This Desert Life: Another year in the Mojave
By Matthew Cabe
Victor Valley Daily Press
Dec. 24 marked the third anniversary of This Desert Life, a column I started back when I knew only that I had a love I needed to express.
Back when I knew only that I wanted to counter the negativity spewed so ignorantly and so often about the desert. When I knew only that I wanted to tell the stories of desert places and people sans politics.
Back when I knew only that a lyric from “High Life,” my favorite Counting Crows song, summed up how I felt and might make for a good column title.
“Beneath the sun in the summer, a sea of flowers won’t bloom without the rain,” Adam Duritz sings four minutes into the song. “But oh, this desert life, this high life, here at the dying of the day. I wasn’t made for the scene, baby, but I was made in this scene, and, baby, it’s just my way.”
The column has evolved. The past, and how it informs the present, became a focus. My personal life sprinkled itself in on occasion. Politics, at times, proved unavoidable, and that’s all fine.
Early on, though, research and immersion into desert culture made clear that my timing was serendipitous. A renewed focus on the Mojave Desert — maybe even a dusty little renaissance — was under way.
Over in Joshua Tree, a few months before my first column ran in late 2015, Ken Layne published the inaugural issue of “Desert Oracle,” a “field guide” to the Mojave that he has since expanded into a weekly podcast.
Some news reports have labeled the magazine and show “weird,” “strange” or “spooky,” and they’re not wrong, really. But to a 27-year desert dweller who grew up on dirt roads, “Desert Oracle” was immediately familiar because the world championed therein was accurately depicted.
The Mojave is a sacred place, simultaneously capable of renewal and destruction. That juxtaposition might be weird and spooky, but it’s also true. Layne understands the poetry in that truth better than most.
Around the same time, Kim Stringfellow started “The Mojave Project,” an unconventional documentary that utilizes the written word and video, among other formats, to tell stories of the desert, its history and inhabitants.
“The Mojave Project” and “Desert Oracle” are essential if you hope to build a connection with the desert.
Other projects followed. The more notable include:
“Joshua Tree: Threatened Wonderland,” a visually immersive, 14-minute documentary I wrote about nearly a year ago that details the uncertain future of the Mojave’s most iconic inhabitant.
Floating Points’ 2017 album “Reflections - Mojave Desert” serves as soundtrack to a short film of the same name. The album wanders through expansive ambience and features songs like “Kelso Dunes” and “Lucerne Valley.”
“Desert Lady Diaries,” hosted by Dawn Davis, is a podcast I found recently. It features 30-minute conversations with women who explain how and why they wound up in the Mojave, as well as why they chose to stay. If you enjoy living here, you’ll catch yourself nodding in agreement as you listen.
But save a few “Mojave Project” dispatches and one hilarious “Desert Oracle” bit that involves an attack of tumbleweeds, the Victor Valley is largely absent from the aforementioned.
So, with 81 years of Daily Press archives at my disposal, I set out to relive the stories that helped make our sliver of the Mojave unique and (hopefully) worthy of reconsideration.
Luckily, you’ve embraced them. Including this one, 155 This Desert Life columns have appeared in the Daily Press since Steve Hunt gave me the green light to write them. Of those, the four that were read the most ran this year.
“Remnants of a lost dream,” an examination of why Lonnie Coffman became obsessed with creating concrete dinosaurs in rural Apple Valley, topped the list. That column arrived in November and has garnered nearly 9,500 views online.
The other three — “The ‘great stone face’ of Mojave Narrows,” “The long goodbye” and “Our Mojave Narrows disaster” — combined for 17,240 views.
In fact, the 48 columns and hundreds of news articles I wrote this year collectively earned more than 400,000 views. That’s small potatoes to someone like Paola Baker. Her articles got more than 1.1 million views. But your growing interest in what I do here each week means everything to me.
Thank you for reading. More to come in 2019.
