Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  Buzz left prison and took a house in Salinas. Derelicts and junkies populated the block, and Buzz had vowed in jail that he would never go back. He was on parole, and he knew he could never make it in a town full of dope fiends. So he spun a globe and stopped it wherever. Where he would live. The finger stopped the map at Palm Springs — which is only fifty miles from Pioneertown. Buzz was getting closer to what — for the next twenty years and doubtless the rest of his life — would be home.

  He found peace and safety in Pioneertown, partly by chance. A friend who cultivated marijuana asked him to mind a crop of sensimilla high up in Pipes Canyon. The friend brought food and booze, but no money. When winter came, Buzz packed eight pounds of weed into his backpack, saddled his horse, and tried to ride out of the mountains. The snow was thick, even down low in Pioneertown, when he rode into the village. It seemed deserted, but Harriet’s mother, Frances, who then owned the bar, found him shelter in a sort of barn down at the corral. Back when the town was founded, it was named the OK.

  To the amazement of the entire parole board of California, Buzz has not seen the inside of a cell for nine years. Giving up heroin was a good career move.

  Buzz is a master storyteller — a skill he has honed through twenty-eight years in county jails and state prisons. It’s a skill much in demand here in the High Desert, where there can be as little to do as in prison, especially in the summer months when the heat drives locals from whatever work might be available. An hour passed as Buzz told his tale. Most of the listeners gathered in the weak winter sunshine hadn’t interrupted even to get fresh beers.

  15

  In three weeks, Tony and I had, I thought, created a place suitable for Boo, and I drove to LA to bring her, bride-like, to her new home.

  The pool was humming in a contented fashion, but the late-winter weather ranged from cold to icy, and swimming would prove difficult as an inch of ice had formed and seemed to have settled for the season. But I had stocked a cord of avocado, a fine hardwood that left little ash, and hoped to keep the entire house warm by mastering the complexities of a wood-burning stove that projected immense heat a good three feet into a house of some four thousand square feet.

  I had taken to sleeping in front of the wood stove, wrestling on the couch with Sailor, our spaniel who was mighty efficient at spanieling the fire. Boo and I would be sleeping upstairs in the room carved from the rock, in a water bed that I would soon discover — courtesy of Sailor’s claws — carried almost a thousand gallons of water, most of which was to flow down into the dog’s den and through to the kitchen.

  But just as water flows downwards, hot air rises, and I figured that after exiting the stove it would make its way to the rock room, and ensure us a comfortable first night.

  My principal concern was rats; my secondary fear, mice. Perhaps Tony and I had disturbed a nest, or perhaps the animals were emboldened by the absence of Bill’s cat, Elvis. I had noticed, a few days before driving to LA to pick Boo up, that the animals had taken to partying all round the house, and behaving in a most cavalier fashion. One rat I had dubbed ‘King Rat’ was most objectionable. He had taken to watching TV, and seemed to be particularly interested in the stock market, avidly viewing The Money Gang and Street Signs. A rock shelf runs through the dog den that houses the TV, and King Rat had taken to reclining on the shelf and keeping an eye on his portfolio when not scampering outrageously about with his extremely extended family.

  Sailor viewed the activities of the rodents with benign neglect. Although bred as a multipurpose thief supposedly capable of catching birds, pheasants, quail, rabbits, and all manner of animals, he had a single, catholic interest in tennis balls. No junkie could be as hooked as Sailor to his balls. The rats and mice would only incur his bated wrath if they strayed in the direction of a favourite ball. This, they soon learnt not to do.

  Otherwise, they were free to party, and such was their abandon that I dreamt of King Rat wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar.

  Apart from bringing Boo back to a frozen, rat-infested house, I could see nothing but clear skies — through the rain.

  And so we arrived to quickly discover there was water everywhere, save in the faucets. I had offered a cup of tea as I stoked the fire, and Boo donned shawls and scarves. The response of the tap was a loud splutter, and silence.

