Photo by Lisa Keresz
For all its desert toughness, the Joshua tree is a delicate creature. With a fibrous, almost hairy trunk and elbowed limbs crowned with spearlike leaves, it bears the solemn dignity of the truly freakish. It can live for nearly half a millennium — no one knows for sure, as it has no real bark, and hence no ring structure by which to count the years — but can survive only at certain altitudes and within a narrow band of climatic variation. It is sorrowfully inept at reproducing.
Scientists tell us that a long-extinct species of giant sloth once fed on Joshua tree flowers and fruit and, in its slothful meanderings, dispersed the plant’s seeds around much of what is now the American Southwest. The trees’ current range, the theory goes, is a much-reduced map of the habitat of their symbiotic pal the sloth. But giant sloths no longer wander
California, and the Joshua trees’ range shrinks with the years, the wildfires and the rising temperature of the earth.
Ecosystems are interdependent. What is true for the Joshua tree is true as well for the human communities strung along the highway that stretches above the northern edge of the 800,000-acre
Joshua Tree National Park. This odd corner of California’s high desert is changing fast. The suburbs are encroaching — one long band creeps along Interstate 10 from the Pacific to
Palm Springs, sending tendrils of tract housing north and south.
The cities are sneaking in, too. Real estate booms and
art-world trends in New York and
Los Angeles echo across mountains, rivers, valleys. Williamsburg and Silver Lake are on the march. They both wear
hiking boots. They ditch Palm Springs, bored by its luxury
spas and too-green fairways. They slip up the Twentynine Palms Highway and climb into the mountains. They feint north to Pioneertown, the 1940s Western-movie stage set, then — skipping Yucca Valley, with its chain-store doldrums and endless parking lots — drop down into Joshua Tree, a dusty little town at the edge of a gorgeous wasteland 125 miles inland from Los Angeles. Here they find a certain “spiritual, poetic, let’s-come-together-and-change-the-world kind of feeling,” as one recent arrival put it. They like it, and drop a couple of new galleries and a wine shop in their wake.
This is America, and cheap real estate has always been part of the deal. Successive populations of Indians came and went here for centuries. Then the gold hunters arrived. In 1938, Congress began signing over five acres of desert land to anyone willing to construct a cabin on it. City dwellers grabbed the plots up, built shotgun shacks, forgot about them. The government took its parcel, too: a giant expanse of what would become the national park to the south of the highway, and to the north another large plot — 932 square miles — for the military in Twentynine Palms, a few miles east of Joshua Tree. Today it’s the largest Marine base in the world. Every
United States Marine en route to Iraq stops off here for a month of desert combat training. As an old veteran explained to me, “It’s the best place to do artillery in the world.” On quiet mornings, you can hear the low thud of the guns from 20 miles away.
People came for their health. They came, like the Marines, so they could shoot their guns without having to answer to their neighbors. They came to get away from neighbors. They came because they didn’t fit anywhere else, because the desert has room for even the most oddly contoured sensibilities.
There are rocks — big ones, lots of them — so climbers came, hikers too. George Van Tassel, an aviation engineer, landed in the desert in 1947 at a place called Giant Rock in Landers, a sandbox of a town a few miles northwest of Joshua Tree. Six years later, a spacecraft arrived from Venus, according to Van Tassel, and took him aboard. The Venusians taught him how to make a machine that would extend the lifespan of living cells. He spent the rest of his days building it — an extraordinary domed structure that he called the Integratron. Van Tassel died in 1978.
Nancy Karl came in 2000, dropping out of “a tightly wound metro life” in the Bay Area to buy the Integratron with her sisters. Most weekends the Karls offer “Public Sound Baths” for $10. (You lie on the floor while one of the sisters coaxes
music from a series of differently pitched crystal bowls. The vibrations radiate around the dome and between your bones — there’s something to this.) “Inside the building there’s a significant spike in the earth’s magnetic field,” Karl explained. “It’s a very, very juicy spot.”
