Mojave Desert Sanctuary

by Gary J George

  “Hiddy, Ade.”

  “Hello, Mr. Stanton. How are you?”

  “Right as rain and happy to be home. I didn’t like that hospital.”

  “I’m glad you’re back. I stopped by on my way to the Mid Hills this morning and checked your place. Everything looked okay.”

  “Thanks. Horse looked around too when he brought me home.

  He’s a good ‘un, is Horse. Not many lawmen woulda took time out of their day to run a old man home.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Ade, I want to thank you. Horse said I might not have made it if you hadn’t stopped by.”

  “He probably made it out to be more than it was. I didn’t know what to do when I found you.”

  “You did just right, Ade. Yessir, just right.”

  “Well, good to see you home sir. I best get down the road.”

  Mr. Stanton thanked me two more times before I could get back in the truck.

  When I got back to town, I told Mr. Halverson about picking up Joe Medrano along the road and about Mr. Stonebridge hiring him.”

  “Now we know the job will get done right. Chemehuevi Joe is a heck of a carpenter. None better.”

  “Interesting person.”

  “I don’t know that much about him.”

  “Does he live here in town?”

  “Lives way out on the desert, somewhere down toward Vidal.

  He’s never told me exactly where.”

  More deliveries had piled up while I had been gone, so I went right to work. But all that day and the next, Kiko and John and Joe rarely left my mind.

  On March 11, 1961, President John F. Kennedy approved the departure of a four-hundred-man Special Forces group to help train South Vietnamese soldiers. On June ninth, 1961, President Ngo Dinh Diem requested additional troops to help train the fledgling Army of the Republic of Vietnam. President Kennedy agreed to the request and sent another one thousand troops. He also agreed the United States should finance an increase in the number of soldiers in the South Vietnamese army from 150,000 to 170,000. None of these events were reported to the public because they violated agreements made at the 1954 Geneva Convention.

  By the end of 1962, there would be 12,000 U.S. advisors in South Vietnam. Johnny Quentin, and Charlie Merriman, both Army Rangers by that time, would be among the 12,000.

  Chapter 9

  Smoke Tree, California

  And the mountains

  Of the Eastern Mojave Desert

  June 10, 1961

  Aeden Snow

  I thought Saturday would never end, but six o’clock finally rolled around. I headed for home. I packed up enough food for two days. I got a blanket from the closet. I picked out a couple of good books and put them in the trunk with the food box, the bedroll, the tank of compressed air, the small pick and the Army entrenching tool.

  I went back in the house and made a salami, cheese, peanut butter and cabbage sandwich to eat on the way.

  Dad wasn’t home, but that was not unusual. A freight conductor on the Santa Fe, he worked odd hours. He was usually only home for the mandatory twelve hours of rest before he marked back up on the extra board to catch the next job going east or west from Smoke Tree.

  Mom was on the couch reading a book.

  “I’m off, Mom.”

  “Be safe, Ade.

  Watch for snakes.”

  “I will.

  See you Monday night.”

  I got back in my ’39 Plymouth. The fuel pump hadn’t vapor-locked during the drive home from work, so the straight six started on the first crank, always a pleasant surprise. I made my way down Jordan Street hill. After a long wait, I managed to turn left across Route 66. In a few minutes, I was out of Smoke Tree, just another piece of the flotsam and jetsam caught up in the steady eddy of traffic headed toward the California coast.

  I took the same route I had taken with the second delivery until I reached Cedar Canyon Road, but this time I stayed on Lanfair until it turned into Ivanpah Road. I turned off Ivanpah onto the road into the New York Mountains.

  It was deep twilight when I reached the OX Cattle Company stock tank and windmill and turned up the faint two-track into Carruthers Canyon. I turned off that onto what was more of a rumor than a road into a side-cut canyon. I turned on my headlights. A few cottontail skittered across the road in front of me.

