Search Results for: Tin House

Making a Pilgrimage Along Prince’s Purple Trail

AP Photo/Jim Mone, File

Even when their music exists outside of time and space, certain musicians become inseparable from the places they lived. Lou Reed was New York. Édith Piaf was Paris. Prince was Minneapolis.

For Vogue, writer Rebecca Bengal and photographer Alec Soth search Minneapolis for the houses where Prince lived or that he somehow touched during his life. Bengal talks to the man who owns the house where Prince recorded Dirty Mind. She talks to a fan who moved from Japan and saw hundreds of intimate small club shows. The woman who owns the house where Prince’s teenage band practiced put it best: “This is where greatness came from.”

When she came back to north Minneapolis to look at the house she didn’t recognize the address. “When we were teenagers, we didn’t know it by the house number,” she said. “We just knew it was the Anderson house. We could close our eyes and find it by following the music.” They used the side door, heading straight for the basement, where a teenage Prince Rogers Nelson would be jamming with his best friends, André Anderson now known as André Cymone and Morris Day, in their early bands Grand Central and Champagne (later Shampayne). They played one of their first paying gigs at a church around the corner, for which they each earned $3. When Prince was kicked out of his father’s house, Mrs. Anderson, who had six kids of her own, took him in. “Prince was already so focused, so serious,” Robin said. “He could go really deep and then he’d hit those high notes. Our friends called him ‘Gazoo,’ like from The Flintstones, ’cause he’d wear this white space suit–type suit, bell-bottoms, and high-heel platforms—and then he had this big Afro.”

“You see down the street?” She pointed through her kitchen window. “We would sit on that corner there on Plymouth in our pink foam hair curlers and wait for the go-ahead so we could come over and be groupies and watch them practice. It was okay to be a groupie! It was part of our culture. We were north-siders and so were they.”

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Bob Dorough and the Magic Number

Bob Dorough
Bob Dorough. Photo by Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Bob Dorough, who died this week, was instrumental in teaching my generation about math, and language, and civics. He expressed these ideas in the universal language of music, and the fact that Gen X kids were able to memorize entire multiplication tables was because Bob Dorough could write a hook. Read more…

Publishing the Best of the Desert: An Interview With Ken Layne

AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File

Ken Layne is the writer, editor, and publisher of the Desert Oracle, a bright-yellow “field guide to the desert that covers the “strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros” of the Joshua Tree region in California. We spoke with him after the publication of a recent profile in Pacific Standard, in which he explained how he designs and delivers each issue himself to desert outposts with as little as 30 people. 

Aaron Gilbreath: You grew up in the desert. Where exactly did you grow up in Phoenix?

Ken Layne: I was born and mostly raised in New Orleans, far from any desert, but I lived in Phoenix during the formative middle-school years. First on the poor side around Buckeye and Seventh Avenue ─ old Phoenix, a shack behind my uncle’s house. Vacant lots, railroad yards. We had motorcycles and Chihuahuas. My classmates were mostly Latino and Native American. I made one friend, this very poetic character, and he lectured me all the time on Aztlán, the Chicano cause. It was all new to me. He kept the tougher kids off my back, which was nice. My grandpa had been a coal miner, along with his father, and they all moved out to the south side of Phoenix on the Black Lung train. At least that was the story I heard now and then.

The other place was a nice little stucco house with a swimming pool,  a suburban elementary school a few blocks away. Most everybody was a white kid from Illinois or Michigan. My dad and his twin brother started an air-conditioning service business, so eventually, we could afford our own house. There was this big urban cowboy sort of honky-tonk nearby, huge place on a nearby big intersection on the northwest edge of town. My parents used to go there now and then. Just north of Greenway Road was wild desert, dirt roads through foothills, crazy saguaros with owl nests hanging out.

AG: I grew up in Phoenix, too. The city itself felt like any other, but one unique thing was how you could drive in any direction and be in the middle of undeveloped Sonoran Desert in thirty minutes. When did Arizona desert start to work its magic on you as a kid?

KL: I never much saw the natural world before we moved to Arizona. I never saw mountains all around, or mountains at all. But it was purgatory for my dad, something he had to endure again to finally earn enough money to move to San Diego. That’s the usual dream of kids who grew up in Phoenix of the 1940s and ’50s, especially the poor ones: Take the highway out to the beach and never come back. There are three generations of Laynes buried in Phoenix.

I liked it up in the foothills, in that mostly wild desert that began just across Greenway. I got to go to a science camp at this since-submerged place up at Lake Pleasant. We held gopher snakes and tarantulas, walked out under the stars, listening for owls and coyotes. It was fantastic.

AG: After your family moved to California, you started exploring the desert on your own. What did you do on those trips? Why were these experiences formative?

KL: Had a group of friends, oddballs mostly, from different parts of town. Four of us went out to Death Valley one freezing winter, Christmas break from high school. Everybody had part-time jobs so we had this narrow window, maybe 48 hours. We drove up in the middle of the night — after one of the guys finished work at a pizza parlor — in this other guy’s grey-primer VW bug with holes in the floor and springs coming out of the seats. A very cold night. Didn’t do much more than drive around, watch the sun come up over the wild desert, hiked a little, explored old buildings. I took a bunch of black-and-white pictures. Drove back in the middle of the night, listening to weird AM radio stations. It was romantic. Still is. That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California. A weekday night, alone with the radio, a motel and more driving ahead. A vague destination or purpose, with time to take sketchy dirt roads, to walk around outside, stop in used bookshops and little roadside taverns with E Clampus Vitus neon signs.

AG: Those desert drives are deeply romantic. They’re a good place to make a life. It’s interesting because many residents of big desert cities loath the desert. They like the sun, the pools, the mild winters. Are you trying to reach those people with Desert Oracle and convert them to the landscape’s wonders? Or are you trying to reach the converted?

That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California.

KL: The only propaganda angle is desert conservation, encouraging people to love these places for their wildness, for their desolation and spooky beauty. I try to make something that looks good in a desert home, that you’ll leave out when you’ve got people coming over. And maybe you learn about the animals, learn about the plants and the seasons, the folklore and history, both recent and ancient. And maybe you already have a backyard full of native plants and ground squirrels and roadrunners, and you want to encourage more of that, defend the wild desert where that’s still the norm.

People who love a place will fight for it, whether or not they live around there full-time, whether they’re in Palm Desert or Scottsdale, surrounded by strip malls and golf courses. You can still see the mountains! The best of the desert isn’t where most people live, anyway, all crowded together. The best of the desert is walking alone on a sandy trail, or being lost in a wilderness area and figuring out how to get back, or sitting alone in the rocks while creatures go about their business, or driving some mysterious road in the middle of the night, watching for cattle on the road and military drones and UFOs.

AG: The desert West is many things: its poisonous critters, prickly plants, spaciousness and deadly heat. It carries the burden of a distinctive mythology and politically charged climate. But it also evokes a feeling, a kind of mystic awe and reverie. Desert Oracle somehow manages to capture that elusive experience in its pages. Can you talk about trying to bottle that desert feeling?

KL: I like having minimal information when I’m exploring: rumors, oddly-worded signs, a sense of menace around a truck stop or a rest area, weird motels, out-of-date interpretive displays, Civilian Conservation Corps’ bunkhouses and trail stairways, the cheery and somewhat suspicious oddballs you meet in a campground outside Trona or Tonopah. With the Oracle, I try to keep it sparse. Easy on the eyes. I don’t want to give anybody eye strain. In telling stories of UFOs and Yucca Man and past civilizations and failed real-estate schemes, I want to dryly transcribe the weird stuff. I don’t want to oversell it. Like somebody calling you in the middle of the night and reading the police reports out of the paper in Barstow or Pahrump, like a radio announcer in a long war. I trust that the people who enjoy the Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities. Alive and alert.

Like any old southwestern newspaper or quarterly, Desert Oracle is presented without fanfare. I don’t explain things too much. You can look up the rest if you get obsessed. And you will probably get obsessed with some of this material, and then you’re diving down internet rabbit holes and raiding used bookstores in the High Desert, seeking evidence. I despise those “Explainer” things that are so popular in the online media. “Here’s a complex subject that could provide years of intellectual pleasure should you pursue it, but we’re going to post some glib, error-ridden thing that nobody even bothered to proofread, and then you’ll be all set!”