Hippies came to the area, artists, writers and musicians, too. There was no one to judge and nothing to do. Gram Parsons came here and died: he ingested the wrong amount of morphine and tequila in Room Eight of the Joshua Tree Inn. Today musicians drop in at Pappy & Harriet’s, the old cowboy beer-and-ribs joint up the road in Pioneertown. I once saw Robert Plant join the Thrift Store All-Stars, Pappy’s Sunday-night regulars, for two impromptu sets. I rented a cabin in Joshua Tree last year in which, rumor has it, Parsons, Steve McQueen, Keith Richards and friends used to party. It was wildly overpriced, but the grounds retained traces of its hedonistic past: weird, decaying sculptures, hippie spray paint on the old water tank.
It’s not just the emptiness that draws people to this place. It is also the beauty. The sky goes on forever, and it is almost always blue. When the sun is at its peak, the hills are drab and brown. At dawn and dusk, the colors come out: greens, pinks, yellows, purples. The light bends everything.
Noah Purifoy came to the desert in 1989. He had started doing assemblage after the 1965 Watts riots, sculpturing art from the wreckage. He wanted to work on a giant scale impossible in Los Angeles. A friend donated two and a half acres in Joshua Tree. (The artist Ed Ruscha, who has a place near Pioneertown, later donated five more.) For the next 15 years, Purifoy crowded his land with sculptures cobbled from the detritus of desert life: bathtubs, bed frames, PVC pipe, vacuum cleaners, bicycle wheels. Purifoy died in 2004, but his work still stands. Themes recur: gallows, crucifixion, time. Visual puns take the edge off. A certain desert sadness pervades. This is not the bright desert of optimism, renewal, mythic self-invention. It’s the desert of cracked laughter, plans gone awry, the whimsy of eternity — all the old American pains abandoned to the sand.
Those two deserts have always existed side by side (though “always,” in Southern California, can represent a very short span of time), often within the same person. To get a look at that brighter desert, and what the future holds, I contacted the artist Andrea Zittel, who lives part-time near Purifoy’s place. Her work — sleek collapsible “homestead units,” for instance, inspired by the desert cabins — is as clean-lined and new as Purifoy’s is rooted and dusty. Zittel came to Joshua Tree because “I was curious to find out if there was a way to create a vital intellectual and creative climate for a contemporary arts scene outside of a cultural capital like New York or L.A.,” she said. “I remember giving the place a pretty hard sell to all of my friends back then.” Zittel suggested that I talk to her friend John Simpson, a real estate agent.
Simpson’s office is on Joshua Tree’s main drag, next door to the Crossroads Cafe and Tavern, where rock climbers load up on pancakes. It is not far from a new shop that sells wine, artisanal cheeses and vintage cowboy boots, or from the battered pink communal piano on the sidewalk outside the health food store. Simpson, a former Angeleno with a rugby player’s build, sat behind his desk. He is fairly representative of the region’s latest settlers, and their bright hopes. “I used to work in a suit and tie in a high-rise building and live the corporate life,” said Simpson, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “It was kind of driving me nuts.”
He is working on developing an “eco-friendly campground and spa,” where “people can experience being outside and learn about the desert but have their comforts, too” — which will include massage therapy, pools to soak in, plasma TVs. In the meantime, Simpson sells real estate, mainly to a niche market of artists, architects and designers.
He arrived at the tail end of the boom. In 2003, only 15 of the nearly 300 properties sold in Joshua Tree cost more than $100,000. You could buy a shack for less than the price of a new car. Then word got out. Prices shot up. When Simpson opened shop in 2005, the market was still, he said, “on fire.” (It has since slowed down.) People who had never visited the desert were buying lots sight unseen. Many of the buyers came from L.A.,
San Francisco and New York. The boom took the area by surprise, but it wasn’t hard to understand. Ecosystems are interdependent. Housing costs in and around big cities were astronomical. Even successful artists could barely afford a studio, much less a vacation home. So what that it could be infernally hot, that there were no decent restaurants and that you had to check your shoes for scorpions — land was cheap, JetBlue tickets even cheaper.
