“Hello there, Horse. I’m fine, just fine. I was just talkin’ to your depity here.”
“Mr. Stanton, we’re going to take you down to the hospital in Smoke Tree.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Horse. Don’t much take with them places. My pappy went into one once. Never come out. Hadn’t never been sick a day in his life afore he went in there, neither.”
“Sir, I’m afraid you might have had a stroke. We need to have a doctor take a look at you.”
“What about my place?”
“I’ll stay and lock up for you and bring your keys to the hospital.
Where are they?”
“On that hook yonder, by the door.
Lock her up good, Horse. The back door too. And get all them winders. Some rough types come by here time to time.”
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.
Andy, go get the door open on your unit.
Mr. Stanton, I’m going to lean forward, and I want you to put your arms around my neck. I’m going to lift you out of the chair and carry you to the car.”
“Oh no, sir. I can get there under my own power.”
He put his hands on the arms of his chair and tried to rise. He could not. He sat back with a puzzled look on his face.
“Now don’t that beat all? Cain’t seem to get up.
Maybe you’d best help me after all.”
Horse was over six feet tall and slender, but strong. His body was so hard he looked like he had been carved out of a chunk of agate. Once the lieutenant got Mr. Stanton out of his chair and onto his feet, he picked the old man up as if he weighed no more than a child.
I moved ahead of Horse and pulled the screen door open. The lieutenant carried him down the steps. He and the deputy got him into the front seat of the patrol unit.
The deputy sped out of the parking lot and onto 95.
Horse turned to me.
“How’d you happen to find him, Aeden?”
I explained all that had happened
“Mr. Stanton’s lucky you came by.”
“It scared me when I saw him. Do you think he’ll be okay?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say the stroke was mild. When I leaned down, he managed to put both arms around my neck. When I talked to you on the phone, he could only lift one. And it’s a good sign he was talking by the time we got here.”
“Well, sir, I’d better get back on the road. I’ve got a delivery to make in the Mid Hills.
But I’d like to ask a favor.”
“Go ahead.”
“Can I call when I get home tonight and ask about Mr. Stanton?”
“Sure Ade.
Here, I’ll write my home phone number on the back of my card.
Call me, no matter how late you get back.”
“Thank you, sir. I’m real fond of Mr. Stanton.”
“I can tell.
And thank you. You did a good turn here today.”
When I got to the truck, it seemed like days since I had left it beside the road and gone running back to the station. I checked the ropes securing the load, trying to shake off a feeling of unease.
I pulled onto old 66 and headed up the road toward Goffs. The raised bed of the Santa Fe tracks loomed forty feet above me to my right, covered with creosote and bursage. The broad expanse of smoke-tree-filled Paiute Wash spread away to my left. As I drove, I could not get what had happened out of my mind. The shock at seeing Mr. Stanton lying there. The feeling of helplessness when he did not respond. The terrible sense of inadequacy because I had no idea what to do.
I reached the section of the highway that wound and twisted as it crossed through Paiute Wash itself. I passed the old railroad trestle spanning the wash where it ran beneath the tracks, carrying the run-off from the slopes of the mountains to the north. As I had many times in the past, I slowed and looked up the wash to the other side of the trestle where a narrow dirt road, once a wagon track, led out of the ghostly smoke trees and off through the low hills to the ruins of Fort Paiute on the old Mojave Trail, abandoned in the 1800s
Then something inexplicable happened. I saw soldiers, dressed in wool flannel uniform blouses and drab-colored cavalry hats, traveling on the wagon track. I heard voices in the rising wind that suddenly began scouring sand and grit out of the wash. I heard the sound of shod hooves clicking against rocks as the mounted column, saddle leather creaking, equipment rattling, moved up the hillside behind the troop guidon.
Some months before, I had dreamed I was running the ancient Mojave Trail, which stretched all the way from the Colorado River to the Pacific Ocean, with Charlie Merriman and other Mojave Indians. They were barefoot, and I was wearing rough shoes of mesquite wood lashed to my feet with yucca fibers. But that was a dream. This was a full-blown hallucination in broad daylight under the glare of a desert sky so clear it was almost washed of color. A hallucination so vivid it made me wonder if I were going insane.