AG: Preserve the mystery while sharing bits of it. Desert writer Edward Abbey was a big influence on you. How’d you first discover him? What did his writing and life teach you?

KL: After that first Death Valley trip, I was raiding the high-school library for regional books, anything about the wild desert. Desert Solitaire was there, with all the nature books. And like everybody who falls in love with the desert and that book at the same time, the deal was done. Abbey wrote beautifully, of course, but he also had that swaggering thing that appealed to me at that age. The brave poetic writer, etcetera, a lifetime of screw-ups, moments of beauty and transcendence.

You’ll find when you start hiking and learning about the wildflowers and the animals, some scold will often appear and start lecturing you, telling you all the things you’ve got wrong, everything you don’t yet know — the people who suck the joy right out of a place in their constant campaign to be validated as some sort of self-appointed expert. Abbey never did that, and that’s one reason why it’s so easy for people to fall for him. He’d often explain that he wasn’t a naturalist, wasn’t a biologist or geologist. He was a philosopher. In one of his books, Abbey claims his favorite desert birds are the turkey vulture and the “rosy-bottomed skinny dipper.” It’s very welcoming. A good teacher makes it enjoyable, makes it a pleasure to accumulate those little bits of knowledge we have about the desert, about the natural world in general.

AG: Abbey influenced me, too. I spent my undergrad years bushwhacking southern Arizona’s deserts and mountains alone. When I found Abbey’s books, I realized I wasn’t some crazy loner, just an enchanted youth fascinated by this place’s magic, and that I could try to write about it, too. He was my first role model desert rat. Do you identify as a “desert rat”?

KL: I like any dramatic, moody landscape. But I guess I’m most at home in the American desert, and mostly the parts of the Great Basin and Mojave with a minimum of other people. Harry Oliver mastered the “desert rat” thing with his Desert Rat Scrap Book that he self-published for 20 years starting in 1946. (Oliver was a self-taught architect and set designer who worked with director Cecil B. DeMille and built the Tam O’Shanter and Brown Derby in Los Angeles, before retiring to Thousand Palms to become a full-time desert rat.)

That’s a particular thing, that sort of cornball comedy, relocating the ornery hillbilly or farmer to another environment that is baffling to the city people. It’s a very American archetype, and I guess I picked up a little of that for the radio show, for my campfire stories. For myself, I seem to be moving toward something more like the early desert hermits of early Christian Egypt. Probably a one-room stone cabin that’s a daylong walk from the nearest person. I don’t want to farm or collect junker cars or have domestic animals or shipping containers everywhere, and I don’t want to see any human works: no power lines, no satellite dishes, no other houses, no visible homes. Come into the little town every week or three for a dinner out and a martini, check the PO box, then “See you next month.” Boy, that would be nice.

The people who enjoy the Desert Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities.

AG: In his posthumous Abbey biography, The Red Caddy, desert rat Charles Bowden wrote: “Desert worship is a suspicious matter to desert rats. It is as if talking about what is out there will diminish what is out there. Also, as a group, we feel damn foolish admitting what we feel out there.” What do you make of that?

KL: Well I don’t feel foolish about it. And I don’t mind talking about it, now and then. But when you’re visiting with other desert people, you don’t need to convince each other of anything. It’s usually the new convert who needs to wax poetic and all that, and that’s a normal part of infatuation.

It’s a good feeling, building this link to a place, a bioregion, the part of the Earth where you’re going to settle in. People can go overboard at this stage but that is all right. Enthusiasm is necessary and generally in short supply. Most of us who choose to live in low-population desert places are looking for a minimum of human interaction anyway. A little goes a long way.

AG: In the recent Pacific Standard article about Desert Oracle, you describe how a black triangular object hovered beside your car before shooting off through the clouds ─ a UFO. What about that experience influenced your magazine’s vision or aesthetic?

KL: It is entirely possible that my preference for black geometric icons and dingbats influenced how I saw that particular UFO — and by “UFO” I mean an unidentified thing you could loosely describe as “aircraft” but more as “pulsating 100-foot-wide manta ray hovering silently next to your car, before it vanished in a point of light over the distant clouds.” It’s also a very popular UFO shape, seen for hundreds of years: the black arrow or triangle. They are still seen, often on country roads or desert highways. It’s a really particular kind of experience, from the many eyewitness reports I’ve read over the years. Usually goes from a brilliant light on the horizon to this enormous thing hovering nearby to a light streaking away in the opposite direction, at the speed of a shooting star. Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas billionaire who had the Pentagon’s UFO study contract that the New York Times recently revealed, ran a black-triangle study for many years. After my own sighting in late 2001, I contacted them and was interviewed by one of their people. They eventually put out a report that said people see these things fairly often, and whatever they are remains unknown.

Desert Oracle #4, the UFO cover from 2015, has a UFO typographic symbol as the only cover art. It’s an “Adamski disk,” something George Adamski saw (or faked) around Desert Center, near the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park. Just this black symbol on yellow cover stock. I love everything about that. It’s my favorite cover so far, and it’s echoed by the radio show’s art, the podcast logo you see on your phone when you listen to the show. My signs at the office in Joshua Tree look like that, too. It puts you in the right frame of mind.

But it initially felt kind of cheap to make a cover out of what is basically a printer’s dingbat, a wingding. I had been commissioning artists to do illustrations for the covers before that one, and the first couple issues have good covers. But the really stark covers are my favorite.

Since the 1990s, I was designing websites that mimicked tabloid newspapers, black and white with some primary spot color. And whenever a “real designer” came in, everything got crowded, too much of everything. Too much color, too many elements. The ultimate nightmare is the modern Internet page, with fifty different things blinking and yelling at you, a sewage mix of every color, every bad style of graphic, crowded and miserable. So I do it all myself now. I just learn as I go.

I’ve always liked one-color printing. Cheap offset printing, no two pieces exactly alike, blocky type, colored stock. I love that kind of poster art, like Eastern European political posters, or Southern California punk-rock flyers. The desert component was the regional press, these small shops in the Southwest that printed up their own field guides, rockhound books, trail & wildlife guides. You could buy them at gemstone shops in the desert, or gift shops at the state park. They had single-color printing for the usual reason—it’s cheap—but generally with desert-colored cover stock, so you’d have the utilitarian and modern 1950s and ’60s typesetting and graphics in black on a yellow or orange or sand-colored cover. Keep it sparse. All of that goes into the design for Desert Oracle. I used to run the photo-typesetting machine at this little backcountry weekly, at night when the regular typesetter was gone and the editor had his column ready after going through a few coffee mugs full of Bushmill’s, and I loved the limited choices for headlines, captions, and body text. The sans serif choices were News Gothic and maybe the Avenir or Futura families, and you could do so much with variations of shape and font size. Then you had easy-to-read serif fonts for text columns, Times New Roman, Schoolbook and such things. Add a little black-and-white illustration from the “Old West Clip Art” books. That combination is nice to read, just nice to look at.

Anyway, I suspect the really dramatic close-up UFOs are at least partly filled in by the brain of the observer, the witness. There’s a whole episode of my radio show, #25, on this subject. Jacques Vallee and John Keel often wrote about it. And it’s entirely possible that my own convincing UFO encounter on a desert highway triggered the part of the brain that produces or processes spiritual experiences — Saul on the road to Damascus and all that, the children at Fatima, people who “see” a spaceship from Star Trek or elves from a fairy tale — and that our aesthetics and culture fill in the details, the “message” if you get a message in the process. Or maybe not. UFO theories aren’t terribly interesting to me, all these 20th-century science-fiction tropes. In the return of Twin Peaks last year, there’s something like a mass UFO sighting in a small-town New Mexico. A girl and a boy are walking at night and she picks up a Lincoln penny. And then this Abe Lincoln robot-hobo is terrorizing the town, staggering through traffic, etc. That made a lot of sense to me.

AG: “Crowded and miserable” — that describes both the modern Internet pages and certain popular urban desert trails I’ve hiked. Part of each Desert Oracle issue contains reprints of naturalists and explorers writings, alongside original pieces. How do you find older material?

