Son of Joshua Tree

Dispatch

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 for defense companies. Even then, desert land was still relatively cheap. He had …

Report

Wheat Crop Disaster

Worst Since 1917

Stressed Wheat Produces Only a Single Grain

By Matt Farwell

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. They call this “abandoning” the field; you know the wheat you harvest isn’t …

Son of Joshua Tree

A Safe Harbor

Wheat Crop Disaster