High desert drifter
Misadventures in the Mojave
Twentynine Palms Book Festival
Last weekend I went to a small book festival in California’s High Desert. For most of LA’s history if you told someone you were going out to the desert, that meant Palm Springs. With the explosion of rental properties, music festivals, and the flight to the fringes brought on by the pandemic, “the desert” means lots of things to lots of people.
I first visited Twentynine Palms twenty years ago when I covered a far-ranging open air art show called High Desert Test Sites for The Believer, and aspects of that trip have lodged in my subconscious for decades: barhopping in Wonder Valley, hitting a coyote with my truck, a restless night in a grim little room at Motel 6, and decaying art rotting away in the desert. I wrote all about it in the immersive journalism style that was in favor in the early aughts.
Twentynine Palms is a military town that serves the Marine Corps’s biggest base in the world—almost 1,000 square miles of desert—not a place where this former sailor was inclined to spend much time. Also, not a place where you’d expect to find a bunch of book lovers, but thanks to the Twentynine Palms Book Festival there we were.
I spent the first night in a literal cemetery. Noir at the Boneyard was put on by the Starlite Pulp crew and was a reunion of sorts for some old friends and colleagues, including Nolan Knight, JD O’Brien, Craig Clevenger, and Mr. Starlite himself Brian Townsley. I read the opening to my work-in-progress, Black Van, a short blast of vitriol called Dead Punk Summer.
There were friends in the audience too, most notably Gabriel Hart and Rob Roberge, who gifted me with a copy of Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a gorgeous ode to the blank cassette. Later, I asked Rob if he knew I’d interviewed Thurston Moore recently. He did not. This was the first of many mysterious coincidences.
The next morning I set out early to pick up Mr. O’Brien at his hotel. I wanted to go back to some of the spots in Wonder Valley I’d visited 20 years ago and see what had changed. As I pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the hill toward 29 Palms Highway, I saw a young coyote on the other side of the street, playing with some crows. I realize that’s an unusual description, but that’s what it looked like to me. The coyote was prancing around, jumping up and crouching down in a way that seemed more playful than aggressive, but what do I know?
Meanwhile a small group of crows swooped and looped around the coyote but weren’t attacking it like they would if it was a hawk or some other predator.
Eerie?
No.
Odd?
Most definitely. Let’s just call it foreshadowing.
I picked up Mr. O’Brien and we drove out to Stars Way Out in Wonder Valley, a bar I’d visited in October 2004, the night the Boston Red Sox won Game 1 of the World Series. Dave Roberts, who is now the manager of the LA Dodgers, played on that team. Another coincidence.
I’d heard the bar had closed down but when I peered through the windows there were signs hanging on the wall, stools along the bar, and pool sticks standing at attention in the rack by the table, waiting for action. When I visited the bar 20 years ago the owner offered to sell it to me, and I’ve always wondered what my life would be like if I’d taken him up on his offer. I wouldn’t have gotten sober, that’s for sure.
I set part of Black Van out here and wanted to drive around a bit. Once we ventured off 29 Palms Highway, the streets were all unpaved and it was hard to tell the difference between someone’s driveway and the road, but I saw what I needed to see. Next, we headed for Palms Restaurant, another stop on my Wonder Valley bar crawl 20 years ago. I didn’t think twice when the GPS pointed me down Chadwick Road, which is unpaved.
About a mile down the road we got out of the car and took photos. We were only a twenty-minute walk from the main road, but there’s something about being on a dirt road in the desert without a fence in sight that underscores how far out we were from the known.
“Look at us,” I said as we climbed back in the car, “a couple of city slickers with no food, no water, and just the dregs of our coffee, out here having a wilderness experience.”
Mr. O’Brien laughed nervously.
A few minutes later we were stuck in the sand.
I take full responsibility. We’d hit a slight incline that was littered with half-submerged tires. To avoid hitting a tire I moved onto the shoulder where the sand was slippery soft and gravity did the rest. We were stuck.
Uh-oh.