KL: Mostly it’s chosen as intentional propaganda. Mary Hunter Austin was really the first Edward Abbey. She wrote The Land of Little Rain, about the California desert, and she was this bohemian character, a socialist, an artist, an important early feminist in the literary and theater scenes. And she wrote beautifully about the desert, in a way that reads very well today. People should read Mary Austin. And it’s public domain, so I can afford it. Same with John Wesley Powell, who most desert people know as this great explorer, the guy who recommended that the United States leave the desert Southwest alone, as it could not support huge populations with its scant water. But he also wrote with style and wit, and you feel like you’re there with him, around the campfire after a day of adventure. I feel a kinship with Powell. His family, like my paternal family, originates in the West Midlands and wound up around the Ohio River, and we both had many early Methodist preachers in our line. His life was a series of adventures, his morals were good and progressive for his time, and he looked at the Southwest with the right eyes. We should’ve listened to him more, but much of the federal desert land we have today is the result of the land-conservation philosophy he helped create, and the recommendations to the U.S. government after his great explorations of the Colorado River and the interior West in general. It was in the last years of his life that the General Land Office ─ what became the Bureau of Land Management in 1949 ─ finally transformed from a land-giveaway agency controlled by the railroad monopolies to a bit more of a conservation mission. He’d be heartbroken to see “Lake Powell,” which is a monument to everything he was against. And of course we’re all still fighting about public lands and water rights, and there are a handful of welfare ranchers and deadbeats like those Bundy people who are paid instigators of an anti-American effort to strip us of everything that’s in the public domain, everything that is part of the Commons. One day we’ll stuff all those nutbags in a rocket and drop ’em on an asteroid somewhere. “It’s all yers, Clive!”

Then there’s Zane Grey, who is always kind of dismissed as this cowboy-book hack. When I finally got around to reading his stuff, I found it interesting and sort of poetic. He was living in a desert cabin and crossing the Southwest on horseback at a time when it was really a commitment to be out on the desert. I like reading something and realizing what I assumed about it was wrong, that there’s real value to the stuff, and then I like to spread it around if I have the opportunity. The old pieces also give you a sense of time as part of the space of the desert. All these times layered over the desert: the U.S. Calvary camels crossing the Mojave, Charles Manson hiding out in the Panamints, Minerva Hoyt sleeping under the stars in a desert canyon, Shoshone and Paiute stories of great ships in the sky, red-eyed monsters in the night.

AG: You must have a large home library.

KL: It’s spread out between home and the Oracle office and a storage unit. I’ve got most of the desert-related books close at hand, but one day soon, I hope, it will all be assembled together, at my secret ranch house that is many happy hours away from busy little Joshua Tree.

AG: What is your ideal Desert Oracle piece? What elements do you gravitate to in material?

KL: It’s not completely clear. It is mood more than subject. I’ll start off with a bunch of ideas for each book and sort of see which ones I still like when it’s time to fill the text columns.

AG: Lots of people who love magazines think it’s nuts to try to start a magazine. Charles Bowden often worked eighty hours a week running his magazine from a cluttered Tucson office. In his words, “The magazine is an obsession and I am at my happiest when I am obsessed.” You’re a one-person operation: You have to fill it, design it, distribute it, sell and promote it. You go store-to-store. How much time does Desert Oracle take? What sacrifices does independent publishing require of you?

KL: It’s one of those times right now when I haven’t had a day off in three months. It’s not always like that. Summer is slower. I can bum around a little more. Each book takes a good 60 days to put together, I’ve slowly figured out — two months full-time. And then I do all these other jobs that are part of Desert Oracle: a weekly radio show that needs to be written and produced and edited, these live performances at museums, hotels and campfires, talking to the reporters, running the goddamned social media accounts, invoicing and delivery, shipping out orders, tax returns, bookkeeping, postal permits. Somewhere in there you try to write and edit and design and proofread this little magazine. It’s every day all the time, and it’s depressing to always be so far behind on everything, but it’s ultimately a satisfying thing to invent and halfway manage to pull off. I had a whole thing in mind: Not just a print book with this certain look, but a radio show, live events and the sparse office with books and maps and yellow file cabinets — this specific desert thing layered over the existing reality, to make the existing reality better, cleaner and more romantic.

But it’s not a sacrifice at all. A sacrifice is working for some media corporation where everybody’s always in fear for their jobs, for their lives. It would be nice to have more money,  to be able to afford to hire a couple of people who see the vision, who would enjoy contributing to the thing. One day. Or not. I’m aware that it’s a singular pursuit and might always be that way.

AG: People either imagine magazines being these lucrative enterprises with fancy editorial parties and celebrity photo shoots, like Vanity Fair, or they imagine them as money pits that devour all your savings before leading to nicotine addiction and divorce. What are the financial aspects of running an independent magazine?

You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you.

KL: Desert Oracle has been barely profitable since the first issue. It doesn’t make much, I rarely pay myself, and I run a tight ship. But I’m deeply against going into debt for things. You have to play whatever angles you’ve got, whatever strengths you’ve got, and see if that works, try something else if one thing falls flat. Stick to the vision but always be ready to go with it, wherever it goes. Having a small-but-loyal readership, a cult following, etcetera, can work out if you run a tight ship. You have to do pretty much everything, and you have to get some satisfaction from it.

There’s this idea that artists — designers and writers and musicians, that whole crowd — are supposed to be dupes when it comes to money, when it comes to contracts. You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you. As a one-person publication, you can rarely afford consultants or “professional services.” I will not skimp on attorneys but I do my own accounting, I do my taxes. I am my own subscriptions-and-circulation consultant, I figure out the postal permits and the databases and the wholesale and retail mix. I design the envelopes and postcards, the invoices and the business cards, my work uniform, all that. I clean the bathroom and change the printer ink, and take packages and issues to the post office, proofread the issues and process the photos. There is always something to do.

You’re going to have do most everything, so you might as well make it the way you want. You have to create the whole world you will operate within, from your physical office to your daily schedule.

AG: Every generation includes ambitious people with literary aspirations who have something to say, and they start magazines and independent presses. Many universities have graduate publishing programs. What insights can you share with these folks about running your own magazine?

KL: If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied. Don’t let people bully you into putting a lot of stuff in the book that doesn’t please you. Don’t feel obligated to run anything. Don’t give out excess free copies if you depend on selling those books. Treat your readers and your retailers well. Answer their emails, at least the nice ones. Listen to them, because your loyal readers can point you to a lot of potential material, and because they’re people with interests very close to your own. You will meet good people and new friends through such work. They will generally forgive your mistakes and tardiness if they believe your work is done in good faith.

If the publication begins to get some attention, and you can make a living from it, then you are part of a proud American tradition of the small-town publisher, the country newspaper, the regional quarterly: Poor Richard’s Almanack, Leaves of Grass, the Territorial Enterprise, the Los Angeles Free Press. It’s a great life, especially if you pick a cheap area to live.

AG: One of Abbey’s problems, particularly with Desert Solitaire, is that his books’ popularity drew more people into his beloved quiet spaces than he was comfortable with? As his friend Charles Bowden put it in The Red Caddy, Abbey “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground and pulverized one of his favorite backwards of the Colorado Plateau.” As a publisher, does that concern you?

KL: Of all the human uses of the desert, people visiting national parks and monuments to sight-see and hike and camp is the best. And you want to convert these people from “Oh this looks great on Instagram” to “I will donate time and money for the rest of my life to non-profits that defend and protect wild desert.” We’re fighting this mafia federal government right now, these Russian mobsters trying to upend our beloved new desert national monuments, trying to upend California’s Desert Renewable Energy Plan, which was put together over a decade of hard negotiation between the Bureau of Land Management, the state government, the environmental groups and the renewable energy companies, years of public meetings and reports and science. These attacks on the environment and our parklands are completely out of step with California, with the modern West, where people place tremendous value on these weird wild landscapes that are near enough to all the big cities for people to escape for a weekend. The California parks and monuments are a steam valve for the densely packed California cities. It’s important.

I’ll complain like any local crank about the tourist traffic and how you can’t eat out most of the time, because we have very few restaurants and they’ve got lines out the doors in tourist season, which is now a solid nine months a year. But these are people here to appreciate the desert landscape, the flora and fauna, the run-down cabins, the wind and the sand. That’s good. We need these people on our side. Too many of these people is a good problem to have.

I’ve spent half my life out here chasing illegal hunters, trash dumpers and off-road motorcyclists tearing up the desert. It’s a lot easier to run off some illegal campers from Oakland or wherever. I always tell them where they can legally camp or point it out on their map.

