Diversions and Dislocations
An account of the CLUI Bus Tour of the Owens Valley
Owens Valley as reflected landscape near
the Los Angeles Aqueduct Intake.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
In late April,
2004, the Center organized a public tour to examine the fabled
“backspace” of California, the remote, isolated, and
notorious Owens Valley. The tour was part of a month-long exploration
of the Valley, which featured an exhibit and the publication of
a tour book. Because the valley is narrow and has only one road
running its length, and because it takes a few hours just to get
there from Los Angeles, the tour was divided into two parts, split
evenly by time, space, and theme. Day one, going from south to
north, Los Angeles to Bishop, looked at the valley as a displaced
place. In other words, as a place where its materials and resources
are removed and relocated elsewhere, such as water to Los Angeles,
mineral resources mined and shipped away, and fish extracted by
fishermen/tourists. The second day, heading south from Bishop,
we looked at the Owens Valley as a place in itself, a place of
the displaced.
DAY TWO 9:00 am - Bishop
On the morning of the next day, after loading up with baked goods
from Schats, everyone is back on the bus for the return journey.
Though we travel on the same road we came in on, we now look,
figuratively, at another side of the Owens Valley. Instead of
focusing on the things removed from it - the valley as source
and resource - we now examine the things that came to it - its
constituents, its places, communities, and history - and we see
how so much of the valley is made from things that have their
origins elsewhere. Isolated by geography and topography, the valley
serves as an away place for the distant cities. As such, a culture
of relocation and isolation is in evidence here. On the way back,
we look at Owens Valley as a Place of the Displaced.
CLUI tour bus at empty Owens Valley Radio
Astronomy Observatory.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
9:30 am - Owens Valley Radio Astronomy
Observatory
At the Owens Valley Radio Astronomy Observatory, we arrive on
time for our appointment with a representative who had arranged
to meet us for a briefing, but he was nowhere to be found. The
bus moves to the various complexes and idles while someone goes
in to look for someone. All the offices and labs are unlocked
and deserted. In one building, nobody sat in front of the rows
of computer monitors, in front of a wide window that overlooks
one of the antenna arrays. In another, a laboratory or maintenance
building, complex equipment and parts surrounds partially assembled
portions of some sort of astronomical instrumentation, next to
racks of blinking electronics. Outside, huge radio dishes with
distinct functions loom enigmatically, pointed towards distant
points unknown. Eventually we disembark and wander around this
unpeopled place, among these potent emblems of the mysteries of
the universe.
Then, from nowhere, someone appears and asked the
ultimate, universal question: why were we here? To learn about
this place, of course, was the unsaid response. Erik Leitch, an
astronomer from the University of Chicago, working on a new antenna
array that will soon be installed up the hill, kindly offers to
serve as interpreter of the observatory, and guides us around,
pointing things out and explaining the function of the facility
from the front of the bus. The observatory is here because the
region is remote, and the mountains cut off a lot of the stray
radio signals that can interfere with radio astronomy. It is also
dry, which makes for clearer skies. Most of the site is operated
by Caltech. The different antenna systems at the site include
the Millimeter Array, which consists of six 10-meter dishes on
a configurable track, which will soon be expanded and moved to
a new location, higher up the mountains, at an elevation of 8,000
feet. There is a solar interferometer antenna array, with two
27-meter dishes, which make observations of solar weather; two
Cosmic microwave background antennas, including the largest antenna
on site, a 140 foot wide steerable dish; and at the east end of
the site is the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) antenna, which
is one of a network of ten similar antennas located at sites across
the United States that make up the VLBA, a National Science Foundation
project. Together, these antennas make this one of the largest
radio astronomy sites in the nation. Out on the flats, near the
Owens River, this site draws the faintest and most distant places
that we can detect, the furthest reaches of the universe, into
the human realm. The site even displaces time, as the further
out into space you look, the further back in time you go - you
get closer to the Big Bang, the current word for the origin of
everything.