  In the city one does not contemplate running out of water, and until recently I had spent the last thirty-five years in a city, never even considering where the water came from. Years back, some smart consortium had decided the High Desert could be developed and fortunes made if a regular supply of water was introduced. As water was plentiful in the alpine stretches thousands of feet above us, the principals proceeded to lay pipes for the seventeen miles from Big Bear to the canyon. A cloudburst, from a very large cloud, ended the scheme. The land that some claim receives more sunlight than any other place on earth and was forever desperate for water was foiled by too much of it. The pipes were torn apart and scattered, and the project abandoned, leaving nothing but a name for the place — Pipes Canyon.

  Even though I knew that our water principally came from the eight thousand–litre tank at the back of old Ron Hopkin’s exceedingly old truck, the knowledge was, until that moment, without form. But the void was now filled with the realisation that water was finite. That we had run out at such a crucial and embarrassing moment was not material. There is, as many before me have learnt, no good time to run out of water. All the cleaning and preparations done to smooth Boo’s arrival had backfired. In doing it, we had exhausted the most essential comfort.

  I ran to the bathroom and tried the sink: it barely managed a fart. The pool, I thought: frozen and full of chlorine. The well: frozen. The stores: miles away and closed.

  ‘I know,’ I said with the air of unlikely optimism. ‘The water in the toilet tank. The ones we haven’t flushed.’

  It didn’t wash. Boo was not going to drink tea made from boiled toilet water, even though I explained that it was no different from that in the tap.

  I had filled the dog bowl high before leaving, and, in the cold, Sailor had ignored it. Boo caught me glancing at the bowl, as did Sailor, who wandered across and started drinking from it.

  ‘Have you noticed Sailor drinks by putting his entire snout in the water?’ I said, by way of diversion, then added, ‘Would you like a beer?’

  There was plenty of beer, a drink that Boo has no affection for whatsoever.

  ‘The hose — there’s water in the hose. It’s frozen, but once the fire’s going, I can wrap the hose around the stove, and as the water melts we can fill the kettle.’

  But frozen hoses don’t bend, as I soon discovered, and the stove wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, due no doubt to the fact that much of the rain that continued to fall seemed to have landed on our wood pile. The only dry wood was a stack of four-by-two beams, all eight foot long, that Tony and I had removed when we took out the wall. The rain seemed to be clearing when I donned gumboots and stumbled and slid down to the garage to a good-sized saw that Bill had kindly left. It screamed fearfully in the total silence of the desert, but soon I had a fine bundle of dry wood and the promise of heat.

  I took some pans outside, intent on collecting some water, hopefully before it froze, and returned in time for the rats and their little friends to make what looked to Boo a triumphant appearance. Verily did they dance and sing and parade upon the floor.

  The rats didn’t seem to mind the cold or the absence of water, but Boo did. She is not a girl overly bothered by rodents, but she sorely wanted a cup of tea.

  I scurried into the frozen wastes, and collected the pans. Tea at last.

  A truck pulled up out the front. It was Gina, carrying a steaming casserole that Carole had prepared for our first night. Gina herself presented us with a bottle of excellent Californian chardonnay before disappearing into the dark. But our mood was much improved.


  Boo suffers from a peculiar aversion to sea travel, due in part to a wave that somewhere in the Indian Ocean washed over her on the ship bringing the four-year-old to Australia back in the mid-fifties. She has a less peculiar dislike for the water bed, an invention, if putting water in plastic and calling it a bed dignifies that word, that, like its sixties cousin, the geodesic dome, never fulfilled its promise.

  But it was the only bed properly set up, and as the rodents had taken to warming themselves by the stove, we had little choice but to make our way upstairs to sleep, or at least huddle together, and try to find the warmth that had eluded us thus far.

