This Time it Was North, Out to Barstow and
Beyond
Tour bus at CLUI's remote
Desert Research Station. CLUI photo.
The CLUI conducted two public bus tours of the
Southern California Desert as part of the Flight Patterns:
Picturing the Pacific Rim exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles. The tours, performed in January and February,
2001, were the usual all-day tours, with a full video complement,
local briefers, and occasional stops. The buses left from the
museum's Geffen Contemporary building near Downtown Los Angeles,
where a CLUI Mobile Exhibit Unit, featuring an exhibit about
the desert and the CLUI's new Desert Research Station, could
be viewed before boarding the bus. Handouts were given to each
of the tourists on board (both tours sold-out, so we had full
buses each time), which contained information about the region
we'd be travelling through and some of the sites we'd be looking
at. Once on route, the interpretive spiel began, with CLUI tour
coordinator Matthew Coolidge.
The tours were titled Lines of Flight: A Voyage
along High Desert Vectors, relating the theme to the Flight
Patterns exhibit. Though the subject was the true desert, an
hour and a half away, there was much to say about the landscape
on the way, as it whizzed by the windows of the bus.
We were travelling on Interstate 10, a route once
called "the Ramona Highway," now, less romantically, called
the San Bernardino Freeway. If we kept going east weÙd pass
Palm Springs, Blythe, Phoenix, El Paso, Houston, New Orleans,
and hit the Atlantic at Jacksonville, Florida. But instead we
just drove through Monterey Park, Alhambra, San Gabriel, Rosemead,
El Monte, Baldwin Park, West Covina, Azusa, Covina, San Dimas,
and finally Fontana after 40 minutes or so, after which we went
north on Interstate 15 and through the Cajon Pass into the desert
proper.
Passing through the eastern cities of the LA
megalopolis, we pointed out elements of the flood control infrastructure,
which makes the settlement of the area possible. To the north,
the great San Gabriel Mountains loomed, while Sarah Simons of
the CLUI read aloud from John McPhee's Los Angeles Against
the Mountains, about the futility of controlling the debris
flows from these same mountains. Then some text from LA doomsayer
Mike Davis' classic City of Quartz, where he describes
this very journey we are making, east on I-10, to the heart
of the darkness of the deflated California Dream, FONTANA!
After an English documentary about the area's
flood control efforts played on the overhead monitors for a
while, and we'd passed the Puddingstone flood control basin
(next to which is the Raging Waters water park) we transitioned
into the Inland Empire, at Kellogg Hill (just after the Forest
Lawn cemetery with the "worlds largest religious mosaic"). Thoughts
about what the Inland Empire is, and how it came to be, were
offered by the tour guide (Coolidge), from the founding of Cal
Poly through Corn Flake money and Arabian horses, to the military
plants first established in WW II, built here to be out of range
of the guns of enemy battleships, then over the county line
into San Bernardino County, the largest county in the continental
US, bigger than Denmark, which contains much of the desert as
well as the urban zones we were still passing through (like
Ontario, so named as it was founded by the Chaffey Brothers
who came from the Canadian province of Ontario...)
Finally the on ramp on to the Interstate 15, north
towards Barstow (another grand highway that connects San Diego
with the Canadian Border at Sweetgrass, Montana). Past the fabled
Kaiser Steel plant site, the basis of the economy in Fontana
for decades, employing nearly 10,000 people during the war,
and said to be the largest steel plant west of the Rockies,
until it was sold to the Chinese who took it apart piece by
piece in 1982 and reassembled it in China (though portions of
the plant remained and are still used to shape steel, and serve
Hollywood as a location for Schwartzenegger movies...)
As we passed the debris flows of Lyttle Creek
(and recalled to mind Joan Didion's "rubble of some unmentioned
catastrophe"), we began our ascension into Cajon Pass, which
divides the San Gabriels from the San Bernardinos and is a major
service corridor connecting the Megalopolis with the outside
world, through buried trunk lines for natural gas and oil, as
well as transportation: this was Route 66, and is still one
of the busiest commercial rail corridors into the City (we showed
a videotape about Cajon Pass produced by a railfan magazine,
which describes the railway through this area in incredible
detail). This cut between two mountain ranges is also the San
Andreas Fault rift zone, and we seamlessly transition from the
northbound Pacific Plate to the southbound North American Plate,
without feeling a thing.
The top of the Pass and into the desert, we pass
by Hesperia, Apple Valley, Adelanto, the Dale Evans/Roy Rogers
Museum, and the California Aqueduct desert spur, which recharges
the aquifer of remote high desert communities with water from
the northern Sierras, 400 miles away, as a video about the Mojave
River pipeline explains, on the overhead monitors.
We exit the Interstate at Victorville and pass
by the Southdown Cement Company, one of the larger suppliers
of cement to the LA area, and one of four big cement plants
around here that produce material for the skyscrapers and freeways
of the City. We pass under the high voltage DC lines that connect
Los Angeles directly to the Intermountain Power Plant in the
middle of Utah (a $5.5 billion project completed in 1987), then
pass the 1,000 inmates housed in the brand new Victorville Federal
Prison, before turning into the Southern California Logistics
Airport.
