Desert Sojourn
Mojave Reminders
Today we’re wandering through the Mojave Desert and the Morongo Basin from Thousand Palms to Yucca Valley and south to the Salton Sea. On our way back to New Mexico we capped our Mojave sojourn with a stop in lonely Rice, California. We used surface roads from Desert Center, another patch of nothing, to the Arizona border at Parker. I’ve often called the barren Mojave the least beautiful American desert, vying for that high honor with the Great Basin. Still, I’m drawn to its bleakness, and the remains of communities left to the blazing heat, blowing sand and acrid air.
It’s the remains of the Salton Sea’s moment in the Sixties that connect Rice and its short life as a World War Two Army base. Rice was the runner up to White Sands in Oppenheimer’s nuclear bomb sweepstakes, so you know it’s remote and was considered worthless. Both whisper a mid-century esthetic as do their booming neighbors in the Coachella Valley, from Palm Springs to Indio and the very graceful Borrego Springs just west of the Salton Sea. The Sea is surrounded by half dead villages built in the fifties and sixties. Half of the buildings especially the commercial ones are ruins. With no fresh water source the Sea has become a toxic stew of salt and agricultural chemicals. What’s left of Rice is the skeleton of a Standard Oil station and railroad cars stationary for half a century. The shoe totem is new since my last visit. There’s another half a mile east. People make art.
Somehow, at this time of year, the brightness and warmth of the Mojave is welcoming. Your words "Still, I’m drawn to its bleakness, and the remains of communities left to the blazing heat, blowing sand and acrid air" are a perfect description. Those things, oddly, pull a tiny thread in one's heart. Nothing could be appropriate for a Standard Oil station of the past to be bestowed with footwear of those who have walked after Standard Oil left the scene. A great way to begin a January morning!