  My dad’s best friend, Lee Hoskins, owned an adobe deep in the side cut. Lee built the house himself. It was next to the mining shack his father had lived in while he worked a vein of silver. The vein played out in the early 1900s but earned Lee’s father title to all the land inside the claim.

  I had been coming to the adobe with Dad and Lee since elementary school. When I was old enough to drive, Lee gave me keys to the padlocks on the heavy doors. He told me I could use the place anytime I wanted. The only rules were: clean up before leaving and bring in wood from the stack outside to replace any I had burned.

  I got out of the car and took in the high desert perfume of sagebrush, juniper and pinyon pine. The canyon smelled more like home to me than the town of Smoke Tree.

  After I unloaded the car, I lit an oil lamp and made myself a sandwich for dinner. After I ate my sandwich, I read by the light of the lamp for a while. When I started getting sleepy, I dragged a cot outside. I unrolled my bedroll on the canvas, took off my boots and lay down. The narrow band of velvet sky directly overhead was filled with stars.

  It had been a long week. I was very tired, but for a while. I lay there thinking about Kiko and Dad’s friend, Mr. Stonebridge. I thought there must be something between them. After all, he was building a special room just for her.

  I stopped turning things over in my head and listened to the coyote chorus out in the main canyon. I was trying to locate the Pleiades in the sky when I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  I was awakened at first light by a flock of pinyon jays as they passed overhead. Their cries echoed down the canyon. I discovered I had pulled the blanket over myself in the night. Although it was summer on the Mojave, Lee’s camp was at six thousand feet. The hours just before sunrise were chilly.

  I pushed the blanket aside and got to my feet. I felt good, and I was happy. I had a whole day of hiking and dinner at the Box S to look forward to.

  As I always did my first morning at Lee’s camp, I scrambled up the south side of the steep, side-cut canyon. By the time I got to the top, the sun was climbing above the Black Mountains in Arizona. Beyond the Black Mountains, I could see the Hualapais, purple in the early light. In the distant south were the Old Woman Mountains, then the Turtle and Whipple Mountains to the west of Lake Havasu.

  In the near foreground to the south, was Pinto Mountain and the completely flat expanse of Table Top Mountain jutting over 5,000 feet above the floor of Gold Valley. To the southeast, I could see Hackberry Mountain, the Paiutes, the Dead Mountains, and the Sacramentos outside Smoke Tree.

  A huge expanse. Millions of acres. Most of it trackless. Filled with mystery. Filled with emptiness. Filled with solitude. The home of very few people. I picked my way down the steep side of the canyon.

  I didn’t want to heat up the adobe for the rest of the day by firing up the wood-burning stove to cook breakfast. I had a cheese, smoked ham and peanut butter sandwich washed down by lots of water from the artesian well behind the house. Before I left, I brought in the washtub from the back porch and filled it with water from the hand pump in the sink. It would go from ice cold to room temperature by the time I got back.

  I decided to hike to what remained of the group of buildings at the old settlement of Barnwell on the lower northern flank of the New York Mountains and then down into the southern Ivanpah Valley. It was a wonderful day on the desert. There was not a single cloud in the deep blue sky. In the wind that carried the scent of sage and the rank smell of cheesebush, the long, gossamer webs of balloon spiders glistened in the bright sunlight.

  On my hike, I made a lot of stops to poke around abandoned mines and
buildings. When the sun began to tilt, I hightailed it for home so I wouldn’t be late for dinner.

  When I got in the tub back at the adobe, the water was refreshingly cool but not cold. When I was done, I dumped a lot of dirt-clouded water off the back stoop.

  I toweled off and put on a long-sleeved, electric-blue cowboy shirt with mother of pearl snap buttons, my very best one. I tucked it into dress jeans: Levi’s that had never been seen the inside of a washing machine but had only been rinsed in cold water and line dried so they would retain the original indigo color.

  When I stepped into my quarter boots, I was ready to drive to the Box S for dinner.

  What followed was a wonderful evening.

