27
I lay in bed listening to the sound of a car winding its way along Coyote Road. It’s such an unusual sound out here that, on those rare occasions that I venture into LA, I keep looking up every time I hear a car’s engine, wondering if it’s coming to visit me. But on this not-yet-hot morning it clearly was.
I staggered out to greet these God-early visitors, and was met by Bob Dix and a man I had never seen before. He had hair down to his waist and a sharp nose below his headband. This was Iron Horse, an extremely skilled drum-maker whom Bob introduced as ‘being from Arizona and a friend of Crazy Fox’.
Bob Dix, the oldest regular member of the travelling circus that Adam surrounds himself with, is a refugee from the world of the rich. For Bob, the wheel of life has turned a full circle, for his father, Richard Dix, was a Western star bigger than Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, who were instrumental in Pioneertown coming into being. Richard’s heyday was the silent movies era, though he successfully made the transition to the talkies. Bob, as a child, would come out to Pioneertown when his father was a handsome household name. Bob inherited his father’s looks, but although he grew up in Hollywood with the kids of the other stars and made it into a dozen or so movies, he never attained his father’s fame. He is most happy telling tales of hanging out in the bars of Beverly Hills at a time when heavy drinking was not restricted to such places as Pioneertown. His stories involve much innocuous name-dropping. It’s difficult for them not to, as he hung out with the stars and acted with them, and has no choice when recounting his tales but to mention Rogers and Autry, Roger Moore, Bob Redford, and inevitably John Wayne as inhabitants of the world he moved in, mates and accomplices in great feats of drinking and partying.
Now he is back in the Wild West, living in Adam’s tiny cottage, a place where the party never stops. His wheel has turned, and I expect he will serve out his days in Pioneertown, and I hope they are long.
Bob had told Iron Horse of the unusual rock formations on our property, and Iron Horse wished to play his drums amongst the rocks. And play them he did.
The drums took Iron Horse about a year to make, and his connection with Crazy Fox was based partly, I learnt, on the latter’s abilities with the various skins required for various sounds. Crazy Fox, as a reader may have gleaned, is an Indian (of the Native American persuasion), and being so can take animals — for food and/or spiritual reasons — and is blessed with a particular skill when it comes to the drying and tanning of same.
Iron Horse, also an Indian, concentrates on the wooden bowls that make the drum of the drum and the tension of the skin. At least that was what I gathered in the time it took for the drums to be removed from the truck and placed in a triangle below the great rocks of the Hidden Valley. The largest drum stood about four feet high and four foot wide — at the top. All three drums and even the drumsticks were new. The product of a year’s work was about to be tested.
Iron Horse took a position amidst the drums, raised the long drumsticks — their leather-clad balls the size of my fist — and put an end to conversation.
Iron Horse had not come to play for me — he had not previously known of my existence, but I was damned happy he had come. The Hidden Valley filled with sounds it might have heard one hundred or one thousand years ago, but sure hadn’t heard for a while. The music cascaded off the rocks and then seemed to flow down the valley, following the old watercourse, and across the flatlands below. There was no pause, beat, or let-up in the sound, which was more like a melodic rumble. After ten minutes or so, Iron Horse was satisfied. The drums were good. We shook hands and agreed to meet up again soon at one of the local drumming circles.
While the Hounds of Spring cause Tony to disappear to Wisconsin’s cooler climes, they also drive Frances and John away from their idyll in San Felipe to summer in Pipes Canyon. It says something about how hot it gets in the Gulf of Cortez that anyone even vaguely in their right mind would rather summer in the High Desert. Even Tony has the good sense to flee, and Tony will toil for sixteen hours a day and complain about being overpaid. I suspect that John and Frances return to feed their coyotes, who by the summer have eaten most of the spring quail and the slower rabbits. They then take to hanging about the cottage that comprises one of the confusing number of homes that these two old outlaws occupy. Their Pipes Canyon home sits a mile from where I sit, and in the summertime the coyotes prance outside amongst the rocks and low brush, awaiting the feast to be bestowed on them by their septuagenarian hosts.
The coyotes, being democrats at heart, have taken to picking up their bowls and carrying them off to share their good fortune with the rest of the pack, an activity that causes John and Frances some irritation. They do not object to this habit, being democrats themselves, but the loss each evening of half-a-dozen food bowls taxes their patience and their pockets. I personally don’t approve of feeding wild animals at all, as we don’t need a pack of coyotes baying around the house here on Coyote Road and eating not just their own dinner but the dog’s. I doubt they could catch Inky the Cat.
But John and Frances have no dogs — except for the coyotes, who have, over the years, become as tame as our dogs — which means that they have reached a level of maturity required for a position at the White House. They are definitely not safe with children or nervous adults.
On a balmy (read boiling hot) summer night, one can sit on John and Frances’s porch and watch the coyotes come within spitting distance to consume whatever delicacy has been prepared for them. Their democratic impulse — to remove the bowls holus bolus — has forced John to nail the dishes into the very rocks. All this provides guests with a relaxed situation from which to intimately observe the animals.
Often, as we reflect on the nature of these shy beasts, the silence is interrupted by the sound of drums. A principal rite of summer is the drumming parties hosted by Adam Edwards. And what a host Adam is. He builds a huge fire pit, brings in as much Bud as his varying fortunes allow, and invites myriad girls from LA to entice as many of his mates as possible to dance around flames that frequently shoot, flicker, and spark six metres into the air. The music is provided by the vast assortment of freaks who frequent the mountains, the high plains, and the lower desert.
Iron Horse is but one of the attractions at Adam’s drum nights. In fact, drums, though common, are augmented by almost every musical instrument in existence — from the first, second, and third worlds — and it might be said that what is achieved is not so much music as something approaching a frenzy. A very loud one at that. This, combined with the leaping flames and leaping individuals, attracts the attention of the few hundred souls who can hear and see the show. That is, those within a few kilometres’ radius. As many are in attendance, this raises few problems.
At Boulder House, we can’t see Adam’s place, but have no difficulty hearing the corroborees across eleven kilometres of yucca forest.
The first night that Boo and I attended, Adam, in an experimental mood, picked up a bale of hay — meant for Smokey the horse, whom he was minding — and hurled it into the fiery furnace. The effect startled even Adam, as the hay, which had dried in the summer sun and was probably close to spontaneous combustion, exploded. Those sitting or dancing or playing their instruments were showered in burning vegetation, and, as many of them were semi- or totally naked, were rather inconvenienced. But Adam soon realised that no one had been gravely burnt, and assumed his merry mood. I don’t believe he has repeated the trick.
Those who were seated at this pagan performance were incongruously sitting on old church pews that Adam had liberated at some stage of his illustrious career.
Adam’s drum parties, at their best, are strange, indeed wondrous, sights. If one walks away into the yuccas to where the fire’s light no longer obstructs the stars, the scene is heathen: up to sixty people, aged from six to sixty-five, lost in a mesmerising mixture of an improvised interplay of instruments and dance around the bonfire. It is a beacon of brilliance in a world where the only other light comes from the moon and the stars.