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CounterPunch
January
18 / 19, 2003
Mt Whitney Towers Over Death
Valley; Death Valley Doesn't Look Up to Whitney
By SAUL LANDAU
Wow, a vacation! The teenager has gone off to
stay with a sib. "Until the rise of American advertising,"
paraphrasing Gore Vidal, "it never occurred to anyone anywhere
in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world
of adults." Maybe we owe the very existence of modern adolescence
to the desperate need to create markets. Adolescence, created
as an advertising gimmick? I'm free to turn the dial to something
other than the top 40 or MTV stations. I surf for something that
will place me in my world, help me integrate my thoughts and
feelings and not alienate me further. The shows on the commercial
channels, however, appear to validate Vidal's observation that
TV has become "so desperately hungry for material that they're
scraping the top of the barrel."
The answer to tension at work, freeway
jams, John Ashcroft's threat to further invade my privacy and
George Bush's pledge to start a war, lies in taking a vacation
away from it all. Imagine, my wife and I will take three days
to just hang out and stare at Nature's wonders with all the awe
they deserve!
A trip to Death Valley, we decide, will
afford us views of natural phenomenon and a chance to breathe
clean air. As for pollution in LA, as Robert Orben noted, if
not "for our lungs there'd be no place else to put it."
On some days I think that even the rocks in my garden will succumb
to the contamination.
Drive north on a Friday afternoon, as
the radio alert on the "all news station" reminds us,
"You'll find the 15 north clogged with Christmas vacationers
en route to Las Vegas and people hot to get to the mall to take
advantage of those after Christmas sales." Angelinos love
the ever expanding Vegas, the creation of Bugsy Siegel, an insane
Jewish gangster who predicted that millions of people would visit
gambling casinos and entertainment palaces in the desert.
"Hey, I get a suite of rooms, free
food and drinks, see great shows and sit beside the pool,"
an acquaintance tells me. "All I have to do is gamble at
the high stakes tables."
And? I ask.
"I won once," he said. "So
it costs me a few grand every month or two. I can't resist the
idea of getting a free hotel room."
Another friend says he goes for the shows.
"Maybe I drop a few hundred into the slots and on the roulette
table. But seeing Wayne Newton at Caesar's Palace! That's worth
it."
We turn off the Vegas road, a conscious
decision, head north onto California 395 and enter the Mojave
Desert, or what should be renamed the "Mojave Desert Housing
Development for People who Can't Afford Homes in Urban Areas."
Billboards advertise three and four bedroom "units"
for sale for the low "100s." "Buy the house of
your dreams," one billboard entices. I remember Bob Kaufman
demanding that "the government stop cluttering up our billboards
with highways."
"You want to take a look?"
I say suggestively to my wife.
"Forget it," she says. "Why
would you want to live in a spot where temperatures rise over
100 degrees for several months a year and you're hours away from
a bookstore? Besides, we have enough trouble maintaining one
unit."
We pass "Okie Ray's Museum."
But it's closed. We laugh. Is this the heritage of the farmers
who had to leave the Oklahoma dust bowl and came to California,
what Woody Guthrie sang about as the "garden of Eden as
long as you got the do re mi." I wonder if the museum contains
photos of the real Okies or just posters of Henry Fonda as Tom
Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.
Towns are few and far between in the
Mojave as they should be. But developers have somehow gotten
access to enough water to build "communities" in this
unfriendly terrain and they advertise "dream houses."
More like a nightmare, I say to my wife.
An occasional ranch dots the base of the mountain range, a maintenance
shed, a railroad repair installation. The arid landscape extends
over the high desert; sagebrush, Joshua trees, infrequent jack
rabbits, coyotes, lizards and the hungry crows find lean pickings
in winter.
But the ancient craggy structures in
Death Valley endure. And we visit Badwater, 282 feet below the
level of the ocean's surface. We walk on the crusted salt floor
amidst other tourists from Europe and Asia and a few of our own.
I think about the phenomenon of driving
several hours to see the world as the original inhabitants did.
"Evolution" has added so many human features after
the dinosaurs died. What would a prehistoric man have thought
about the very idea of tourism, which includes Bud Light bottles
strewn across the vast crater-like landscape as pieces of ugly
sculpture? A vicious-looking cactus, less than three feet high,
has caught a white plastic shopping bag on one of its powerful
thorns. The bag flutters frantically in the wind, as if trying
to escape the ancient spines that have pierced its thin poly-ethylene
surface. Will the flapping cease before the cactus dies? How
many decades or centuries will this contest endure? Should we
add the history of plastic bags and flattened Coors cans to the
overall history of Death Valley?
