by Bill Barich
February of 1937, the farms of Iowa gripped in a chilling freeze, and there was Ronald “Dutch” Reagan boarding a railroad car at the depot, readying himself in secret to test the waters in Hollywood and beginning the process that would transform him into the Ultimate Californian.
IN TEHACHAPI, some teenage girls were talking about a recent Junior Miss Pageant that had taken place at their high-school gym. They were sitting behind me in a booth at T. Juanito’s at lunch, and over nachos and sodas they were recalling the epic moments from the pageant and also relaying previously unreleased gossip about which contestants had thrown up or had gotten the giggles before the main event. They seemed to find a seed of cosmic justice in the trials of the chosen.
Beauty mattered everywhere in the world, of course, but it mattered most in southern California, building to its peak in Los Angeles and falling off by degrees from that epicenter. Every big town in the South and many big towns in the North could be counted on to select an annual Rose Bowl Queen (Pasadena) or a Garlic Queen (Gilroy). Such contests were often assumed, however naively, to be the first tentative step in the impossibly long march to movie stardom.
I was able to dig up a leftover program from the Junior Miss Pageant and learned that there had been eight finalists: Becky, Amy, Penny, Kristy, Laura, Helen, Joanna, and MaEllen. Only four of them were California blondes, but almost all of them had affected the spiral perm I’d seen so much of in Bakersfield.
The overall sponsor of the event was the Tehachapi Lions Club, but the finalists had an individual sponsor, as well—Farmer’s Insurance, Benz Propane, Cee-Cee’s Boutique, and so on. On the back page of the program, there was a message from last year’s Tehachapi Junior Miss, Stefani Stark. She thanked God for her good luck and quoted Phil. 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
While I flipped through the program, I couldn’t help remembering my own adolescence and how for a time in my early teens nothing was as vital or as potentially defeating as the image confronting me in the bathroom mirror. I felt that I’d be judged by it (and I wasn’t far wrong), so each blemish or pimple struck me as a betrayal of the flesh. How I longed to look like an actor—any actor would do! Hollywood, the home of all transcendent beauty, was more than three thousand miles away, but I knew boys and girls in high school who secretly believed that they were destined to be discovered and transported to the Coast.
Similar dreams of glory must have prompted Ronald Reagan to board that train to Los Angeles under false pretenses. Dutch had seen his twenty-sixth birthday come and go, and he was craving more from life. In his suitcase, he was carrying a brand-new suit of white linen. He put it on after checking into his hotel at Hollywood and Vine, hailed a taxi, and rode uncomfortably through a stifling winter heat wave to Republic Studios, where he dropped in on some acquaintances, the Oklahoma Outlaws.
Reagan had met the Outlaws at WHO during his broadcasting sojourn. They were filming a cheapie western with Gene Autry, but Dutch, who’d been thinking about breaking into the movies, didn’t like the look of things at Republic, or the way that he was treated. He got a better reception at Paramount and an even better one at Warner’s, where a friend even arranged for him to have a screen test before he went back to Iowa.
This friend was a singer with a big band, and she did Reagan another favor, too. He still wore glasses, but she urged him to remove them and never be seen with them in public again. He did his test without them, and the Paramount executives received it so enthusiastically that he was awarded a seven-year contract at two hundred dollars a week, a fortune in those days. Dutch was on a roll.
No doubt Ronald Reagan would have understood the fantasies dogging those potential Junior Misses. The pageant was not supposed to be about beauty, its sponsors claimed—there were no bathing suits or cheesecake posing—and yet beauty was still the subtext. A Junior Miss could not escape from being conflated with Barbie dolls and fairy princesses and giving into a fantasy that she would one day light up the silver screen.
Our eight Junior Misses were lovely, sweet, vicious, churlish, and wholly human, a compendium of teenage desires in conflict, and after the pageant was over and the winner had been crowned, seven of them had started a slow retreat into the dimensions of an ordinary life in California, having seen the elephant.
