The Other Side of Los Angeles

There was a time not too long ago that great herds of antelope roamed the western Mojave. In the 1880s, driven by heavy snows across the valley floor, they headed east toward their feeding grounds. The Indians were already long gone from the region, and, like the mighty buffalo of the Great Plains, the antelope’s days were numbered. A few months after Custer and his gray horse unit were killed in the horrific clash in the greasy grass, a sporting party gathered at the arroyos and foothills of the Antelope Valley where the fleet animal liked to range. “They came on horseback and in springboard wagons,” says valley historian Gloria Gine Hossard. “Their faces flushed with excitement and the effects of an ample supply of liquid spirits. Their suits were of the latest fashion and cut from the most expensive material deemed suitable for the hunting field. Packed inside the felt-lined leather boxes were the latest in firearms, new Sharps and Henry rifles, well oiled, manicured and pampered … . They stopped at an open plain just short of a canyon. Some of the mounted men galloped into it with their dogs, locating the antelope herd, circling behind, and harrying them towards the other members of their party, who were positioned with their weapons at the mouth of the canyon. The frightened animals stampeded away from the horses and towards the hunters, who fired round after round into the onrushing herd. And thus were the last antelopes of the valley wiped out.”

According to the legend, there were a few that escaped, and they joined up with one or two other surviving small herds and, later that winter, while foraging for food in a blizzard, they wandered into the town of Mojave, where they encountered a new obstacle: A strange line in the sand which they had not yet seen – the railroad tracks. And there they stopped as if frozen in time; the animals that were known for their quick moves and ability to leap over obstacles were not willing to cross the tracks, and there at the very foot of the advancing new civilization they laid down and died, leaving not just their name, but their spirit.

North of Los Angeles – the studios, the beaches, Rodeo Drive – lies a sparsely populated, 2,200-square-mile region that comprises one-half of Los Angeles County. It’s called the Antelope Valley, and it’s in the high Mojave Desert and it happens to be our last frontier. Except for Highway 14, which cuts right through as it connects the 5 in Santa Clarita to the 395 in Kern County, or the asphalt snake called the Angeles Crest Highway that winds through the San Gabriel Mountains from Foothill Boulevard in La Cañada Flintridge to Palmdale (on the other side), it’s literally walled off from the adobe jungle. So too is it separated from the rest of the world by the Tehachapis to the north and west and a series of fabulous buttes along its eastern flank.

Like all deserts, the Antelope Valley is filled with glitter and charms, and can bring you to your knees in shock and awe, an enclave of freakshow plants and bird symphonies and miraculous outbursts of rock, endless bajadas leading everywhere and nowhere, empty wastes that lock on to your nerve endings and jack or calm your fears, now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t creeks with Wild West names – the Amargosa, the Little Rock, Big Rock, Bob’s Gap, Deadman, Boulder, La Montaine, and Bone Yard, and of course – splendid! there are washes – those alluring pathways that take us right into the crust of the earth, the Miocene Pliocene Holocene roads that animals have been traveling for eons, past the bones of their ancestors to and fro, to and fro, and into the 21st Century, where even as the megalopolis approaches, they range the sands.

At dusk, coyote eyes refract the new four-way stoplight, green snakes with triangle heads slither past Trader Joe’s, vast armies of ravens patrol the latest eruption of SoCal tract mansions that you can buy for NOTHING DOWN! (until the latest bust in the endless boom-and-bust cycle of the desert) as the sands out of which we wandered beckon all to join the reverse exodus and come home. Legions have answered the Mojave’s song, breaking the shackles of the freeway whirlpool cell phone smiley-face you-honking-at-me-motherfucker? spinning class low-cholesterol half caf organic soy milk triple vente botox, facelift live-forever program, heading into the desert, getting up close and personal with the rough beast that is slouching nowhere, for it is Bethlehem, trekking up the 14 in numbers so immense that vast swaths of ice age granite lining the freeway are being blasted and cleaved as I write to make way for the coming hordes. 