AG: Endurance and armor are important survival strategies for desert creatures: come out at night, hunker down by day, grow slowly and develop a thick skin. Where do you see the magazine in five years?

KL: Hopefully it’s still here — hopefully we’re all still here! — hopefully publishing on a tighter schedule, maybe with a couple of employees, an editorial person and a production or layout person, maybe another several thousand subscriptions, some income from the radio show, some other things in the works, and mostly I hope I can do more driving around and walking around the desert. I had planned on a “couple days a week” made-up job as publisher and editor of the Oracle and that part of the scheme has not yet worked out. But it’s all right. Better than the usual alternative: Go bust and go back to working for somebody.

The Known Unknown: Tales of the Yucca Man

Photo by Ken Layne

Ken LayneDesert Oracle | Winter 2015 | 11 minutes (2,903 words)

The story you’ll hear most often goes like this: There’s a young Marine on guard duty in some far-off corner of the massive Twentynine Palms desert training base. He hears an awful sound in the dark, something like a growl. Then, the breathing, coming from one side of his lonesome little guard booth and now from the other.

It’s circling him.

He steps out into the dark, his sidearm drawn. There it stands, eight feet tall, an unbearable stench from its hairy body, the eyes glowing like red coals.

Sometimes, the Marine is knocked unconscious by the beast and found hours later by the next shift. One version occurs at the old rifle range, where the watchman — also armed with a rifle — wakes from the assault to find his weapon bent in half.

Since the 1970s, when the Mojave Desert base expanded from its World War II encampment, there have been regular reports of new recruits terrorized by both the Yucca Man and pranks inspired by the tales. But most sightings of the spectral creature come from campers and hikers at Joshua Tree National Park. Tents have been opened in the night by stinking monstrosities, and there is an occasional large footprint or blurry photograph submitted as evidence. A snapshot from the Hidden Valley campground has made the rounds for a decade now: The figure bounding over the boulders looks much like the iconic Bigfoot from the Patterson–Gimlin film of 1967.

The-Mysterious-Legend-Of-The-Yucca-Man

A photograph of the alleged Yucca Man from the 1990s.

Since the 1960s, when tales of Yucca Man and his desert cohorts were commonly reported by Southern California newspapers and television stations, amateur “cryptozoologists” and Bigfoot researchers have analyzed the blurry pictures and measured the prints in the sand, all in the effort to document a flesh-and-blood creature they believe exists alongside everyday mammals such as bears, coyotes, and humans.

But the Natives who lived in California long before European colonization considered these creatures to be supernatural entities, with names that often translated to “hairy devils.” They took care to avoid the gloomy spots where the devils were often seen.

The Tongva People living around the Santa Ana River called the devils’ hideout east of the river’s source in the San Bernardino Mountains the Camp of the Takwis, pronounced the same as the Tahquitz known to the Cahuilla of Agua Caliente. According to John Reed Swanton’s The Indian Tribes of North America, “Takwis” also survives as a site name at the head of the Santa Margarita River, at Temecula Creek. Throughout Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, you’ll see it spelled Tahquitz — the angry specter’s unhappy home in the region is the cursed Tahquitz Canyon.

Sometimes the Takwis or Tahquitz played a role in creation stories, as in Cahuilla culture. Other times the creature was an omen, or simply something weird in the wilderness that should be avoided. To the Cahuilla, the Tahquitz could be the “original shaman” and a murderous monstrosity that collected victims from Tahquitz Rock (or Lily Rock). “Tahquitz has also been said to manifest as a large green fireball moving through the night sky,” the website Weird California reports.

That coastal and desert Indians should know the same creature is not in itself cause for skepticism: Under various names and dressed in myriad traditions, Yucca Man has been reported in the wilder parts of Southern California as long as people have lived here.

In Fontana, that hard and wind-blown Inland Empire town, there was a famed racetrack north of Foothill Boulevard called Mickey Thompson’s Fontana Dragway. From 1955 to the dragway’s closure in 1972 following a gruesome series of fatal crashes, spectators repeatedly saw something they called the ‘Speedway Monster.’ Assumed to be a “wild man” resident of the foothills of the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, it had the habit of crossing the rural land at the dragway’s edge, during car races that produced horrific noise.

In the new suburbs of Antelope Valley, encounters with the Mojave Sasquatch reached epidemic levels from the late 1960s through late 1970s, as new housing developments in Lancaster and Palmdale pushed into the wild desert and secret technology was tested at Edwards Air Force Base and Lockheed’s notorious Skunk Works facility.

Under various names and dressed in myriad traditions, Yucca Man has been reported in the wilder parts of Southern California as long as people have lived here.

The Antelope Valley Daily Ledger-Gazette described the common features of the eyewitness reports in a staff report from June 1973 beneath the headline “Bigfoot Surfaces Again In Palmdale, Nine-Mile Canyon.”

According to reporter Chuck Wheeler, “the creature likes to run around houses and leaving footprints. That is its MO in the East Lancaster area where footprints were found around several houses recently. One woman reported that the creature ran around her house and scratched at the door. A small boy sent to tell his father supper was ready was found hours later crying near the corral. When asked what happened to him, he answered that a big, furry man would not let him pass.”

Southern California encounters were common enough in the 1970s to keep multiple Bigfoot-investigation groups busy taking reports. In March of 1973, a babysitter and three Marines — separately, we presume — reported seeing the sasquatch in Lancaster. Nerves were frayed to the point that two separate vigilante groups searching for the monster nearly killed each other two months later, according to the files of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

In May 1973, a search party in Lancaster attempting to follow up on several ‘Big Foot’ reports was forced to take cover when another party on the same sort of search panicked and started shooting when they thought they were being approached by a large creature. Fortunately, no one was injured.

In recent years, the hair-covered red-eyed “Sierra Highway Devil” has been repeatedly spotted by terrified drivers on Highway 14 near the junction with Pearblossom Highway, always at night, always running along or across the road.

The strangest tales come from Edwards AFB itself. The desert base adjoins the massive Rogers Dry Lake, with its miles of smooth desert runways, and is famed for its “Right Stuff” test pilots and landings of NASA’s space shuttles. There is significant subterranean infrastructure at Edwards AFB, with the personnel and technology required to keep secret aircraft a secret. Security cameras were always pointed at sensitive areas. According to persistent stories from Edwards, those cameras repeatedly captured images of desert sasquatch moving through the tunnels by night. Entire families of the hairy monsters apparently traveled the base’s buildings and corridors, appearing and disappearing at will, and to the bewilderment of base police sent chasing after the phantasms.

With the report of Edwards Bobbie Ann Slate, that tireless Bigfoot researcher, collected this report from the base policeman, who was patrolling the old “sled track” section of the base where the notorious Thelemite wizard and Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Jack Parsons tried out his rockets, and where Nazi V-2s had once been tested on a specially built railroad:

Heading back to the main base, I noticed maybe 200-300 yards to my left, these large blue eyes. I do a lot of night hunting and it was strange — they were larger than anything I’d ever seen before. The [blue eyes] had to be about four inches apart and seven feet off the ground. I stopped the truck and sat there watching them. It was too dark to see any body shape to the thing. The blue glows proceeded toward my truck at a right angle for about 100 yards and then stopped.

As an overpowering stench filled the desert air, Sgt. House saw the huge blue eyes again, now just 50 yards away. “The movement of the eyes was extremely fast. Another thing that bothered me was that they didn’t bob up and down. It was like two lights on a wire moving from one point to another.” A radio call gave him a good reason to drive away fast.

Because of the ribbing he suffered after filing a report, others in the squadron refrained from making formal statements about their encounters.

But the encounters didn’t end. Not until 2009 would Edwards Air Force Base officially acknowledge the many incidents with “Blue Eyes” and other strange phenomena.

The hair-covered red-eyed ‘Sierra Highway Devil’ has been repeatedly spotted by terrified drivers on Highway 14 near the junction with Pearblossom Highway, always at night, always running along or across the road.

According to a 2009  article in the base newsletter, Inside Edwards, the entity known as “Blue Eyes” was much discussed at a reunion of the 6510th Air Police Squadron officers who worked on base between 1973 and 1979, known as the 6510th Desert Rats.

