Wedding, breakfast, no privacy honeymoon, ducks, and cohabitation.

It’s been a life changing couple of months and I have been spending time adjusting to a new life, new schedules, etc. As I stated a few weeks ago this is why I haven’t been writing much, though I have wanted to.

On April 10th, in a small outside ceremony that was attended by most of our immediate family and close friends, my beautiful bride and I were married. My sister Margaret officiated the ceremony, making it not only short and sweet, but special. She incorporated our two daughters in to the ceremony, so for the last half they stood with us. As this was thrown together on somewhat short notice, we had no groomsmen, bridesmaids, etc. It was just us. We said our own vows; hers were written down, heartfelt, sweet, and beautiful. Mine were not written down, just a jumble of things I wanted to say and in no particular order. I kept going over it in my head in the days before the wedding so I wouldn’t forget…..I almost forgot in the moment and stumbled a little.

A word of advice, write them down.

Our reception was a small, intimate, pot luck affair. Old friends caught up, new family met, and new acquaintances were made. At the end of the day, we were so tired we went to bed early and crashed very hard.

The next day we met DjMatticus, his Queen, and the little prince for breakfast. This is the first time my Queen and their royal family have met, and everything was great. Matticus will always be my brother, part of my Ka-tet (Read the Dark Tower series).

From there it was the honeymoon weekend at a Bed and Breakfast in Bishop. That was a mixed experience. The owner of the B&B didn’t really believe in privacy, going so far as to enter the room without knocking once. My new wife was very upset. We balanced it out with a little shopping, some great bbq, the Laws Railroad Museum, Shats Bakery, and she faced her fear of ducks and survived.

She still doesn’t like the wooden duck I keep in the bedroom. She says it stares.

From there it was seeing her family off, me moving in to her rental with her and our daughters, and learning cohabitation. Our friends say that we have been acting married for a long time now, so they are glad we finally made it official. These are the same friends that say they never thought that I would get married; I was the perpetual bachelor. Perpetual bachelor no more.

I gotta say, I love being married.

Randomness

I was looking over my blog postings while killing some time at work and realized just how random I am. Some postings are history lessons, some are about my car, some are little short fictional stories, and some are basically just journal entries on my life. Are all blogs so chaotic or am I just gifted/cursed with a head full of wonderful chaos? I’ll have to ask the wife, maybe she will know?

So keeping in theme with the randomness of the day, here are some observations:

1.) I read blogs about Death Valley and other parts of the desert and people like to exclaim about how hot it is. Yet, most of them haven’t even visited during the hottest season. For us desert dwellers this is nice weather. I really want to call these people pansies, but then I realize I could never live where they do. Some live in places where they get multiple feet of snow per winter. F**K THAT! I hate the cold and I have arthritis. Others live in the city…I can’t stand cities. I can barely tolerate visiting them for a few days. Living in them? I would go insane. Too many people, too much traffic, air you can taste…no thanks.

2.) Kittens are the cutest damn things in the world.

3.) Engineers and PHD. Chemists are really really smart…yet really really dumb at the same time. No common sense.

4.) My grandparents are getting very old. This is not something that pleases me.

5.) Life is unfair and the world doesn’t owe you a damn thing. Get off your ass and do whatever you need to that will allow you to better your life. Stop making excuses and don’t blame the town where you are from. It all falls on you and the decisions you have made in life. Stop being a fuck up.

6.) What the hell, California?! (I feel that this phrase covers many topics and situations).

Los Angeles, Owens Valley, and Water

My Maternal family came to the upper Mojave Desert in the 1950’s. During that time my grandfather started talking to the “old timers” as he called them. These were men and women that were in their 50’s -80’s back in the 1950’s. My grandfather tells one story in particular about a man who came to the Antelope Valley and Mojave area with his father when he was a young boy, sometime around the late 1890’s or 1900. The old man said that at the time this part of the Mojave Desert was a very different type of Desert, almost a grassland. There were still some antelope in the Antelope Valley (Lancaster/Palmdale area), and the area was lush with wildlife. The old man, as a boy, had to ride on a mule that his father led. His father wouldn’t let him walk across this high desert/grassland because their were so many rattlesnakes, it was dangerous. These days you have to try to find a snake.

