Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part IV
The Death Valley Suite, continued
Movement 3 - 12/28/00: Allegro non troppo, con molti scherzini
Lynnie and I decided to wake up early and have a full day of valley-combing. I was dressed and out by seven to check out the continental breakfast in the lobby. On offer were glazed or jelly donuts and coffee that tasted like it was made from twice-used grounds from a never-cleaned machine. What did I expect? Betty, the white-haired proprietress, in an influenza-induced stupor, coughed up loogies dramatically and swallowed them back down while I paid for another day. I spent a long time calibrating dried milk and sugar levels for maximum coffee drinkability. A brain-dead couple around my age were manning the continental breakfast table, but Betty kept having to tell them what to do.
“You get them donuts?” she said. “We out a’jelly already? You got that decaf goin’?” The woman manning the coffee makers started making more coffee, and Betty said, “don’t use that one over there” (indicating the coffee maker in the corner) “because the water leaks on that one and you’ll have a big nasty wet mess on your hands.” Right after she said that, the coffee helper woman went directly to that coffee maker and started pouring water in. Her husband (I presume), who was still sitting in an easy chair beside a plastic ficus and most decidedly NOT getting the new batch of donuts from the shop across the street as had been suggested by Betty, said, “Hey, are you sure it’s all right to use that one?” And the coffee woman went, “Yeah. Just shut up and sit there.” He shrugged, and cracked a dopy grin at me as I exited with my heavily doctored java.
Our first stop in the park, after listening to Rickie Lee Jones warble while we rolled across the hilly highway for an hour, was Ubehebe Crater, a large geological anomaly surrounded by a bevy of smaller anomalies, like a pimple and its attendant blackheads. We ran straight down into the gaping hole left by the volcano's last eruption (millenia ago, darling!), where the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. We then decided that one of the sheer walls on the opposite side of the crater looked like it was plenty scalable, and that we were going to climb it. In fact, there seemed to be a little staircase leading all the way up one of the slim gullies.
“Seemed” would be the operative word here. It was doable, but pretty scary, and about a third of the way up, it became less plausible to go back down than it was to continue climbing. We kept grabbing onto rocks that would come detached from the wall itself, and crumble apart down the cliff. There were one or two places where Lynnie and I had to stop and figure out how to keep going on our own terms, each taking a different route, but we finally scrambled our way to the top, and took a picture of the wall after walking around the crater to the other side again. We were sure it had been, oh two, maybe three thousand feet, but we later found out the wall was about 800 feet tall. Still, that’s about eighty storeys, and that’s pretty good for two city kids in trendy sunglasses and walking shoes.
From Ubehebe, we headed to Scotty’s Castle, where I learned that we were on one of the few discernible circuits in the Valley: Ubehebe, Scotty’s Castle, the Dunes. This was our, and obviously a host of other small groups’, plan for the day, so familiar faces kept popping up here and there, and it started to feel at times like we were all being slowly shepherded into someone else’s conceptual art piece.
I like the story behind Scotty’s Castle, which was definitely “Death Valley Scotty’s” own conceptual art piece. He was a known con artist who was a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and basically squatted on public land in Death Valley while trying to con bankers and such back east to back a non-existent gold mine, for which he had created an entire narrative and cosmology. He finally landed on this guy Johnson, a wealthy insurance broker in Chicago, who liked him, believed him, and sunk a whole lot of money into his “mine.” Scotty figured Johnson would never come out to Death Valley, but he did the very same year. He was immediately aware that Scotty had swindled him, but he fell in love with the place, and felt he had struck a good bargain anyway. He also liked Scotty for some reason, as did his wife Bessie, a tiny little thing of good old California breeding, who had graduated in the first graduating class of Stanford and become an erudite Methodist preacher. Scary. There’s a picture of her sitting on a rock with a parasol along the spring at Scotty’s Castle, age 50 or so, in the 1920s, with a little chiffon ribbon around her salt-and-pepper bob and a sly, coquettish smile on her plump, tiny face....