I started to shake. I pushed in the clutch and stopped the truck in the middle of the road. My hands were trembling when I lifted them off the wheel and held them up in front of me. When I turned my head and looked up the wash again, the troop was gone, as were the sounds of its passing.
I had driven up that road to the fort many times and poked around the ruins. But for the first time I realized in a visceral way that living men had soldiered there almost a hundred years before. Men with daily concerns. Men with friends and families somewhere. Men who were all dead and gone. And the awful truth about mortality struck me like a physical blow. Oh, I knew people died. I had been to funerals, seen caskets lowered into the ground, seen dirt shoveled on top of them while relatives wept, but this was different.
It was different because of the way Mr. Stanton had sat staring at the poorly-painted wall in his barren house while I waited for help to arrive. I had wondered what he was seeing. Now I believed he had been staring down a desolate, deserted road carved through a blasted, bleak landscape to a desert destination where buzzards dropped deftly from an ominous sky, pinions creaking, eyes shining, beaks agape, in anticipation of the latest arrival to the place from which there is no returning. And it had scared him. Scared a self-sufficient man who had lived alone for many years. A man who had survived trench warfare in World War I, the dust bowl migration, and the Great Depression.
I also believed that if I hadn’t happened by, he would have reached that destination and died in the dirt. I was struck for the second time in less than a year with the appalling randomness of life.
I’m not sure how long I sat there with sweat pouring down my face. Long enough that a car, horn blaring, swerved around me on that poorly traveled stretch of road. Shaken, I put the truck in gear and drove slowly on. My head felt like it was full of cotton.
When I reached Goffs at the top of the grade, I pulled into the parking lot at the little store and sat there with my own thoughts for a long time before I got out. I checked the load again and made a few adjustments. Then I went inside for a Dr. Pepper.
“Howdy, Ade. Don’t often see you out this way of a week day.”
“Hello Mr. Sweeny. Taking a load from the lumber yard up to the Stonebridge place.”
“Might want to take the long way ‘round. Had us a pretty good rain Monday night. Some of the lads from the OX said the road through Von Trigger Wash is in bad shape.”
“Then Watson’s Wash is probably worse.”
“Sure to be.
Ain’t this something? Dryer than a popcorn fart out here for years and years, and then in 1959 we started to get some good rains. Now we’re even getting rain in the early summer. Never seen that in all my years out here.
I’ll bet you want a Dr. Pepper.”
“Yessir.”
I paid for my drink.
“So long, Mr. Sweeny. Thanks for the information. You saved me a lot of trouble.”
“Any time, Ade.”
I got back in the truck. I opened my Dr. Pepper and took a drink. And once again was s
truck by how odd life can be. Twenty minutes before, I had been sitting in the middle of the road with my hands shaking, thinking deep thoughts about mortality. Now I was drinking a bottle of pop.
I pulled onto the road and headed west, passing the turnoff for Lanfair Road and continuing on old 66.
With Hackberry Mountain looming large on the north, I started down the long rise of the vast Fenner Valley. The Fenner Hills were ahead of me and to my northwest. When I left the plateau, the valley spread out below me, a huge empty space that could have held all of the city of Los Angeles. A space inhabited by fifty people at the most
I could see two dust devils spinning across the valley floor. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was tilting to the west. The ribbon of highway shimmered in the heat, mirages forming in the dips ahead of me. Miles and miles of barbed wire fence paralleled the road almost all the way to the bottom of the valley before veering off and cutting directly north, receding into the distance until it could no longer be seen. I passed the abandoned gas station at Fenner with its collection of slowly rusting, junked cars. Then the road bent southwest toward Essex where old 66 and new 66 would reunite.
