Big Dreams (48 page)

Borax dust, cement dust, dust from the rock quarries and the gravel pits: I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed in the desert, not unlike a biblical wanderer paying in spades for an indescribable sin. My atlas showed acres of white space sparsely veined with thin red lines, Hill Truck Trail, Mirage Lake, and even a Doberman
Street. Which direction to go? I took Highway 58 to Barstow past sewage ponds, junked cars, and tire tread ripped from eighteen-wheelers, but Barstow brought no relief. It used to be a railroad town, but now traffic clogged its center. The old Santa Fe switching yard had the aura of a faded photograph.

Ahead lay Daggett and Yermo and then nothing for 286 miles. Then Needles on the Arizona border, a town that was the hottest spot in California on any TV weatherman’s map, nine times out of ten.

So I went south instead, toward Victorville. The peaks of the Calico Mountains stood out above the embattled air, which was becoming darker and thicker, more diseased. In Victorville, giant American flags were flapping. The town seemed to be eagerly awaiting the next war, any war at all. It was home to the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum, where Trigger’s hide was stretched over a fiber-glass body and postured in an eternal gallop. Critics had once accused Rogers of having the horse stuffed.

“Would you rather I put him in the ground and let the worms eat him?” the old cowpoke had responded.

Adelanto saved me. Every sinner in that godforsaken corner of the Mojave had convened there to frolic in the light of a crimson sunset. Adelanto had honky-tonks and watering holes. Under a special dispensation from the state, it had a casino, the Hi-Desert, where plungers could play poker, pan, and pai gow, a Chinese game of chance. It had a new massage parlor where the needs of the boys from George AFB could be answered. At the Hi-Desert Motel, guests had to leave a two-dollar key deposit and contend with a woman desk sergeant who’d seen it all and then some.

After the bliss of a long shower, I joined the gamblers at a poker table, Doc and Ace and Red and Shorty. They were people who were too old or too lazy to drive to Las Vegas, or people who’d driven to Las Vegas and were trying to divest themselves of the last of the money burning a hole in their pockets before returning to their homes in subdivisions elsewhere.

Twenty minutes into my stay, Ace looked at me funny and said, “You sure are getting the cards tonight.” I sure was.

An Armenian couple, John and Jasmine Mgrdichian, owned the Hi-Desert. The Mgrdichians published a bi-monthly newsletter listing their poker tournaments and praising their employees. They were considerate toward their customers. Several tapped-out gents were asleep on couches and in chairs when I walked into the casino the next morning, but nobody was pounding on their feet with nightsticks.

A man came over and sat at the table where I was sipping coffee and savoring my windfall profit of eighty-four dollars—not Ace or Doc but Carl, a retired bus driver. Carl smoked Merit filters and wore a bolo tie. He had observed my hot streak and complimented me on it.

“Don’t you wish it could always be like that?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye.

I pondered the metaphysics. “Yes,” I answered truthfully.

Carl was seventy-eight, but he still got around and even knew The Oaks card room in Emeryville, near Oakland. His wife enjoyed gambling, too, but she only played Bingo, he said. They were staying in Adelanto a while longer to take advantage of the special fifteen-day gambler’s rate ($345) at the motel before they went home.

And where might home be? Lathrop Wells, Nevada, up Death Valley way.

T
HE CONCEPT OF DEATH VALLEY
had fascinated me as a child. I had imagined it as a great, sandy hellhole where the bodies piled up in stacks. In the valley, I believed, death came in forty-eight flavors. You could be bit by a rattlesnake, slaughtered by Indians, or fried in your skin by the sun. Worst (or best) of all, you could die of thirst, your throat contracting as you limped in total isolation across the desert floor.

Death Valley had indeed made its name by claiming lives. William
Manly, a New Englander, had left a record of its power. He was a ’49er who had departed for California from the Wisconsin lead mines, traversed the Oregon Trail, and then went by boat to Arizona, where he elected to take a shortcut to Eldorado by crossing the valley. Several families joined him, as did the Jayhawkers, all single young men from Galesburg, Illinois.