When the Death Valley 49’ers eventually struggled out of Death Valley and Panamint Valley, they came to the Indian Wells Valley. The springs they found there, down along what is now Highway 14 and in to the Antelope Valley is what kept them alive long enough to reach Los Angeles. If you go out on remote parts of what is now Edwards Air Force Base you will find remnants of duck blinds, springs, and artesian wells. That area and in to the Antelope Valley was prime duck hunting through the 1920’s. The whole area had spread out farms and ranches that were irrigated with groundwater. Up through the late 1960′ and early 1970’s there was still just enough groundwater to have a large alfalfa ranch between Boron and California City.

What is now the upper Mojave Desert, from the Antelope Valley to Mojave, to Boron, North to around Ridgecrest, and even some ways east of Boron, wasn’t the desert we know today. Wondering what happened to it? What made it the way it is now? The easiest and most direct answer is this; Los Angeles.

LA was a small and dirty city at the turn of the last century, desperately in need of water. In contrast, the Owens Valley was a farming community and was becoming the fastest growing area in California. The Owens River flowed in to Owens Lake, which was 20 miles long, pretty darn wide, and had steam paddle boats that ferried people and mining products across. There were large farms and ranches in the area, all of which used irrigation farming, and wildlife, especially birds, were abundant. In 1904, two men, Fred Eaton and J.B. Lippincott traveled through the Owens Valley on a camping trip and marveled at the available water.  Fred Eaton was the former mayor of Los Angeles and had also worked as a supervisor for the water company. J.B. Lippincott worked for the Bureau of Reclamation, which was at the time looking at a public irrigation project in the Owens Valley which would have greatly helped out the farmers.

Eaton went back to LA and convinced William Mulholland, the head engineer for the water company, that the answer to LA’s water problem was the Owens Valley, over 250 miles away. Lippincott, working for the Bureau of Reclamation, went out and surveyed the Owens Valley, found out where the water flowed, how it flowed, how much of it their was, and where the key water rights and ranches were. Instead of giving this info to the Bureau, he gave it to Eaton and Mulholland. Eaton and other LA officials were able to pass a bond in LA to get enough cash to buy the key ranches to gain the water rights in the Owens Valley. In these days, news did not travel like it does now, and the Owens Valley had no clue LA was out for its water.

After the bond was passed,at the end of 1905, Eaton and Mulholland, using Eaton’s extensive political contacts, as well as dubious tactics such as bribery and deception, to acquire enough land and water rights in Owens Valley to block the irrigation project. Eaton posed as a rancher that was working for the Bureau of Reclamation. The Owens Valley thought that he was buying land for himself, to be a rancher, and buying land for the irrigation project. By the time they found out the truth, it was too late. by 1907 LA owned the key water rights and the irrigation project was blocked. At this point the rest of the water rights were obtained through bribery and coercion. In 1908 the LA aqueduct began to take life.

When the aqueduct was completed in 1913, the all of the water that had once flowed in to the lower Owens Valley, and Owens Lake, began to flow in to LA. A substantial portion of it was diverted in to the San Fernando Valley, a agricultural community that was not yet part of LA. It just so happens that all of the key players in the purchasing of water right in the Owens Valley and various high powered political and public figures had all recently purchased land in the SFV. The land values skyrocketed, surpassing the purchase prices.

After the aqueduct was completed in 1913, Lippincott immediately quit his job at the Bureau of Reclamation and went to work for the LA Water Department.

In the 1920s, the Owens Valley farmers that had not sold out were watching their farms drained of water, nearly every drop of which was pumped into the steadily growing San Fernando Valley. By the mid 1920’s the Owens Lake had become prematurely and totally dry. In 1924 and again in 1927, protesters blew up parts of the aqueduct. This period of time is known as the California Water Wars.

In the late 1930’s LA again needed more water, so the aqueduct was extended North through the rest of the Owens Valley, Long Valley, and in to the Mono Basin. It was completed by 1940.

It was also during this time that the Antelope Valley and the upper Mojave Desert started to become the desert that it is today. The Owens River and Owens Lake fed a multitude of underground rivers and streams and traveled many many miles South. When the river was diverted, and the lake dried up, the desert took on the form we know now.

What of the Owens Valley? With its giant lake drying up faster than nature intended, their was nothing to hold down the lake bottom and it became a giant unnatural salt flat. For many years it became the single worst source of dust pollution in the United States, it still may be. The wind will create alkali dust storms that that carry away as much as four million tons (3.6 million metric tons) of dust from the lakebed each year. The dust plumes can at times be seen from space, and will travel as far South as LA, can’t say I feel sorry for them though.

