Day 2: Bishop, CA to Mesquite, NV
Arborglyphs, Porno Grove, nature's studio lot, the lack of death in Death Valley, pupfish, world's largest firecracker (not actually a firecracker), marriage, old age
Just north of Bishop, Erick Schat’s Bakkery sells loaves of sheepherder’s bread. This is a Basque style, brought by Basque immigrants, two-step immigrants who went first to South America and then north to the gold mines of the American West. Mining being chancy, some Basques turned to sheepherding - it paid surprisingly well, required little English, and there developed a sense that herding sheep was simply a Basque thing to do. The situation obtained for a surprisingly long time - the first wave of Basque immigrants arrived in the 1840s; a hundred years later, sheep ranchers requested that congress pass a special immigration exemption for Basque shepherds, to replace herders called into service during World War II.
Flocks wintered in the plains and summered in the mountains. The sheep had each other, but it was a lonely life for a shepherd. Over time there developed a tradition of carving messages and images into the bark of aspen trees - arborglyphs, these are wonderfully called. Basque arborglyphs can be found throughout the West. They record names, dates, complaints (“If life is what the old-timers told me it was, my balls are carnations”), epitaphs. Sometimes they list the names of Basque towns, or even a street address in Spain, the simplest expression of homesickness. There are carvings of people and animals. Some of the carvers worked blue - there is a collection of arborglyphs on Table Mountain known as Porno Grove.
From Bishop we take the US-395 South, past Big Pine to Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills (we are still in California - the hills were named by southern Civil War veterans, after the Confederate warship the USS Alabama). If you watch movies you have seen the Alabama Hills. They are a kind of nature’s studio lot - baroque rock formations, grassy meadows, twisting rivers, blasted barrens, all against the stark white backdrop of the looming Sierras, and only a three-hour drive from Hollywood. They played Afghanistan in Iron Man, and various distant planets in Star Trek. Tremors was made here, a film about giant carnivorous worms that I saw when I was eleven years old and which I remember as a work of gem-like perfection.
A huge swathe of the cinematic Old West is illustrated by the Hills - Riders of the Purple Sage, Hop-Along Cassidy, The Tall T, Oh, Susannah!, Under Western Stars, The Charge of the Light Brigade (Errol Flynn, in town for filming, helped put out a fire at a local hotel).
Near Lone Pine is the Oyler House, all lines and glass, a midcentury beauty built by Richard Neutra in the sheer middle of nowhere.
From here we turn east, taking California State Route 90 to the CA-190, heading into the Mojave Desert. Rain clouds coming from the west reach the Sierra Nevadas and say nope, and the result is around fifty-thousand square miles of hot dry earth. CA-190 takes us through the northern portion of Death Valley - so-named during the Gold Rush but not, in fact, a place where many people died. For those making the overland crossing to California by far the most dangerous portion was passing through St. Louis, the site of a horrendous cholera outbreak. At the outbreak’s height it was killing north of two-thousand people a month. By contrast one man died in Death Valley, a Captain Culverwell.
Culverwell’s body was discovered by William Lewis Manly. As a young man Manly lead a life of somewhat manic adventure. He was born in Connecticut, raised in Vermont; when he was nine he drove a horse and wagon to Michigan. A little later he built a boat and sailed to Wisconsin, where he worked as a lead miner. From there he struck out for California. After many misadventures on the trail he found himself scouting for a wagon train that ended up stranded in a parched, barren valley (it was winter so they weren’t hot, but they were very thirsty). Along with a companion Manly was sent to get help. He walked for two weeks, often crazy with thirst, nearly to Los Angeles, found supplies, came back, saved everyone (minus the unfortunate Culverwell), and on his way out turned and proclaimed “Good-bye Death Valley!” And so Death Valley was named.
Manly made it to California, then went back to Wisconsin, then went back to California, where he bought two-hundred and fifty acres of what is now prime Silicon Valley real estate and settled down to ranch.
We will continue on, crossing into Nevada and taking the US-95 through Amargosa Valley. The land here looks like a rumpled beige shirt that stretches to the horizon. There is little sign of water, but in fact the Amargosa River runs like a thread through the desert, now peeking above-ground, now plunging away into hidden tunnels; and at an isolated geothermal pool named Devil’s Hole we again meet our friends the pupfish. The pupfish at Devil’s Hole are if anything even more endangered than their cousins in Owens Valley (the two populations belong to different species); they exist on a single small shelf of rock, near the lip of the pool, under less than a foot of water. No one, by the way, has ever figured out exactly how deep Devil’s Hole goes - aside from knowing it goes very deep. Two scuba divers died exploring it in 1965, and their bodies have never been found.
Aside from thoughts of the poor pupfish, we have to break the monotony a glimpse of the world’s largest firecracker, placed roadside to advertise the Alamo Fireworks store - although to be accurate, the firecracker in question is a large water tank painted red and labeled “M-80”.
After passing Indian Spring and Corn Creek we skim through Las Vegas, not down the strip but via the Bruce Woodbury Beltway, through tony neighborhoods full of nice houses that might seem expensive to us if we hadn’t just been in California. If we were so inclined we could get married in Vegas. The first wedding chapel here was established in 1940, The Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, followed shortly thereafter by The Hitching Post. There are now around fifty chapels. When Joan Didion visited in 1967 there were nineteen:
…intensely competitive, each offering better, faster, and, by implication, more sincere services than the next: Our Photos Best Anywhere, Your Wedding on A Phonograph Record, Candlelight with Your Ceremony, Honeymoon Accommodations, Free Transportation from Your Motel to Courthouse to Chapel and Return to Motel, Religious or Civil Ceremonies, Dressing Rooms, Flowers, Rings, Announcements, Witnesses Available, and Ample Parking. All of these services, like most others in Las Vegas (sauna baths, payroll-check cashing, chinchilla coats for sale or rent) are offered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, presumably on the premise that marriage, like craps, is a game to be played when the table seems hot.
Assuming that we are to continue on a purely platonic basis, it is back out into the beige shirt desert again on the I-15 North. Mesquite, our destination, was once one of the fastest growing small towns in America. It tapped a gusher of silver-haired retirees who craved dry heat and easy access to casinos. The New York Times investigated, and found a town in the throes of intergenerational conflict, with the olds agitating for a law to allow golf carts the right to the public thoroughfares, and the less olds wondering if the time may have come to flee into the desert.
Stephen Paddock lived here, before shooting sixty people dead with a rifle from the window of his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Strangely, Paddock had previously lived in Mesquite, California. There are only four towns named Mesquite in the United States, meaning that Paddock had lived in half of them.
The area surrounding Mesquite is strewn with golf courses, volumes of green grass mottled with cerulean water hazards.
Sources:
Speaking Through the Aspens, by J. Mallea-Olaetxe
The Mammoth Letters, by Jennifer K. Crittenden
The Age of Gold, by H.W. Brands
Death Valley in ‘49, by William Lewis Manly
Slouching Toward Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
On the Rainy Days in Mesquite, There’s Always Politics, by Christopher Smith