by David Hirst
‘Have been, and I’m out. They threw me out right after the operation, which was fine by me ’cause they wouldn’t let me smoke.’
‘How are you doing?’ was my obvious question.
‘Well, it hurts a bit.’
George pulled up his shirt, revealing a massive fresh wound.
‘Shouldn’t it be dressed?’ I wondered.
‘Nope, the air’s the best thing for it, I figure. It don’t smell, do it?’
It didn’t.
‘And how’s the wife?’
I then realised why George was in such fine spirits.
‘She died under the knife,’ he said with a naughty smile.
‘Well,’ I ventured, ‘there’s two pieces of luck.’
‘They sure was,’ said George putting his truck into gear and cruising off with a conspiratorial smile.
26
Breathing like a hound down spring’s throat came summer — the real challenge of the Mojave Desert. In the minds of those who cannot learn to love it, the Mojave is synonymous with the most unpleasant extremes. Extremes of heat and extremes of violence. As we live in the High Desert, we can kid ourselves for much of the year that we are not actually in the desert. But when summer arrives, the lie is exposed.
‘The season’ ends because city folk stay in their cities, and locals try to stay out of the sun’s daunting rays.
There can be no pride in surviving autumn, winter, or the spring. That’s the easy bit. For three months a year — three months that feel like three years — mad dogs and Englishmen try to stay in shade or indoors until indoors is hotter than outdoors.
‘Wait till the summer comes,’ we were cautioned time after time.
‘We don’t mind the heat,’ we would reply. ‘We’re used to it.’
‘Yeah, I guess Australia’s pretty hot, but it’s nothing like this. You’ll see.’
Weather has a way of directing human behaviour in a fashion that city dwellers are scarcely aware of. It might reach 43 degrees Celsius in LA and even more in The Valley, but for the most part this heat is experienced as an inconvenience rather than a daily (and nightly) reality. August, we were gleefully informed, is like a bad LSD trip made worse by the belief that the heat will never end. August is the cruellest month. September might be as hot, but there is in the air a suggestion that the heat has done its best, a whiff of relief.
As the temperature rose, the house, being built into the rock, remained cool, but I knew it was time to master the workings of the swamp coolers that Bill Lavender had positioned at strategic parts of the building. Bill had explained the subject back around Christmas, which seemed a lifetime away. I knew they functioned or were supposed to function in the same way as an air conditioner, except that they used virtually no power and little water, and did not damage the ozone layer by releasing freon. They work by spraying a trickle of water onto porous beds of Aspen paper, which make up the cooler’s walls, and using a tiny engine to spin a large fan that blows the water-cooled air through a series of ducts and into the house. The result was an amazingly effective and environmentally benign cooling system that soon had to be turned off as the house became as cold as it was in the frosty days we had hoped were behind us.
While I fiddled with such, Boo was getting herself into a state over the emergence of a new threat — rattlesnakes.
‘The rattlesnakes have woken up and they’re hungry’ rattled the headline from The Desert Sun. It was the moment Boo had been dreading. The manager of the city dump, the article went on, had already killed three big rattlers in a week. Peter, a refugee from the old commie days of Czechoslovakia, did not remember them appearing this early before. Peter had escaped the brutal forces of that state by crawling through a forest and swimming a river, and became an accomplished snake man after finding his way to the free world twenty-five years ago. Peter had given up on keeping rattlesnakes.
The article explained this early arrival phenomenon. It was global warming. Or El Niño, followed by La Niña. Take your pick. The rains had caused the vegetation to go berserk. Everything was shooting up like a drugstore cowboy, and the rodents were having a field day. Jack rabbits bounded across the scrub, dodging their cotton-tailed cousins like cars on a freeway. Chipmunks, mice, and pack rats threw parties, and the rattlesnakes waited for their chance to gatecrash. They also come down from the rocks looking for water, and it was not unusual to find them curled up near the tap. An old man had recently bent down to uncoil his garden hose where a Green Mojave — the most deadly of all the rattlers — was curled up enjoying the heat of the warm plastic, perfectly camouflaged. By the time he got to the doctor, the finger that had taken the hit was completely black and had to be amputated.