The past also comes to the present in the mountains
above the Observatory, in a grove of withered, desiccated, but
tenacious bristlecone pine trees. Among them is the Methuselah
Tree, which at 4,723 years old, has been called the oldest living
thing in the world. Despite the notoriety of the tree, its identity
is not indicated on the walking trail, in order to protect it
from souvenir-hunters and vandals, which have already left their
mark. The tree is a sort of invisible attraction. Its status as
the “oldest living thing” is of course debatable.
A recently discovered, but less dramatic creosote bush in the
Mojave is said to be 11,700 years old.
Above the bristle cone pines, higher up the spine
of the White Mountains, is the White Mountain Research Station,
a high altitude and alpine research complex, composed of four
facilities, located at different elevations on the peaks. The
highest of these stations, the Summit Laboratory, is a small building
14,250 feet above sea level and is the highest high-altitude lab
in North America (and fourth highest in the world). Research is
conducted in a variety of disciplines, including archeology, physiology,
biology, and aerospace. The research station was founded by the
Navy in 1940, and is operated by the University of California.
But these lofty sites, though they represent the
valley’s rim, are out of range of the tour. So the bus heads
back out to the 395, and south again. North of the town of Big
Pine is a big pine tree, which is often assumed to be THE big
pine, from which the town gets its name. But this big pine (actually
a Sequoia) at the intersection of Highway 168, was planted later,
in 1913, to commemorate the opening of the Westgard Pass road,
one of few roads that make it out of the Owens Valley, and which
was promoted by hopeful locals at the time as a possible transcontinental
thoroughfare. Connecting to an even more remote valley (Nevada’s
Fish Lake Valley) the highway is used mostly for local traffic.
Even so, the only settlement along it is Deep Springs College,
a school that while replete with quality (with full tuition paid
for all students and average SAT scores around 1500), is lacking
in quantity (with a student body of around 26 people). The big
pine that DID give the town its name, incidentally, is said to
have been cut down to make way for a gas station.
South of Big Pine, the highway passes through an
area where a displaced herd of Tule Elk roams freely, placed here
by the state, despite not being native to the Owens Valley. Tule
are the smallest form of elk, and once roamed the Central Valley
and Coast Range of California, their main habitat, until being
hunted nearly to extinction by 1870, forced off their land by
the rapidly spreading agricultural industry. Owens Valley’s
Tule Elk herd had originally been relocated in the Yosemite Valley,
but were later evicted by the Park Service, as they are not native
to Yosemite either. Though exotics, like the students of Deep
Springs College, the original 27 elk brought here in the 1930’s
have done well, and their progeny are often visible from the road.
The next town on the highway is Independence, the
seat of Inyo County. We take a loop through town to look at some
of the sights, which include the house where Mary Austin lived,
author of a well known book about the Owens Valley called “Land
of Little Rain.” Nearby is the Eastern California Museum,
the regional museum for the Owens Valley, where rusting old farm
equipment lies across the street from a large, and more functional,
DWP maintenance supply and equipment yard. Also in town are a
number of buildings that originally came from Manzanar, the Japanese-American
internment camp, built nearby during World War II. When the camp
was closed after the war, the buildings were sold to the public,
and many were moved into the surrounding communities, and assumed
new functions, their origin and connection to this dark part of
American history often unknown to their current owners. The photographer
Andy Freeman has been studying and documenting these replaced
buildings of the displaced Japanese-Americans of Manzanar, and
he was on the bus to help pick them out from among their neighbors.
Though the buildings have often been transformed by their 60 years
of subsequent uses, the distinctive WWII barracks type form is
often discernible, more easily as they eye learns what to look
for. One is a home, another is now a motel, and another a community
center.
The new interpretive center at Manzanar on
opening weekend.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
11:15 am - Manzanar Relocation Camp
Then on to Manzanar itself, where the tour bus creeps along the
dirt street grid, past rows and rows of buildings that are no
longer there, but whose functions are occasionally presented on
signs, saying things like “Camouflague [sic] Net Factory.”