TEHACHAPI WASN’T A COUNTRY town anymore, but it still had twenty-three varieties of apples, including Red and Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Rome, Jonathan, and Tydeman Red. It had turbines to harness the big winds and the fifth-largest prison in the state, where 4,802 inmates fought for 2,757 beds and made flags and office furniture.
Tehachapi was expanding so rapidly that Bob Carl, a recent refugee from overcrowded Huntington Beach, would say dispiritedly to the Tehachapi News, “Tehachapi’s probably grown twice as fast as we had anticipated.” It had traffic problems and land-use problems and irate natives such as Manney Cowan, a laborer and a pig breeder, who blamed all the problems on the newcomers.
“There’s a bale of losers in town now,” Cowan would tell the News. He had a hog pictured on his cap and looked like Haystacks Calhoun, the old wrestler. “Rather than thirty losers, now there are three hundred.”
There was a new golf course in Tehachapi, Horse Thief Country Club at Stallion Springs. The Southern California Golf Association had given it a rating of 72.1. Newcomers played it, and so did daytrippers from Bakersfield and personnel from Edwards Air Force Base. I played it once with rented clubs, hooking, slicing, shanking, and lurching my way to a 102 as I fulfilled a hitherto unexplored aspect of what it mean to be a Californian.
I was ready for the desert.
THE MOJAVE DESERT IN AUGUST. To contemplate it was akin to contemplating blank space or negative capability. You couldn’t rightly think about it. It could only be experienced.
Mojave was a word with many romantic associations. It felt good in your mouth, like a stone worn smooth in a stream, and conjured images of blazing sands, tired cafés, motels harboring loutish gunmen, and old pack mules trekking the last few miles to the boneyard.
The desert was a strict master, slow to reveal its secrets. It put a dose of pure anxiety into any fearful soul. Out on the backroads that led from one nowhere to the next, travelers were ripe for worry. Were there enough soft drinks in the cooler? Enough gas in the tank? What if you got lost? A person lost on a backroad might never be found. The Mojave had no use for a concept such as “enough.” It was a meat-eater.
In all, the Mojave covered about fifteen thousand square miles, fully a sixth of the California landmass. It was contained entirely within the state. The temperatures in summer were severe and lived up to their billing, but winters could be mild and pleasant, with brilliantly starry nights and occasional frosts. Between four and fifteen inches of rain fell each year, mostly in winter, although summer cloudbursts sometimes invigorated the desert, flooding dry washes and summoning a smattering of wildflowers.
Spring was a gorgeous season in the Mojave. The yucca sent out their white spikes, and you could smell the red blossoms of the ocotillo and the yellow blossoms of the paloverde. Creosote, not sagebrush, was the dominant plant. It grew sometimes to a height of seven feet, its gray-brown clusters masking the more tender vegetation beneath it, sea blite and pickleweed, salt grass, desert trumpet, and Mormon tea.
Wherever the soil was moist, there were clumps of mesquite and cottonwood. Bulrushes sprouted in puddles. Higher up, on the slopes, grew Joshua trees, all members of the lily family, their trunks twisted into crippled shapes. Above them were the junipers and the piñons. In a few isolated spots in the mountains, you came on relict white firs from a time when the desert had ample water to support such species.
During the Pleistocene, the Mojave had glacial streams running through its meadows. Great herds of animals grazed on the grasses, but the glaciers had subsided, the air warmed, the clouds thinned, and a dry, treacherous climate established itself. The herds died off, a mass extinction, and now when you
walked about, you saw playas everywhere, the salty, desiccated beds of dead lakes.
Three Indian tribes had made the Mojave their home. The Chemehuevi were hunter-gatherers of the middle desert. They were poor and primitive and subsisted on rats, reptiles, jackrabbits, and mesquite seeds. The Serrano also had a trying existence, but the Mohave—the largest tribe—flourished along the Colorado River on the Arizona border. They were farmers and practiced the typical flood-basin agriculture of the Southwest, raising pumpkins, beans, corn, and melons. They seined for fish, or coaxed them into sloughs and speared them.
Although the Mohave were known to be warlike, they could also be kind and enlightened.
