Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Today I went walking through what remains of the open desert in front of my parent’s house. We live on a dirt road. For about twelve years ours was the newest house on that road. There were two next to us. In front of us there was nothing but sage brush and a dry lake bed that would fill up when it rained a lot. Now there are four (!!!!) houses across the street, and a new one a little bit up the road behind them. You used to be able to walk out my parent’s front gate and keep walking straight ahead for a mile without hitting so much as a paved road, let alone another house. It’s tragic, I tell you. Tragic. Plus the house across from us built up the flood plain a little and now all the water that used to collect there floods the street and part of my parent’s front yard. Assy.

Anyway, I went walking around in the dessert today. Southern Californians have taken to putting small shrines to people who’ve died in car crashes along the road where they got hit. Usually there’s a cross, some plastic flowers, a few candles, and a picture of the person who got killed. They dot the landscape here in the High Desert.

Everyone here drives at least 60 miles an hour down the main thoroughfares. There are only a few roads that will take you all the way across town and in the less built up areas you don’t have to stop for a light or a sign for miles of straight, flat road. Highway speeds are common, and at night most everyone drives 70 or 80 if there’s no one else the road. A few months ago this girl made the mistake of trying to cross one of these streets, coming off of a tiny dirt road without stopping for the cross traffic.

So now there’s a huge shrine down the street from us. Really, it’s huge. There’s a big white cross and a smaller pink cross with the girl’s name on it. There are candles and baseball caps. There are Halloween pumpkins and a Christmas tree. There are weird plush snowmen with angels wings an halos. There are solar powered driveway lights. It’s one of the more elaborate examples of car crash shrines I’ve ever seen. So of course, I had to go take a few pictures.

Just as we got to the shrine, a woman pulled up in a large pickup truck. She got out, holding a necklace or a rosary or some such thing. I decided that it would be a little rude to go snapping photos while someone was visiting, so John and I walked around for a while.

Now, you’d think a walk through the desert would be somewhat uneventful. Walk past a few bushes, see a couple of tumbleweeds. Maybe a rabbit. But the thing about walking through large open spaces that are easy to drive through is that people like to dump stuff there. “What kind of stuff?” you ask. Well, think of something. Anything. It’s probably out in the open spaces of Apple Valley right now. Old appliances, rusting oil drums, falling down homes, pieces of cars, whole cars, dinosaurs made out of concrete, sai,dead goats. Anything.

A short list of things I saw in the desert today:

1. The remains of a one room shack
2. Heat shrinking tube
3. A 1980s era cookbook
4. Several mattresses in various states of decay, including one that was just the inner springs with a tiny piece of fabric still attached
5. Three matching sofa cushions
6. A water bottle filled with urine
7. A smallish septic tank

Of those things, the most surprising was the bottle full of urine. A bottle of urine? What the fuck? I mean, if you have to pee in the desert typically you just pull over and go behind a bush. Why bother with a bottle?

I’m trying to get John to start a “things I found in the desert” photo blog. It would make me very happy.