Where the Rebel Meets the Road in Joshua Tree

NYT Travel: Where the Rebel Meets the Road in Joshua Tree
By BEN EHRENREICH
Published: May 20, 2007

....Scientists tell us that a long-extinct species of giant sloth once fed on Joshua tree flowers and fruit and, in its slothful meanderings, dispersed the plant’s seeds around much of what is now the American Southwest. The trees’ current range, the theory goes, is a much-reduced map of the habitat of their symbiotic pal the sloth. But giant sloths no longer wander California, and the Joshua trees’ range shrinks with the years, the wildfires and the rising temperature of the earth.

Ecosystems are interdependent. What is true for the Joshua tree is true as well for the human communities strung along the highway that stretches above the northern edge of the 800,000-acre Joshua Tree National Park. This odd corner of California’s high desert is changing fast. The suburbs are encroaching — one long band creeps along Interstate 10 from the Pacific to Palm Springs, sending tendrils of tract housing north and south.

The cities are sneaking in, too. Real estate booms and art-world trends in New York and Los Angeles echo across mountains, rivers, valleys. Williamsburg and Silver Lake are on the march. They both wear hiking boots. They ditch Palm Springs, bored by its luxury spas and too-green fairways. They slip up the Twentynine Palms Highway and climb into the mountains. They feint north to Pioneertown, the 1940s Western-movie stage set, then — skipping Yucca Valley, with its chain-store doldrums and endless parking lots — drop down into Joshua Tree, a dusty little town at the edge of a gorgeous wasteland 125 miles inland from Los Angeles. Here they find a certain “spiritual, poetic, let’s-come-together-and-change-the-world kind of feeling,” as one recent arrival put it. They like it, and drop a couple of new galleries and a wine shop in their wake.

This is America, and cheap real estate has always been part of the deal. Successive populations of Indians came and went here for centuries. Then the gold hunters arrived. In 1938, Congress began signing over five acres of desert land to anyone willing to construct a cabin on it. City dwellers grabbed the plots up, built shotgun shacks, forgot about them. The government took its parcel, too: a giant expanse of what would become the national park to the south of the highway, and to the north another large plot — 932 square miles — for the military in Twentynine Palms, a few miles east of Joshua Tree....

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Hippies came to the area, artists, writers and musicians, too. There was no one to judge and nothing to do. Gram Parsons came here and died: he ingested the wrong amount of morphine and tequila in Room Eight of the Joshua Tree Inn. Today musicians drop in at Pappy & Harriet’s, the old cowboy beer-and-ribs joint up the road in Pioneertown. I once saw Robert Plant join the Thrift Store All-Stars, Pappy’s Sunday-night regulars, for two impromptu sets. I rented a cabin in Joshua Tree last year in which, rumor has it, Parsons, Steve McQueen, Keith Richards and friends used to party. It was wildly overpriced, but the grounds retained traces of its hedonistic past: weird, decaying sculptures, hippie spray paint on the old water tank.

It’s not just the emptiness that draws people to this place. It is also the beauty. The sky goes on forever, and it is almost always blue. When the sun is at its peak, the hills are drab and brown. At dawn and dusk, the colors come out: greens, pinks, yellows, purples. The light bends everything....

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/travel/tmagazine/07well-29palms-t.html?pagewanted=all