But back to her husband. So here’s this clean-cut old-school robber baron type who just falls in love with Death Valley and sees in it the promise of solitude (even back in the 'teens of the last century, people were loathing the hustle and bustle of the city–how things have changed, right?). In order that his wife will join him, he’s gotta build a house, and he decides to build this Spanish gothic monstrosity with all the modern amenities for millions of dollars, and let Scotty say it’s his, built on the profits from his gold mine, so that Scotty can deflect all the public interest and be left in peace. The Castle was never actually finished because the Johnsons lost all their money in the crash of ‘29, but this weird symbiosis between Scotty and Johnson went on for something like thirty years, while Bessie tended to guests and preached three-hour long sermons to the workers of the castle’s land and grounds. Wicked weirdness in the west.
The tours of Scotty’s Castle are conducted by true history geeks who dress up and pretend it’s 1939, the year Bessie Johnson started giving her own tours of Scotty’s Castle to defray upkeep costs. Just imagine the comments. I know you can. I gleefully joined in, coming up with the answers to our guide's little interactive questions when the rest of the crowd was too dull, and nodding a lot and chuckling politely at his tongue-in-cheek-ad-extremis explanations. The place is a trip, full of odd Spanish and Flemish antiques and custom made furniture, plus a zoo of wild artisanal tiles, dishes and textiles, all in their original states, just as they were lived with. It’s all very Thurston and Lovie Howell in the desert instead of on Gilligan’s Island, circa 1920s instead of 1960s. I guess Scotty would be Gilligan. I mean, it wasn’t actually Gilligan’s island, right? My favorite feature at Scotty’s was the opposing fireplace and fountain in the living room, creating fire running up the west wall and water running down the east wall. Totally western Zen.
Of course, nothing can compete with the Zen of dunes. From a distance, say about twenty miles away, the Death Valley Dunes lie on a southern slope like a sprinkling of sugar, like someone sifted out a few artful handfuls across the alluvial fan. Closer up they are monuments to organic geometry: Intersecting, three-dimensional sine waves curving on multiple axes, changing with the wind and the weather but remaining in sync, always occupying the same amount of space, if not the same exact space, sharing a stranded supply of velvety, post-Pleistocene sand. We trod across them for almost an hour before reaching the highest one, whose back we scaled as if it were a sleeping brontosaurus. A German family was at the apex of this great dune, talking very loudly, until one by one the children of the family unit slid down the face, and the parents marched in tandem back down along the ridge. Lynnie and I stopped at a mid-back hump, and watched a pair of air force SSTs spiral around each other in the sky, trailing long, thunderous moans that ripped through the purpling furl of the heavens.
Back in Beatty, we hit our third casino, the Exchange Club, smack in the middle of town, across from a never-opened coffee and candy place that had constantly taunted us with the promise of espresso during our stay and a bar whose neon signs read: “Cock” and “Beer.” Hmmm. Lynnie decided to break her burger and dinner salad routine, so we both ordered the special–All You Can Eat Spaghetti–from the plodding waitress...that is, we did so after she took almost half an hour getting us a glass of water, then took the orders of a couple who had come in after us. After a few minutes of consultation with various clueless kitchen personnel, the waitress advised us that they were out of the special for the night. Guess what the people who came in after us had ordered. That’s right: spaghetti. I had a BLT and a cup of chili, and, of course, another glass of that fine Burgundy they serve out in them parts. Despite the spaghetti fiasco, or perhaps because of it, we were rewarded with Travis.
Travis was about thirteen, with feathered red hair, round glasses and a hauntingly professional manner, and he hostessed that coffee shop to within an inch of its saltines. He was so heartbreakingly intelligent and efficient and friendly that everyone in the whole restaurant was following him around with their eyes, half-amused, half-tragic smiles on their faces–even the rednecks who didn’t quite understand where that smile was coming from. I wonder if Travis will make it out of Beatty, and where he will end up, finally, and what all the bovine waitresses of Beatty will think of it.
Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel
Movement 3 - 12/28/00: Allegro non troppo, con molti scherzini
Lynnie and I decided to wake up early and have a full day of valley-combing. I was dressed and out by seven to check out the continental breakfast in the lobby. On offer were glazed or jelly donuts and coffee that tasted like it was made from twice-used grounds from a never-cleaned machine. What did I expect? Betty, the white-haired proprietress, in an influenza-induced stupor, coughed up loogies dramatically and swallowed them back down while I paid for another day. I spent a long time calibrating dried milk and sugar levels for maximum coffee drinkability. A brain-dead couple around my age were manning the continental breakfast table, but Betty kept having to tell them what to do.
“You get them donuts?” she said. “We out a’jelly already? You got that decaf goin’?” The woman manning the coffee makers started making more coffee, and Betty said, “don’t use that one over there” (indicating the coffee maker in the corner) “because the water leaks on that one and you’ll have a big nasty wet mess on your hands.” Right after she said that, the coffee helper woman went directly to that coffee maker and started pouring water in. Her husband (I presume), who was still sitting in an easy chair beside a plastic ficus and most decidedly NOT getting the new batch of donuts from the shop across the street as had been suggested by Betty, said, “Hey, are you sure it’s all right to use that one?” And the coffee woman went, “Yeah. Just shut up and sit there.” He shrugged, and cracked a dopy grin at me as I exited with my heavily doctored java.
Our first stop in the park, after listening to Rickie Lee Jones warble while we rolled across the hilly highway for an hour, was Ubehebe Crater, a large geological anomaly surrounded by a bevy of smaller anomalies, like a pimple and its attendant blackheads. We ran straight down into the gaping hole left by the volcano's last eruption (millenia ago, darling!), where the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. We then decided that one of the sheer walls on the opposite side of the crater looked like it was plenty scalable, and that we were going to climb it. In fact, there seemed to be a little staircase leading all the way up one of the slim gullies.
“Seemed” would be the operative word here. It was doable, but pretty scary, and about a third of the way up, it became less plausible to go back down than it was to continue climbing. We kept grabbing onto rocks that would come detached from the wall itself, and crumble apart down the cliff. There were one or two places where Lynnie and I had to stop and figure out how to keep going on our own terms, each taking a different route, but we finally scrambled our way to the top, and took a picture of the wall after walking around the crater to the other side again. We were sure it had been, oh two, maybe three thousand feet, but we later found out the wall was about 800 feet tall. Still, that’s about eighty storeys, and that’s pretty good for two city kids in trendy sunglasses and walking shoes.
From Ubehebe, we headed to Scotty’s Castle, where I learned that we were on one of the few discernible circuits in the Valley: Ubehebe, Scotty’s Castle, the Dunes. This was our, and obviously a host of other small groups’, plan for the day, so familiar faces kept popping up here and there, and it started to feel at times like we were all being slowly shepherded into someone else’s conceptual art piece.
I like the story behind Scotty’s Castle, which was definitely “Death Valley Scotty’s” own conceptual art piece. He was a known con artist who was a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and basically squatted on public land in Death Valley while trying to con bankers and such back east to back a non-existent gold mine, for which he had created an entire narrative and cosmology. He finally landed on this guy Johnson, a wealthy insurance broker in Chicago, who liked him, believed him, and sunk a whole lot of money into his “mine.” Scotty figured Johnson would never come out to Death Valley, but he did the very same year. He was immediately aware that Scotty had swindled him, but he fell in love with the place, and felt he had struck a good bargain anyway. He also liked Scotty for some reason, as did his wife Bessie, a tiny little thing of good old California breeding, who had graduated in the first graduating class of Stanford and become an erudite Methodist preacher. Scary. There’s a picture of her sitting on a rock with a parasol along the spring at Scotty’s Castle, age 50 or so, in the 1920s, with a little chiffon ribbon around her salt-and-pepper bob and a sly, coquettish smile on her plump, tiny face....