It’s not that Boo is fond of black widow spiders or scorpions, but she is quite happy to leave them alone as long as they watch their manners. But snakes are a whole different game. They terrify her, even though most are not only harmless but practically a man’s best friend. Take the Rosy Boa. It is a smaller member of the boa-constrictor family, and has a reddish hue that is best described as ‘rosy’. It has no venom. It doesn’t even bite. But not only will it gobble up mice after crushing them, it will do the same to a rattlesnake, though I am not quite sure how. It is a snake you can give children to play with, as it seems to delight in slithering around one’s body — no doubt enjoying the warmth. After encountering one in the laundry one morning and admiring its beauty, Boo was placated on the question of the boa family, and even warmed to the idea of their being present. But her nerves began to fray when Boulder House was described as ‘rattlesnake heaven’, and especially when the rattlers started coming to the front door.
The locals, as always, were delighted to offer city folk advice, but, as always, the advice was contradictory and not altogether reassuring.
Always watch where you put your feet — and hands. Always carry a stick. Always carry a torch. They’re nocturnal. Always keep your dog locked up. Talk to them. Tell them you like them. Get a mongoose. Forget the mongoose — the dog will eat it. Get an outdoor cat. Forget the cat — the coyotes will get it unless the owls get there first. Get rid of all the vegetation around your house.
Get rid of the dog’s water bowl. Shoot the sons of bitches.
Get a goose. Geese love snakes. The geese appealed to Boo until someone pointed out that they also love water. Our swimming pool would have a nice coating of slimy goose shit within a week.
All agreed that baby rattlers are the most likely to inflict bites that could be mortal, and most dangerous of all is the Mojave Green. Apparently, it attacks both the heart and the nervous system. The little ones are worse, as nature endows them with ample venom to help them on their path to adulthood. But nature omits to inform them that a quick bite will usually deter its enemies. Sinking its entire store of venom into a large animal (for instance, a human) is a waste of good venom, as an eight-inch rattlesnake has no chance of consuming even the smallest of children.
In the end, we settled on a kind of peaceful coexistence on the property with Mutual Assured Destruction agreed upon in the immediate perimeter of Boulder House.
I had no fear of rattlesnakes, having dealt with their far more deadly Australian cousins as a kid in the Australian bush. Within the first week of summer I found it necessary to kill two, but only because they were virtually entering the house — one had crossed the porch — and I feared for Sailor and Boo. These were an average-sized couple clearly mating somewhere very close to the house. Having watched our beloved Harry (our first springer) decline following a snakebite, I reluctantly put a spade through their necks, and carefully buried the heads. One thing not common to the Aussie snakes, to my knowledge, is the fact that the rattler can kill when it is already dead. It is essential to bury the head, as its muscles continue to contract after it has been chopped off; if the creature manages to sink his fangs into man, woman, or dog, it will pump a
ll its venom into the victim. I guess it’s things like this that cause people to fear snakes more than any other of nature’s more unfriendly creations.
But if the snakes stay out of the house I maintain a live-and-let-live approach, as when an Australian friend, Woodley, stumbled on a huge western rattler a few days later.
Big Foot Woodley had just arrived from Australia, bringing an inflatable, floating bar, and while I was attending to the pool he had wandered off a few hundred yards to a ridge, where he came face to face with the biggest and loudest rattler I have ever seen. I saw him waving frantically from the ridge — not a difficult task, as he is almost seven feet tall and has arms the length of a standard pool table. I grabbed a spade and went to inspect the reptile. Sailor had already bounded over to check things out. A big rattler is one of nature’s finest sights, and one can imagine why Eve got off on snakes when looking at this coiled mass of gold and brown — its flecked scales perfectly woven for what might have been five feet. Sailor walked past it, inches away, and its rattle rattled and my blood ran cold.