Yet for now, the last frontier of Los Angeles remains relatively wide open, big enough to absorb the many pilgrims but rugged enough to stay that way. In the past few years, the Antelope Valley’s long-time residents – a wide-ranging mix of fighter pilots stationed at Edwards Air Force base, ranchers, farmers, realtors, cowboys, winemakers, Vietnam vets, aerospace workers, bikers, meth chefs, white, black, and brown supremacy freaks, spaceport employees, a minor league baseball team, Hispanics who work the region’s onion fields, desert hermits, prison guards who punch in at the local Mira Loma penitentiary, cops, paramedics, teachers, nurses, mail carriers, and construction crews who grease the engine of the Hollywood studio system “down below” – have been joined by a strange, ex-urban brew, consisting of felons who have been destroyed, not rehabilitated, by the notorious California prison system, and can’t function anywhere but the desert; paroled gangbangers who live in federally-subsidized section 8 housing (the scourge of the Mojave); instantly wealthy tech folk looking to live large on the cheap; and young families in need of a launching pad.

But in spite of the region’s cultural, social, and economic role, in the seas of ink that have been spilled in the ciphering of Los Angeles, few drops have been devoted to this other half of the county, as if it were a crazy twin sister in the attic better left locked up and ignored. The second-biggest newspaper in the country rarely gives it a mention, proving for the umpteenth time that when it comes to the desert and those who live there, history is blind (and that’s why the desert is not just America’s salvation but its dumping ground). Moreover, the prevailing narrative coming from an endless parade of those who should know better, that L.A. has no history, no connection to the past, no center, fails to take into account the blank slate that fuels the golden dream, the big white heart of the Mojave that beats right here in our own non-indigenously landscaped backyard. In this perpetual deconstruction of Los Angeles, the land has been taken for granted, and the people who were here first not considered at all. And so the myth of disconnect has arisen – indulgent, fashionable, and a lie.

I’m not sure exactly when it was that Brother Coyote first called me to the desert. The master trickster and once-and-future shaman and deliverer of all news funny and tragic is behind all manner of events and moments. Sometimes I think it was when I had a vision of my grandmother handing me a vial of water – my own tears, I realized a few moments later – at a rocky shrine under a mighty Joshua tree. Other times I have ascribed it to DNA or spiritual coding, and then sometimes, I think that it’s all about Van Halen, because the only place you can hear them any more is on jukeboxes in desert bars, or in your own car on your own CD and the best way to listen to them is driving fast across a desert two-lane, which is when you might actually see a coyote, if you can slow down without flipping your car before he vanishes into the sands of time.

For a long time and until a few years ago, I was exploring the desert east of Los Angeles, the Mojave and Colorado deserts that are encompassed by Joshua Tree National Park and beyond. Then I met the photographer Mark Lamonica, who, after exploring the Los Angeles River for many years and memorializing the local Ganges in Rio L.A. with writer Patt Morrison, had established a new outpost in the Antelope Valley, whose vast, flat emptiness provided solitude and relief from urban travail. After learning of my simpatico with the Joshua tree, he told me he had one in his backyard. As it turned out, he was a bit of a coyote himself, for the tree was across the street. But no matter; since then we have driven and hiked and climbed the paths and by-ways of L.A.’s least talked about valley and discovered an amazing story, one that connects Los Angeles to itself. We tell this multi-faceted story in words and pictures in our forthcoming book, Reconstructing Los Angeles: A Journey to the Antelope Valley and Beyond. It includes Ice Age horses, Aldous Huxley, a socialist Stonehenge, and a hermit who has breakfast with ground squirrels. Recently, Brother Coyote called again, in the form of an urgent message. “You think you’re finished,” he said, “but actually there’s something else you need to know. Go back to the Devil’s Punchbowl.” The Devil’s Punchbowl is a deep and stunning abyss in the San Andreas Fault. Mike Davis once referred to the Antelope Valley as “the virgin bride”; I like to think of the Punchbowl as the womb of Los Angeles County. You can hike down into it, and I have, many times, even under a full moon. Once again, it was time to hit the road, in the terminology of those of us who live at the beach, to ride the clean-up set.

