sits a large bust of the deceased proprietor, staring out at the ageing weekend cowboys and their rhinestoned gals, dancing a slow quickstep to the band. The bar rolls up at midnight these days. When Pappy was alive, the music went all night. Pappy loved to dance.

With the first real warmth, the first cactus bloom. The brilliant vermilion flower is so improbable even it looks surprised to be showing itself off so shamelessly amongst its plain, prickly neighbours, like the first girl in the street to swish through her front door in a gaudy sundress after a long winter’s chill. The flower almost looks artificial, like the finest paper.

The centrepiece of the rock garden that in turn is the centre of the driveway is a beautiful ponderosa pine that stands right before the house. It was planted by Saundra Edwards, and nurtured by the bathwater she would carry out to it after washing the children, thirty years ago. Beneath it, a dozen different types of cactus flourish, their blooms competing with one another for brightness, wooing the bees that flit from one to the next like a fat man at the buffet brunch bar. Suddenly, everything is flowering, even the otherwise charmless cholla. No sooner have the blooms died on one variety than another, even more stunning, appears — the claret cup hedgehog, purple sage, apricot desert mallow, deep blue chia, rich red chuparosa or sucking rose, pale-pink desert willow, yellow marigold, and the vivid red Indian paintbrush, which has inspired Boo to match the colour on our dining room walls regardless of my protests and the horrified looks of the locals. The desert floor, barren for the rest of the year, shape-shifts into a great woven tapestry of tiny ‘belly flowers’ so small that the best way to appreciate them is from flat on your stomach.

The Joshua trees are also in bloom in the spring with great clusters of creamy flowers crowning their spiky heads. The Indians used the trees for making sleeping mats, and they wove sandals from the fibre. In the Apple Valley museum is a one-thousand-year-old sandal found in a pack rat’s nest.

They pounded the tree’s roots for soap. Yucca and Joshua trees provided everything, from spikes for needles to strong drink from the fermented blossoms. Moccasins and sandals made from yucca leaves were wrapped with juniper bark.

The trees were once called ‘the cowboy’s friend’, as they would burn even when wet. No one burns or touches them these days. Being caught cutting one means serving time.

In the late 1800s they were cut down for pulp for newspapers on the east coast and Britain. This was a complete failure, as the crated pulp overheated and spoilt.

During World War I — being light and sturdy — they were used to make artificial limbs, and were even turned into Panama hats. The Joshua tree forests disappeared from much of the Southwest, and the High Desert is one of the few places they still flourish.

In their place grew tumbleweed, a curse imported from Russia (its seeds mixed in with imported flax) after the Civil War. Pioneertown was named after Roy Rogers’ band ‘Sons of the Pioneers’, who recorded the hit that still gets older Americans misty-eyed — ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’. But the fact is that the early cowboys would never have seen a tumbleweed, which is just a weed, a thistle, and a destructive one at that.

It first appeared in the Dakotas not long after the Civil War, and covered a third of the nation and much of Canada within a decade. This nasty plant breaks from the main root and tumbles where it will, releasing as many as fifty thousand seeds in a good tumble. The cowboys never happily ‘tumbled along with the tumbling tumbleweed’, as the dirge goes, as the much-loved plant ruins pasture. As it’s not native, it has no natural enemies, and today Caltrans spends millions each year trying to control the thistles along the roads. They are dangerous to drivers and a fire hazard. They don’t so much burn as explode, and they tend to bunch up. They block drains and waterways, and contaminate fields with a virus.

In late spring, Sean moved into the guesthouse, or poolroom, or both. The deal was a makeshift matter that vaguely involved a reciprocal arrangement whereby we would provide him with a dwelling, and he would work and not pay rent.

Sean, when we met him, was a lay preacher at the Pioneertown Church, a sect of a larger sect, or a moonbeam from a greater lunacy — the Baptists. He was recovering from a ferocious addiction to methamphetamine, which he had overcome through devotion to hard liquor — in the main, tequila — and the study of the Bible. These two loves were equalled only by his attachment to guns.

We had first visited him at his small trailer at the other end of Pipes Canyon in the mountain foothills, for Boo to take some lessons as a shootist. Sean, with a .22 six-shooter low on his thigh, was on his bed studying the Old Testament. He put down the Bible, took a swig of tequila, and joined us outside — there being not enough room for us to join him inside. By way of instruction, he drew his gun and fanned from his hip at an old can some fifteen metres from the trailer. The can flew into the air, landing a metre away. He fanned the gun again, and the can flew once more into the air. After six fast shots, the thing was riddled with holes, and Sean reloaded and explained he was using .22 magnums.

‘They have that much more punch,’ he added, showing us the extra length and therefore powder of the bullet. I raised the gun, took careful aim, and missed. I walked over and set the can standing, fired again, and missed again. My fourth shot came close enough to spray dirt onto the can, knocking it over. Boo did a little better, knocking over the can a couple of times.

‘Handy if we ever get attacked by a beer can,’ she reflected.

Sean enthused, pointing out that if the can was a heart we would have gone close enough to slow an assailant down, but I reflected that a target that was shooting back and moving things could get bloody — for us.

‘Then get a shotgun,’ he advised.

Sean could not find suitable work, and Tony had gone back to Wisconsin. Sean might not have been as strong as Tony, but he had a tractor, and even Tony wasn’t as powerful as a John Deere. We set about doing some landscaping.