The snake was backed up against a boulder, and I raised the spade to end its life. Sailor, oblivious to the danger, had wandered a short distance to launch an assault on a small shrub, which presumably harboured a lizard. Sailor has not the faintest interest in snakes, or, for that matter, birds, quail, or any prey that should concern a bird dog. Lizards and tennis balls had continued as his dual obsessions, although as the weather warmed he would take an interest in flies, spending hours vainly snapping at them. Like the lizards, the flies always escaped, but this in no way reduced his determination to rid Boulder House of these pests. He disliked ants, another of the plagues of summer, but gave up the habit after being bitten on the nose by an angered ant — a development that was to cause me to have to rush him to hospital, at 1.00 a.m. — a return trip of some two hundred and thirty kilometres.
I was well into The Ruthless Gun and enjoying a cold beer out in the courtyard when Boo burst in to announce that Sailor’s face was swelling and that he was beginning to resemble Bob Hope.
‘You’re imagining it,’ I replied, but she insisted, and after half an hour I had to admit that he was getting a queer look around the head.
‘A snake must have got him,’ Boo shouted. ‘We have to get him to the vet. Now!’
Sailor might have been aware of his swollen nose, but concentrated on enjoying the journey — an hour and a half of it — roaming the back seat and barking furiously at the cars that were travelling at that late hour. The nurse refused to even allow him to see the vet, and examined him in the outer office. She was good-natured about it, but insisted the vet was far too busy to deal with what she thought ‘might be an ant bite’. The springer pranced happily around the office catching up with the latest smells, while Boo argued that he had probably been snake bit — and was likely to pass away at any moment. I stood glumly by the door as the kindly woman explained the difference between a snake and an ant bite until a distraught woman burst into the emergency clinic with a small mutt that seemed to be bleeding from every part of its body. It was hard to tell what sort of a dog she carried in her bloody, tear-drenched arms. She shrieked hysterically about a pack of coyotes that had savaged ‘her baby’, and even Boo forgot the faint swelling of Sailor’s nose.
But that was to come. Here I stood, spade on high, ready to sever the neck of this fabulous great western rattlesnake. The serpent looked up at me, and it was clear from his look that his time had come. He could strike — and probably was about to — but it wouldn’t help his cause. He knew he was a goner, and it seemed sad to end the life of so magnificent a creature. But Woodley was watching, and I knew — as did the snake — that it must die. Then I thought of Sailor, whom the snake could so easily have killed, and slowly lowered the spade and stepped back. The rattler silenced his rattle. We watched one another for some time, the snake eyeing me balefully, and me returning the stare with one of admiration. The creature showed less fear than I felt. Finally, we left the monster on his sunny perch, and returned to the pool, Sailor springing happily beside us.
27
I lay in bed listening to the sound of a car winding its way along Coyote Road. It’s such an unusual sound out here that, on those rare occasions that I venture into LA, I keep looking up every time I hear a car’s engine, wondering if it’s coming to visit me. But on this not-yet-hot morning it clearly was.
I staggered out to greet these God-early visitors, and was met by Bob Dix and a man I had never seen before. He had hair down to his waist and a sharp nose below his headband. This was Iron Horse, an extremely skilled drum-maker whom Bob introduced as ‘being from Arizona and a friend of Crazy Fox’.
Bob Dix, the oldest regular member of the travelling circus that Adam surrounds himself with, is a refugee from the world of the rich. For Bob, the wheel of life has turned a full circle, for his father, Richard Dix, was a Western star bigger than Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, who were instrumental in Pioneertown coming into being. Richard’s heyday was the silent movies era, though he successfully made the transition to the talkies. Bob, as a child, would come out to Pioneertown when his father was a handsome household name. Bob inherited his father’s looks, but although he grew up in Hollywood with the kids of the other stars and made it into a dozen or so movies, he never attained his father’s fame. He is most happy telling tales of hanging out in the bars of Beverly Hills at a time when heavy drinking was not restricted to such places as Pioneertown. His stories involve much innocuous name-dropping. It’s difficult for them not to, as he hung out with the stars and acted with them, and has no choice when recounting his tales but to mention Rogers and Autry, Roger Moore, Bob Redford, and inevitably John Wayne as inhabitants of the world he moved in, mates and accomplices in great feats of drinking and partying.