“Attendees traded memories of their bizarre experiences on patrol such as seeing ‘Blue Eyes,’ the local version of a Yeti near South Base or ‘Marvin of the Mojave,’ a ghost who could be heard but not seen and left size-10 sneaker imprints in the sand,” Lisa Camplin of the 95th Security Forces Squadron wrote in the official Edwards newsletter.

The now-retired Edwards guards also recalled “observing unexplainable objects in the skies [and] seeing disappearing tail lights on the dry lake beds.”

The Desert Rats’ motto, shared with the Air Force Test Center for which it served, was Ad Inexplorata, or, “Toward the Unknown.”

As with the padres’ old stories of “hairy monsters” living at a camp of devils along the Santa Ana and Santa Margarita rivers, written accounts of monsters in the Antelope Valley date back to the Spanish colonial era. Horace Bell, famed for his role in the frontier vigilante group called the Los Angeles Rangers, later wrote two influential history books about life in mid-19th century California. One of those, On the Old West Coast: Being Further Reminiscences of a Ranger, tells of a shadowy winged beast at Elizabeth Lake, that deep-water hole where the Sierra Pelona Mountains meet Antelope Valley. The “sag pond” was created by the San Andreas Fault, and successive generations have branded this generally welcome geographic feature—ample fresh water in the desert!—as a cursed place. Supposedly given its old Spanish name by no less a figure than Junípero Serra himself, the Laguna del Diablo held an awful creature, a beast that would fly in shadow form over the rancho from the 1830s—when early California legislator Pedro Carrillo (grandfather of actor Leo Carrillo) abandoned the place following a mysterious fire and general bad feelings.

The winged wraith flew over the hacienda of Don Chico Vasquez, a man unimpressed by the folklore surrounding the lake. It was his foremen who alerted the Don to the beast thrashing in the mud on the cursed lake’s shore. He saw it, too, but the creature vanished — whether into the lake or into the sky or into thin air, they never knew. Cattle and horses began disappearing shortly thereafter, with the eventual discovery of several carcasses leading to the belief that the devil in the lake had grown hungry for meat. As with the “hairy monsters,” the winged lake beast also assaulted the rancho with its vile stench.

Don Chico Vasquez had enough, selling cheap to Miguel Leonis, the “Big Basque” known as the “King of Calabasas.” Leonis not only proposed to capture the lake monster that had bedeviled his Indian, Spanish and American predecessors, but he also planned to make money on the deal. The Big Basque contracted with the Sells Brothers Circus, which operated across the country from its base in Columbus, Ohio, from 1862 to 1895. According to On the Old West Coast, Leonis’ contract with the Sells Brothers would have made him significantly richer, had the flying lake beast been captured:

That if the python is such as the party of the first part describes it to be, and if the party of the first part succeeds in taking it alive, then the party of the second part agrees to pay the party of the first part the sum of $20,000.

Instead, the winged snake flew east after being shot by the Big Basque’s hunting party. According to legend, this was the same “dragon” killed outside Tombstone, Arizona, in 1890. But evidence of the monstrosity’s corpse has proved elusive, and Elizabeth Lake remains “haunted” to this day.

While Yucca Man and its cohorts are often described as huge, hair-covered humanoids, there are nearly as many reports of shadow beasts lacking any real definition beyond their brilliant glowing eyes — often red, sometimes blue as in the Edwards AFB reports. Such brazenly paranormal entities have much in common with England’s “Owlman” and West Virginia’s “Mothman” — or the Mojave Desert’s own “Cement Monster.”

As with the ‘hairy monsters,’ the winged lake beast also assaulted the rancho with its vile stench.

Anyone who has taken the scenic drive on Highway 18 from the West Mojave up to Big Bear Lake has driven past the huge concrete mine eating into the mountainside and national forest. Now owned by the Mitsubishi Cement Corporation and surrounded by security fencing, there was a time when many of the mine’s graded roads could be easily accessed from the two-lane highway.

In March 1988, two U.S. Marines returning from a day of snow skiing at Big Bear encountered the red-eyed shadow giant and pursued it into the strip mine. The former Marine, Ken Fox, sent his report of the incident to sasquatch researcher Douglas E. Trapp in Texas.

“From the left side of the road something very large seemed to stand up on two legs and run across the road,” Fox wrote. “The bottom half looked human, covered with hair. The top half wasn’t very visible, but appeared monsterish, scary in other words. The headlights only got the bottom half, and the damn thing ran out about 150 feet in front of us. It made it across the road in three strides. I distinctively remember seeing the arms pumping back and forth just like any of us would do if sprinting across the road in front of a car. It appeared to be 8 feet tall.”

What was it? Ken Fox’s buddy recognized it immediately: “It’s the Cement Monster! After him!” They briefly pursued, but having no luck continued back to base at Twentynine Palms. If the cement mine is still haunted by this monster, it is considerably more difficult for people to access the cuts in the mountainside today.

This transition zone between the transverse mountain ranges and the High Desert is rich with reports of similar monsters, from the beast seen as recently as 2012 at Devil’s Punchbowl to the sasquatch stalking hikers at Big Rock Canyon.

Yucca Man, too, is connected to these immense mountains via the Little San Bernardino range that runs from Joshua Tree National Park westward into the proposed Sand-To-Snow National Monument up to San Gorgonio and Barton Flats —generations of summer-camp kids have suffered sleepless nights as a diabolic forest monster lurked just beyond the cabins.

The harsh, hot badlands that comprise much of Anza-Borrego State Park are home to many strange and terrible stories of the creature that has been called “The Missing Link” and the “Borrego Sandman.” The Sandman has been seen by 20th-century gold hunters and rockhounds and is most often described as being an enormous primate with whitish fur and glowing red eyes.

The Missing Link sasquatch of Deadman’s Hole is reportedly a mass murderer.

Once the Gold Rush reached Southern California’s mountains and deserts in the later 1800s, prospectors and bandits quickly made the area home. Discoveries of gold at Julian and in the desert to the east brought many hopeful miners to the scorching San Diego County desert, and many stagecoaches loaded with suspicious characters. One of them, Peg Leg Smith, claimed to find and then lose a “mine” near the Salton Sea where gold nuggets could be picked up off the ground. And a couple of characters from Julian, Edward Dean and Charles Cox, claimed to have shot a sasquatch dead. An 1878 article in the San Diego Daily Transcript reported that the men had found and then killed the monster at Deadman’s Hole, northeast of Warner Ranch. Delivery of the mysterious creature’s corpse was promised, but it never appeared in San Diego. More than a century later, a Daily Transcript reporter named Herbert Lockwood went digging for the old story and found it appeared in an 1878 issue dated April 1.

While Yucca Man and its cohorts are often described as huge, hair-covered humanoids, there are nearly as many reports of shadow beasts lacking any real definition beyond their brilliant glowing eyes.

It was March 1876 when a more credible report appeared in the San Diego Union. A man named Turner Helm claimed he saw a “missing link” near Warner’s Ranch (four miles south of present-day Warner Springs). Described as a bear-like giant with a human face, the report generated great interest because of the many unsolved murders at Deadman’s Hole, then a water stop on the Butterfield stage line.

The bodies had been piling up at the stagecoach stop’s waterhole for two decades, with the victims including a French-Basque shepherd, several dubious individuals on the run from the law or creditors, and a wealthy San Franciscan named William Blair.

Many of the victims were found with bruised and broken necks, their money or gold untouched. The last unsolved murder at the waterhole dates to 1922, when again a strangled victim was found there, 64 years after the first recorded murders at the hole.

Deadman’s Hole — “Deadman Hole” on modern maps — is located in a grove of live oaks about 15 yards east of California State Highway 79, an 8-mile drive up from today’s Warner Springs, just southeast of the place called Takwi at the headwaters of the Santa Margarita River.

The visitor to the Deadman’s Hole of today should look for the small, plainly lettered sign that reads “U.S. Navy Remote Training Area,” at an unmarked crossroads just before Sunshine Summit. As at Edwards and Twentynine Palms, here the Marines train side-by-side with the elusive sasquatch of Southern California’s wild lands.

* * *

This article first appeared in the fourth issue of Desert Oracle, the quarterly print magazine edited and designed by Ken Layne out of Joshua Tree, California. 

