Category Archives: Americana

A roundabout trip to Death Valley and back: post 2

Americana, Death Valley, Photography, Travel

Mojave sign-3515

We turned left towards Trona and, after a few minutes, passed a recreation vehicle area. This is an area where people who want to come to the desert to rip the shit out of it with their motorcycles and 4x4s – known as off road vehicles (ORV) – can just drive around. I don’t know the details, but the rules seem to be that you can drive anywhere with anything.

Mojave vehical rec area-3520

Giving both the TreeHuggers and ORVs separate playgrounds is one of those things that the government really seems to do well. Everybody is pretty happy playing in the desert. Speaking of which, when people think desert plants, they think cactus, but most plants in the desert are not cactus. The preferred survival strategy seems to be Wait around for rain, bloom and produce seeds as soon as possible, get the seeds dispersed, and wait around for the next rain. Which is why, after a couple of well timed rains, the desert will be filled with carpets of flowers. Cactus, and alot of other plants, honker down and sort of hibernate between rains. So, while they can take harsh conditions, they can’t take really harsh conditions like annuals.

Mojave vehical rec area Opuntia-3522
But, when the conditions are right, they can be very happy, like this Opuntia basilaris living between tracks at the Wagon Wheel ORV Area.

Further down the road, on the way to Trona, is the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake at Ridgecrest. China Lake is a misnomer, there is no lake there – atleast not what we would call a lake. I guess it is called a lake to sort of justify having a Navy Base in the middle of the desert. I am not sure why the Navy has a base there except that it is left over from WWII when the military grabbed every piece of available land and, now, they don’t want to let go.

Trona, on the other hand is actually on a lake, Searles Lake. The lake sits in a shallow basin and is usually very shallow although it used to be over 600 feet deep. Now what is left is a couple of hundred feet deep lake bed of dried salts and minerals that are being mined by the Searles Valley Minerals Company and Trona is, more or less, it’s company town.

Searles Lake-3541

I would like to be snarky about Trona but over the years, I have become sort of protectively fond of it.  When I first saw Trona, the mine – factory? – was run by Kerr-McKee and it was, by far, the worst place I have ever seen. As an aside; I hold the position that Kerr-McGee is the most evil company in the world and that was before I saw Silkwood. Kerr-McGee sort of makes the PG&E of Erin Brockovitch look like the Red Cross; end aside.

It seemed, then, that Kerr-McGee dug up the dried salts and minerals and blew them in the air – apparently for the fun of it. The whole area was covered with a gray layer of salt and mineral fallout. Everything, the rundown buildings, the dirt football field at the highschool, the road and all the trucks on them, everything. Now, with Searles Valley Minerals Company replacing Kerr-McGee, Trona is close to infinitely better than it used to be.

Sure, the football field is still dirt but the school buildings are newly painted and, most importantly, the dust is gone. Cars are shinny, buildings are clean, and there is a nifty shinny pipey thing across the dried lake. The town looks alive.  It is also worth keeping in mind that, without the Tronas of the world, we wouldn’t have computers or iPhones or the Hubble telescope.

West end @ Searles Lake-3535

Shinny pipe @ Searles Lake-3552

The rest stop looks pretty dismal, but not if you had seen the old Trona; and the new information kiosk has a good map of the area and real information. Although, I have to admit, the Biocarb® is a little creepy.

Rest stop @ Searles Lake-3557
Info @ Searles Lake-3559
Biocarb @ Searles Lake-3562

From Trona – at the upper left of the map below – our plan was to drive to Death Valley via a couple of old, dirt – rock? – roads over, first, the Slate Range, and, then, the Panamint Range ending near the small blue square at the bottom mid-right of the Google map. Double click to get it large enough to read.

Trona to Death Valley

Continued here

 

 

God, Sex, and Race: how swearing has changed

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, Politics, Religion

From everything that I have read on the life and times around 1600 – which is not very much, excluding the 1632verse – using God’s name in vain was a big deal. I mean, a really big deal. People didn’t do it. When I read that, it seems so strange that I adjust the words to mean that it was probably like saying fuck today.

But, now that I have really thought about it, I am convinced that people didn’t do it. It was taboo.

By the middle of the 19th, century, people did take the Lord’s name in vain, people might say damn you, but sex was taboo. Even indirect words like bastard or son of a bitch were considered heavy duty. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was considered a great book for it’s accurate depiction of Civil War combat and it does not have any sexual swearing in it – I have not read it in more than 50 years so it is possible I might have forgot them, but I don’t think so. I don’t think fuck – or, to push the limit, cunt –  is to be found in Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because they were effete – they were anything but – but because those words really were taboo.

Now, we use sex words. Michele and I are watching HBO’s Pacific and they use fuck all the time. But we don’t use disparaging words about race. As close as a white person gets to using the N word is to say the N word. It has become taboo.

The vice-president says This is a big fucking deal!  and nobody really notices. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and he is political history. No reprieve.

Here is a test:

Imagine you have an eleven year old daughter; she comes home from school and says Jane, that fucker, lied about me to the teacher…. Depending on alot of things: you might tell her that If you say that again you will go to your room for a timeout; admonish her saying Nice people don’t talk that way; just laugh, knowing she wouldn’t say that in front of your mother and she was doing it for shock value for you only.

Now imagine she comes home and says Jane, that nigger, lied about me to the teacher… Among other things, you would probably consider pulling her out of school and putting her in a different school. I know I would and – I have to admit – I am sort of shocked about that.

Slavery and Confederate History Month

Americana, Current Affairs, Photography, War, What's a man?

To me, from now, from here, slavery seems so improbable. Not informal, chance slavery like bringing home a captured souvenir from winning a war; but institutionalized slavery. It requires a belief that the slaves aren't really as human as the owners – how does someone do that to a person they are living with every day (and, more than sometimes, having sex with), it requires complex laws to define who are the slaves and who are the owners, it requires an huge infrastructure to  keep the slaves from escaping, it must, I think, require a preoccupation that permeates every part of society. 

That is why the whole concept of slavery in the south is abhorrent but not really real. And that is why a post, entitled Honoring CHM: One Drop, on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, is so horrific. With little commentary, it shows a picture of eight people and reprints a letter asking for money to educate them. They are  emancipated slaves.- eight individual, traumatized, human beings.

8slaves

The letter describes each one of the people with passages like this

Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old, he was "raised" by Isaac
Howard of Woodford County, Kentucky. When 21 years old he was taken
down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about
45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his
negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters "V. B. M." Of the
210 slaves on this plantation 105 left at one time and came into the
Union camp. Thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron,
four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm. 

I really recommend that you follow the link back to the original post. It is hard to read – at least it was for me – but it makes real what we often think of as abstract. Check it out.