Generally, I travel to the Antelope Valley by way of the 405 to the 14, but Mark suggested I join him on a different route, the one that begins in Pasadena and heads through the San Gabriels, and true to the spirit of this trip, had much to do with water. So we began our journey at the Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena, where the Tongva/Gabrieleno Indians had settled and the hiking trail that starts there is named after them. These original dwellers of the Los Angeles basin came to the region in 500 A.D., after passing time in the Antelope Valley; a prehistoric crossroads for Shoshone tribes searching for game and water. From an elevation of 10,000 feet near Mount Wilson, the Arroyo Seco flows into this historic and scenic water center, chattering across rocks and boulders, flowing into the veins and arteries of Los Angeles, providing spiritual and liquid succor. After the torrential floods of the early 20th Century, the first dam in L.A. County – the Devil’s Gate – was built at this ancient settlement, stopping up the waters around which one of the first cities in SoCal had formed. Then we headed north up Foothill Boulevard, and followed it into the San Gabriels, where it becomes the Angeles Crest Highway, backtracking the ancient serpentine trail traversed by the first human and animal nations through the mountains, and stopping at certain places along the way. Soon we would emerge in the Antelope Valley and head through it, taking two of America’s deadliest highways along the way – a trick – or test, perhaps - that could only be played by Brother Coyote in his insistence on conveying a message of utmost consequence.

The first of these highways is the 66 mile-long Angeles Crest Highway, which begins in La Cañada Flintridge. Narrow switchbacks, falling boulders, blind spots, and avalanches combine to cause a high number of fatal accidents and scary motorist alerts on this notorious avenue. Sometimes it’s so crowded with fast-moving commuters that locals refer to it as the Palmdale 500. But I’m a firm believer in signs and symbols, and in Mark’s Mustang, with the galloping pony on the grille, we had wild horse mojo on our side, and I figured that would carry us safely through terrain that the wind drinkers themselves had once traveled. Up the mountains we wound and climbed, encountering no traffic, and as we approached the Antelope Valley, I thought about the story of our region, a tale that is older than time. Contrary to the view that Los Angeles is a vague megalopolis rooted simply in now, the Antelope Valley is a rich repository of dramas, epic geologic sagas that involve all the great themes – births, deaths, betrayals, suffering, endurance, and truth – and they pre-date the official record. The modern ’scape that we call Southern California – including what came to be known as Los Angeles – actually began to appear around one billion years ago. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the first components of SoCal were not freeways, the studio system, or gated communities, but materials that eked their way through Earth’s crust and mantle, or accumulated from rain and biological activity in the oceans, or were swept in as ash or dust from the atmosphere, whispering of the Big Bang, God’s click of the fingers, a mythical Liberace’s frenzy across the universal 88s, or perhaps of nothing.

Their rest was not permanent, and they were deranged by eons of volcanism and tectonic collisions, resulting in erosion and the reshuffling of sediments, followed by periods of calm, interspersed with repeated cycles of upthrusting and tectonic fender benders, during which vast inland seas rushed in and consumed all and then disappeared, leaving sprawling alkaline floodplains in their wake – rendering the region a kind of geologic mosh pit whose fate is still determined by an ancient honeycomb of fault lines that could blow modern civilization from the thin membrane of sand that separates us from the abyss at any given moment. It’s hard to imagine how this would actually happen, but consider this – during the Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene eras (65 to 24 million years ago), massive fault systems that predated the mighty San Andreas were responsible for the very mountain ranges on the central coast, heaving tremendous blocks of crystalline basement rocks and all the sediment that lay on top of them to that area and beyond.

It was around this time that the Antelope Valley began to emerge, in the western Mojave Desert, the most extreme part of the country’s most extreme desert, the one with the hot white heart and the gravelly tributaries and washes that seem to grow crunchier and craggier as you follow them toward the setting sun. Some of the oldest rocks in California are in the western Mojave, clocking in at 1600 to 1800 million years; metamorphic boulders that are similar in age and character to those found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. A portion of these have come to reside in the Antelope Valley, and others that are equally old form the bedrock geology of the San Gabriel Mountain Range, which lines the valley’s southern edge, separating it from the Los Angeles basin at the lower elevations. The San Gabriels include some of the highest peaks in California, including Mount Baldy to the east of the Antelope Valley at 10,000 feet. The “pre-Cambrian basement” (as scientists call the range’s underlying foundation) is a treasure trove of fossils and decomposed life forms and throttled secrets that speak to a past so old that it’s almost beyond time, older even than the exhibits of the Hollywood Wax Museum, with the exception perhaps of Hugh Hefner’s smoking jacket – an antediluvian relic that, according to rumor, actually defies carbon-dating!