Until 1849, history in Death Valley,
according to the National Park Service, consisted of the history
of pre-historic and now extinct animals, rocks, mountains, flash
floods, flora and fauna. Human history--that is white--history
began on Christmas Day 1849 when gold seekers (49ers) entered
the space occupied by Panamint Indians, Shoshones and Piutes.
What happened during the centuries of life that these indigenous
people lived in the area presumably doesn't qualify as official
history, even in this allegedly PC era. The road into Death Valley
passes The Lone Pine Reservation. Dilapidated trailers, pick-up
trucks and metal junk litter the front yards. A few poorly dressed
and un-smiling kids stare at the tourists in their cars. The
location of the Reservation doesn't bode well for a gambling
emporium--about the same distance from LA as already developed
Vegas -- to pull these indigenous people out of deep poverty.
Nor will the tribes offer their land for a garbage dump, the
other money-maker for some tribes. Although you won't find much
about their history in the free pamphlets, the tribes retain
a pride that has deep roots in the past.
Their history changed when caravans of
lucre-hungry white men thought they had found a short cut to
the California gold area. The successive caravans of miners found
some silver deposits and other precious metals and with each
strike new settlements arose in the valley. But Nature--in the
form of extreme heat and dryness in summer--drove the tough pioneers
away.
Many miners died seeking silver and even
gold. The rocks entice the greedy prospector, with signs that
metals galore exist inside them. The yellow flickers, the greens
and rusts, signal gold, copper and iron ore. Of course, the rocks
did have traces of all these wonderful metals, but the economics
of extracting them did not coincide with the supply.
The only enduring mining, extracting
boron, from which derives borax ("white gold of the desert")
did make some people rich. But wealth alone did not suffice to
tie human settlements to the harsh climate. By the 1880s the
Harmony Borax Works began to send 20 mule team borax trains with
loads of almost 50,000 pounds on their trek across the desert
to the railroad in Mojave some 160 miles away. In 1890 the factory
moved northeast to the Calico Mountains, closer to the railroad.
The tourists who visit these and other
relics, like Scotty's Castle, a kind of Jay Gatsby story in the
desert, see an orderly and controlled Death Valley. American
millionaires loved to build castles (not just William Randolph
Hearst) in off-the-road places. Since they couldn't be real king,
they could fabricate their own kingdoms, by buying large tracts
of land and finding architects to design royal edifices. Just
as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby and his real live ilk laid waste
to Long Island, so too do modern developers see the desert as
something to conquer for their own emotional needs. What does
one do with one's fortune after all? Give a little to charity
and try to satisfy fantasies.
Outside Scotty's Castle, buses with Japanese
and German visitors arrive from Vegas and park in designated
places, visit gift shops and snack areas; others come in rented
cars. They listen to hear National Park Service employees who
have obviously taken courses in storytelling entertain them with
sanitized tales of the past. Members of the desert club go hunting,
mountain climbers test their stamina and heart, nature lovers
kvell over the moonscape and like us, eventually head back home,
having seen a piece of relatively untouched Nature; nature in
its extreme Death Valley form is too hot to touch.
Like Whitney towering above it, Death
Valley signals untouchable power. Do tourists come away from
it thinking about what a nice day or weekend they spent "out
there" before returning to "civilization." I felt
humbled, as if the extant of low desert and badlands, with magnificent
Mt. Whitney in the distance, had put me in my proper insignificant
place in the vast and powerful organic world.
One day, however, our scientists may
figure out how to conquer these remote and forbidding areas,
so that we can turn them into more lucrative tourist sites or,
better still, factories and office buildings. The materials to
make these modern production and residential facilities all originate
in Nature, the kind we still see in Death Valley. The Japanese
family arrives in their rented car.
The father takes digital pictures of
his wife and two teenage kids with the vast landscape as the
backdrop. He then records something on his palm pilot and they
hop back into their car and drive toward the next tourist attraction.
These electronic artifacts, like the ancient rocks, belong to
Nature. They just look kind of different. I guess that's what
progress means.
Saul Landau
teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the
Institute for Policy Studies. His latest film, IRAQ: VOICES FROM
THE STREETS, is available from Cinema Guild 1-800-723-5522. He
can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org.
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