The two parties entered the desert at Furnace Creek around Christmas and split up. Manly’s group went south and the Jayhawkers went northwest. Thirteen of the Jayhawkers would die of exposure and dehydration. The Manly party found a spring and fared better, although they struggled through enough hardship that Manly, a survivor, was able to publish a popular memoir of their ordeal in his old age.

In
Death Valley in ’49
, he recalled the moment when the remaining members of his party were liberated from their tribulations.

Inyo County, where Death Valley was located, had more than ten thousand miles of land, but the prevailing measure of density was about one person per square mile. The only incorporated town in the county, Bishop, had less than four thousand occupants. It was simple to vanish into the landscape, into the pinks and roses of the Panamint Range, on the valley’s west side.

Charlie Manson had brought his Family to live in Death Valley and had camped with them at the abandoned Barker Ranch in the Panamints, up Goler Wash, where the ground was so rocky it could scarcely be negotiated in a Jeep. No towns were around, but sometimes the Manson girls traveled to far-off Shoshone to panhandle,
shoplift, and sell marijuana. The boys made forays out to steal guns and cars.

Somehow Manson had managed to get his school bus into the Panamints. The floor of the bus was a foot deep with oddments of clothing, and the Family members plucked their wardrobes from it. Here in the mind-blowing heat and the unearthly desolation, they read about Hitler and about Rommel’s desert campaigns and did lots of dope and sex. Around the campfire, they listened to Charlie play his guitar and sing his songs.

At the Barker Ranch, the Family dreamed of melding with the Beatles and forming an elite corps of dune-buggy marauders to patrol the desert. In the aftermath of their creepy-crawling, they would be arrested by surprise in the Panamints—some of them naked, some of them stoned, and Charlie all in buckskin pulled like a nasty little Hobbit from his hideout in a tiny bathroom cabinet.

Death Valley had also figured in Dutch Reagan’s life. His career as a successful movie actor had ended in the early 1950s, and he had sunk so low that he was working as a sideman with The Continentals, a barbershop quartet, in the lounges of Las Vegas, when General Electric tapped him as the host of its new dramatic series on television.

GE wanted a clean-living, moral, all-American type, and Dutch fit the bill. He liked the job and even liked to tour GE plants and chat with the employees. His bosses marveled at his ability to charm both men and women. Because he was frugal, he always dressed in dated suits, but he had an unusual recall of names and birthdays and seemed humble for a former Hollywood star. In essence, Reagan was honing the political skills that had made him a six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild through the 1950s—a position he used to celebrate Republicans and bash Commies.

By 1962, “General Electric Theater” had run its course, and Reagan was looking for work again. His brother, Moon, an adman and a bon vivant, had U.S. Borax as a client. Like GE, U.S. Borax sponsored a TV show, “Death Valley Days,” but its host, the Old Ranger, had become a problem. He delivered his lines so slowly that
it took almost as long to shoot his two introductory minutes as it did the rest of the episode.

At first, Reagan didn’t want to replace the Old Ranger, but after his brother and his agent sandbagged him at a lunch at the Brown Derby in Hollywood, he sank under the weight of the dollars being offered to him and hitched himself to the 20 Mule Team. The teleplays dealt with subjects that he enjoyed, themes both western and archetypal, and also kept Dutch’s face before the American public—no small thing for the Ultimate Californian, who was already quietly running for the presidency of the United States.

I
N THE SWEET AIR OF EARLY MORNING
, before the sun was high, I left the Hi-Desert Casino and drove away from the Mojave Desert on Route 18, a road lined with yuccas and palm trees. It led me through Llano and Pearblossom, where roadside stands were stocked with baskets of fruit and sacks of almonds and pistachios. Truck farmers from Antelope Valley, in north-central Los Angeles County, were unloading their last crates of produce, stripping off the flannel shirts they’d put on at dawn and using them to mop their sweaty faces.

In Littlerock, some men were sitting in folding chairs by the California Aqueduct, improbably fishing in the manmade stream coursing through a wide, concrete chute. This was desert-style angling, fiendish and illusory.

“We catch bass and catfish, mostly,” one old boy told me, reaching into a cooler to refresh himself.