A decades long court battle ensued because of these dust storms, with the Owens Valley finally winning in the end. LA has to now put back just enough water to stop the dust storms and create some bird habitat.Not enough to restore Owens Valley. LA wasn’t exactly happy about having to give back water. Last year, they devised a way to till the land and cover it with giant dirt clods. In theory, the clods will hold the dust down and LA will only have to give 1/3  as much water as before. Only time will tell if this method actually works.

Today, NASA says that California only has one year left of water. It seems that in the end, LA raping the Owens Valley didn’t help it. Karma is coming, just too late to actually affect the men who legally stole the water in the first place.

The Night

The road winds, twists and turns. It runs over hills, down valleys and cuts across the arid flats like a scalpel, two lanes bisecting the deserts sandy body. He looks out the car windshield, knowing where the road will take him but not the night. His only reassurances are the comforting weight of the .45 on his hip, and the sound of the modified V8 as it roars down the road, the car as black as the night it rips through.

The engine roars a little louder through the pipes as he presses down on the gas pedal.

The Ghost of Tom Joad comes through the speakers.

Leather on leather, his holster creaks against his gun belt.

He doesn’t know how the night will end, only that one it will end.

Monsters

You know how when you are a kid you are afraid of the dark? Your imagination would populate the shadows and the night with all manner of monsters. Some would be things you saw on television, read or heard in stories, or just things you saw that scared you that your child’s imagination would morph in to some shapeless boogy man.

I’m here to tell you that those monsters are real.

They live inside you waiting to take control, scratching away at your brain and conscience every day. Every mean thought and every dark impulse is theirs. Some people are better at fighting their inner monsters than others. For some, the monsters are just too big. Others have to maintain a daily fight against the growing darkness inside them! Building a virtual Hadrain’s Wall between them and the monsters, populating the garrisons with every mental defense and offense imaginable to wage mental war. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, for some it’s a stalemate.

The monsters are real, they are you.

Rain Day

He stood there outside his front door, looking up in to the sky. The rain washed over his face, through his beard and down his neck, cleaning the dust of the day off his skin. He took his grease stained gloves off and shut the garage door; a cement floor was not a place to be lying on when the temperature started to drop. Besides, the day was called because of rain. Rain days were few and far between, they were days for sitting on the porch with a hot cup of coffee and looking out across the desert to the mountains.

The desert is a hard place, he thought as he gazed at the landscape that surrounded his home, full of jagged and sharp edges. In the summer it was hot, dry, dusty and shades of brown as far as you can see, if your not looking closely that is. In the winter, cold, dry, and dusty. Not as cold as other places, but still colder than most people realized and of course, windy. It didn’t matter what time of the year it was, it was almost always windy. Normally just breezy, but it could change to the kind of wind that blows over telephone poles and rips the roofs off houses. But today wasn’t windy, today was rain.

The rain would be welcome by everyone, especially if it were to be a rainy winter. A rainy winter meant that wildflowers and desert grasses would be abounded in the spring. The desert wildlife might have a chance to live a little easier this next year, instead of coming in to the towns for food and water. He didn’t know how many cats and dogs the people in town had lost to the coyotes this year, but he knew it had been a lot. Just the other day he read that a bobcat was actually seen in town carrying off a small dog. The animals were desperate if they were getting that close to people. He hoped this was the sign of a rainy winter, to change all that.

In his own way he was like the animals that lived in the desert; wary of other people, only going in to town when he had to and full of scars from a hard life. He gave a small smile and shook his head at that thought; the things he thought of when stopping to enjoy the rain. He walked under the porch, wiping the water off his face and kicking the mud off his boots before going in the house. It was time for that coffee.

You can’t go home again

The other evening I walked the silent streets of the neighborhood I grew up in. The streetlights gave a dull yellow light, throwing small anemic pools of light on each corner that brought the shadows in instead of driving them back. A few porch light’s tried to drive back the night that the street lights wouldn’t. They were fighting a losing battle, most of the houses stood dark and silent. Some families were away to celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend with family in other places, but most houses just sit empty. The former residents have either died or moved away. The only living things that I saw were a few dogs, guarding their owner’s yards from the increasing crime. The night was still and silent, no cars passed by, no television sets or radio’s carried their sounds from houses where there used to be life, to train rumble or horn; just an almost malevolent silence that followed me back to the warmth and glow of my grandparent’s home. A shrinking oasis of light in an ever increasing desert of dark.

Grandpa stories part 1, family stories.

