Son of Joshua Tree
Coachella Babies Overrun Desert Paradise
Airbnb Schemers Displace Weirdos and Freaks
Mysterious Energies Remain
About an hour before the sun starts to abandon this wild expanse of the high desert, the owner of the six-acre homestead that I’m renting for the weekend issues a dire warning:
“Be careful of the energy vortexes around here. They reflect back at you,” he says, picking up a shard of broken glass off the dirt road. For the purposes of this story, let’s call him Ez, a recent emigre from Venice Beach, a wiry bundle of neuroses and long black corkscrew hair in his mid-40s. “Everything is exaggerated here. If you dwell in negativity, the spirals will be made much worse.”
A couple of years ago, when everyone was losing their minds, Ez forfeited a career in festival logistics and luxury brand marketing to move his wife and young son onto this cactus and creosote-covered tract of the Mojave. Remote tech work was plentiful, so he took a job managing an Uber-like network of manufacturers who made rocket parts …
A Safe Harbor
Back to the land, back to the sea
A naturalist cavorts with seals
The tide is slack, the water so still it seems it might shatter. Seals float, suspended, in the shallows, two dozen pairs of dark eyes looking towards land. I feel a kinship with these animals, a relationship, or I want one, anyway. Their gaze is towards me. Do they recognize me, from far back in time, as one with whom they share history? Do they consider me at all?
Shorebirds amble among the rocks — here a fling of dunlins, there a pair of oystercatchers, red beaks and eyes bright among the intertidal murk. Cormorants and gulls roost offshore, on little Goose Island. There are more seals there, too, indistinct lumps on the sandy shore. Ducks and geese float by on the water, which is now showing the barest of ripples.
Soon enough, the tide flows faster, and there are eddies and waves and chop. The sounds of surf mingle with the bellowing of sea lions from distant outcroppings, a sound like the …
Wheat Crop Disaster
Worst Since 1917
Stressed Wheat Produces Only a Single Grain
Dixon Palmer, a six-foot-two Kiowa warrior in a Cowboy hat, is the only man in Caddo County whose winter wheat isn’t failing. Caddo County, east of Kiowa County, is one of the top five wheat producing counties in Oklahoma. On the way to one of Dixon’s fields, we pass cattle turned out to graze on what Dixon calls 50 mile an hour wheat — a crop that only looks good when you're whipping past it in a pickup truck at 50 miles an hour. Other fields of 50 mile an hour wheat have already been cut for hay, their hulls empty, bearing only one grain, evidence of the dust bowl-level drought that's ravaged western Oklahoma over the past couple of years.
Stressed wheat produces just one seed, a single grain, the plant’s primary purpose being reproduction. Stressed wheat is worthless wheat. There is, at the moment, a lot of stressed wheat in Oklahoma being baled up into hay or eaten by free-range Oklahoma beef cattle. …
