The turnoff is just a little ahead, on the left.
Think you could live out here? I don't mean in one of the little cities out here, like Inyokern or Ridgecrest or, yeah, Mojave, where people congregate and try to maintain their dusty tract homes and keep their green yards green, and hope and pray that a Vons comes to their neighborhood soon. I'm talking about out here, out there, in the middle of all that sagebrush.
No, I couldn't either.
My Dad did, of course, that's where we're going. He retired out here, believe it or not, from the Merchant Marines. He spent all his life on the sea and then he traded it in for all...this. Sagebrush as far as you can see, and the winds blow like this all the time. In the depths of winter there's snow, a lot of it but it melts fast, and then the flash floods and the mud.
See up there, on my right? See that mountain range? That's Sand Mountain. See where it dips down there, near the end? There's a tunnel there. Some guy, retired from the Navy, spent twenty years of his life digging a tunnel to nowhere through a mountain.
Yeah. I guess that's how they are.
My Dad couldn't take living in a tract house. He didn't have a need for neighbors that he couldn't choose, didn't want to live in a place where you couldn't see the horizon for buildings. He and a friend, Don, bought eighty acres of this land, out here in the middle of nowhere, and he slapped a trailer on it and he called it home.
I think it's only another mile or so.
No, it wasn't just a trailer. There wasn't any water, so he and Don drilled a hole in the top of the aqueduct, and they used an old flatbed truck with no brakes to haul water back to their land. He'd pump the water up to a tank on a tower and that way they'd have flush toilets and faucets and showers, and water for the trees. Under the tower, because they didn't have electricity, he built a generator shack and he had a couple of wind turbines to help charge the batteries.
Okay, there it is. Right there. Pull in right there. Stop for a second.
Yeah, there are a few people out here. There are bike trails all through here, and all along the base of those mountains where the aqueduct runs. A lot of the bikers were friends of his, they'd come out here riding and then later take the family out to see old Chuck, the Desert Rat. The bikers would come by, the cowboys out here with herds would come by, and people from town would come out to see him too. My cousins practically lived here. Go ahead and drive up out of the wash.
They were people he could choose, that he thought he could choose, instead of being just people he saw. They came out here to see him. They'd drink beer and tell BS stories. We'd come out here and do anything. We'd ride the bikes and the ATC's, and shoot guns right there in the arroyo. For a while my cousins would come out here just to blow things up. We'd sit around a campfire at night and drink more beer, and we'd catch these little mice with puffballs on the ends of their tails. And the stars would shine like you've never seen.
The road's a little washed out here on the hill, but then it's straight on and flat. Over there, see that rock column? That's Robber's Roost, there's a bunch of treasure legends about that place but no one's ever really found anything, that I know of. Now it's a bird of prey sanctuary.
Dad had a bunch of lean crazy dogs, and we'd drive up into the foothills there with the dogs running behind, and he'd show us hidden springs and streams, and we'd pick up arrow heads right out of the dust. He made friends with the wildlife, like the raven that would sit on his shoulder, the one that flew into the turbine one windy afternoon.
Well, yeah, he always had his bottle. He always drank. He and I didn't always... well... hardly ever got along.
Everybody else was his friend though, whether they were good friends or not. He picked up a hitchhiker one time, and the guy stole his truck and drove it out into the desert with the cops chasing behind. Once they'd shot and arrested the guy they found a whole arsenal with him, in a bag. Dad trusted everybody, like me he had to learn the hard way.
That's a nice little pool there, must be left over from the rain. Hey! Look at that jackrabbit! He was huge! Slow down a bit.
This was his view. He could see this from the big picture window at the end of his trailer. The sun going down behind the mountains, the long shadows lying across the valley floor, those mountains rugged like they were sculptured. It never really changes, it's the same mountains every day, year after year. But it does change, I guess, the seasons and the wind push the sand around, rocks grow from the dirt like they're alive, and it's teeming with the movement of wildlife, like that jack we just saw. The bushes sway with the wind, they undulate like the sea -the sea that he'd left behind and then come home to, I guess.
Yeah, go ahead. And the wildflowers! And the smell of sage after the rain.
See that line along the foot of the mountains? That's the aqueduct. We should be able to see the tower soon.
One night when it was really cold -I think around Christmas, there was snow on the ground- Dad was running his generator, the one under the tower, and the thing caught on fire. Don saw the fire from his place a half-mile away, and came running over to help. It was a really fierce fire, so hot that it melted the aluminum aircraft tank that sat on top of the tower to hold the water. The water rushed into steam and misted away without putting out the fire, and Dad thought that the fire would spread to the trailer, but it didn't.
While helping to put out the fire Dad's friend Don had a heart attack, and he died that night. There's the tower, see it over the brush?
After Don died Dad kind of went downhill, it got harder for him to take care of himself. We'd come up here a lot more, to try to take care of him. But it was hard.
This was his dream, his home. He thought he could come out here and live, out here in the middle of nowhere. He thought he could make his place, and make it endure, with green trees and water and electricity. But the desert endures in its own way. Yeah, turn on that little road.
Two years after he died I dropped his ashes from a Cessna 150. My sister, Lisa, was here on the ground, and she said it was calm and hot and that there was no wind. When she saw the ashes drop, she said she felt a sudden wind blow across the sage, and through and around the trailers and the carport and the things left behind. She said the wind had a voice like a low buzzing hum and, though it didn't speak to her, she said that when she felt the wind she knew that Dad was back home.
Okay. This is it. We're here.
Oh, no.
Since I was here last, someone's broken every window in the trailer, see? And there, it looks like someone's been ripping off the aluminum siding.
The carport's collapsed, yeah, and someone has pulled off the side of the little trailer, and pulled out its cabinets and sink and everything. People got no respect.
Yeah, I'm all right.
It's like any other desert dream. You've seen them before, the leaning shack on the side of the road, the stone fireplace standing alone in the brush, the cafe sign on a road that leads to nowhere. We can only take so much, we can only live for so long, and then everything collapses, dust to dust, right? We leave parts of ourselves behind but the parts... they only last for a while.
And they're only buildings, after all. They're only a framework to hold us while we live and breathe and love. It was the desert he loved, and the desert endures.
Can you feel the wind?
This cache was placed to memorialize my father, Chuck Blakeslee, and the place where he lived. It was also placed to commemorate the property cleanup completed March 30, 2008.
The remaining compound, Don & Nina's Place, will be cleaned up in a year or so.
Please respect this place. Don't ride off trails and roads. Use the fire ring for fires. Clean up before you leave. Use only the wash for shooting, and please don't shoot glass objects.
Congratulations to WeikHikes for the First Time Find!