  We climbed up the stairs, and then climbed up the granite on which the bed was perched high on a rock slab some four feet from the rock-room floor, and which had no steps. Having reached the wooden frame around the bed, we hurled ourselves up and into it, into the roiling water. Then we sank, down to the cold wood-on-granite base. En route, Boo lost a significant amount of skin from a shin that did not quite make it past the granite.

  We adjusted to the movement of the water, and warm air from the fire penetrated the room to the background of furtive scurrying noises. As we had left the rats and mice by the fire, I wondered what other creatures we were entertaining. We were soon to find out.

  The sky cleared, and through the sunlight came the stars, which seemed to be almost in the room. The night was moonless, and the stars brighter than any we could remember seeing.

  I went to sleep reflecting that Tony didn’t like the moon because it stole the light from the stars. Tony was the first person I have known to dislike the moon. It’s a funny old world.

  16

  The moon’s greatest admirers are the coyotes, and, Boulder House being the last outpost on Coyote Road, we had inherited a goodly number of packs or ‘troops’ of the animals.

  Most of ‘our’ coyotes live in what we came to call The Hilton — a range of rock, studded with large pinyon pine, oak, deep gamma grass, juniper, and buckwheat that separates the Hidden Valley from the vast sweep of Pipes Canyon. It’s the wildest part of the land, furthest on all sides from human habitation. Here, nestled in caves against rocks under some of the biggest trees in the region, where the grass grows tall and brown, they have made their dens. The only beast that threatens is man — white man. The Indians, to whom the coyote is sacred, would not consider killing the animal that they view with fear and with the sort of sympathy they have for all living things. Nature, as Stephen Powers, California’s first anthropologist, says, ‘was the Indian’s God. The only God he knew; the coyote was his only minister.’ Tonight, its song — ‘the saddest and most beautiful and most triumphant music in nature’ — haunted the skies above Boulder House as they met to forage or socialise, or just to have a good old howl-in to the full moon.

  Our coyotes live well. Deeper in the desert, where the land is hard, they have a more wretched appearance, and to the north, where snow covers the ground far more than here, they are more magnificently coated. Locally, they are the colour of the land at twilight: grey-brown and reddish, with a little white.

  I watched one evening as they took up positions around Sailor, who wandered down into their main drag a few hundred feet below on the desert floor. They were particularly organised, one fleeting shadow after another moving out of a canyon with what appeared to be precision, taking positions around the young dog. Sailor might not have been their planned dinner, but he stood between their pack (perhaps pack is the wrong word, as the coyotes live in small family groups) and the food that The Blade Runner leaves out some nights. They stood silent sentinels, five or six of them visible in the fading light only if you knew they were there. Sailor seemed not to. They were all around him, but Sailor was young and stupid. He would probably have fought, and, as he was on the way to their food, would have lost.

  The cliché that most wild animals will only attack if cornered is not accurate. If their food is threatened, they will fight. Sailor didn’t know he was in their way, so I clambered and slid down the ridge, and, as boldly as I could, walked past their points, calling to him. They watched, knowing exactly what I was doing, but I shivered in the evening air when I saw one flick behind me, potentially cutting off my retreat. There are stories of coyotes attacking man, but I couldn’t see them attacking a large male. As a rule, they will not mess with domestic dogs either. They know that an injury can mean a slow and painful death. Instead, they will watch and wait — wait until they have identified an easy target. Then they will send a female in heat out to lure a healthy young dog into an ambush.

  It was darker on the desert floor, and I lost sight of them. They were all around me, only yards away, watching, maybe just interested. Sailor came to me, and we returned through their ring.

  Inspection of their droppings suggests a good life. There are few seeds, indicating a good deal of meat in their diet. They rely on meat, mostly from rabbits, vegetables and fruit, and berries and roots if necessary. The white man put bounties on them, ignorant of their capacity to control rabbits. So the rabbits came in plagues, ate the grass, and starved the cattle. The Navajo, who lose thousands of sheep to the coyote each year, generally accept their deprivations in what has been described as a ‘spirit of religious tolerance’. An analysis of the contents of the stomachs of fifteen thousand coyotes has shown that rabbit amounts to 33.2 per cent of their diet.