Now he is back in the Wild West, living in Adam’s tiny cottage, a place where the party never stops. His wheel has turned, and I expect he will serve out his days in Pioneertown, and I hope they are long.
Bob had told Iron Horse of the unusual rock formations on our property, and Iron Horse wished to play his drums amongst the rocks. And play them he did.
The drums took Iron Horse about a year to make, and his connection with Crazy Fox was based partly, I learnt, on the latter’s abilities with the various skins required for various sounds. Crazy Fox, as a reader may have gleaned, is an Indian (of the Native American persuasion), and being so can take animals — for food and/or spiritual reasons — and is blessed with a particular skill when it comes to the drying and tanning of same.
Iron Horse, also an Indian, concentrates on the wooden bowls that make the drum of the drum and the tension of the skin. At least that was what I gathered in the time it took for the drums to be removed from the truck and placed in a triangle below the great rocks of the Hidden Valley. The largest drum stood about four feet high and four foot wide — at the top. All three drums and even the drumsticks were new. The product of a year’s work was about to be tested.
Iron Horse took a position amidst the drums, raised the long drumsticks — their leather-clad balls the size of my fist — and put an end to conversation.
Iron Horse had not come to play for me — he had not previously known of my existence, but I was damned happy he had come. The Hidden Valley filled with sounds it might have heard one hundred or one thousand years ago, but sure hadn’t heard for a while. The music cascaded off the rocks and then seemed to flow down the valley, following the old watercourse, and across the flatlands below. There was no pause, beat, or let-up in the sound, which was more like a melodic rumble. After ten minutes or so, Iron Horse was satisfied. The drums were good. We shook hands and agreed to meet up again soon at one of the local drumming circles.
While the Hounds of Spring cause Tony to disappear to Wisconsin’s cooler climes, they also drive Frances and John away from their idyll in San Felipe to summer in Pipes Canyon. It says something about how h
ot it gets in the Gulf of Cortez that anyone even vaguely in their right mind would rather summer in the High Desert. Even Tony has the good sense to flee, and Tony will toil for sixteen hours a day and complain about being overpaid. I suspect that John and Frances return to feed their coyotes, who by the summer have eaten most of the spring quail and the slower rabbits. They then take to hanging about the cottage that comprises one of the confusing number of homes that these two old outlaws occupy. Their Pipes Canyon home sits a mile from where I sit, and in the summertime the coyotes prance outside amongst the rocks and low brush, awaiting the feast to be bestowed on them by their septuagenarian hosts.
The coyotes, being democrats at heart, have taken to picking up their bowls and carrying them off to share their good fortune with the rest of the pack, an activity that causes John and Frances some irritation. They do not object to this habit, being democrats themselves, but the loss each evening of half-a-dozen food bowls taxes their patience and their pockets. I personally don’t approve of feeding wild animals at all, as we don’t need a pack of coyotes baying around the house here on Coyote Road and eating not just their own dinner but the dog’s. I doubt they could catch Inky the Cat.
But John and Frances have no dogs — except for the coyotes, who have, over the years, become as tame as our dogs — which means that they have reached a level of maturity required for a position at the White House. They are definitely not safe with children or nervous adults.
On a balmy (read boiling hot) summer night, one can sit on John and Frances’s porch and watch the coyotes come within spitting distance to consume whatever delicacy has been prepared for them. Their democratic impulse — to remove the bowls holus bolus — has forced John to nail the dishes into the very rocks. All this provides guests with a relaxed situation from which to intimately observe the animals.
Often, as we reflect on the nature of these shy beasts, the silence is interrupted by the sound of drums. A principal rite of summer is the drumming parties hosted by Adam Edwards. And what a host Adam is. He builds a huge fire pit, brings in as much Bud as his varying fortunes allow, and invites myriad girls from LA to entice as many of his mates as possible to dance around flames that frequently shoot, flicker, and spark six metres into the air. The music is provided by the vast assortment of freaks who frequent the mountains, the high plains, and the lower desert.