Some of the 10,000 people who were uprooted from their lives elsewhere
and forced to live here for the duration of the war come here
every year, with members of their families, as part of a ritual
pilgrimage. Arriving the day after the pilgrimage, we pass the
fresh remnants of commemoration, like flowers for the dead, wilting
at the graveyard. Now operated by the National Park Service, the
site has a large visitor center inside the old auditorium, the
only building that was left on the site. The visitor center is
brand new, with state of the art interpretive displays about life
at the camp. As it had opened just the day before, there was an
unusual freshness to the displays. It felt like the information
they presented hadn’t yet been totally consumed, let alone
digested, and there was a tangible sense of urgency, of voraciousness,
among the numerous visitors in the space.
After loading up at the visitor center gift shop, we head south
again on 395. As we approach Lone Pine, the last of the four towns
(of over a thousand people) in the Owens Valley, we follow an
escarpment that was formed in the earthquake of 1872, which, at
8.3 on the Richter Scale, is still (so far) the largest earthquake
in California history. A graveyard with the 27 citizens of Lone
Pine killed in the quake rests on top of the escarpment. Today,
Lone Pine, a town of 1,600 people, is known primarily as the gateway
to Mount Whitney, and an energetic, outdoorsey energy exists on
its streets. We turn up Whitney Portal Road, which leads to the
parking lot, snackbar, and trailhead for the ten mile climb up
the tallest peak in the lower 48, something that around 20,000
people do every year. While reservations are required, and the
mountain is often officially booked up all season, there is no
fence surrounding the peak.
1:00 pm - Movie Flats
But without a road big enough for the bus, we stop along the road
long before the portal, at what we came to see - an area known
as “Movie Flats.” This part of the Alabama Hills,
just west of Lone Pine, has been used as a location for hundreds
of movies and television shows. The bouldery mounds, with snow
capped mountains in the background, play either a generic, Western
American landscape, or is filmed to look like somewhere else entirely.
It has been used in hundreds of Westerns and British-army-in-India
films, featuring stars from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, and
was the location for more recent films such as “Tremors,”
which featured an underground, tube-like monster menacing the
local population, which could be interpreted as a metaphor of
the conflict between the Los Angeles Aqueduct and residents of
the Owens Valley.
While idling at a dirt turnout we watch part of a video called
“On Location in Lone Pine” made by Dave Holland, an
energetic promoter of the cinematic history of the Alabama Hills,
as we contemplate this landscape. In a number of remarkable moments,
the video shows scenes from Western films, cross-faded with scenes
of the same view of the valley today, merging with the views out
the windows of the bus. Back in Lone Pine, we pass the site where
a sign promises the coming of the “Lone Pine Film History
Museum,” and also pass the site of a tribal office of the
local Native Americans, housed in a relocated Manzanar building.
We pick up a picnic lunch, prepared for us by the Totem Cafe,
then head to a nearby roadside regional information center, operated
by the Forest Service and others, with outdoor tables, to feed
on lunch, and on the information available inside.
After lunch, we head south on Highway 136, to look at the east
side of Owens Lake. Unlike the extractive activities of US Borax
and Crystal Geyser on the west side, the east and south ends of
the lake have a more accumulative nature. Once, however, the mines
above the lake were a major producer of silver, lead, zinc, and
other minerals, and the east shore of the lake had several large
processing centers for this material. An aerial tramway operated
for a few decades, bringing ore from the mines at Cerro Gordo,
as high up as 9,000 feet, down to the shores of Owens Lake, where
it was transported across the lake by steamships to the landing
at Cartago. Later, the railway was brought around the lake to
Keeler and Swansea, which had smelters and processing facilities
for the mine. Now Cerro Gordo is a privately owned, partially
restored historic site, reachable on a treacherous dirt road,
and the shoreline processing sites are low ruins, slabs and piles,
though there is some minor activity at the base of the mountains
on Dolomite Road.
