Desert Rattler: Along Cowboy Poem
The Mojave River, idiots, a botanical war and a real artist
By Ken Layne
The sun-bleached sign says Camp Cady Wildlife Area, but the old compound along the Mojave River looks decidedly unwelcoming to the public with its disintegrating old barns and cattle pens. I just drive on in, figuring the place is unstaffed, abandoned, unloved, like so much out here. No crime to visit a California Department of Fish and Game critter reserve, right?
The mean-looking guy in the olive-green “Quails Unlimited” cap and bushy gray beard is riding one of those bulky bouncy quad contraptions popular with old farmers and fat hunters. Maybe there’s a shotgun, maybe not. I generally figure anybody who looks like they might have a gun should be treated as someone who has a gun.
“Hello,” I say through the open window.
“Where you think you’re going?”
“Looking for the wildlife viewing place, Camp Cady ... ”
“You just drove past a sign saying No Entrance.” Was that even true? No point in arguing. I gesture back to my smiling three-year-old in the kid seat, who is jabbering something about owls. I’d mentioned there might be barn owls in the old wooden water tower.
My kid yells, “HI ARE THERE OWLS HERE?” Better than a gun. Sometimes.
The caretaker’s name is Dave, a volunteer from the quail conservation group. He shows us where to park and then shows us around. “Sorry,” he says. “Most people who drive up here are looking to shoot stuff or off-road.”
The U.S. Army made their outpost here in 1860, on the sandy bank of the sandier Mojave River, and grandly called it Camp Cady. They made shelters of loose brush or just dug holes to burrow within, like rats. At this lonesome spot halfway between the Colorado River and the Pacific, these ragged soldiers were ordered to keep the river trail safe from marauding Piute and Shoshone, who never much marauded and generally lived a more civilized life than these filthy losers doomed to bake under the desert sun.
Crude adobe structures were eventually built, although none of them remain today. The fort was repeatedly abandoned over the next dozen years, and finally reactivated for a last stand against the Confederacy, which apparently never noticed. Floodwaters melted the whole mud-brick complex down the river in 1938.
Walking the dry bed, Dave points out a banged-up old boat roasting in the sun. There was real water in this river, now and then, not so long ago. The water ran aboveground in 1993 and again at Christmas 2003 – a desert winter so wet that kayakers rushed to Death Valley to row across lakebeds that are usually bone dry. These days, the oriental alien Tamarisk, or salt cedar, clogs the Mojave River. It’s a pretty tree, but it doesn’t belong here, and it has a terrible appetite for what little water is available, screwing our much prettier native cottonwood and diminishing our native desert creatures in the process. The Tamarisk must die.
Here on this Fish and Game refuge, Dave shows us some new tricks being played on the hearty trees. After a tent is installed around a Tamarisk, savage Eurasian beetles are set loose upon the tree. They kill it. God knows what happens next; the history of strategic use of alien predators is universally grim on this planet. Maybe the tents work.
We stroll through the old barns and crumbling cow gates. These were built with the diminished fortunes of one Alexander Pantages, the vaudeville-theater magnate who once ran a string of sparkling venues throughout North America. Pantages, the Greek tycoon, moved from Seattle to Los Angeles and gave Walt Disney a start in the animated-film business. But Pantages had other interests, and as Wall Street collapsed in 1929, he was tried and convicted of the rape of a 17-year-old dancer.
The conviction was overturned on appeal, but Pantages was finished in show business. He began breeding racehorses, here at Camp Cady, and died in 1936, two years before the savage floods would wash away the old remnants of the Army complex.
Dave invites us inside the little house where the caretakers reside. There are racks of desert bighorns and other curiosities. In the kitchen, he offers milk to my kid and root beer to me. We sit at the creaky table and he opens a bound volume of drawings and hand-written poems and begins to read.
Cowboy poems! Who does this, out here, in this artless desert? Dave, Dave Smith of Hesperia does. Before we go, I buy one of his poetry CDs (all proceeds to a cystic-fibrosis charity) and vow to join Quails Unlimited.
I leave the perfect silence of this Mojave River refuge and head back up Harvard Road, forced to stop so many times by the clusters of idiots racing their bubble-wheeled motorized tricycles across the asphalt.
Published: 11/19/2008
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