“No indians I have seen pay so much deference to the women as these,” confided Jed Smith to his journal, while crossing the desert in 1826. “Among indians in general they [women] have not the privilege of speaking on a subject of any moment but here they harangue the Multitude the same as me.”
A chief known as Red Shirt impressed Smith. He was a favorite among the women and slept with any of them that he chose.
The Mohave were fond of travel and passionate about dreaming. It was an art to them, something to be worked at, and when they let their dreams drift into speech and become myths, the dreams so transformed acquired a purity and symbolic order as keen-edged as poetry.
Drifting was integral to any notion of the desert. The wind, the wind—things kept scattering through. Vultures drifted in the sky, thoughts drifted, the sands drifted, all in slow motion.
Human drifters were hugely present, people who collected Depression-era milk bottles and paintings of Haile Selassie, people hiding out, people with grave mental disorders, survivalists and shotgun buffs, charter subscribers to Soldier of Fortune, toothless hombres in touch with UFOs, dune-buggy freaks and dirt-bike commandos, men in love with dogs, people devoted to solitude, prayerful people, religious zealots and Christs incarnate, heavy users of crank and LSD, imbibers of Sterno, borax miners, bad dudes about to commit a crime or relaxing in the aftermath of one, Scientologists, blowers-off of small arms, illegal aliens, people who needed people, people who didn’t need people, and people who just didn’t fit with other people at all.
Praise the Lord, then, that the U.S. military-industrial complex controlled the Mojave. More than thirty thousand American military personnel were installed in the desert, with every branch of the service represented. The marines had a training base at Twentynine Palms and a marine supply depot in Barstow. The navy maintained an ordnance test station at China Lake. At Fort Irwin, where G.I.s had once geared up for the North American campaign, army boys did their basic. Edwards Air Force Base had the most advanced air-test range in the country, while the boys at George Air Force Base near Victorville handled jet-flight training and were assigned the job of defending Los Angeles against air attacks.
Nowhere but in the Mojave could you see such convincing evidence of the importance of the military to the economy of California. All day, almost every day, the whoosh of jets on the wing hovered over the desert, and the evening sky was streaked with contrails.
IN THE LITTLE DESERT TOWNS of the Mojave, life did not appear to be all that much fun. It wasn’t the sort of life that anybody imagined when they toyed with moving to California. The hot sun on an aluminum trailer roof, a bored dealer in a card room, easy access to chiropractic care—you might not even give up Akron, Ohio, for it. The desert people were frequently scraping by on fixed incomes, welfare, or disability insurance. There wasn’t any gainful employment unless you were in the service.
In a certain sense, the Mojave was still the Wild West, effectively lawless and too big to police, although malefactors were so numerous that a few of them did get caught and were arraigned at Ridgecrest Court, as reported in the Mojave Desert News. They were not, by and large, the kind of folks that you would pick as neighbors.
Timothy Marshall Bachman—Spousal abuse, being under the influence of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance.
Jeffery Paul Osburn—Being under the influence of a controlled substance, possession of marijuana, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a destructive device without a permit.
Maxine Case—Charged in 175 counts of improper care of dogs, estimated in the hundreds.
John Patrick Slaughter—Felony shooting at an inhabited building or vehicle.
Mariano Asenas—Possession of a deadly weapon while serving time at Tehachapi State Prison with a prior prison offense.
The destructive device was a cause for concern. I thought about stolen warheads, about somebody riding around stoned and furious and equipped with nuclear capability.
In spite of the debilitating living conditions in the desert, the little Mojave towns were growing. In Rosamond, the subdivisions were going up fast, even though high levels of dioxin, a carcinogen particularly lethal to children, had been found in some local eggs, a pig’s liver, and the soil not far from residential areas. The state was still investigating the cause of a Rosamond cancer cluster that had purportedly killed nine children some years earlier.
The new homes in Rosamond were deeply affordable. For seventy thousand dollars, you could buy a three-bedroom house. The buyers were senior citizens, commuters priced out of Bakersfield, and soldiers, sailors, marines, and flyboys. Here, in Rosamond, on the dioxin flats, was their treasured piece of California. If Rosamond failed to capture them, they could always buy in nearby California City, another subdivision in the sand, where the billboards advertised a lifestyle “worth living.”