  The hired hands had not yet returned home from Searchlight where they were gambling away their wages at the tiny casino or visiting the lovelies who worked out of the motel across the street. There were only four of us for dinner: John, Joe Medrano, Kiko and I.

  Kiko had cooked a meal of cheese enchiladas, chicken with mole sauce, and black beans and fresh nopales seasoned with onion, garlic, oregano, chili powder and cumin.

  “You don’t grow up in Salinas without learning about good Mexican food,” she explained.

  After dinner, we moved out to the veranda with flan and coffee to take in the amazing sunset flaming above the Marl Mountains and the purple twilight that followed. As the remaining color began to leach from the western horizon, bats and nighthawks appeared overhead in the darkening sky.

  Although the ranch was over a mile high, it was still the Mojave Desert in June. It had been a hot day. But once the sun went down, the earth began to release its heat. Then a strong, north wind, born in the Great Basin Desert of central Nevada and coming all the way down through Austin, the Great Smokey Valley and Tonopah, came ripping over Pinto Mountain. The wind seemed to shred the little light remaining from the sky. Complete darkness descended.

  In the dark, the wind blew hard for another ten minutes or so and then stopped as suddenly as it had started. In its aftermath, the temperature dropped ten degrees. A total calm settled across the vast desert landscape that surrounded us. The dry, desert air was soft and perfect.

  John Stonebridge got up and went inside. There was no electricity in the adobe. He blew out all the oil lamps in the living room, dining room and kitchen. He brought the remaining carriage lamp outside from the hallway and extinguished it after he sat down. In the desert that rolled away from us on all sides, there was not one light visible.

  Within fifteen minutes, the velvety sky was crowded with uncountable stars. The Milky Way formed a glowing, opaque highway against a backdrop of the evening stars from the southern horizon to where it was blocked from our view by the veranda roof. The handle of the Big Dipper was almost directly overhead, its sweep pointing the way to brightly shining Arcturus. Although I couldn’t see it from where I sat, I knew that somewhere behind Pinto Mountain the bowl of the dipper poured out the path to the North Star and distant Las Vegas. There could not have been a greater contrast between that garish city and the peaceful place where we sat staring outward into the dark and inward into ourselves.

  I heard the clink of somebody’s spoon against a bowl. Otherwise, all was silence until, from off to my left, Kiko’s soft voice floated out of the darkness.

  “John, I have to ask. How in the world did an Englishman end up in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”

  “Well, it’s a convoluted tale, and a long one.”

  “I would like to hear it.”

  “All right, but stop me if you get bored.

  My father, Benton Stonebridge, came from a fading but still secure aristocratic family. Then, in a move that added to the family fortune, at the age of thirty he met and married my mother, Elizabeth Wainwright, a woman eleven years his junior, the daughter of a successful merchant.

  Father’s family was wealthy in land and assets, but its wealth was eroding. The cost of keeping up appearances was nibbling at the edges of the once-large estate. As my grandfather struggled to maintain the great house at its center, began selling pieces of the property.

  Grandfather Wainwright was a merchant whose wealth was measured in pounds sterling, stocks, bonds and lucrative contracts. He and my grandmother were assaulting the bastions of the British upper class with floods of money. In essence, they were trying to buy their way into London society because, in spite of all their money, they were considered upstart nouveau riche. They knew they would always be looked at that way until they married my mother into a titled family. So my father, who would eventually inherit Grandfather’s lands and minor title, was just the ticket.

  How Father ever met Mother is a matter of mystery. He was rarely in London, preferring the quiet acreage of my grandfather’s estate to the cacophony, smoke, fog and dirt of England’s capital.”

  As John’s voice rose and fell in the night air, I realized I was in the presence of a great storyteller. His voice conjured images of a lush, country estate, round hills and rushing streams, as well as grand balls and drawing rooms in a London filled with the rattle, roar, fog and filth of the teeming, cosmopolitan city.