When I reached Essex, a wide spot in the road with a service station, a post office and a tiny schoolhouse, I took Essex Road north out of town toward the Providence Mountains. The road was paved, if poorly maintained, past the Clipper Mountains and the Blind Hills. When it hit the Clipper Valley, the paved road veered west toward Mitchell’s caverns. Black Canyon Road, broad but unpaved, led directly to the north. I took the unpaved road.
As soon as I left the pavement, a plume of dust, fine as butterfly glitter, began to billow hundreds of feet into the air behind and above the truck. The sound of the tires changed from a high-pitched whine to a ripping noise. Below thirty miles an hour, the truck yawed and swayed. At forty, the ride smoothed out and the truck seemed to almost float on a fine layer of dust atop the roadbed, just at the edge of being out of control.
Every time a heavily washboarded section appeared, I would have to slow down to a crawl and suffer through a series of jarring bumps that made me clench my jaw to keep my teeth from knocking together. Then the road would smooth out again, and I could pick up speed.
When I approached a dip, I pumped the brakes to slough off speed, so the heavily laden truck would not bottom on its springs and fling the load off the back. Every time I slowed down, the dust behind me caught up and filled the cab with a silty, dry mist. I wished I had brought a bandana to tie over my mouth.
It was hot, bumpy, noisy, dusty, and frustrating.
I was in the middle of nowhere, out back of beyond. The main highway was now far, far behind me, and I knew if I stopped I would be surrounded by the incredible stillness of the Mojave.
As I climbed higher, the glaringly white sky of the valley floor gave way to one so blue and deep it seemed to draw off into the blackness of space. The character of the land began to change. Creosote and white bursage transitioned to blackbrush, cholla cactus, catclaw and yucca. There was desert willow in the washes. The sloping hillsides were littered with volcanic rock: some of it solid black and some brown. The brown rocks were covered with desert varnish, giving them a reddish patina.
Gradually, the air began to cool, and the hills showed a green tint from the recent rain. Canyon country rose on both sides of the road. Joshua trees, junipers, pinyon pines and scrub oak began to appear among the cactus.
I passed the turnoff to the 71L ranch in the bottom of a broad wash. The sand was very soft, so I had to sustain just the right speed. To slow down would leave me stuck in the sand, but moving too fast would make the back end of the truck begin to slew out of control. I realized I was gripping the wheel so tightly my fingers hurt.
I got through the wash and began climbing again, the bulk of Wild Horse Mesa on my left. I was afraid the load may have shifted while I getting through the wash, so I stopped near Hole-in-the Wall to inspect.
When I got out, I was wrapped in stillness. A stillness in which the unimportant and non-essential had been stripped away, leaving a quiet world waiting for sound. Every noise I made: the door opening; the crunch of my boots on the road; the sound of the cap unscrewing from the dripping, canvas desert bag; expanded into the stillness before being swallowed, leaving behind the barely audible wind and the thrum of the wings of small birds flitting from shrub to shrub
I stood for a long time, taking sips of the musty-tasting, lukewarm water from the bag and letting the stillness fill my head and slow my heart. I was home. Home in the place sacred to me: the mountains of the Eastern Mojave. The only place I felt I belonged anymore.
I thought again about the strange hallucination in Paiute Wash.
“Buddy,” I said out loud, “maybe you’ve been spending too much time alone out this way.”
As I stood there thinking about that strange experience, I realized there was another side to that story. Those soldiers had been patrolling the Mojave Road, patrolling to protect mail riders and white travelers from the Paiute, Chemehuevi and Mojave Indians. Indians who were the ancestors of Mojave and Chemehuevi kids I went to school with in Smoke Tree.
One of the old men in the Mojave Village near Smoke Tree, Webster Charles, had been born before Camp Cady, Camp Marl Springs, Camp Rock Springs and Fort Paiute had been abandoned in 1868. I wondered what he thought of the role the soldiers had played. I would like to have asked Mr. Charles about that, but my Mojave friend, Billy Braithwaite, once told me there was no way the old man would ever talk to me about anything concerning Mojave history and culture.