Until it closed in 1992, this was George Air
Force Base, home of a fighter squadron protecting the areaÙs
cities and military assets and employing 5,000 people. Now itÙs
in a state of decay, with crumbling housing tracts that are
blown up for State Farm Insurance commercials. The taxiways
around the 13,000 foot runway are being used by some airfreight
companies, and for rows of airliner storage (mostly Delta airlines)
and for aircraft scrapping.
After a drive-through itÙs back to National Trails
Highway, with its closed motels and gas stations, which thrived
when this was the main road to the West: Route 66. We turn in
at the community of Silver Lakes, a master planned residential
oasis surrounding two large manmade lakes, which is itself surrounded
by the dry, open desert, then continue on to a dirt road to
a surprise stop at the Exotic World Museum of Burlesque Dancing.
Here Dixie Evans, herself a famous dancer of
the burlesque era who was the nation's leading Marilyn Monroe
double, guides the group through her museum in her professional,
show-biz manner, enlightening us about the historical importance
of burlesque as a sort of editorial medium on popular culture,
which existed before "exotic dancing" became the strip clubs
we see today.
Back on the bus to the nearby gate of the secretive
Lockheed Radar Cross -Section Range (access to us was denied),
a stealth technology R&D test range, associated with UFO activity,
according to the monitors overhead, which showed aerial views
of the facility being analyzed by an articulate and knowledgeable
secret saucer base researcher named Captain Eric.
The next stop was the CLUI's Desert Research
Station, north of Hinkley, where the attendant Craig Simpson
was on hand to show people around the displays and facilities,
and where we unpacked box lunches and wandered the grounds.
The first stop after lunch was down the road at
the Hinkley Compressor Station, the PG&E plant made famous by
the Erin Brockovich film, which told the true story about the
plant's contamination of the groundwater and the $330 million
settlement reached between PG&E and the sick and dying residents
of Hinkley.
On to Main Street in Barstow, we passed the Barstow
Rail Yards, a major train repair and classification yard, and
a continuing part of the legacy of rail traffic that founded
the town of Barstow over 100 years ago. The bus pulled in to
the Desert Discovery Center, full of wonderful displays about
the natural history of the Desert, where Tim Reed, director
of the Barstow Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management
was waiting for us in the conference room. Mr. Reed described
the land development patterns in the desert, and discussed the
BLM's role in the management of the 12 million acres of California
Desert that they own (about half the entire desert region).
After this informative stop, we headed out past
Calico (a former ghost town where the first pieces of the Knotts
Berry Farm amusement park came from), and past the Marine Corps
Logistics Base (the main logistics center for Marine operations
west of the Mississippi and into the Pacific). Meanwhile videotapes
of Huell Howser roaming this area played overhead, and Barstow
music by Harry Partch played on audiotape.
We stopped to look at the impressive Solar Two
solar power tower, with its circle of thousands of heliostatic
mirrors locked in down position, as the facility has been shut
down, then poked in at the Villa Augusti, a surprising desert
estate built in 1916 by the architect Charles Kysor, for Buel
Funk and his wife Helen, who was the daughter of the famous
naturalist John Muir. The 21-room desert villa is now owned
by a heraldry and chivalry organization called the Augustan
Society.
Down the road we stopped near the old general
store in Daggett, and read a brief passage from a book (published
by the Center for American Places) about the old days in this
otherwise obscure little desert town. The book, called Daggett:
Life in a Mojave Frontier Town, tells the tale of Theodore
Van Dyke and his son Dix, who settled together in Daggett in
the late 1800's. Theodore was an educated man from Back East,
and he soon became the local judge. Guests at his ranch (the
ruins of which are still visible) included his friend John Muir,
and his brother, a professor of art at Rutgers University, and
an art consultant for Andrew Carnegie, named John Van Dyke,
who in 1901 wrote the classic, phantasmagoric, romantic, naturalist
epic about the American desert, called, simply, The Desert.
The passage we read from, inside the tourbus
idling outside the old general store, was from the epilogue,
written by the Western writer and poet Peter Wild, where he
imagines a hypothetical, improbable tour bus of lost people,
stopping in the precise spot we are in, and the befuddled tourists
walking around town, not seeing the rich history or interesting
qualities of the unremarkable-looking old town of Daggett...
"Back on the bus, they'd decide, quite rightly, that, like some
of the other desert towns widely scattered hereabouts, Daggett
had its heyday, as the old, peeling, false-front stores, now
boarded up, attest. But those days are gone forever."
Leaving Daggett, we joined the full-speed stream
of Interstate traffic coming from Las Vegas, heading to Los
Angeles. Arriving back at the museum our parting thoughts for
the group were taken from Lawrence WeschlerÙs book on Robert
Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Things One Sees,
where Irwin contemplates how to represent the wonders of the
desert in his work: "...Still I had the problem of how
any of this could be brought to bear on what we call art. How
was I going to deal with these situations? Was I going to take
photos? Well, that didnÙt really make any sense. Make plans,
draw maps? That wasnÙt critical. How about loading people onto
buses and dragging them out there to show it to them?"
These tours were made
possible by the CLUI Public Tour Program; the Los Angeles Museum
of Contemporary Art, and the Public+Artist Program at MoCA,
sponsored by The Winnick Family Foundation; the National Endowment
for the Arts; and the California Arts Council.
CLUI On Board Staff: Matthew Coolidge, Erik Knutzen, Lize Mogel,
Sarah Simons.
