Tag: zebra tailed lizard

When you get good at begging, which is to say you can earn a living at it, you start to understand it from a public service perspective. It’s a bit like being one of those people who dresses up like Santa Claus so kids can take pictures at the mall. You can’t just take the beard off and walk past the line of kids to smoke a cigarette or make a phone call – there’s a certain level of expected decorum.

It’s the same with begging. You need to look hungry, you always accept food and you never count out your money while standing in the same spot you were flying your sign at. Someone could see you and while it’s common sense that a single dollar isn’t going to make very much of a difference you still want people to be able to feel like it could. In the most basic terms you want to help people feel good.

The car pulled up – I’m not very good at remembering what cars look like but it was probably a greyish Subaru station wagon. The woman inside had a greying bowl cut that kind of reminded me of the vulture character from Tiny Toons. She was wearing loose fitting khakis, a button up shirt and wide legged shorts, and while I wouldn’t have been able to see this from where I was standing outside the car she would have been wearing hiking boots and had a bright green and red hummingbird tattooed just above them on one of her calves:

“Just take the dollar…”

She’d been holding it outside her window for nearly a minute but I only shook my head and remained where I was standing with my sign. Why wasn’t I taking the dollar? Wasn’t that my job? Atonement is an interesting thing – many of the people who offered me money on a daily basis could have been operating from a place of guilt but like the faces behind the obscuring screen in a confessional booth they were anonymous and unknown to me so any absolution they took from the act of giving cost me nothing.

I knew the woman holding out the dollar and the absolution she sought was not abstract but specific. I like to say that money is the only language it is impossible to communicate dishonestly in because its very value ensures the truth of every gesture. In simplest terms I didn’t take the dollar because refusing it held more value for me. They say that every person has a price and it’s possible that a bill of higher denomination would have overcome my pride but I’d like to think I would have held out for anything except the one thing she thought a single dollar could take the place of:

An actual apology.

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One of the interesting things about marriage, or any partnership really, is the way that individual tendencies and capabilities can combine to reach conclusions neither party would have arrived at independently. I never would have found the listing for the host position at the Thousand Palms Oasis Nature Preserve or thought of applying for it and LaPorsha wouldn’t have had the academic background or been able to write the cover letter to get accepted. Between the two of us we briefly ended up as unlikely park rangers.

If you’ve read the Beaumont and Banning stories this all took place directly after those but it might seem confusing as we’d originally left Thousand Palms to go toward Banning. We spent much of 2017 drifting back and forth across the low desert like a tortoise in our thirty seven foot RV. It had mechanical issues but amazingly minor ones all things considered.

We’d been overheating on the way to Beaumont so I found a mechanic to come pull out the thermostat. I should have just gotten another one and had him replace it while he was in there but that’s what comes of taking automotive advice from the other homeless people in RVs who are mostly tweakers. It would be a problem later.

The last time we’d tried to move it from its parking spot on the side of Kohl’s it wouldn’t start. I carried the battery over to the Wal-Mart to get it charged but it needed to be replaced. The Kohl’s people had started leaving notes on our door and sending police around so I came in to talk the manager. They were pretty freaked out with this direct approach but we quickly came to an understanding – if they left us alone for a couple of days we’d get a new battery and get out of town.

It took me one long day of flying a sign by the Wal-Mart to get about 120 bucks together.

It’s easy to miss the Thousand Palms Oasis if you only see the casino and everything by the freeway exit – we’d never known it was there. It sits about eight miles deeper into the desert and it’s natural greenery isn’t as much of a contrast now that the town is full of artificial landscaping. The town is named after it as it used to be the only place wet enough for the palm trees to grow in thick clusters.

All of the water is because it sits directly on the San Andreas Fault and natural springs well up from the cracks in the ground. There’s a boardwalk through a wetlands area and another hike will take you to a medium sized pond. It had a bunch of little carp in it that are no doubt invasive and impossible to get rid of.