The Red Caddy

Photo by Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Charles Bowden | The Red Caddy | University of Texas Press | April 2018 | 19 minutes (5,099 words)

I don’t bring a lot to the table. I knew him, we were friends and we had a lot of good talk. But there were no big moments, dra­matic events, or secret missions. There is no cache of letters. I’d pretty much pitch those as they came in. I was trained up as a historian but apparently the training never took. I am by nature a person who takes things as they come and that is how I took him. The only thing special about him to me was our friendship, since I don’t make friends with everyone I meet.

Now I run into people who are struck that I knew him and I always tell them it was not a very hard thing to do. He was rea­sonably polite, didn’t shit on the floor, and was well read. This last point mattered to me since I devour books, and like most such wretches love to talk about what I have read and even better argue about it. He had a similar pathology. I admired what he wrote and by and large agreed with it — not just philo­sophically, but viscerally. I suspect I was born already knowing a lot of what is in his books, it seems to come with a certain ornery cracker territory as part of the blood. So, naturally, we never wasted time on such commonplaces but talked about other things. Read more…

Life on the Oil Frontier

Maya Rao |The Great American Outpost| Public Affairs | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,428 words)

The house is squat and tan, near a 24-hour Walmart and a small truck stop along a busy road where diesel pickups groan and belch black exhaust. My new landlord leads me to the sparsely furnished basement, where a room costs $600 a month; the window by the bed is level with the gravel parking lot. About a half-dozen other women are renting rooms in this oasis of one of America’s most patriarchal societies: the North Dakota oilfield.

“It’s not like you’re in prison,” says the landlord, explaining that we are not to have any guests over. “But we don’t let it be the Wild West and let people get crazy.” Somebody’s oil worker boyfriend might trash the place; indeed, the last round of roughnecks already have. Men in other camps and housing developments are also forbidden from having women over, in an effort to keep out prostitutes. Gender segregation is de rigueur in a region where the oil industry is about 80 percent male. There are plenty of women around, but they’ve often followed a boyfriend or husband to the oilfield and taken jobs cashiering, tending bar or working as office administrators.

The landlord owns a cleaning company, and the house was originally purchased to lodge some of the cleaning staff, though it has open rooms for tenants like me. Some clients hire him after other cleaning firms send out women who lean over their mops to reveal undergarments, signaling they are available for extra services. But the landlord assures me that his operation is nothing of the sort. A billboard at the corner features a rotation of advertisements:

West Prairie Estates – new home auction
Holiday season special Golden China super buffet (lunch $6; dinner $8)
Dewatering containers filter sock solutions SPILL-CLEAN-UP
Little Caesars $5 classic TURN LEFT NOW

It’s spring 2015 and I’ve spent the last few years traveling back and forth from Minneapolis to the North Dakota oilfield in order to write a narrative nonfiction book about the largest oil rush in modern U.S. history, and the implosion that follows. Like most people out here, I’ve found myself living in a myriad of makeshift circumstances: crashing in spare rooms and on couches in a farmhouse, a camper, a few apartments and a trailer park called Dakotaland where a roughneck from Tuscaloosa gets stoned every night with our Houston neighbor and educates me about the intricacies of workover rigs. My housemates have been all men — more out of necessity than preference — until I decide to go on Craigslist and sign a proper lease. By the time I show up to the basement room near Walmart, several people have dismissed my inquiries upon learning that I’m a woman. “We don’t want to discriminate, but we can’t put anyone in a compromising situation,” says one landlord. So the basement room by Walmart in Williston, the largest town in the oilfield, is my only choice. It is too expensive to live alone — even as OPEC’s oil price war against the American shale industry makes overleveraged apartment owners desperate for tenants.
Read more…

The Apology Tour

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 12 minutes (3,043 words)

As I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a Mexican restaurant, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the table. I didn’t want to follow through with my plans. I splashed a bit of water on my face and tried to give myself a pep talk, but nothing helped. It was all just too painfully awkward.

I was at the restaurant to apologize to Chris, a regular of mine when I used to serve tables a few years back, who I had befriended and stayed in touch with. He didn’t know I was planning to apologize — or even what I’d done in the first place — so if I wanted to go the cowardly route, I could get away with it.

I thought about that when I’d pulled up outside of his apartment and opened the back of my SUV so that his guide dog, Westin, could hop in. I thought about it as I helped lead Chris from the parking lot to our table. I thought about it as I avoided making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror. How could I even explain why I was apologizing, anyway?

Let me try right now: We’ve all been in a public place, maybe a grocery store for example, and spotted someone we know before they spotted us. We didn’t feel like talking to them for whatever reason. Maybe we were in a hurry. Maybe we didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone. So we changed directions or walked down another aisle and managed to avoid the interaction altogether. It’s not a particularly nice thing to do — treating someone as if we wished they didn’t occupy the same space as us.

But how do you apologize for that? Worse yet, how do you apologize for walking right past them without saying a word? How do you apologize for using someone’s blindness to avoid interacting with them? How do you begin to fess up for doing that numerous times, months apart?

I reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, that I owed this to my friend, even if he didn’t know it. But I really didn’t want to do it. Soon, the food would be at our table. I could order another beer, tell a couple jokes, listen to his stories and have a great time catching up.

Why ruin that?
Read more…

Who Needs Jurassic Park When We Have Liaoning, China

Visitors pose with their hands in a dinosaur's mouth at an exhibition in Shenyang, China.

In The Middle of Nowhere, China, 250 miles northeast of Beijing, a massive new museum is rising up from the dusty earth. It will house a portion of the findings from Liaoning, a region whose abundance of fossils is helping paleontologists understand dinosaurs’ relationship to birds in more detail — and making China the new paleontology hot spot. Richard Conniff has the full story for Smithsonian.

Nonetheless, there’s genuine fossil wealth being revealed in Liaoning. Many of the slabs have been transferred to Beijing, where preparators are getting them ready for display. One morning in the basement of the IVPP, I watched a young man stare through the dual lenses of a microscope as he worked an air-pressure tool along the length of a wing bone. The needle-pointed tip whined and flecks of stone flew out to the sides, gradually freeing bone from matrix. Nearby a woman used an old credit card to apply a tiny drop of 502 Super Glue to a break in a fossil, then went back to work with a needlelike pick in one hand and an air pump in the other. Eight preparators were working at that moment at different fossils. It was an assembly line, dedicated to opening old tombs and bringing whole empires of unimaginably strange and beautiful creatures almost back to life.

Read the story

To Hug, or Not to Hug?

Getty Images

Emily Meg Weinstein | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (3,682 words)

There’s a thing that happens on blind internet dates. I’ve never liked it. In this brave new #MeToo world, where first we have said that we will not be raped, then we have said that we will not be beaten, and finally we have added that we only want to have sex that is “much wanted and excellent,” when we want to, with the people we desire, I feel that I can finally say — and do — something about it.

It’s the thing where men I’ve never met before, and am encountering for the first time on a blind internet date, ignore my outstretched hand, and tell me, “I’m a hugger,” before touching my body without my consent, invitation, or desire.

***

Single and desiring sex — desiring men, intimacy, friendship, conversation, connection, adventure, motherhood, family, and life partnership, too — I use the internet to seek these things, as I have used it to seek and find used cars, my current living situation, advice, information, and a variety of inanimate objects to purchase.

At best I am likely to be disappointed — by the strangeness of the stranger, the dullness of his personality, the rudeness of his remarks, the smallness of his mind. Or I might be beleaguered by his suggestion that since I am a writer, I help him with his writing; or that since I am a tutor, I help him with his résumé; or that since I am climber, I help him learn to climb; or that since I am a woman, I help him with his problems; or, just as often, by his suggestion that we retire to his home, after a single beer or coffee and less than an hour of conversation, to engage in a specific sexual practice or kink in which I have expressed no prior interest. Most often, and most of all, I am likely to be disappointed by my own lack of desire to know this man, or be known by him, either in conversation, or any other, more intimate way.

At worst, I have discovered, I am likely to be groped, and to face the reality that when women make dates we open ourselves up to a range of experiences, ranging from disappointment to dehumanization to violence.

A not insignificant percentage of my internet dates have touched me in intimate ways without my invitation or consent. Several men have placed their hands on my knee or inner thigh within the first half-hour of meeting me, while we sat sipping our first and only drink. They have grabbed or stroked or held my hand without my consent; they have squeezed my waist or shoulder when I have neither touched nor leaned toward them. These touches were not invited by anything other than my presence and proximity.

