Big Puffer Jacket Energy : Joshua Tree
We get in at night from Los Angeles in a black Ford Mustang with a deep rumbling undercarriage and enough thrust to throw us back in our heated seats. All those roadside taco vans on the way out of the city, along the underside of the San Bernardino National Forest heading east, passed by in a blur of colour.
Dusk, then dark, in California. The cold sets in quickly in the spring. So on our arrival in the Joshua Tree National Park, at Yucca Valley, two or three hours east of LA into the Mojave Desert, it was impossible to see anything at all, including the mystic trees. Nor even the fabled stars — the weather had been poor with more cloud and rain than usual. A heap of these glamping compounds are out here, all with fire pits and stargazing beds. From our tent, named “Soleil”, I hear coyotes howling about 4am. Otherwise there’s total silence. The smell in the air is woody and deep: juniper, mesquite, sandalwood.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars, declared Jim Morrison in his beat poem “Stoned Immaculate”. The perimeter, the edge of reason, the horizon. Jim was a frequent Joshua Tree visitor, as a doomed seeker of the strange, the unworldly and the psychedelic. Gram Parsons — my favourite American singer — died of too much morphine and alcohol in the Joshua Tree Inn in 1973, room 8. He told his friends, including Keith Richards, of UFOs above the desert. Onstage he wore a Nudie Cohn suit of cacti, pills, weed, poppies and a crucifix, inspired by this place. Two friends infamously stole his coffined body from LA airport to prevent it being flown to his rich family in New Orleans. They drove it back to Joshua Tree instead, in line with Parsons’ apparent wishes, in a “borrowed” hearse, then set the body alight at a spot called Cap Rock, where a makeshift memorial remains.
In the morning in Yucca Valley — lukewarm shower, travel soap in a ziplock bag, five degrees out, snow glistening on the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the west and big puffer jacket energy all round — it dawns that these trees, which are not strictly trees but tree-like Yucca brevifolia succulents, are humanoid. They have what appear to be heads and limbs. They’re very, very alive in this harsh and unforgiving place — beautiful, ghostly and haunted.
Most are about six metres high, with arrowed limbs extending towards the heavens like either an exaltation or a Slender Man, scissory garlands on the end of every limb. The Spanish name is izote de desierto (“desert dagger”). The Mormons named the trees “Joshua”, according to local histories, because as they were heading west to evangelise in the late 1800s, they thought the trees were pointing the way. Indeed, the Book of Mormon in Mormon 2:6 has the Nephites, a pilgrim Mormon tribe, marching to “the land of Joshua, which was in the borders west by the seashore”. Joshua was deputy to Moses, who was deputy to God.
They’re very, very alive in this harsh and unforgiving place — beautiful, ghostly and haunted.
U2 took this holy vibe for its masterpiece The Joshua Tree, a record about “spiritual drought”, according to music magazine Hot Press. Anton Corbijn’s iconic images for the album art were taken on a bus odyssey through the national park. Unfortunately in the accompanying text, lead singer Bono got his Bible mixed up, saying Joshua trees only grew in California and Israel. They don’t grow in Israel, only the south-west of the United States and a little bit of Mexico.
The park is huge — 325,000 hectares, bigger than Mauritius. It has two deserts at different elevations, the Mojave and the Colorado, and the trees cover most of the higher bits. There are three small Mojave towns, about 20 minutes apart heading east — Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and 29 Palms, with its huge military base, the Air Ground Combat Center, for training Marines.
We pack up from Yucca Valley and load the Mustang to drive to Joshua Tree for coffee, playing “Brass Buttons” by Gram Parsons again. The town is teeming with weekenders. It’s Saturday morning and the farmers’ market is in the main street selling the best berries I’ve ever eaten. Joshua Tree Coffee Company has queues out both doors and it’s like an Arc’teryx or Patagonia convention with all the clean-scrubbed LA hikers. The good breakfast place over the road is full. The lamppost out the front is like a counterculture ‘zine, covered with stickers in lime green and neon pink advertising bands and happenings, including stargazing and alien-themed events. The previous weekend a local band called Lost Hiker (“spontaneous jazzpunk”) played — an unsettling reminder of those who wander off into the desert with alarming regularity.
It’s my birthday, so we write my name on a ribbon and hang it on a Buddhist-themed wishing tree installation behind a shop. A younger man is doing the same, except he’s trying to reach the very top. “That’s pretty high, mate,” I say. “That’s fine,” he says. “So am I.”
Later, out in the desert, I see a national park safety sign warning “People Die Here”. The arid ground is full of mine shafts and seven kinds of rattlesnake. The weather can be extreme. In their book about Joshua Tree desert animals, written in the 1960s, Alden Miller, an ornithologist, and zoologist Robert Stebbins offered some grave advice for spotters in the heat of the day to “find a shady spot among the rocks or under a Joshua tree or beside a juniper, or even better at an oasis, and sit quietly, conserving water and keeping [one’s] temperature down through inactivity”.
There’s a feeling of course of a vast, dangerous emptiness — the promise and the threat of any true desert — but also an unearthly beauty. The extraordinary boulder formations, created by primal liquids oozing up millions of years ago, look like nothing else. The seismic cracks have an unnerving, metaphysical symmetry to them.
The indigenous peoples who lived here before the cowboys and goldminers came — this is a place of deep First Nations grief — used those rock formations as harbours for their ancestors and their art. The Mojave was considered — similar to the terra nullius declared of Australia — nobody’s land, empty land. The indigenous people of the Pinto, Serrano, Chemehuevi and Cahuilla cultures were moved to reservations despite their ancient history in the area.
The old cultures used the Joshua trees for shade but also for fibres, flowers, stalks and seeds. Ephedra grows wild. There are tortoises, black widow spiders and roadrunners. Vultures, hawks and eagles in the skies.
We exit the national park at the southern end and drive through a series of weird places, near the site of the annual Coachella music festival — the ghost town Desert Center, Lake Tamarisk (another biblical place name), then down the Redlands Freeway through Mesa Verde and over the Colorado River into Arizona. “Outside it’s America,” Bono said. He got that right. We are in Phoenix by early evening.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 11, 2024 as “Mojave in a Mustang”.
Originally published at https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au on May 10, 2024.