Living quarters on the north shore of Owens
Lake in Keeler, CA.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
2:30 pm - Keeler
But it is the legacy of the DWP that reigns on the east side of
the lake. Storms of dust blown from the exposed sediment of the
lake can cause blizzard-like conditions here, and the lake has
been called the largest point source of particulate air pollution
in the United States. In addition to accumulating in drifts and
mounds, the particles of dust are aspirable, and thus enter the
lungs when breathed. After listening to a recorded radio program
of interviews with some of the residents of Keeler, the only town
on the east side of the lake, and watching a video about the dust
problem, we pick up our local briefer in Keeler, who is waiting
for us, standing next to his pickup truck. His name is Mike Patterson,
and he has been around this area for some time. He owns the ruins
of the town of Swansea, and has a residence and office there.
Mike guides the bus around the town, pointing out the old buildings,
and the curious habitations, some of which though obscured by
bushes, are carefully ornamented with clutter and sculptures formed
with found objects, as Keeler is a town of colorful characters
and hardy desert rats. Though few of the couple of hundred inhabitants
were born and raised here, and thus arrived here mostly by choice
long after the dusty winds started blowing, there is still a lot
of bitterness about the DWP, and questions about the efficacy
of their dust mitigation projects.
After saying goodbye to Mr. Patterson, whose insights into the
history and current conditions here were vivid and articulate,
we leave Keeler (pointing out a picturesque trailer for sale on
a small lot, in case anybody wants to stay), and pass the cluster
of office trailers and equipment of the Keeler Research Center,
run by the company CH2M Hill, the main contractors for the DWP
dust control projects at Owens Lake. For the ten minute journey
down Highway 138 and Highway 190, we watch the DWP produced video
about the dust control project we are on our way to see. In 1998,
after years of negotiations with local action groups and state
and federal agencies, the DWP agreed to dust reduction programs
on the 30 square miles of lakebed that was identified as especially
“dust emissive.” The project involves installing a
network of buried pipes supplying two parts of the lake, in the
north and in the south, with water from the aqueduct. Dust reduction
consists of two techniques: shallow flooding and revegitation.
The project is estimated to cost more than $500 million by the
time it is done in 2006, a date set by a federal clean air mandate.
To date they have covered around 20 square miles, and are therefore
two thirds complete.
Drip watering feeders burrow from the sand
to irrigate salt grass on the dry lake bed.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
3:15 pm - DWP Construction Camp, Dirty
Sock Hot Springs
By the time we arrive at Dirty Sock, where the main road out to
the revegitation project begins, we have heard about the project
from two sides. Our briefer, Pat Brown, who is the operations
manager for the whole project, boards the bus and guides us around
the transformed lakebed. We pass by rows and rows of saltgrass
planted by the DWP for the managed vegetation part of the dust
control program, a strange site amid the cakey white alkali of
the lake. Nearly 30 million plugs of this salt resistant grass
were planted here, and are perpetually irrigated with drip pipes
integrated into the low furrows, covering a four square mile area.
We also pass part of the shallow flooding area, where rows of
large sprinkler heads protrude from the ground, each spewing an
umbrella shaped cone of water onto the ground. At this part of
the project, covering under two square miles at the southern end
of the lake, the ground has been graded to minimize the slope,
and increase the area that stays soaked in a thin blanket of water.
In the northern part of the lake, the first attempt at shallow
flooding covers more than ten square miles.
To fuel this massive irrigation project, two connections to the
Los Angeles Aqueduct were made, at the Cartago Spillgate, feeding
the southern lake areas, and the Lubkin Valley Spillgate, in the
north. Buried pipelines a few feet in diameter carry the water
under Highway 395 and into the networks of smaller buried pipes
in the lakebed, and an 8 mile pipeline is currently being built
to connect the north and south parts. To maintain this system,
an estimated 50,000 acre feet out of the 450,000 acre feet of
the total volume of the aqueduct - more than ten percent - will
be spilled back into Owens Lake, in perpetuity. Despite all the
efforts so far by the DWP, 2004 was one of the worst dust years
on the lake yet, due simply to rainstorms breaking up the hard
crust on the lake, and windstorms blowing it around.