Until October 2017, I thought being touched in these ways was somehow either their right or my mistake. I met these men for drinks, mostly after 9 p.m. (I work, tutoring, most weeknights until 8.) I put my picture on a dating app. I wore purple mascara.

Even close male friends I considered woke feminists suggested that agreeing to an internet date carried with it some kind of “implied consent,” though to what, specifically, they couldn’t name.

I never thought my presence, proximity, picture, and purple mascara constituted a tacit invitation for these strangers to touch my knee or inner thigh, hand or arm, waist or shoulder. But even as I grew weary of being touched in these ways, I stopped allowing myself to believe it was wrong, or even preventable. I began to accept that it must be what I signed up for by agreeing to meet a stranger for an alcoholic beverage in a public place after dark. I began to dread these meetings.

Now, I only meet strangers in the afternoon, for coffee, so we can have more clarity and more daylight. I still wear the purple mascara.

But there is something else that happens, even in the afternoon, even just with coffee — even before the beverages are ordered, before we are sitting on the benches, chairs, or stools: I go to meet a man, a stranger, in the afternoon, for coffee. I find him at the appointed hour and location. I say hello. I say his name, question mark. I smile with curiosity, warmth, and somehow, still, a faint, feathery hope. I put my hand out, for a handshake.

But most men, when they see my outstretched hand, jovially announce, “I’m a hugger!” Then they reach out to touch my body, and pull it to theirs.

Read more…

Maybe We Can Make a Circle

 

Nicole Piasecki | Hippocampus Magazine | June 2017 | 13 minutes (3,410 words)

 

This is the second in a three-part series on gun violence.

In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.

In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.

In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear. 

 

* * *

Dear Alice,

1. I’ve started to write this letter at least 20 times in as many years. Just imagine me sitting alone in my office surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper. Since you’re a writer yourself, I know you understand the difficulty of saying it just right. I have spent way too much time trying, and I need to find a way to finally be done with this.

2. When I first walked into your high school English class in Chelsea, Michigan, I saw a light in you that I wanted for myself. Your chestnut eyes were always welcoming, your smile always subtle, yet warm. In person, you were impossible to hate.

3. “The center is a point,” you said to our class during the daily segment on commonly misused phrases. “One centers on a point, not around one.”

4. I had never given much thought to my teachers’ lives outside of school. I knew you within the context of your 11th and 12th grade classes. I rarely even saw you in the hallways of Chelsea High. You were a fixture in that corner classroom, a woman who seemed to exist wholly there. I knew you as humble and intelligent, absent of the complexities and fallibility of the literary characters we discussed in class.

I never would have imagined that you were married to a man who kept a gun beneath his pillow.

5. I took Chemistry I with your husband in 1992, when I was a sophomore. I remember that he played loud rock music on the stereo while we did experiments. He wore that plaid and wool hunting jacket and drank coffee out of that small, plastic cup that doubled as a lid to his tall vacuum thermos. His hands sometimes shook when he lifted the cup to his lips. He kept his haggard ponytail pulled back with a thin rubber band. I remember the fluorescent classroom lights shining on his balding head as he lectured. During class, he stroked each side of his wide mustache with his thumb and first finger, while he waited near a wooden podium for a student to answer a question. Sometimes he started class at his instructor’s desk with a lab sink and used test tubes and chemical reactions to create sudden, violent bursts of flames. That was his signature method of making chemistry seem cool.

Though I interpreted his personality as arrogant and strange, I didn’t dislike him as much as I quietly despised the subject of chemistry. You should know that I have always struggled with solving complicated formulas.

6. My dad never told me things that a teenager didn’t need to know, and I never thought to ask him. He mostly kept his work life separate from home life. I didn’t know what a school superintendent did all day, and I never thought to ask him.

One night, though, when I was standing in our kitchen by the sliding glass door, my dad walked up to me with his hands in the pockets of his faded weekend jeans and said, “Hey Nick? When you went in early for chemistry help, did Mr. Leith ever act weird around you?”

I looked at my dad for a few seconds and wrinkled my brow. “What are you talking about?” I replied.

My dad dropped the subject without explanation, and I quickly forgot about it.

Even when it was just the two of us — your husband and I — in his chemistry lab, he had never said anything inappropriate to me. He just buzzed around the room while I sat in the middle, an island among a sea of empty desks. He answered my questions about the homework and continued preparing for the school day.

I wasn’t a pretty girl. I was self-conscious and tomboyish. Acne spotted my jaw line and chin. My chest was as flat as a boy’s. And I was the boss’s daughter.

You should know that I have always struggled with solving complicated formulas.

7. Earlier that year, the mother of a quiet, long-haired, senior girl called our home telephone at an unusually late hour. I answered the call in the kitchen. “Dad, it’s for you,” I said in the direction of the living room. He took the call in private.

8. One of my favorite photographs of my dad is the one where he’s sitting next to my hospital bed at St. Joe’s in Ypsilanti, right after my knee surgery during my senior year. He sat in that uncomfortable chair, staying day and night, as my left leg moved, bending and straightening in a Constant Passive Motion machine. In the photograph, he’s wearing jeans and a blue sweater with a tired, loyal smile on his face. He only stepped out of the room when the nurse arrived to help me use the bedpan. Back then I never saw his commitment to me as remarkable because it was all I had known.

9. Through high school it seemed that my teachers somehow belonged to me. “Mrs. Leith is my favorite teacher,” I often said, not even realizing the implication of the possessive determiner, the inherent egocentricity of the teenage mind that places everyone and everything in her life on a single orbit.

10. Surely you know all about the giddiness that your high school students felt on the Thursday before Christmas break. My energy that day felt boundless. I practically bounced from seventh period, across the grass, and straight to the outer window of my dad’s office. I knocked on his window, and he tilted it open. He was eating an ice cream sundae from McDonald’s out of a small, clear, plastic cup. He smiled his full-faced smile when he saw me, and I returned a grin. He reached out and dropped the car keys into my hand so I could drive to physical therapy. My mom planned to pick him up later so they could finish the Christmas shopping. As I turned to walk toward the parking lot, my dad said, “Have fun. See you later,” and tipped the window to close it.

At physical therapy, my friend Carey and I both rode Stairmasters, and we listened to the Lemonheads album, It’s a Shame about Ray, on the stereo. We moved our arms like we were dancing. The snow fell quietly outside; the cold windows had white paper snowflakes taped to them.

Mid-workout we overheard someone say there had been a shooting at Chelsea High School. We stepped off of the Stairmasters and huddled around an AM/FM radio to try to learn more. Our first instincts developed concern for our friends who may have been attending a sporting event in the school gymnasium. We imagined that the shooter must have been a kid from another school.

It never crossed our minds that the shooter could have been your husband or that the victim could have been my dad.

Carey and I changed into our street clothes without finishing our workout. We quietly puzzled over all the possible scenarios that could have led to gunfire in our small hometown, but we couldn’t add it up.

11. When the details of that afternoon — the day your husband killed my dad — slowly leaked out from police reports and school employees, I learned that your husband had been reprimanded for sexually harassing female students in the school hallways. I learned that he was on the verge of losing his job. I learned that your husband had stormed out of the grievance meeting with administrators not long after the school day had ended. I learned that you and your husband carpooled home from school together that day. I learned that you were with him and his anger for the 20 minutes it took you to drive home.

I learned that when you arrived home, your husband disappeared upstairs. He returned with a 9mm, semi-automatic pistol in his hand. He asserted, “He is going to die.”

I learned that your husband got back into the car alone and sped toward the school administration building where my dad and two others continued the meeting.

Twenty minutes.

That’s how long it took your husband to drive back to the high school.

I learned that you didn’t call the police whose small-town headquarters were only blocks from the school. You didn’t call the administration building to warn the three men whose lives were at stake, sitting ducks. Instead, you called the teachers’ union office in Ann Arbor, 20 minutes in the opposite direction.

Since nobody had cell phones then, my dad and the others in the room received no proper warning that your husband was coming back to the meeting with a gun and intent to kill.

Your husband wore a long trench coat with pockets of ammunition. He squealed his tires in the school parking lot. He told someone who approached him that he had “unfinished business” to attend to.

He walked into the administration building. Turned the corner into the doorway of the small office. He lifted the gun and pointed it, first, at my dad (Daddy, Dada, Pops).

My 47-year-old dad’s last words were: “Steve, you don’t have to do this.”