I’ve been visiting my grandparents more recently as they are not only getting older (86 & 85), but they are starting to have health issues. My grandmother was recently diagnosed with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, and my grandfather is heading that way too. He was also diagnosed as borderline diabetic and told to go on a diabetic diet. He politely informed the doctor that he is 86 years old and that he would cut out the sweets (of which he doesn’t eat a whole lot anyway), but that he would NOT be altering his diet any further.

Realizing that they probably don’t have a whole lot of years left, I’ve decided to record as many of my grandfather’s stories as I can get down. I didn’t do this with my father and I regret it, so I won’t make that mistake with my grandfather. He is full of stories, many of them he tells over and over in true elderly person fashion. Many of them are entertaining, some are sad, most give you a glimpse in to a world long gone.

This will be just the first in a series.

My great great grandparents:

My grandfather tells a couple of stories about his grandparents, and his great grandfather. His great grandfather came home from the Civil War on the back of a mule, was helped in to bed by his family and never again left that bed. He died there some days or weeks later. Before he died he told his son (William, my grandfather’s grandfather, and the man my grandfather was named after), who was maybe a teenager, that he was now the man of the house and would have to take care of the farm and the family. William worked the farm and took care of his mom and his siblings until some unspecified time in which he had a family of his own in Texas. From what my grandfather says, he worked his hands to the bone for his mom and siblings and later for his wife and kids.

My great grandfather could remember that one night, when he was a young child, his father William was pacing back and forth in the little house carrying his infant daughter, who was sick. William’s wife Hattie was sitting in a rocking chair either sewing or knitting. William was trying to soothe the baby to sleep, and walking back and forth for some time. My great grandfather remembered that William stopped and checked his daughter because she had stopped fussing in his arms and when he checked her, this exchange took place:

William: “Hattie.”

Hattie: “Yes?”

William: “The baby is dead.”

Hattie: “Oh?”

And that was about the extent of it. The baby was buried in the yard the next morning.

My great grandfather and his brothers:

My great grandfather’s name was Beverly Carradine  Heath, back then Beverly was a unisex name. My grandfather used to never talk about his dad much, but he has been more in recent years. He describes his father as a “rawboned” man, about 6’1”, strong, stern, hard worker, never smiling, never laughing, rarely talking, instead preferring to let his actions speak for him, with the fastest reflexes he has ever witnessed in a human being.

My grandfather said that when he was a young child prohibition had just ended, so this would be about 1933 or 1934. He was in a Ford (Judging by the year it was either a Model T or a Model A) with his father putting down the road, when they drove by a bar. Outside the bar was a small gathering of drunk men, and one thought it would be fun to run up to the car, jump on the running board, and punch my great grandfather in the face. My grandpa said that his father saw the punch coming and moved his head, so that the man’s fist only knocked the pipe out of my great grandfather’s mouth. My grandfather said that just as quick as anything, my great grandfather snapped his hand over, grabbed the thumb of the drunk, and bent it back. My grandfather said that the man screamed like a woman. My great grandfather, without even looking at the man told him something along the lines of “Now you behave, or I will tear it right off.” My great grandfather then putted down a few streets to the back of a police station where the drunk was arrested.

He said these same reflexes about knocked him out when he was seven years old. He was in the back of a car when they were moving from Cleveland to California. My grandfather doesn’t remember what he did, only that he misbehaved in the back of the car. Without saying anything my great grandfather whipped around, back handed my grandfather, and then went back to driving. My grandfather said that he saw stars and it almost knocked him out.

My grandfather describes his dad as an Artillery Captain to the day he died. My great grandfather was a Captain in the Army during World War One and stationed at Fort Patrick Henry (he thinks).  It was during this time that an Artillery Battery could not pass the tests that they needed to pass in order to be sent to Europe and fight. The Command was under the gun from Washington to get this Battery to perform. My great grandfather was put in charge to get them to shape up. He figured out that it was about six or so men that were purposefully instigating the Battery to fail so that they would not have to be sent to Europe. My great grandfather weeded these men out and then began to train the Battery like they had never been trained before. He had them going over trajectory tables, learning how to factor in wind, humidity and everything else that affects ballistics. He had them studying math and memorizing these tables seven days a week in the beginning, until someone complained to the Inspector General. The IG informed my great grandfather that he had to legally give them Sunday off.

This angered my great grandfather. To make up for the Sunday loss, he had the Battery train night and day the other six days a week and the men were confined to the base until the Battery was able to pass the proficiency test. Evidently my great grandfather received a lot of anonymous death threats during this period so he as well never left the base, spending all his off time in the Officers Club, until the Battery and the six men he had weeded out were all either sent overseas or to another base.