Near Three Point, northwest of Littlerock, the Los Angeles Aqueduct fed into the aqueduct system, diverting the Owens River in Owens Valley. It represented the first big water grab in the history of southern California, a coup pulled off by Fred Eaton, who was then the mayor of Los Angeles, and his associate, William Mulholland.

Eaton’s city had a burgeoning population of more than 200,000 in 1904. There was plenty of land left to develop, but the Los Angeles
River had almost run dry. Eaton saw the Owens River, some 250 miles away, as a resource that might be able to supply a city ten times as big as the current one and asked Mulholland to design a gravity canal on a scale not attempted since the days of the Romans. He guessed that the canal would cost about $23.5 million. The money had to be raised through an immense bond issue.

The project proceeded in secrecy. With the secrecy came skulduggery, chicanery, and rapacity. In Owens Valley, Eaton conned ranchers into selling their ranches, making no mention of the water plan. The U.S. Reclamation Service had an eye to building a reservoir for irrigation in the valley, and Eaton had to journey to Washington and lobby Teddy Roosevelt to kill the idea.

The aqueduct took about five years to build. Mulholland brought it in on time and under budget. The system went into operation on November 5, 1913. Thousands of Angelenos motored out to San Fernando to witness the miracle.

“There it is,” said a proud Mulholland, as the water began to flow. “Take it.”

I
N PALMDALE
, red roofing tiles and plastic gutters were stacked in the desert. Like Lancaster, its immediate neighbor in Antelope Valley, Palmdale was growing swiftly. Nothing was shrinking in California, I thought, except for California itself.

Palmdale wasn’t as close to Edwards Air Force Base as Rosamond, but the houses were fancier, and some military families were moving in. There were also many buyers who commuted to jobs in central Los Angeles, a trip that could take two hours each way and made the Hercules-to-San Francisco run seem tranquil.

In other sections of Antelope Valley, you still came upon windswept plains alive with poppies, and to alfalfa fields and some orchards. The fields, the crops, and the poppies were all about to go. They were to become another new town, California Springs, a suburb of Los Angeles built out of nothing, a Levittown.

I drove along an ordinary block in Palmdale and watched the neighborhood waking on a Sunday morning. The light was a soft and hazy gold. It made the big houses in their unscarred newness look artificial, as if a movie company had put them up and would tear them down again at the end of filming. On a lawn where the blades of grass were a vigilant green, as yet untouched by sneakers or bikes, a man in his bathrobe was standing with his arms crossed and staring blankly at his street, intent on a private matter.

The man appeared to be doing an internal calculation, maybe adding up some things—his cars, his children, his commute time, and his mortgage payments—and then dividing his insurance premiums by the sum of his property tax to try and arrive at a formula that might explain how he had come to be where he was: at the edge of the Mojave Desert, rootless, a Californian.

S
TILL WANDERING TWO DAYS LATER
, not yet ready for a descent into L.A., I was headed along Highway 58 toward San Luis Obispo on the coast when I passed seven pronghorn antelope grazing on the tall grasses of a fenced preserve on the Carrizo Plain. They blended so perfectly into the tans, golds, and whites of the plain that I almost missed seeing them. They were yet another museum piece, the last of their species in California.

The Carrizo Plain was west of Bakersfield between two mountain ranges, the La Panzas and the Temblors. It was among the most remote regions in the state and suggested a remant section of the Great Plains. It had the aridity of a middle-latitude desert, but the soil was good for growing winter wheat and providing seasonal pasturage for sheep and cattle.

The area had a timeless feel. Prehistoric peoples had left some paintings on a singular sandstone butte, birds and suns and undecipherable symbols. Soda Lake, a playa, was a shallow bowl at the center of the plain. Ranchers had once gathered salt from the lake to use as a preservative.

I wanted to press on before dark, but hunger got the best of me, and I stopped at a café that sat all by itself near the ruins of a motel. Ranch families took up most of the tables. A boy of six was sprawled on the floor by me, coloring with crayons. He had silky hair and blue eyes and had just finished first grade at the local one-room school. He would go there until he was ready for high school, he said, and after that he would board in San Luis Obispo, sixty miles away, as most ranchers’ children did.