But back to her husband. So here’s this clean-cut old-school robber baron type who just falls in love with Death Valley and sees in it the promise of solitude (even back in the 'teens of the last century, people were loathing the hustle and bustle of the city–how things have changed, right?). In order that his wife will join him, he’s gotta build a house, and he decides to build this Spanish gothic monstrosity with all the modern amenities for millions of dollars, and let Scotty say it’s his, built on the profits from his gold mine, so that Scotty can deflect all the public interest and be left in peace. The Castle was never actually finished because the Johnsons lost all their money in the crash of ‘29, but this weird symbiosis between Scotty and Johnson went on for something like thirty years, while Bessie tended to guests and preached three-hour long sermons to the workers of the castle’s land and grounds. Wicked weirdness in the west.
The tours of Scotty’s Castle are conducted by true history geeks who dress up and pretend it’s 1939, the year Bessie Johnson started giving her own tours of Scotty’s Castle to defray upkeep costs. Just imagine the comments. I know you can. I gleefully joined in, coming up with the answers to our guide's little interactive questions when the rest of the crowd was too dull, and nodding a lot and chuckling politely at his tongue-in-cheek-ad-extremis explanations. The place is a trip, full of odd Spanish and Flemish antiques and custom made furniture, plus a zoo of wild artisanal tiles, dishes and textiles, all in their original states, just as they were lived with. It’s all very Thurston and Lovie Howell in the desert instead of on Gilligan’s Island, circa 1920s instead of 1960s. I guess Scotty would be Gilligan. I mean, it wasn’t actually Gilligan’s island, right? My favorite feature at Scotty’s was the opposing fireplace and fountain in the living room, creating fire running up the west wall and water running down the east wall. Totally western Zen.
Of course, nothing can compete with the Zen of dunes. From a distance, say about twenty miles away, the Death Valley Dunes lie on a southern slope like a sprinkling of sugar, like someone sifted out a few artful handfuls across the alluvial fan. Closer up they are monuments to organic geometry: Intersecting, three-dimensional sine waves curving on multiple axes, changing with the wind and the weather but remaining in sync, always occupying the same amount of space, if not the same exact space, sharing a stranded supply of velvety, post-Pleistocene sand. We trod across them for almost an hour before reaching the highest one, whose back we scaled as if it were a sleeping brontosaurus. A German family was at the apex of this great dune, talking very loudly, until one by one the children of the family unit slid down the face, and the parents marched in tandem back down along the ridge. Lynnie and I stopped at a mid-back hump, and watched a pair of air force SSTs spiral around each other in the sky, trailing long, thunderous moans that ripped through the purpling furl of the heavens.
Back in Beatty, we hit our third casino, the Exchange Club, smack in the middle of town, across from a never-opened coffee and candy place that had constantly taunted us with the promise of espresso during our stay and a bar whose neon signs read: “Cock” and “Beer.” Hmmm. Lynnie decided to break her burger and dinner salad routine, so we both ordered the special–All You Can Eat Spaghetti–from the plodding waitress...that is, we did so after she took almost half an hour getting us a glass of water, then took the orders of a couple who had come in after us. After a few minutes of consultation with various clueless kitchen personnel, the waitress advised us that they were out of the special for the night. Guess what the people who came in after us had ordered. That’s right: spaghetti. I had a BLT and a cup of chili, and, of course, another glass of that fine Burgundy they serve out in them parts. Despite the spaghetti fiasco, or perhaps because of it, we were rewarded with Travis.
Travis was about thirteen, with feathered red hair, round glasses and a hauntingly professional manner, and he hostessed that coffee shop to within an inch of its saltines. He was so heartbreakingly intelligent and efficient and friendly that everyone in the whole restaurant was following him around with their eyes, half-amused, half-tragic smiles on their faces–even the rednecks who didn’t quite understand where that smile was coming from. I wonder if Travis will make it out of Beatty, and where he will end up, finally, and what all the bovine waitresses of Beatty will think of it.
Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel
