Ditto The Silence

A good friend of my daughter recently moved his Airbnb operation to Joshua Tree. He owns several properties and has them filled with coastal clients most of the time. It’s just the latest in what seems like a mass migration of young folks (labeled by many as rich hippies) who have discovered the mystical magic of the high desert.

These modern-day explorers of the high desert are building stunning new homes near the park. But that’s nothing new, many people have come before them. Way back in the forties, land up around the park was cheap and people were encouraged to buy acreage for building their own tiny homesteads.

The Small Tract Act of 1938 was designed to dispose of ‘useless’ federal lands by leasing up to five acres of public land to applicant citizens for recreational purposes for use as a home, cabin, camp, health, convalescent, or business site. The idea was that the applicant was supposed to make improvements to his or her claim by constructing a small dwelling within five years of the lease. Then the applicant could file for a deed from the federal government, purchasing the parcel for an appraised price at the regional land office. It gained the moniker ‘Jackrabbit homesteading.’

That trend last for only a decade or so. Gradually many of the shacks were abandoned and a lot of the land returned to the government tax rolls. In the sixties, another generation, turned on to drugs and rock & roll, found themselves lost in the darkness, staring up at a million stars. Thus, the legend of Gram Parsons, Country Folk and the mystic of Joshua Tree was born all over again.

In my most recent play, ‘By the Salton Sea,’ there are a lot of references to Joshua Tree and the attraction it has for a kaleidoscope of characters who inhabit the area. I love to get up there at least a couple of times when I’m back in season. Everything about Joshua Tree screams self-reflection and peaceful journeys to the far reaches inside your head. For all the changes the high desert has seen, some things just never change.

Far from the crystal-clear pools of Palm Springs and its emerald green golf courses lies another world. Less than an hour away, it is a world of vast nothingness peppered with the sad remnants of past lives and male exuberance. It’s still a place where stillness thunders louder than the wind and God has done some of his finest paintings.

Joshua tree and its surrounding communities embrace another form of existence; all of which is surrounded by endless horizons. The area is a mecca for today’s new age hippies, aging rock stars, artists and modern-day bohemians along with ordinary people all in search of a new beginning. It’s the place where people go to get lost and be forgotten.

The high desert of the Morongo Basin is like a modern-day outback of more than 9.5 million acres of public land in the California desert. Its home to old walking trails first used by Native Americans between seasonal encampments then followed by Spanish explorers and finally 19^th century gold seekers and pioneers.

Reminders of past human lives are everywhere. Abandoned mines litter the area with their relics of past hopes and dreams scattered about the ground. A restored railroad depot stands alone with its tracks still leading nowhere. Ramshackle old cabins planted amid miles of sage and scrub brush, sit isolated and lonely in the desert. The evidence is all there if you can look past the dust and dirt and castles made of boulders to imagine all the past lives that once pasted through this place on the way to a better life.

Much like the high-altitude cerebral vacuum of the San Jacinto mountains, Joshua Tree is the perfect setting for letting your mind wander and bumping into thoughts and ideas and feelings that you never knew were lurking there.

It means nestling into a large boulder, resting your head on its warm pillow of granite, looking up at the pure blue flawless sky and listening to your surroundings. The stillness will batter your eardrums with a quiet so loud that all you can do is retreat back inside your head for peace and serenity.

The high desert is a cornucopia of images, lifestyles, attitudes, ambitions, and dreams from a plethora of characters; real and imagined. It’s where you go to lose yourself and perhaps find the unexpected. It’s where the ghosts of past rock and roller stars still play their mournful ballads for no one to hear but the wind.

And it’s where writers like myself love to go and ask “what if?”