Soon, we found ourselves at a rustic red cabin called the Hidden Springs Café, a popular biker stop and purveyor of “nearly famous homemade chili.” Out front was a Smokey the Bear rain barrel and phone booth with a “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker – two things which immediately made me feel welcome: I love the old park service mascot, too goofy for much action nowadays, and when it comes to the coiled rattlesnake that signifies independence, to me it explains the whole American shebang. But better than these symbols was a real-life character named Otis who greeted us as we got out of the car. Otis, a member of the family which owns the joint, has a Klondike beard and a lot of stories, and filled us in on the nearby Monte Cristo mine (that’s “Mountain of Christ” for you gringos who think it was named after a cigar) – a famous gold strike about which I had not heard. We do not generally associate L.A. County with the gold rush, and the only local mine whose riches are regularly hauled out is Hollywood. But in the 19th Century, prospectors were crawling through deep fissures of the San Gabriels, emerging with yellow flakes and glittering rocks, and one of these veins was the Monte Cristo. Originally, Otis said, it was the legendary Lost Padres mine, named for some mission priests who were said to have scraped its walls clean and secreted their treasure in the chaparral, until Indians found and seized it and wiped out the Spanish elders. Later, Tiburcio Vásquez, the notorious Mojave bandito and horse thief who descended from the conquistador Juan Bautista de Anza, plied the desert freighters that hauled gems and minerals down from the mountains and across the sands, hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the Antelope Valley until he was arrested in 1874. A superstar of the era, he was mobbed by female visitors to his jail cell, and hanged a year later. “There’s a few people still working the mine,” Otis said, and then showed us a big rock with gold streaks. “This came right out of these mountains.” With the Antelope Valley just beyond the ridges and the sun approaching the afternoon mark, it was time to continue our journey, prospecting something more valuable than gold – our ancient past. But we left our contact information in case of breaking news; after all, any day now there could be a new strike.

We headed down the highway and remained on it as it became the Angeles Forest Highway, and emptied out in Palmdale, where we turned right on the other deadly road, the 138, a.k.a. the Pearblossom Highway; the one that David Hockney made famous in his desert collage, a high-desert Walk of Fame where John Wayne, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Frank Zappa, Chuck Yeager, and Maynard Dixon have left their tracks. In the Antelope Valley, the two-lane is known as “Death Alley,” and although we had cranked up the Allman Brothers for the drive, we headed with extreme caution to the east, toward the Devil’s Punchbowl. Apparently the wind drinkers were still with us, for we arrived safely at our favorite desert pit stop: The Country Mart in the town of Pearblossom. We parked and raced in for the best egg salad sandwiches west of the Mississippi. The Country Mart is a classic Mojave store. It stocks propane, tat mags, sleds in the winter, motocross goggles, and all manner of packaged jerky. As we waited in line to pay, a ringtone went off. It was “I Drink Alone” by George Thorogood, and a guy in a mullet answered his phone as the lyric “Me and my good buddy weiser” trailed off into the store chatter. It was the best ringtone I had ever heard, and one that you would never hear at the lower elevations. I gave the guy a nod and we sat down in front of the wood-burning stove and ate our sandwiches. An article from the local paper that was pasted on the wall caught our attention. Often, it takes stories such as these – obscure accounts tucked away in remote pockets – to provide information that turns conventional history on its head. This one carried the headline “Hapsburg Descendant Founds Pearblossom.” This was of particular interest to Mark, a Renaissance scholar who has been working on a book about that era in which the Hapsburgs played such a pivotal role. A cashier offered Mark a stepladder so he could climb up and read the startling news. In the early 1900s, it said, a direct descendant of the the Hapsburgs, the famous family that ran the western empire for centuries and financed the exploration of the New World, settled in the Antelope Valley, married a “commoner,” was defrocked by other relatives, and set up the first PEAR orchards in the Antelope Valley. “Aha!” Mark said. “So L.A. does have royalty!” I was beginning to see why Brother Coyote had told me to hit the road yet again; the western Mojave was not just linked to cowboys and Indians, but now to the 15th Century power fields of Europe.