The visitor center is an unusual log cabin made from the trunks of palm trees that was built by this kind of proto-beatnik who lived out there named Paul Wilhelm. He had inherited the 80 acres it sits on from his father while he was off fighting in World War II. After the war he took to living out there full time and there was another guy who made some vaguely tiki style palm carvings I’m pretty sure he had some kind of romance with.

There’s not a whole lot of information online, I couldn’t even find the other guy’s name, but all of Wilhelm’s letters are accessible at one of the nearby colleges. He wrote a bit of poetry that was printed in some of the local newspapers but his real legacy is the nature preserve. He had plans to develop the area to something between Palm Springs and Disneyland but while this never took off his partnership with a Montana oilman named John Wight allowed the ownership of much of the surrounding land to be consolidated for easy purchase by the conservancy in 1986.

A lot of the exhibits in the visitor’s center are dedicated to a lizard species called the Coachella Valley Fringe Toed Lizard that is endangered and unlikely to be seen but depends on natural sand dunes adjoining the oasis for its survival. Along with the toes it is named for various adaptation of its head and nostrils allow it to almost “swim” just under the surface of loose packed sand.

While walking on the trails I saw a lot of zebra tailed lizards that curl their striped tails over their backs like scorpions when startled. It’s difficult to realize how unique this behavior is until you see it first hand but most North American lizards keep their tails low to the ground. In the mornings I would see larger lizards laying along the edges of shadows that reminded me of the dog statues with nodding heads in the back windows of cars.

I want to say that these were granite spiny lizards but when I look it up it sounds like these are too small.

There’s a lot of nature I didn’t really see or take advantage of in the small time we were there. I mostly wish I’d taken one of the longer trails up onto the ridge to try to catch a glimpse of some chuckwallas. I’ve been pretty interested in that species in particular since I was a kid but I’ve still never seen one in the wild.

The host position wasn’t paid – the arrangement was that we could park our RV and live at the preserve and they would provide electricity, internet and drinking water in exchange for us performing certain tasks. I didn’t really hold up our end of it, I was supposed to clean out the composting toilets daily and only did it once or twice in the week we were there, but I imagine that would have been overlooked for the added security of having someone on site if not for one specific thing we were doing.

Theft had been a problem. A little under one mile away was a patch of land where some squatters had dug a giant trench they were living in underneath some tarps. There was video footage of them taking electronics and other supplies away in a wheelbarrow which circumvented the locked gate to keep vehicles out. There hadn’t been a host for some time when we arrived and our presence would have acted as a deterrent to further plundering but we made ourselves a liability.

Things were a little weird from the first morning when I asked about a coffee maker. We’d never had one in the RV because we’d never had electricity and I was a little surprised there wasn’t already one in the office but the volunteers either weren’t coffee drinkers or were in the habit of bringing their own. I found an old dusty one under one of the cabinets and cleaned it up and started using it but it was emblematic of a larger issue – a lack of self sufficiency.

When we first moved out to the desert we’d had a little black diesel Mercedes 240 that we used to take various trips without having to move the larger and more gas hungry RV. About a month before this the transmission had gone out on it and we sold it off instead of getting it fixed – now the RV was it. We could have opened the gate and moved the RV every time we wanted to go into town but eight miles was just a short enough distance to not feel worth the hassle.

On our first or second evening we tried out hitchhiking but wound up walking the whole way in both directions and realizing we’d never get rides. Then there was the golf cart – the reserve had an electric rechargeable golf cart that was supposed to be used on the premises. Technically speaking nobody ever told us that we couldn’t go to town in the golf cart and Thousand Palms is the kind of town where golf carts aren’t uncommon on the sidewalks but we did always wait until after all of the volunteers had left before riding it into town.

You know the expression “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission” right?

I guess I should probably also mention that we were on heroin. We weren’t strung out to the point where we needed to have it every day but our dealer was in Thousand Palms – a dude named Truckstop that hung out by the Truckstop. On one of the early days a kid I middled for came by and picked me up then accidentally dropped his bag outside our RV. I found it on the ground a couple of days after that and then we just started riding the golf cart into town on a nearly daily basis.