  “Grandfather Bucyrus Stonebridge, a widower with mutton chop sideburns and an actual monocle, was pleased his son was forging an alliance with a family that had both the wherewithal and the desire to support the Stonebridge Estate and great house in order to enhance its standing in society.

  In 1911, Mother and Father wed.

  Mother, who was delighted by the splash she had made in London society with her marriage, was not keen on relocating full time to an estate in the distant, barbaric countryside, regardless of how grand. To placate his young bride, Father bought a fashionable house in the city, so Mother could move back and forth between the estate and London society.

  A year later, an heir to the Stonebridge family name was produced. That, by the way, would be me.

  And so, Mother and Father began to live a life similar to many couples of their class. Father was rarely in London, and Mother was but an infrequent visitor to the countryside manor.”

  Kiko’s soft voice came again.

  “And where were you?”

  “My mother refused to give birth at the estate with only the services of a country doctor at hand, so I was born in the London house. After my birth, I remained in London with a wet nurse and two other nurses: one for the daytime hours and one for the night. Father returned to the country.

  As soon as I was weaned, Mother took me back to the estate, bringing a nanny and one of the nurses with her. When I was settled in and a suitable routine established, she left for London. My contact with her, which even in the city had been limited to one visit after breakfast and one before bedtime, ceased almost entirely.

  I don’t know how long I would have remained at the estate, but in 1914, the Great War broke out. As was expected of titled men of substance, Father accepted a commission and went off to fight the Kaiser’s boys on the continent.

  Much to Mother’s chagrin, I was moved back to the house in London. Of course, the nanny came along. Before the war had ended, a governess was added to the staff of the town house.

  Father experienced all the horrors of the first modern war. Those horrors included the boredom and wretched conditions of life in the trenches interspersed with the terror of the heavy bombardments that preceded every attack by the enemy. He never said much about his experiences, but I gleaned from Grandfather that on many occasions he led his men ‘over the top’ as they called the nearly suicidal frontal assaults on the enemy positions. On those occasions he was fearless, leading by example, screaming like a demented man, urging his troops forward in a pointless gambit to gain a few yards of dearly-bought ground that would often be re-taken within a fortnight.”

  Mr. Stonebridge paused. I heard him take a sip of his coffee, which must have been cold by then.

  Nobody spoke.

  I don’t know what the others were thinking, but I was recalling scenes from movies about that war and marve
ling that I was listening to a man whose own father had been there.

  He continued.

  “Because he survived every one of those exercises in futility and sanctioned insanity without so much as a scratch, Father gained a reputation among the soldiers as a charmed man. So many of his men tried to stay as close to him as possible during those frontal assaults that it must have looked to the enemy like they were advancing single file in their frenzied dash across No-Man’s-Land.”

  As if he were trying to marshal the exact words needed to tell the next part of his tale, John paused again

  In the stillness, I heard a match pop off a thumbnail and I smelled sulfur as Joe Medrano held the flame to a cigarette he had somehow managed to roll in the complete darkness. In the sudden light, his skin had the appearance of rawhide stretched over sticks and dried in the sun, so pronounced were the contours of his face with its high cheekbones and deeply set eye sockets. In that moment, he could have been one of his aboriginal ancestors from centuries past. The acrid smell of tobacco cut the night air.

  The companionable silence settled around us once again as we waited for John to resume his narrative. It was so quiet, I could hear the crinkle of Joe’s cigarette paper as it burned.

  John’s voice had an emotional quaver when he spoke again.

  “Then his unit was gassed in the trenches. If he hadn’t rushed to help a wounded corporal who could never have put his mask on alone, he might have escaped injury once again. After he made sure the badly injured man was protected, Father got his own mask on. He was a little late. He had inhaled a small amount of the mustard gas. The gas cored into his lungs like an insidious canker.

  When he was evacuated to England, the war was nearly over. His luck, which had been so good, had deserted him. The medal he received meant little to him, but he was always proud of having saved the life of one of his soldiers. Especially since the lives of so many of his men had been forfeit.