And the area had been getting a lot of press. In 2002, Zittel organized the first High Desert Test Sites show, inviting artists (most of them from out of town, which raised some hackles locally) to erect installations at sites scattered about the desert. For a few days a year since then, art students, gallery owners, scenesters and journalists have arrived, maps in hand, sniffing out the next big thing. Like attracts like.
A new wave of artists and designers bought property here; designers, too. Stephanie Smith bought a homesteader’s cabin and called it Ecoshack, now a lab for her L.A.-based environmentally conscious design company. The L.A.
architecture firms Taalman Koch and Marmol Radziner & Associates are building glass-and-metal prefab homes. Galleries are opening from Joshua Tree all the way to Wonder Valley, 10 miles past Twentynine Palms on the very edge of nowhere. The Red Arrow Gallery opened in Joshua Tree last year. “The price was right, and the air is clean,” said Katie Shaw, the owner. She shows photography and drawings, is planning a film program, and works three jobs to keep it all going. “It’s just nonstop.”
At the moment, though, Shaw is depressed about the Home Depot in the works just down the road from her gallery. And for every sleek architectural prototype built here, another block of tract housing goes up, leaving John Simpson worried that Joshua Tree will soon resemble the places that he, and his clients, intended to escape. “If this area was built out to its full zoning, we’d have 100,000 people here. We have 8,000, 9,000, and it’s starting to feel full.”
The desert might be changing, but it was never timeless. The old desert dwellers wrinkle their noses at the newcomers — “It’s a lot of artists,” one Joshua Tree native said to me, “I mean, a lot of artists” — but the old prospectors didn’t think much of the homesteaders, either, and the American Indians, well, no one asked the Indians.
Earlier this year, I hiked up the sandy wash behind the cabin I was renting. As it snaked uphill, the wash turned into a steep canyon. I scrambled over boulders, hoping no rattlesnake was sunning itself near my reaching fingers.
At last a valley opened up beneath me, uniformly ocher in color, apparently bare of vegetation. Down below, I found that the earth was not barren but covered with low, dry grasses, the occasional creosote bush and, every few yards, remains of a Joshua tree. They had died in a fire 12 years before, hundreds of them.
Many experts believe the culprit was the grasses. Fires don’t usually spread in the high desert — there’s not enough ground cover.
But sediment from L.A. smog has enriched the soil with nitrogen, allowing nonnative grass to take root. Ecosystems are interdependent. Lightning strikes that once would have burned out in a few yards now can spread for miles. Joshua trees are bad at reproducing and can take centuries to grow.
By the time I noticed that the sun was getting low, I could no longer find the canyon I’d climbed up in. I spotted another wash beneath me and, hoping it would take me down toward the highway, hustled toward it. I weaved between the boulders until, about 20 yards in front of me, I saw a mountain lion. It saw me first, then turned and ran. It leapt from rock to rock with extraordinary grace and disappeared.
Mountain lions hunt by pouncing on their prey from above. This one ran off in the direction that I still had to walk, and rocky precipices hung every 15 or 20 feet over my path. But it was almost dark, and I could guess no other way home. Feeling foolish, with a rock in one hand and a pocket knife in the other, I walked on, shouting obscenities, hoping to scare it off. I doubt that I intimidated it, but I didn’t see it again.
For weeks, I didn’t know what to make of the encounter, and still don’t, except that from the vast, denuded valley to the fleeing lion, I couldn’t have asked for a starker image of wildness on the run, and me alone, pitiably human: lost, dumb and ill equipped to deal with the danger or the beauty of this place.
I’ll tell you one more story, because all is not lost. Even with Home Depot on its way, some things won’t change fast. I was hiking home another day, not far from where I met the lion. The sun was setting. I hurried along as the daylight dimmed and the earth turned pink. The shadows disappeared. Then, without warning, the world grew bright again. Gold and fuchsia spilled from the sky. Eventually the cloud cover shifted or the sun withdrew too far, and darkness fell again, but for a minute the earth stayed bright, the desert lit up like an amusement park. I couldn’t move an inch.