Beyond California City lay the Desert Tortoise Natural Area preserve, a subdivision for tortoises. A familiar wind, hot and dry, swept across the Mojave while I slowly negotiated five miles of dirt road to an empty parking lot in a creosote jungle. Signs directed me to an Interpretative Center, an open-air structure with concrete-block walls and a roof balanced on two-by-fours. It would not have been out of place in Malawi.
On a bench behind a wall, all alone, sat a thin young man, Jeff Holland, whose eyeglasses were coated with dust. Holland had longish hair, and the skin on his face was peeling from exposure. He looked terribly forlorn. In defiance of the wind, he was trying to fix a tuna sandwich for lunch, studiously applying mayo to one slice of bread while holding down the other slice with a tube of Pringles. The sight of him was curiously monkish and devotional.
Holland, a graduate student at UCLA, was doing a four-month stint at the preserve. He specialized in lizards and desert ecology, but he knew a lot about tortoises, too. They were an endangered species that had tolerated every sort of abuse, he said, dead beneath the wheels of off-road vehicles, plinked at by rifles, trampled by cattle, and carted away as pets and souvenirs.
The tortoises were worse off than ever this year, Holland continued, because the greenery and the wildflowers that kept them alive were in short supply. It had rained in the Mojave but not on the tortoises’ preserve. He told me how frustrating it had been to look out over the desert and watch clouds break apart less than a mile away.
The preserve enclosed thirty-eight acres. A wire fence protected it from off-roaders and grazing cattle and sheep. Off-roaders and ranchers felt that such precautions were unwarranted. They assumed that the tortoise in its tanklike armor was a hardy creature. It had sampled the lakes and the meadows of the Pleistocene, and it was still around.
Actually, though, the ongoing destruction of tortoise habitat showed how the entire Mojave ecosystem was being destroyed. For the past few years, legislators in California had gnawed at the fringes of a Desert Protection Act without turning it into a law. The act would designate 7.5 million acres of the Mojave and the adjacent Colorado Desert as a wilderness area, thereby curtailing ranching, vehicular assault on the land, and the building of houses.
The Mojave Desert had already been appointed a protector in the Bureau of Land Management, in fact, but a recent report from the Government Accounting Office had criticized the BLM for not doing its job. The GAO accused the bureau of failing
to spend enough time or money on the desert—a serious error, because the desert, once wounded, was very slow to heal.
Some of the BLM’s attempts at protecting the Mojave were downright zany. Its agents had recently embarked on a misguided program to improve the habitat for tortoises by killing ravens, who preyed on tortoise eggs. They had set out poisoned, hard-boiled chicken eggs on platforms. The agents were selectively shooting ravens, as well, presumably believing that they could separate a good bird from a bad one, but the Humane Society had slapped them with a restraining order.
I told Holland that I was going to scout the preserve.
“If you really want to see a tortoise,” he recommended, “you’d do better to knock on doors in California City.”
Out in the creosote, the glare of the sun burned my eyes. It was tough to see anything in the desert. So many of the plants and animals had a protective coloration, and so much of the activity occurred at night. To understand how complex the Mojave was, you had to be patient and quiet and do some crawling. There were 120 plant varieties on the preserve, and quite a few of them were inconspicuous enough to escape all but the most inquiring eyes.
On my walk, I counted two lizards, one cricket, no ravens, and no desert tortoises.
IN BORON, not far away, U.S. Borax operated the biggest open-pit borax mine anywhere. The sky had a whitish cast, and dusty miners were driving through town in the late afternoon on their way home from the pit. Every working day, they hauled ten thousand pounds of borax out of the earth. They must have had bad dreams about borax, must have seen it drifting over them in powdery clouds.
Some uniformed lads from Edwards Air Force Base were handing out free coffee in Boron, informing the public about F-16s and B-52 Stealths. The letters they wrote home would all be like the letters we Peace Corps trainees had written so long ago, each beginning the same way but conveying a sharply different sentiment. “Dear Folks,” they’d say, “California isn’t like I expected it to be …”