not ever a slacker
always on time
always showed up
always did the right thing
he was a good person
To get back in touch with the man she remembered, Kimberly would travel to Catalina, revisiting its enchanted underwater kingdom, diving beneath the sea, looking as we all do to past moments when the inexplicable happens and returning with the question that many who knew Steve the surfer asked over and over: Why would a dedicated waterman forsake waves and head for the desert? Whatever it was, as Sheriff Baca would tell it later, in the drylands, in the beautiful, extreme, paved-over and wide-open Antelope Valley, it became Steve’s mission to protect God’s creation.
NO TRESPASSING: WELCOME TO DON’S WORLD
What are you looking for? . . . You’re happy out there, are you? Eh? Wandering? One day blurring into another? You’re a scavenger, Max . . . You’re living off the corpse of the old world. . . . What burned you out, huh? . . . See too many people die? Lose some family?
—Pappagallo to Mad Max in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
IN THE SHADOWS OF THE VANISHED COMMUNITY OF LLANO, Donald Kueck had pieced together his own desert utopia. Oh, it did not have groves of palm trees or alfalfa fields or waterfalls or even babbling brooks, and it was not pretty or particularly inviting. Nor was it set up for others to live there—but of course that wasn’t the point. It was a utopia for one, a place where a man could be left alone and not have to submit to the fetters of the world, to get through the day and night in whatever way that might happen, to smoke pot or get high whenever he wanted to in the manner of his own choosing, to not get dressed in the morning or to get dressed for a while and then cast off the clothing if it suddenly caused an awareness and became constricting, to tinker and concoct and organize, to live like the animals and birds and trees had always lived, to dream uninterrupted. Yet there was a plan of sorts in the construction of Don’s world—in fact he was very set in his ways (the German in him, he told friends)—and there were plans to make it better, and he had everything that a man could possibly need and, at one time, kept all of his possessions highly organized in boxes, compartments, and shelves, almost like a personal army barrack.
Don’s first attempt at a desert paradise happened at the far end of the alphabet avenues, on a parcel near Avenue T. There he lived in a tent, paying a small amount of rent to the owner of the property, living on a monthly disability check from the government, which he had been receiving since he had incurred his back injury at his job in Long Beach before moving to the desert. His role in the local ecology was one of scavenger; he would traverse the sands, find things, trade them at local flea markets for other things, or sell them for small and occasionally large change. He was also available as a handyman, in the finest sense of the word; his mechanical skills and general knowledge of how things worked permitted him to fix and invent all manner of contraptions and devices. Sometimes at flea markets or through the desert grapevine, those in need of a service would come his way. He would head over to the customer’s house on an old bike he had salvaged from a wash after a flash flood or in one of the old muscle cars he had rebuilt from spare parts he had found in some far-flung junk pile or another rusted out vehicle and get the job done in a way that would last for a long time. But outside his tent and over time, Don acquired a lot of junk, ultimately attracting the wrath of the landlord, who asked him to leave.
Coming to his rescue were his older sisters, Lynne Kueck, a career nurse in the navy, and Peggy Gilmore, a housewife in Pensacola, who purchased a one-acre piece of land not too far away from where Don was already living. In any direction, there was wide-open space, the mountains in the far distance, and then forever. It seemed like the kind of location that would crank down the chaos in anyone’s mind and permit a state of grace for those who were open to the region’s gifts. Lynne and Peggy bought an old trailer for Don to live in, and now, at 19100 East Avenue S-8, he could have the ultimate American dream: he could build a sand castle, literally, on his own land, and no one could tell him to dismantle it or complain about too much junk in the driveway. At its peak and before it began to crumble, before his own degeneration, his family and friends marveled at what he had eked out of nothing. “He was a brainiac,” a friend recalls. “That’s how he rolled.”
The first thing that any desert outpost needs is water. At first, Don acquired some large blue drums in a trade or because they were just lying somewhere, and he cleaned and sterilized them. Then he strapped them on top of an old Lincoln, headed to a friend’s house, filled them up, and brought them home. With a makeshift system of pulleys, he would crank and lower the drums into compartments he had dug in the sand. There the water would remain cool and free from dirt, and he piped it into a sink in his trailer with a homemade hand pump. He also rigged an outdoor shower and used it regularly, contrary to the perception that solitary desert dwellers are caked with dirt and haven’t bathed in months or years. As the days passed in his new desert abode, he walked the land in every direction, studying its rhythms and ways, coming to know where there were outcroppings of certain plants or trees, which meant there was water nearby, depending on what kind of plants or trees they were, and discovering ancient seeps in the buttes to the east. He also watched which way the water flowed and where it went after the summer monsoons, and soon he was able to dowse the terrain. To get to the source, he would dig down until he found underground trickles and streams. He would mark these places with cement pipes that he had found along his desert treks, sinking them into the ground but leaving a portion visible so that he would know where the water sources were. Whenever he needed water, he would head to these wells and pump some out, filling up jugs and heading back to his trailer.