It was time to resume our journey to the center of Los Angeles, so we headed back out onto the 138 and pointed the Mustang for the Punchbowl. The turnoff came soon, and then we followed the signs for the Devil. As you shall see, there is nothing to fear. True to my promise to Brother Coyote, I ventured into the womb of the virgin bride, sacred vessel of all there is and has ever been, past pinyon and juniper and down the narrowing incline, as the sun’s rays danced across the granite walls which glittered in response. As I made my way into the lower elevations and through the chaparral, some leaves rustled, and a bobcat ran from the scrub and crossed my path. This was, after all, his domain. I continued to the bottom and soon reached the very center of the center of Los Angeles – a mounded rock around which a trickle of water flowed, hinting at the stream which gallops through the bowl after the monsoons, the very liquid which the first nations followed all the way to the ocean. I sat down, folded my legs, and listened. From the distance, there came one of the periodic sonic booms from Edwards. Then it was quiet again – there were no sounds of civilization; no suck-and-whine of Harley pipes, no huffing diesels, no pings or rings or horns. Then the silence became even more pronounced, and all I could hear was my breathing, and after a while I began to hear my own blood coursing through my body – a sound that is at once familiar to me, after many desert sojourns, but nonetheless overwhelming, like the immense Tibetan ohmmmmm of an onrushing overhead wave in the surf at a rocky break.

What else do you have to tell me? I asked the bowl. Whither Los Angeles? To quote the Clash, should I stay or should I go? And then I waited, because waiting is the way of the desert and I knew the answer might not come quickly. The sun rose higher in the sky and no message was forthcoming – only the sound of my own lifeforce continuing on its way. I sat with the mounded rock for a length of time and realized, as the sun approached high noon, that there was no answer to be had, although for one quick moment, I thought I heard “Dust in the Wind,” or maybe it was my ancestors chanting, and then I saw an image of Sacajawea, or perhaps it was Janis Joplin, or maybe even the eternal hitchhiker on the side of the road, or maybe it was a shape-shifting mountain lion, because that’s why the Indians called it the Devil’s Punchbowl. In any case, the image vanished before I could discern its name, and from nature’s broadcasting station came nothing more, if indeed the image had actually materialized in the first place. Sometimes that too is the way of the desert – you can wait forever and it throws you a curve, leaving you to your own epiphanies or demons, forcing you – that skank! – to answer your own questions. I hiked out of the stone chalice, a tough climb with a steep grade, and was now very hungry.

At the top of the rim, Mark was waiting for me; he had spent some time with the park’s mascot raptors – an owl and a hawk that had been injured, and greeted visitors from the large enclosures that were their home. We were hungry, and pondered the valley’s wide range of dining options, from kosher hot dogs and pizza at Costco to homemade barbecue at shacks along the 138, to sushi at various well-appointed Japanese restaurants. Eating raw fish in the desert never seems right, and, in any case, after trekking through wilderness fault lines, I wanted something more substantial. So we decided to head for the enchanting monastery at Valyermo.

Driving across paths of cowboys and Indians and the old Butterfield stage route, we soon arrived at our favorite desert oasis. It’s been here since 1956, when the Communist party in China evicted its Benedictine monks. The archdiocese of Los Angeles extended an invitation and they settled in the high Mojave desert of the Antelope Valley. Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains near tributaries of the San Andreas Fault, Valyermo is one of the most sublime places in Southern California. The hills are studded with juniper and sage and Joshua trees. The chaparral lowlands feature a chattering brook lined with cottonwood and mesquite. Monks in Holy Land robes stroll the grounds like the old Christian prophets, engaged in meditation, chores, prayer. Anyone can visit Valyermo, for it is a retreat; I myself have wandered in many times, to hike its meandering trails which take you around a duck pond, up into the hills where there is a crumbling stone amphitheater that begs for a spectacle, and across a wash and onto another path – that of the stations of the cross.