Even if we weren’t going to be riding it into town to get dope we would have been going after groceries but I doubt that distinction makes too much of a difference to anybody. I could have easily figured out how to drive it but we were always going together anyway and I like to compare me and LaPorsha to James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in Two-Lane Blacktop – she’s the driver and I’m the mechanic.

Of course I don’t really know how to fix anything and she’s almost killed us in a handful of crashes but it all works out.

I have really fond memories from all these rides. The Desert Sky was always turning toward dusk in shades of pink and violet and there was a good stretch of road where the only sound was the elastic swaying of power lines in the distance and it kind of reminded me of when both my parents had mobility issues and would ride down to the shopping center sitting side by side on a Rascal plus there really is just something free and easy feeling about an electric motor.

I think Neil Young has a whole album about it.

Truckstop and a bunch of kids lived in this cluster of cottonwoods in an empty lot next to the Denny’s and sometimes they’d get tweaked out and say that some elves that lived in the tree roots would talk to them or something. All that Summer people around that camp kept going to the ER for shooting up bug spray because they just sprayed it everywhere to get rid of these big biting ants and it always wound up on some cottons somebody would try to get a rinse off of.

Anyway one of the volunteers at the Reserve was a Dan – like a younger dude with a full beard kind of ginger. It’s a whole type – I think there was a Dan at the furniture store I worked at in Chicago. One of the last times we pulled into that Denny’s parking lot in the golf cart LaPorsha saw him in his truck and she knew he saw us so that pretty much it.

The lady with the dollar at the beginning of this story – she wasn’t there every day and she was the director while everybody else was a volunteer. The next day the golf cart wasn’t around and Dan told me they had sent it in to be serviced somewhere and I happened to go on a long hike that day and saw it was under a tarp by these old buildings by the pond that weren’t used for anything any more. Obviously they knew we were riding to town on it and they put it there to hide it from us until the hummingbird lady could come back and get rid of us.

When she came to tell me that it wasn’t working out and we’d have to leave I asked her why Dan didn’t just tell us the truth about the golf cart:

“That isn’t his job.”

I asked why it was his job to lie to us then. It seemed like he could have just as easily said we needed to talk to her about it and he didn’t know where it went or something. Anyway I didn’t hold it against him. I knew it was her lie delegated to him. I knew that we’d essentially been a headache for her but I resented being seen as somebody who needed to be lied to.

She came the next day and told me it was a big deal that we’d taken the golf cart to town – that it wasn’t legally designated to go on some of the roads without sidewalks and the reserve would be liable if we’d gotten into any kind of accident and so on. We gave back the water cooler and coffee maker and unplugged the power and hoses and drove off after giving her back the keys. I liked living out there and it was nice having power and internet for a little bit but it was ultimately a lot easier and more convenient for us to be parked closer to town until we left for San Francisco.

We started off on the side of the Del Taco but then we realized there was a shady area we could pull off to under a tree on the side street where we used to park the Mercedes and we just stayed there from then on and nobody messed with us. Most days I would walk to the side of a Wal-Mart to fly a sign and that brings us cleanly back to the bit with the dollar at the beginning.

I don’t know if she ever felt particularly bad about the lie. She probably just saw me flying a sign and felt bad about the situation I seemed to be in and wanted to help. In a way our values weren’t too radically different – at our core we were both NPR nature types but on a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet our alignments would have looked essentially opposite. By the rules of the lawful world I had done wrong by her in being a liability and by the rules of the outlaw world she had done wrong by me not just by lying but by delegating the lie.

A lot of contrasting and incompatible values were being put on a single dollar bill and in the moment I didn’t see it as something I could afford to take. Eventually she stopped asking me and drove away.

I doubt it was the last time she saw me but it was the last time she stopped.