I got back in the truck and continued on my way. Table Top Mountain dominated the view to my north, and the strangely striated rocks of the Woods Mountains rose to the northeast.
When the road crested the Mid Hills, Round Valley spread out below me, filled with juniper, yucca, Joshua trees and blackbrush. To the northeast, I could see the Pinto Mountains, my destination.
At the bottom of the valley where Cedar Canyon Road and Black Canyon Road intersected, I drove past the dense stand of chamisa beside the road and turned east onto Cedar Canyon. The road began to rise. Table Top Mountain now turned on the southern horizon as I drove toward Pinto Mountain and the Box S ranch owned by John Stonebridge.
In a few miles, I turned north onto the road John’s father had carved out of the valley floor. Because of the topography of Pinto Mountain, the road he cut could not climb straight to the large shelf halfway up the mountain where he built his ranch. Instead, the road wound around the base of the mountain and came in from the west, where a series of switchbacks led up the mountainside to the ranch.
Unless you’ve ever visited a working, desert ranch, it’s hard to imagine the isolation of such a place. To coax a living out of such unyielding land is an amazing accomplishment. There are many easier ways to earn your daily bread.
Because I spent so much time in these desert mountains, I was familiar with most of the ranches spread throughout the vast area: the OX, Valley View, Kessler Springs, Gold Valley and 71L. None of them had buildings that were completely finished. There was usually a tumbledown addition or two attached to the main building. There were middens out behind the main buildings full of glass bottles, tin cans and other detritus. And there were junk yards filled with abandoned vehicles and farm equipment of all sizes and descriptions.
The Stonebridge place was the exception. The main ranch house was a large, elegant, whitewashed adobe with a red tile roof. There was a good barn on the place. Perhaps not one that an Eastern or Midwestern farmer would envy, but one that was functional and in good repair, although the rough boards that covered the exterior had almost turned black under the multiple coats of creosote protecting them from the desert sun. The barn was not home to any farm animals. The barn’s purpose was to provide cover for pieces of ranch equipment and the rudimentary machine shop required to keep the equipment running.
There was also a solid, wood-frame bunk house. In the heyday of the
ranch, it had housed as many as ten full-time hands. Now there were only two, but sometimes more were hired when there was extra work.
Mr. Stonebridge had a substantial corral. No flimsy structure of pinyon and juniper posts; this was a well-constructed corral of almost five acres, outlined by railroad ties cemented into the ground and tightly strung with barbed wire. The gate was made of two-inch pipe, welded together, supported by cross struts and hinged into a railroad tie.
But the best thing about the Box S ranch was its location. Mr. Stonebridge's father had built the ranch into the side of Pinto Mountain. It must have taken a tremendous amount of work, but he had enlarged an existing flat area three quarters of the way up the mountainside by blasting and cutting into the mountain until he had the site the way he wanted it.
When he was done, he had stunning views. From his living room window he could see the sun rise over the Black Mountains. In the evenings, he could sit on his veranda and watch it color the sky as it set over the Marl Mountains.
The gleaming white adobe came into view as the International labored up the final switchback. There were no steers in the corral at this time of year. But there were five horses. They all turned to watch as I drove by. I pulled the truck to a stop on the flat hardpan.
I stepped down from the cab and stretched my back. It had been hammered hard by the washboarded roads. I pulled the water bag off the front of the truck and was getting a drink when I heard a voice behind me.
“You don’t have to drink that warm water. Come inside and get something cold.”
I turned around. A beautiful woman was walking toward me. My mouth probably fell open because the look on my face made her smile.
She was Asian and no more than five feet tall. Her black hair, cut in a page boy, framed a face with almond eyes, a delicate nose, and bright white teeth. She was wearing a pink T-shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s cinched to a tiny waist above narrow hips.
The only Asian person I had ever known was Mr. Lee, the Chinese owner of the Jade Cafe in Smoke Tree. I didn’t know much about Asian people, but I was sure this woman with walnut-colored skin was not Chinese.
Mojave Desert Sanctuary Page 10