wow. what an amazing and wonderous and enchanting place! there are really no words to describe the experience of being there. it's stark and vast and beautiful and quiet and calming and exciting all at once. it's magical. sadly, i only had one hour before my gig, which is not nearly enough time to romp around there amongst the weird joshua trees and the strange rock formations, and i could not get enough of it so i stayed longer than i should have and kept going deeper and deeper into the park, as long as i could.... i loved it. the puppy dog did not like it at all, which was confounding: she had a blast at the beach-- why didn't she like the desert? i told her, "Tootie, it's all sand, just like the beach, just without the ocean!" She didn't believe me. And i guessed she was right. Maybe there were thorns or stickers on the ground. Maybe there was the scent of wild animals. Maybe its eerieness was just too much for the little puppy dog, but she kept pulling on me to get out of there. We stopped at the Visitor Center, where they were mopping up after the torrential downpour they had just had, and the most helpful of all park attendants told us it had just rained for the first time since December. I got some Joshua Tree Seeds to take home with me and checked out the photos on the wall... big prints of those great Henry Diltz photos from the early 70's that he took of the Eagles and America out in the Joshua Tree for those first albums of theirs. But strangely, there was no sign of Gram Parsons. hmmmmmm.... I guessed it was the weirdness surrounding his death? I dunno, but I read the 20,000 Roads biography of him by David Meyer and thought it funny that Gram is quoted as having called the Eagles' music "plastic dry f-ck"... which is neither here nor there. i played some Gram at the Joshua Tree Saloon that night-- which is really a great place.... and Mike did sound for me, and Ed and the beautiful Jessica served us and someone in the audience told me that some guy had died out in the Joshua Tree last year... that the guy wasn't out there for very long, and maybe he just flat-out got dehydrated and completely drawn-in to the place and kept walking and just passed out and died.... i drove out of there, away from the Joshua Tree Saloon and down the 29 Palms Highway. and now i understand why someone would want to live in the desert.
i was driving down 29 Palms Highway, wondering to myself why anyone would choose to live in the desert, when i pulled off into the Joshua Tree National Park....