  Rabbits were most evidently in abundance around Boulder House through late spring and early summer, but there are fewer about now in the winter. The coyotes, their friends the eagles, the hawks, and the snakes have consumed almost an entire generation. But the rabbits are in their holes making new families, more fodder for the food chain.

  Our coyotes are strategically positioned for the good life. There is food at Pioneertown, leftovers from the trash. The Palace is only a mile on the other side of the wash, and Sean, when he was the bar-b-q chef, would take great trays of leftovers out to the animals when the restaurant closed for the night. They came to await that treat, and would form around him in the dark. That was their Saturday-night outing — across the butte, through the wash, and into town.

  The mind of the coyote must be like a map. Every rock, stream, clump of grass, every bend in every stream, every waterhole, every hideout and cliff, is exactly mapped. The map’s dimensions include smells, sounds, the direction of winds, and even the whereabouts of the moon and the stars — all the information from long before man came here. It is said that the coyote came first and made man, gave him fire, taught him how to hunt, and introduced him to death.

  ‘The Apache say that in pre-human times coyote created “a path” in which man is doomed to follow — a path of gluttony, lying theft, adultery, and other wrongdoings,’ says J. Frank Dobie, who set out early this century to write a tract on the animal and who, over twenty years, wrote a large book. Powers, the anthropologist, noticed an element of ‘practical humor and slyness’ in the Pacific Indians that he had not observed in those of the Atlantic. He believed the Indians had acquired this from interaction with the coyote.

  That an animal could be responsible for an entire human attribute is a remarkable suggestion. Only a man like Powers would have made it, as he wasn’t the Smithsonian style of anthropologist. He was much attacked when his Tribes of California was published in 1877, but remarked he had ‘waded too many rivers and climbed too many mountains to abate one jot of my opinions for a carpet-knight who wields a compiling pen in the office’.

  All the human attributes lend the coyote characteristics that appeal to cartoon creators. Added to this is his ability to imitate. This may be the base of the common Indian belief that the coyote can talk. Ernie and Carole recently heard a dog yapping in the night. Skylar, their small dog, apparently recognising a friend, leapt up and ran out into the dark to meet it. It was a bunch of coyotes, and Skylar escaped to make a trip to the vet.

  Another night, they heard a loud meowing. At first they th
ought it was their cat, but White Kitty was draped over the sofa. Ernie went out to investigate. The meowing was coming straight out of the mouth of a coyote half hidden behind a Joshua Tree.

  The coyote legends of the Indians mould the creator with Coyote Man. Coyote is God the Father and God the Spirit plus the Devil in one. Each tribe has an Old Man Coyote, Old Man, First Creator, Chief Coyote, Coyote, and Coyote Man who came first and procreated earth and man.

  From the day of the arrival of the white man, the coyote has endured a bad press. So significant was he to the denizens of the Old World that the Spanish found it necessary to remove him as a religious symbol. In their zeal to erase pagan strivings from the souls of the conquered, they burnt and destroyed almost all depictions of the animal. Their records leave only enough to show that coyote worship was rife.

  Mexico City was once Coyoacan (meaning Place-of-Coyote Cult), and nagualism — the belief some humans could transform themselves into animals — was at the heart of its citizens’ beliefs. J. Frank Dobie speculates that this was a form of the werewolf belief. In the Aztec pantheon, three gods were represented by or represented the coyote. The Spanish suppression of pagan histories such as those pertaining to the coyote lasted nearly three hundred years, and reflected the church’s belief in the ‘diabolical’ nature of the coyote. This lasted until 1830, the very time when English-speaking people were moving into the southwest and coming into contact with him. The Anglo-Celts named him ‘Prairie Dog’ at first, but the Aztecs’ name continued to dog the animal like no other. Indeed, no animal name from all of North America has so penetrated both English and Spanish as the coyote.