We tried to push ourselves out and when that didn’t work I called AAA. I’ve been paying for the service for more than half my life, I might as well use it. I was confident we could dig ourselves out and use strips of old tire rubber for purchase, but Mr. O’Brien had a book signing at 10:30am and I had one at 12:30pm and it would be good to have a back-up plan.
The tow truck was dispatched and we started to dig and push and push and dig until it was clear we were going nowhere.
Except it didn’t feel like it. It was surprisingly busy for the middle of nowhere. There was a cell phone tower back at Stars Way Out so our reception was great. Some joggers went by on a dirt road that bisected ours about a quarter mile down the hill. Then a convoy of motorcycles, dune buggies and a JEEP came along and a made a pit stop a few hundred feet into the desert. Finally, after about an hour, our tow truck arrived, kicking up a plume of dust, but as it climbed the hill to where we were stranded, it started to slip and stall until it, too, was stuck in the sand.
“I don’t think you’re going to make it to your signing,” I said to Mr. O’Brien.
I was pretty sure this was the same dirt road I’d traveled 20 years ago the night I hit a coyote with my truck. Was this some kind of delayed divine retribution?
It seemed that way. I’d upset the natural order of things and the natural order was getting some payback.
The JEEP pulled up alongside the tow truck and the two drivers were talking so we went down to investigate. During that time another car—a minivan—inexplicably pulled up behind the tow truck and also got stuck. What the hell was going on?
The Latino tow-truck driver said I’d need to call a 4x4 service. That would be an hour in, an hour out, and an hour to pull me out—at $350 an hour—and AAA doesn’t cover it. In other words, over a grand.
“Can I hire you to pull me out?” I asked the driver of the JEEP.
“We’ll see. First we’re gonna try and push her out,” he said, pointing at the pale, green-haired lady who’d gotten her minivan stuck and did not seem to understand where she was, what was happening, or how to drive a car. But we got her out.
The driver of the JEEP was a no nonsense, buzz-cut leatherneck named Duane who’d come out to the desert with his buddies for the long Veteran’s Day weekend. I asked him what branch he’d served in, mostly as a pretense for bringing up my own stint in the Navy, and he said, “I don’t want to talk about my past.”
Okay then.
Next, he pulled the tow truck out of the sand, which was pretty impressive feat, considering it was one of those massive flatbed jobs and the JEEP was an ordinary JEEP, albeit with enormous tires.
“All right let’s take a look at your vehicle,” he said.
I all but sprinted back up the hill to where my car was mired in the shifting sands of the Mojave. Duane looped a tow band through my right rear tire and when he honked his horn I gave it some gas and I popped right out of the hole. Rather, than go back to where all the cars had gotten stuck, Duane suggested I keep going up the hill, and he and Mr. O’Brien would follow in case I got stuck again.
I tore up the road and didn’t stop until the soft sand gave way to hard-packed dirt—like the roads I’d driven all over Valle de Guadalupe the weekend before. We thanked Duane and offered him all the cash we had on us—$40 bucks—which he accepted.
“I couldn’t leave you assholes out here,” he said and off he went.
We made it to Amboy Road and a few minutes later we were pulling into the parking lot of Palms Restaurant, but it was closed because of course it was. We trudged on foot to where some artists had installed a sculpture that spelled out THE END OF THE WORLD with ten-foot tall letters made out of plywood and spray-painted silver. We talked all about all the things that could have gone wrong, how lucky we’d been, how thirsty we were.
There’s one detail I left out. One of the vehicles in Duane’s convoy was flying a giant red TRUMP flag. Did Duane’s politics alter his decision to assist us?
Apparently not.
What lessons can be learned from this?
All that money I give AAA every year wasn’t worth two shits when I needed it.
Never drive in the desert without food and water.
I should probably stop othering people based on how they vote.
Mostly I’m glad my wife wasn’t in the car with us.