My grandfather said that he never actually held a conversation with his dad until he was about 22, so some of the things he had to learn about from one of his uncles. Uncle Lally.

My grandfather speaks of a few uncles, but the only one he ever really talks about is an uncle “Lally” his full name was Lallance Lloyd Heath. Lally was a short and stocky man that had trained as a boxer and was the contender of either the light-heavy weight championship of Texas or the middle weight. My grandfather can’t remember which one. Evidently Lally, like his brother, had a temper. However, Lally tried to hide it behind laughter and jokes. Some of these were basically abusive jokes, like making my grandfather eat grass, which Lally thought was hilarious.

My grandfather told a story in which his dad, his brother in law (my grandfather had two or three sisters and another brother), and Lally went in to a bar in Los Angeles. He never said the year, but this was probably in the 1940’s. The three men were at the bar drinking beer, when three very large Mexican men came in. The men were some sort of construction workers as evidenced by the cement dust all over their boots and bottom of their pants. They wanted to sit at the bar but there were only two bar stools left, so one of them men grabbed my grandfather’s brother in law and told him very forcefully to give up the stool. Lally put down his beer, stood up off the stool and walked over to my grandfather’s brother in law, put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down on the stool. He then punched the large Mexican man in the face knocking him to the floor unconscious. He stepped over that man and punched the next man in the face also knocking him out. It was at this time the third man was running out the door. Lally, Beverly, and the brother in law quickly finished their beers and left.

During the ride home Lally made the men promise to not say anything to Lally’s wife, as he had promised her years before that he would no longer fight. My grandfather mentioned the story to Lally’s wife upon Lally’s death. Lally’s wife smiled at him and said the she had known all about it.

There were other aunts and uncles but he never really talks about them. Except for one which he described as a “Mountain Man.” He said that twice a year this uncle would kill a bear for the meet and fat. The meat was used in everything you would expect him to use the meat for. The fat was used for cooking, baking, etc. He said that the uncle would use it to bake pies the way people would normally use Crisco. Now, the real special part of this story is in how the uncle would kill the bear. He would shoot the bear at the base of the skull, somewhere just behind the ear, with a .22 Long Rifle! Now, if

you don’t know anything about guns or bears you probably don’t realize how dangerous and amazing this is. The man must have been one hell of a shot.

Speaking of bears, my great grandfather once punched and kicked a bear in the butt during a camping trip to Yosemite back in the late 1930’s. As my grandfather tells it, the family was all in a large umbrella tent for the night when a bear came in to the camp looking for food. At some point the bear backed in to the tent wall where my great grandfather was sleeping, annoying my great grandfather, so he punched the bear in the butt. The bear grunted and moved a couple steps, then again backed in to the tent. This time my great grandfather, without saying a word, began to repeatedly kick the bear in its butt. The bear ran away.

Now, before you judge these men too harshly for some of these stories you have to realize the time of the world it was and where they came from. These were men that grew up in the pan handle of Texas in the late 1800’s, conditions were rough and life was cheap.  My great grandfather had to hide behind the front door with a loaded gun when the Apache Indian braves would ride up demanding food from his mother, under threats of violence. She always gave them food and they always behaved.

It was out of this life that my great grandfather became an Army Artillery Captain with an amazing aptitude for math, a Mechanical Engineer, a Chemical Engineer, a Lawyer that was nominated to the Ohio Supreme Court and a self-taught machinist. As I said before; hard working.

Next time: Childhood stories.

Morning

The sun was up in the clear and bright blue sky, hanging over the Eastern hills and warming the morning. What was probably the last of the sporadic cold winter storms had moved through the day before, and and a mist hung above the desert floor. It enveloped the base of the hills and stretched across the dry lake bed, giving everything a dreamy quality, almost like something you would see in a movie or read in a book.

He looked at the road out of town. Normally it seemed like it stretched endlessly across the empty desert, but now it disappeared in to the haze. He looked back at his car, his only possession. and new it was just a matter of time. 

Okay dear reader, I’m not sure where this came from, but it came. It popped in my head this morning as I was driving home from my girlfriends and saw the mist that was caused from yesterdays rain evaporating. I kinda like it, seems to be the opening of a story. Maybe more will come later. 

Something to think about

An old and close friend posted something today and I thought that I would share it, it is definitely something to stop and actually think about before responding to. Remember, the world is not always black and what.

“Here’s an idea….. for one day… lets stop talking about how wrong the other political/religious/whatever side is. Believe it or not, the world’s problems are not the fault of your opponent and you do not have the answers.”