Your husband fired round after round. He killed my dad. He injured two others.

You didn’t call the police.

12. Why Alice? Why the fuck didn’t you call the police? Why? Why? Why?

13. After your husband shot my dad, a pocket of time existed where my dad was not gone, and it was still just a Thursday in December. I was still just a teenager, happily riding the Stairmaster at MedSport looking through icy windows with paper snowflakes taped to them. My brother, Brian, was still just a fresh-faced Private First Class, wrenching bolts on the engines of fleet vehicles at the Marine base in Okinawa, Japan. My mom was still a wife of 26 years and a middle school special education teacher at a neighboring school district.

You were still just my favorite high school teacher — the one who made me love words.

14. I can’t remember if it was you or I who initiated the meeting two days after your husband murdered my dad at our school. I hadn’t slept since I found out. I had been desperately pulling his photographs from sticky plastic pages of family photo albums and taping them to the bathroom mirrors: Dad sitting on a chaise lounge chair on the beach in Cancun the previous December; Dad sitting on a tree stump by Higgins Lake smoking a corn-cob pipe and holding a cup of morning coffee in his relaxed hand; Dad with his arm around my brother Brian at the Marine boot camp graduation ceremony at Camp Lejeune less than four months prior.

Still, I was worried about how you might be feeling. I was eager to believe in you — to affirm that we were both unknowing victims of your husband’s violent actions, to tell you that I didn’t blame you.

I sensed some hesitation from my mom, but she took me to meet you anyway. The story was still developing. I couldn’t imagine any scenario wherein you were not the hero. She could.

We learned that you had been staying with your friend and colleague, Pam. When we arrived at her house, Pam took our damp jackets, and I saw you sitting alone in a wingback chair at the far corner of the large room. You didn’t rise to greet us when we entered the Christmas-ready living room. Your face displayed a low, distant gaze. Your fingertips fidgeted with a pinch of fabric on the bottom of your sweater. I don’t know what kind of welcome I had expected.

Finally, you approached me. You said something like, “This is for you,” and your tone was solemn. You reached out and handed me a hardcover book and hand-written letter. Did the book have a tree on the cover? Do you remember the title?

I never read the book. I meant to. My head was too clouded with grief in those days to concentrate for long. I stuffed the book into a drawer in my bedroom and never looked at it again.

I did read your short letter. Your words were scrolled diagonally across the yellow legal paper that you’d folded like a business letter. The one thing I’ve always remembered about the letter was the part I understood the least. “Maybe we can make a circle someday,” it said.

I’ve been wanting to ask you for years: What does that mean?

15. I returned to school only three weeks after my dad died, often arriving late and unprepared, driving up to the school in the used Chevy Corsica that was still registered in his name. My other teachers offered me unspoken allowances for my unimpressive academic performance during the second half of my senior year. My government teacher passed my late, biased research paper that took a stance against the death penalty. I called capital punishment “an option that doesn’t warrant enough suffering.”

I was scheduled to take your English class, but the counselor intervened. Instead, I met with your student teacher in the library. I don’t remember her name, only that her severe psoriasis frightened and distracted me. I was afraid it was contagious, and I couldn’t bear any other complications in my life. We read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as an independent study. I was just barely getting by. I remember how tired Santiago was while trying to reel that large Marlin into the boat. I supposed that I wouldn’t have had it in me to keep going like he did.

On the one-month anniversary of my dad’s death, I doodled “un mes” on the top of my worksheet in Spanish III, instead of listening to Señora’s lecture. I wanted someone to understand the dispassionate nature of time — that it kept moving forward, creating more and more space between my dad’s terminated life and my enduring one. It had been one month since your husband killed my father. But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t scream or cry or even say that I was sinking, that I needed help. I couldn’t say that my 17 years of gentle experiences hadn’t come close to preparing me for this.

That final semester of high school, I don’t remember speaking to you. Surely I must have seen you in the hallways. Did you see me?

If I could forget about Hamlet, the Lilliputians, stream-of-consciousness writing, and all the prefixes and suffixes in the English language, maybe nothing would remind me of you.

16. It was confusing to see you in the courtroom, on the opposing side, sitting next to your mother-in-law, then taking the stand, making a case for your husband’s insanity defense, trying to get the jury to say, not guilty. The defense attorney led you through a detailed account of your husband’s bizarre actions. I remember the story of your husband killing your pet bird, how he broke its neck with his bare hands. You recounted a Christmas when he curled himself beneath a piano and sobbed like a baby. You explained his obsessions with guns — how he usually kept one within reach.

An aisle in the courtroom divided my family from his, yours. You never once looked across.

I often wonder why I expected some sort of loyalty from you. I was one of thousands of students who had filtered through that corner classroom, but you had made me feel like an insider.

17. I know exactly where I was when I learned that you lost your battle with cancer. I stood courtside in the main gymnasium at Adrian College. I wore my baggy, white shorts, a bulky knee brace, and jersey #25, covered with a bright gold warm-up top. My blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it was wispy on top from my sweat. I was a sophomore at Adrian and had just finished playing an NCAA, Division III basketball game. My mom came to watch my game because it was the second anniversary of the day your husband killed my dad, and anniversaries held a weakening force for us. It seemed that we should be together.

“I have some news,” Mom said. She had done the right thing by waiting until after the game was over to tell me.

“Alice died.”

“When?” I asked.

“Her funeral was today.”

18. You taught me to love the nuances of words. You were the first to introduce me to Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Swift. If I could forget about Hamlet, the Lilliputians, stream-of-consciousness writing, and all the prefixes and suffixes in the English language, maybe nothing would remind me of you, except there will always be circles.

19. Did you ever attend the National Council of Teachers of English convention? I have barely missed a year since I began my own career as an English teacher. You’re gone, so I don’t have to worry about running into you there, in an elevator going up or in the cafeteria at lunch. But I must admit that sometimes I still think I see you places. I see a modestly dressed woman with shoulder-length brown hair, and downward-pointing chestnut eyes, and my breath catches in my throat. Then I remember.

20. The last time I saw you in the flesh, I was a freshman at Adrian College and you were still an English teacher at Chelsea High School. In a moment of capriciousness, I drove the hour north on Michigan 52 and parked in a visitor space in front of the high school. The campus was quiet. All the students sat in class, which left me alone to walk the cement pathways.

I walked past the art building where I had taken half a dozen studio art classes in drawing, painting, pottery, and jewelry; past the science building where I had taken chemistry with your husband; past the building where I had taken Spanish every semester; past the administration building where I had spent so much time waiting for my dad so that we could ride home together, the same building where I saw him, an hour before he died, eating his ice cream sundae and smiling through the propped-open window.

It still seemed strange that life just continued on in that place. A different teacher stood in front of your husband’s old classroom, a new superintendent sat at a desk in my dad’s old office, new kids replaced those of us who had graduated.

I entered the English building and walked down the locker-encased hallway to your classroom.

I peeked into your classroom window, a thin, rectangular pane of glass. I saw you leaning on a desk just a few feet from the door, helping a small group of students. I stared through the window until you saw me. When you looked up, your body froze for a moment. I wonder what you were thinking then.

I hadn’t told anyone that I was coming, and still find it hard to explain my motivation to see you that day.

You looked weak, frail, and sick, a dimmer version of your former self. I remember that you stepped into the hallway and faced me. You looked me straight in the eyes. You wore an expression that I decoded as a combination of mercy and fear.

Even with your full attention, I couldn’t speak a single word. All I could do is stand in the hallway and look at you, standing three feet away.

I searched your face and eyes, and you searched mine, as if all the questions were written there. You never asked me why I had come. You seemed to understand, maybe more than I did.

How long did we stand there, saying nothing at all?

21. It never occurred to me that you would die from a cancer recurrence soon after that day we stood together in silence outside of your classroom door at Chelsea High School. I didn’t know our impromptu meeting would signify a final goodbye between teacher and student, woman and girl.

I always imagined that someday I would write you a letter, that someday you would hold it in your hands. That someday I would have the answers to all of the questions I never had the courage to ask.

* * *

Nicole Piasecki teaches undergraduate writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado Denver. Her creative writing has been featured in HippocampusMotherwellBrevity Blog, Word Riot, and Gertrude Pressand is forthcoming in Literary Mama.

This essay originally appeared in Hippocampus Magazine.

Editor: Dana Snitzky