Together, we scoured the land for suitable rocks with which to construct a grand stairway that would lead from the house to the Hidden Valley. Sean wanted something definitive, something he could photograph as evidence of his abilities. Something to show off.

We collected about thirty good-sized flat stones — some weighed half a tonne — but Sean figured we needed a base rock that would serve as the first step in the stairway on which the big steps could sit. He located the appropriate rock, which was shaped rather like a whale. It weighed as much as a decent-sized whale — well over a tonne. We managed to wrap heavy chains around it, and these we attached to the backhoe. Sean lifted it high into the air and backed out through deep sand towards the house.

Sean was pretty good with his tractor, but had never been taught the finer points of tractor work, and the tractor started to spin in the sand. I was standing by, nervously aware that tractors were dangerous machines, all the more so in sand with a heavy object high above. Then Sean completely lost control. The whale rock was spinning, the tractor threatening to roll over. Somehow, I caught Sean’s eye for a fleeting moment. He was terrified. He couldn’t jump, as the tractor or the rock or both might land on him and crush him. I was helpless, and could only watch. For a few seconds, Sean’s fate was in the hands of the God he talked so much about. Or in his own. Only one back wheel of the tractor was on terra not very firma.

With the tractor, the backhoe, and the whale rock combined, Sean had lost control of maybe five tonnes of metal and granite. He had to alter the balance and bring the wheels back to earth to stop it all turning over on top of him. Relinquishing control of the steering wheel he threw himself across the tractor hoping his weight (some eighty kilograms) might turn the tide.

Doubtful, it stood for a few seconds. But Sean’s redistribution of weight finally brought the tractor back to earth, and he jumped off and ran. The whale rock was still spinning in the air, but the tractor was upright and Sean was saved. Both of us were shaking — Sean more than I — and we took the opportunity to seek out his tequila bottle, where we found comfort.

I told him that we were trying to do too much with not enough experience, but Sean knew what he had done wrong and wasn’t about to repeat the mistake. He got back on the tractor, lowered the whale rock to a few feet off the ground, and slowly backed up through the treacherous sand and onto the hard dirt roadway.

Soon the whale rock was lying in place — and in a few days the stairway, comprising twenty huge rocks, rested on its massive shoulders and provided easy access to the Hidden Valley. The effect, Boo remarked, was of a giant’s causeway. But Sean and I dubbed it ‘The Stairway to Heaven’.

That afternoon, Sean went off alone, no doubt to contemplate his deliverance from death’s clutches. He wandered down to the churned-up sand and inspected the mess he had made of the land. Something glittered in the decomposed granite. He leant down and picked up an arrowhead, which he brought to the house. It was a particularly pretty thing chipped from a hard blue stone and carrying a funny glazed look.

In the course of determining something about the people who had been on this land before us, I had got to know Jim Brock, an archaeologist who lived in Pioneertown but worked in the Coachella Valley.

The gated cities of the valley are spewing out towards the Colorado River as the developers blithely build over the remains of the people who came before. People like Jim are employed to inspect areas and give the development a green light.

Jim, I had discovered, didn’t take to that form of archaeology and hence was not as often called upon by the developers, who preferred more compliant ‘experts’. This enabled Jim to spend some free time helping the other experts hold up the bar at The Palace. Sean and I, somewhat excited, headed off to find him. The setting of Boulder House, with a clearing surrounded by high rocks on all sides, was perfect for an Indian village. Bill’s son had found a clay pot with seeds still inside one of the caves. The prospect of uncovering a village had us most excited.

Jim looked long and hard at the arrowhead, and asked if he could borrow it. Sean and I agreed. I said it was Sean’s as he’d found it, and he said it was mine as he’d found it on my property. We argued, and Jim went on his way.

A few days later, Jim entered the bar with the arrowhead. Now it was enclosed in plastic and tagged. It looked rather official in the little bag.

Jim was a taciturn man, and got straight to the point ‘First,’ he said, ‘it’s not an arrowhead. It’s a spearhead.’

I ordered Jim a beer, and he, having jogged down to The Palace, accepted enthusiastically. Jim is a weighty man both physically and intellectually. He can be irritating, as he tends to keep his knowledge to himself. As a journalist, I expect people like Jim, once asked, to spill their guts and tell me everything they have learnt. But Jim is a measured man — almost aloof.

Today Jim was, for once, borderline excited. The glazed look, he informed a bunch of people who had gathered around the spearhead, was created by the last ice age, dating the piece to between five thousand and nine thousand years of age. Thus Jim’s excitement.

‘This means that man was here long before we thought,’ he said, adding that this was not only his opinion but that of other authorities he had consulted.

Its previous owner (Sean and I were still arguing who should keep it) was, Jim explained, probably Pinto Man. Pinto Man was the Southwest’s earliest human inhabitant. The spear, Jim informed us, was of the kind attached to a throwing device, in which it rested, giving the projectile greater accuracy and distance. The Australian Aborigine employs an identical method of enhancing the efficacy of the spear. They call it a Woomera. In fact, a missile base in the midst of an Australian desert is called the Woomera Rocket Range. Australians, like Americans, enjoy paying tribute to their indigenous people by naming things after them. It’s one way of showing how much we care.

The spearhead lies locked in the safe with the labels from the museum that Jim took it to. Soon we will take it to some other museum, or perhaps present it to one of the local Indian casinos, or just continue to get it out and show it to people.