Of course, we probably wouldn’t have gotten ourselves in this pickle in the first place if she’d been there…
Meanwhile back at the ranch…
Mr. O’Brien had called the festival organizer to let him know he was going to be late and by the time and we made it back, word had spread about our misadventures. It would have been embarrassing if not for the fact that I was floating in a bubble of gratitude.
Most writers were given individual time slots for their book signing, but the entire panel of music writers signed together and we got to know each other a little bit:
Peter Jespersen: Euphoric Recall: Five Decades of Story and Song
Cary Baker: Down On The Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music
Laurie Kaye: Confessions of a Rock 'n' Roll Name-Dropper
Jaan Uhelzski: MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band
Jaan and I connected over stories about Wayne Kramer and our many mutual friends, including our publisher Ben Schafer, who—to our great surprise—turned up for our panel. I also made a new friend in crime writer Nevada McPherson who came all the way from Georgia. I also ran into Lynn and Sean from Brown Bag Books up in Running Springs, which came *this close* to burning down in the fires last month.
After the panel, we went to another reading: this one was at the 29 Palms Visitor’s Center and was emceed by Gabriel Hart and featured an excellent line-up of readers, including friends Matt Philips from San Diego and Duncan Birmingham from LA, with musical accompaniment by Rob Therrio, which made the readings that much more dynamic and engaging. A terrific all-around show.
Incident at Giant Rock
You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but I wasn’t done exploring. After brunch with a gaggle of great writers at Palms in Wonder Valley, we headed out to Giant Rock, which Atlas Obscura hilariously describes as “a regular-looking rock with an unbelievable history.” If you don’t know anything about Giant Rock, you have to read a bit about it to believe it, but it involves a hermit, explosives, and UFOs.
Giant Rock may be regular-looking, but it’s also massive—seven stories tall and occupies 6,000 square feet. Some claim it’s the largest freestanding boulder in the world.
There’s a scene in Black Van that takes place at Giant Rock and I wanted to see it. However, I was nervous about taking my vehicle off-roading again. Luckily, Mr. O’Brien’s rental car had been upgraded to a neon all-wheel drive JEEP Rubicon that could easily handle the dirt roads.
At this point the savvy reader will ask, “Was this vehicle available the previous day?”
Yes, savvy reader, it was.
We drove to Landers and parked in the lot outside the Integratron, which has its own peculiar history, jumped in the JEEP and went off in search of Giant Rock. Ten minutes later, we found it, and it was stunning.
Giant Rock sits in a valley and is surrounded by dozens of boulders that would be considered giant if not for the presence of a seven-story boulder nearby. As we took this in, motor-cross bikers zipped up and down the floor of the valley, cheered on by a group of men and women in souped-up four-track dune buggies that were all flying the Mexican flag and blasting Bad Bunny on the stereo.
It felt like a party. Nuvia started dancing and the crew cheered her on. I loved how the riders flew their flags, claiming space for themselves and having a good time in this contested gathering place. Would I have felt differently if the riders were white and the flags were red?
Undoubtedly.
It was all weirdly welcoming, but I tried to imagine how it would feel at night, engines roaring in the darkness like restless spirits…
To get back to San Dieg we took Old Woman Springs Road to Yucca Valley, which has some of the highest concentration of Joshua Trees outside of Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Trees live to be about 150 years old, which is something I just looked up on the Internet. Isn’t it wild that every person who has ever lived, through one fucked-up age or another, has looked up at a tree and thought, “Damn, that tree is going to outlive me”? Is that why we’re so destructive? We have this existential pettiness hardwired into our DNA? There’s something mesmerizing about the gnarled persistence of the Joshua Tree, especially in the wintertime when it’s not 100 degrees, and the goldenrod is blooming, and the skies are unbelievably blue, and you feel like you’re standing on the cusp of two worlds, your brain and body thrumming with so many feelings you can barely stand being alive.
Bad Bunny knows what I’m talking about…
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with an interview with Keith Rosson and some book reviews.
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You are such a fine storyteller, Jim. Thanks for taking us with you on your adventures.
Wow that had me stressed. I’m real curious about crows and coyotes playing together. Also…existential pettiness!!!