Not all of the stations are depicted here, but there are sculptures and constructions that invoke the key ones, most importantly the crucifixion. The monks of Valyermo have chosen to portray this moment in an unusual way, with a stone carving of Christ’s feet nailed to a cross. Not his body, mind you, not his hands: Just his feet. Unlike some of the other stations which you can spot from a short distance, you can’t see this one as you walk the dusty by-way; when I first came upon it years ago, I found myself transfixed, as they say, and spent an unknown period of time pondering the sight, and even now, after working up a mighty hunger, I am once again standing in its shadow. Why it is so powerful I cannot explain, but I can tell you this: Like many of us, I’ve seen my fair share of Christs, from dashboards to hip-hop jewelry to neon signs. But this one, in the Mojave, surrounded by Joshua trees in a scene right out of the Old Testament, carries me back to another time, perhaps the very streets of Jerusalem when my tribe, the ancient Hebrews, followed an array of desert wise men and acres with all manner of messages. Which path to take? they had wondered, and whenever I stand at the large stone feet amid the Joshuas, I think of the Diaspora which has never ended, and even my own reverse exodus, which took me back into the desert, where I always find comfort among the old spirits.

“Hey,” Mark says after a while, reminding me of our mission. “Let’s see if there’s something to eat.” We headed down the path to the monk’s large dining room, where a pilgrim can always get a meal. “Welcome,” the monks said as we entered, and directed us to a large metal barrel surrounded by stacks of bowls and utensils. “Today, we’re having chicken soup.” It was fragrant and steaming and thick, with chunks of meat and vegetables grown in the gardens. We picked up the ladle and helped ourselves, then sat down with others who had made their way to Valyermo on this hot desert day, supping mightily of Grandma’s favored replenishment.

As we were replenished by the hearty brew, I thought of the great spiritual teachings that have poured out of the drylands forever and ever, and how such things continue, for that is the way of such places. A few miles away at the Sacred Heart Church, someone was uttering a prayer, and over at Lancaster Baptist, someone recited a psalm, and across the valley, at the dozens of houses of worship, people sought communion with that which was infinite and good, trying, as always, for a new beginning. For some members of my tribe, that meant gathering at the temple of Beth Knesset Bamidbar in Lancaster, built around the same time as Valerymo when the region held but a mere 3,500 people. Beth Knesset Bamidbar translates as “congregation of the desert.” When Rabbi David Hoffman assumed leadership of this particular congregation a couple of years ago, he referred to another important translation in a sermon for his installation. The phrase “Eretz Tzvi,” another name for Israel, means “land of the deer”; a reference not so much to the physical being known as the deer but to what it represents. Deer, or antelope, as Rabbi Hoffman noted (since after all, the concern was the Antelope Valley, and the two animals are of the same family), live in the higher elevations and can often be found alone, grazing. In its solitary search for nourishment, the rabbi said, “the animal symbolizes the how and where of the very spiritual path we all treasure, the path of being alone with one’s God.” In addition to translating as deer – or, more loosely, antelope – the word “tzvi” also means “beauty,” Rabbi Hoffman explained. “Our challenge,” he said, “is to realize the spiritual vision of the antelope through spiritual practice.” Each year, the shofar is blown on the New Year, to signal the renewal of this quest. The sharp keening that ushers in the breaking of old ways and pathways to the new often emanates from breath blown through a ram’s horn, but it also comes from the antelope, the animal which laid down and died at the Mojave railroad tracks so long ago.

On the way back to L.A., we heard one more time from Brother Coyote. He was lying on the road at call box 138-62, the latest victim of Death Alley. He had been hit by car, or so it seemed, for a leg was broken. When it happened we could not tell, but he was stiff, and in the high desert winds, the kind that knocks big rigs to their sides and strips paint from cars and makes it impossible to make flame no matter how you cup your hands or in which direction you face, his beautiful pelt riffled. I ran my hands through his coat and said kaddish, and he still seemed to have that coyote grin, with his teeth bared and now forever exposed to the elements. Mark moved him to the scrub where Caltrans wouldn’t find him but the ravens would, and said “R.I.P., my friend.” I thought of an old Mary Austin story, the one called “The Last Antelope,” about a hunter and coyote who vied to take down the region’s last one, and it was the hunter who got to him first, but his shot also felled the coyote, and as the hunter mourned the episode, coyotes appeared from nowhere and gorged on the antelope carcass. Now, as we headed back to the car, there came another coyote, probably the mate of the felled coyote, for they travel in pairs, and it watched us merge back into traffic, perhaps guiding us, and it continued watching us, and we it, until we could see each other no longer.

In April, Angel City Press will publish Reconstructing Los Angeles: A Journey to the Antelope Valley and Beyond by Deanne Stillman, with photographs by Mark Lamonica.

2008-02-07