Over time, his gerrymandered way of living seemed to be boundless. Once, on a junk run, he found some abandoned solar panels. He hauled them back to his place, hooked them up to a battery, attached them to his trailer with duct tape, and used them in the winter to warm it. He acquired old cars, especially his favorites—Dodge Darts and Swingers, and at one time there was a Plymouth. At any given time there were several on his property, and he was working on them, switching parts around to make them run and selling pieces of them to anyone who needed a particular part. To move the nonworking cars around, he ran a pulley from the engine of a large lawn mower to whatever vehicle needed to be moved, turned the mower on, and began the operation. It was an efficient method of getting the job done, and visitors marveled at how one man could maneuver the cars across dozens of yards of desert gravel. In addition, he kept a vast store of automotive information in his head; he knew which car had already yielded what parts, how many valves remained in a particular engine mount, how many miles of gas each working car could get by the gallon on a paved desert highway, assuming you were driving the speed limit, which friends say he generally did. Whenever he drove anywhere, he would calculate the exact amount of gas he would need based on the mileage and driving speed, and fill up accordingly. Quite simply, he was a man on a budget and did not like to waste things.
This view applied to his manner of sustenance as well. Generally he lived on a diet of canned sardines, tuna, mackerel, beans, and quantities of peanut butter, which he bought in bulk at local big-box stores. He liked to bake, often surprising the occasional visitor with his homemade bread fresh from a small iron oven in his trailer that was powered by propane. It was a simple recipe—flour, baking soda, and water—and guests all remember it as the best bread they ever ate, a surprising offering in a harsh place, manna from a hermit’s heaven. In addition to this bit of homemaking, Don was trying to grow fruit. “An orchard,” he once joked to a visitor, perhaps harking back to the long-gone apple and almond fields that flourished at the old commune, or perhaps it wasn’t a joke but a grandiose statement about what he was up to, which was cultivating a pear tree near his trailer.
The tree came from a cutting that Don had acquired in a trade. He planted it in the dirt and rigged a
perpetual irrigation system. This consisted of four holes he dug around the tree, into which he inserted black pipes, each about three feet long. At the top opening of each pipe, he placed a one-gallon wine jug upside down, piercing the bottom with small holes so that moisture would gather inside the jugs and drip down through the pipes, directly feeding the roots of the tree. To protect the tree from animals, he arranged chicken wire around it. After a while, the tree yielded some pears; Don had become an Adam in his own garden, never finding or looking for an Eve, partaking of his own fruit, tempted and succumbing on his own to the many snakes that lived all around him, some of which were now residing in his trailer.
He had befriended other animals and birds in his strange domain and was taking care of what may have been one of the last families of ground squirrels in the Antelope Valley. It was a time of drought and scarcity in the western Mojave, a situation that had been unfolding for years. Wildlife was under siege as tract housing edged closer to remote areas, taking out groves of Joshua trees, barn owl populations, and other animal tribes. The Mojave Desert ground squirrel had long been listed as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act, although a small and scrawny population remained, pressed deeper into remote areas such as Llano during the years Don lived there. To help them along, and add to his band of friends, Don dug a hole in the floor of his trailer and, through that, ran a plank into a small tunnel he had hollowed out, creating a burrow for the animals. He attracted them with peanuts; then he brought them inside and ran them down the plank under his trailer and into their new quarters. Every day, he would open the trap door, and they would emerge for a meal.
Although Don did seem to prefer the company of animals, he did not create a situation that precluded daily contact with people. Outside his trailer he had hooked up a large antenna, and he used it to receive signals on the radio that he kept on a shelf next to a cot inside it. Usually the radio was tuned to the police scanner. He had a television, but because of its age and the fact that he really wasn’t all that interested in watching it (his sisters had given it to him as a gift, on the off chance that the mechanized diversion would help him in some way), it was able to receive just one frequency. This was the Home Shopping Network, and toward the end of his life, he watched it often, purchasing loose gems on The Gem Show, trying to acquire something that he could pass on to his daughter and her children. There was one more way for him to connect with the outside world should he feel the need or have an emergency—a cell phone—another item his sisters purchased for him. In the end, it would play a large role.
Exactly when Don put up his “No Trespassing” sign we do not know. There’s a funny thing about those signs in the desert, and there are many: the land they are warning you off—actually, to be precise, the property—is not always inviting. In this part of the Mojave, the westernmost segment, the altitude and sunlight and rainfall have contrived for a terrain that is sparsely populated with cactus and flowers and that great signpost of the Mojave, the Joshua tree. But the people who live behind the signs are serious—as the old saying goes, “as serious as a heart attack.” Head past these signs in the desert and you are at risk; in Don’s case, an interloper was entering a world whose king had spent years alone, marinating in the sun, exploring the nooks and crannies of himself and the desert, cultivating a philosophy based in part on God, Buddha, Native American mythology, and search-and-seizure law—his own version of the old commune’s mix of watchwords and homilies, one that he would expound on when the opportunity arose and refine and chew on in the solitude of latter-day Llano.