Leaving the lake for “dry land,” we dropped off
Mr. Brown at the Dirty Socks construction trailer camp, then return
to Highway 395 at Olancha, enroute to our last stop at Indian
Wells. Along the way, we watch a video that addresses an important
aspect of the Owens Valley as place of the displaced: the valley
as tourist attraction. As it became clear to the residents of
the Valley that the loss of water and land to the DWP was going
to limit the commercial prospects of the Valley, the move to promote
it as a place to visit and recreate began. The most famous and
effective of the Owens Valley boosters was Father Crowley, also
known as “the desert padre,” whose diocese ranged
from Death Valley to the Owens Valley. Especially in the 1930’s,
Father Crowley worked to inspire and raise hope, throughout the
valley, for a brighter future based on a positive promotion of
the region's attributes - the mountains, clean air, wildlife,
etc. - and the subsequent visitors that would be attracted as
a result, who would come to hike, to fish, to hunt, ride horses,
and eat in the restaurants, stay in the motels, and shop in the
stores.
As part of his efforts to boost civic pride and a sense of community,
and celebrate the wonders of the region, Father Crowley staged
a remarkable public event in 1937, at the opening of the highway
(which we were just on), that connects Lone Pine with Death Valley.
Known as the “Wedding of the Waters,” the pageant
started by filling a gourd with water at Lake Tulainyo, a lake
on Mount Whitney, the highest point of the region (and, at that
point, in all of the USA), and ended after a three day long journey,
dumping it out in the lowest point in the nation, at Badwater
in Death Valley. Along the way, the gourd was carried by a series
of modes of travel - foot, pony, burro, oxcart, 20-mule team,
stagecoach, train, car, and airplane - representing the development
of different transportation technologies over time, and symbolizing
the settlement and development of the West (Indian scout on foot,
pony express, miner, pioneer, industrial mining, etc...). Each
leg of this symbolic spatiotemporal performance was carried out
by local historical figures and dignitaries that included the
Governor of the State of California and Hopalong Cassidy. It seems
to have been a great success.
This story of the Wedding of the Waters was rediscovered by
the Los Angeles area public television personality Huell Howser,
whose popular “California’s Gold” series of
upbeat explorations throughout the state has made him the modern
equivalent of the Desert Padre, on a statewide scale. In this
role, Huell recreated the event in the 1990’s, bringing
in as many of the original participants, or their relatives, as
he could, interviewing everyone the whole time for the production
of a video, called Wedding of the Waters, funded by the US Borax
Corporation, who in addition to profiting from the exposed bottom
of Owens Lake, sponsored the 1950s TV series of pioneers and miners
called “Death Valley Days,” hosted by Ronald Reagan,
the future booster of all of America.
Through the establishment of scenic corridors, interpretive
driving tours, overlooks, more museums and visitor centers, and
newly staffed and managed attractions, the selling of the wonders
of the Owens Valley is now careening into the tourist age. Like
much of America, the valley is set to become a version of itself.
Tragically and ironically, Father Crowley, the fabled promoter
of tourism and roads, died in a car accident.
5:30 pm - Indian Wells Brewery
Outside the southern reaches of the valley now, the bus stops
at Indian Wells, a natural spring on the hillside overlooking
the desert of Inyokern, Ridgecrest and China Lake Naval Weapons
Center. The spring has recently been developed into a source for
a microbrewery, built on the site by a disabilitied former local
police officer. The brewery makes Sidewinder Missile Ale, Lobotomy
Bock, and Mojave Red, which is sold by Trader Joe’s. The
owner shows us around, and tells us about how Anheuser-Busch has
tried to buy him out, not for the beer, but for the water. We
eat dinner at the steakhouse next door, at long tables in front
of plate glass windows, and watch the desert fade from view. Then,
heading back to Los Angeles, we watch Race with the Devil, where
Peter Fonda and Warren Oates pilot a RV through the plains of
Texas, lurching and veering wildly throughout, in an ultimately
unsuccessful attempt to escape an encroaching Satanist conspiracy.
The rectilinear interior of the screeching and careening RV seems
metabolically connected to the tour bus, sensoramically emphasizing
our empathetic connection with the protagonists on screen.