You see, Don loved to read, and he relished the thinking and simmering that happened because of it and spilled into his other endeavors. While living in Llano, he had assembled an amazing library of works penned by some excellent writers, picking up the obscure and best-selling books and magazines and pamphlets at flea markets, or finding them strewn across the desert, nature’s very own, always-open, perpetual learning annex. The collection tells us that Don studied American history, war, weaponry, geology, living off the grid, space travel, time travel, the environment, inner dimensions, and aging—and his family and friends confirm that these subjects and concerns informed much of his thought and conversation over the years. But there was more than that; as we shall see, the knowledge and insight he gleaned from these works factor into his last days as a fugitive. Here are some of the books in his collection:
Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom by Sandra Mackey
Gun Digest, 33rd anniversary 1979 deluxe edition
Black Holes, Quasars and Other Mysteries of the Universe by Stan Gibilisco
Geologic Guidebook: The LA Aqueduct System
American Indian Archery by Reginald and Gladys Laubin
Radio Fundamentals TM 11-455 War Department Technical Manual
All About Telescopes by Sam Brown
Modell’s Drugs in Current Use and New Drugs, 37th edition, 1991
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf by Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie
Analysis of Electrical Circuits by Frederick F. Driscoll
The Complete Guide to Growing Marijuana
Escape from Corregidor by Edgar Whitcomb
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
Trial by Tom Hayden
Pathfinders: Overcoming the Crises of Adult Life and Finding Your Own Path to Well-Being by Gail Sheehy
The Planetary and Lunar Nodes by Dane Rudhyar
The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan
The Second Ring of Power by Carlos Castaneda
Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones by Raymond Moody, MD
A man with such an extensive library ought to have a good place to sit down and enjoy a book. Like many a conventional man, Don had one; it was a Barcalounger, or a lounging chair in that category, an old one which he probably found in a junkyard or perhaps scored while bartering some of the loose gems from the Home Shopping Network. The Barcalounger was in his living room, which in his case was the outdoors. It was facing the east, sunrise, and there he would sit and look across his kingdom, watching and reading, in the shadows of the Three Sisters Buttes, his favorite place in the Mojave, the selfsame formation that provided comfort to all who gazed in this direction, including the nuns at Mount Carmel. During the last two years of his life, it was in his Barcalounger, with the grace of the mountains and the sage-dotted land before him, that he turned to two particular books, seeking a way out of an existence that had become increasingly painful and filled with fear and anger and doubt. The first book was The Second Ring of Power by Carlos Castaneda, the thirteenth in the trail-blazing series that helped to usher in the counterculture, telling the story of the Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan who enters Castaneda’s life and forever changes it, guiding him through portals to other dimensions where he gains wisdom from plants and animals, returning to the here and now to use it. The second was Reunions. Its author, Dr. Raymond Moody, is a highly educated man—brilliant, according to some; a crackpot say others—who chairs the Department of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He has written several best sellers about encounters with the dead. As it happens, he has much in common with Don: he hails from the deep South, his father was a military officer, and for many years he was drawn to astronomy, psychology, and philosophy.
It was while reading Plato’s Republic that Moody learned of a warrior named Er. Thought to have died on the battlefield, Er suddenly sat up and told of entering another world, returning just before he was about to be cremated. The story convinced Plato that there was an afterlife, and years later, when Moody’s mother was dying, she roused from her deathbed and spoke of a visit to the next dimension, where her ancestors awaited. Coupling the two stories, Moody was convinced that the living could contact the dead, and it became his mission to contact his mother when she died. He has devoted his life to helping others contact the de
parted, and his book Reunions provides details on how to reach across time and do so. The method is called “psychomanteum” or “mirror gazing” and involves a mirror and a variety of elements, such as music, hypnosis, and nature. Following a series of instructions, the person who seeks contact gazes into the mirror until the reunion has occurred.
Sitting in his Barcalounger, Don would page through Reunions. It was not an ancestor with whom he sought to make contact. Nor, as far as anyone knows, was it his great-grandparents or his grandparents. And it was not even his father, who had died in 1992. It was his son, who had preceded him in death, the thing that every parent fears, even those who have had little or no contact with their children, and it was this event that propelled a torqued-out, once brilliant, and now degenerating hermit from the land of illusion to desperation, murder, and flight.
THE LOST CHILDREN OF THE INLAND EMPIRE
My heart is broke
I have some glue.
—Nirvana, “Dumb”
THEY HAD NAMES LIKE LIZARD AND PARANOID PAM, AND THEY were in bands like Let’s Go Bowling and Nazi Bitch. They hung out at a place called Spanky’s, a punk dive across the street from the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, the history-infused hospitality headquarters for presidents, foreign dignitaries, and well-heeled tourists. A lot of these kids were products of what were once called “broken homes,” but broken didn’t begin to explain it, and their stories spoke of a wreckage across the suburban lands of their home turf, the Inland Empire, that strangely named California region that is a corruption of a vanished real estate dream—the Orange Empire!—and has engendered all manner of jokes and disparagement—Conquer this!—and that no one can quite figure out the boundaries of, but most agree that it begins where greater Los Angeles bleeds into San Bernardino and Riverside counties and then the whole thing ends where a warehouse runs into the desert and people go shooting.
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