Joshua Tree is Evil
Hipness and Hatred in the Heart of the Mojave
Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer!!??
Get ready to hate your life. It’s not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake.
“One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant… A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal.”
—Joseph Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails, 1919
Assuming me some sort of authority on the Mojave since it occupies such a chunk of my book China Lake, people always ask me what my favorite thing is about Joshua Tree and I tell them: Not ever going back there.
“The trees themselves were as grotesque as the creations of a bad dream; the shaggy trunks and limbs were twisted and seemed writhing as though in pain.”
—Charles Francis Saunders, With the Flowers and Trees in California, 1914.
And yet, without fail, my interlocuters will press me further. “But like weren’t you going to have your wedding there?” To which I invariably respond. “Yes, but it was thankfully canceled—three times—thanks to Covid.” If they’re still stupid enough to want to go, I tell them not to forget their face mask.
It isn’t the virus they have to fear, of course, but the rancid aroma.
“It is well that you view the flowers from some little distance for they give off a strong fetid odor that is exceedingly disagreeable.”
—Francis M. Fultz, Scientific American, 1919.
But where did I get all these dumb ass florid quotes about the infernal Joshua Tree?
Do not be deceived!
Many blogs and brief articles out there on the internet will pepper their pages with comical quotations attesting to the Joshua Tree’s once universally reviled status as the most grotesque abortion ever miscarried by Mother Nature, but NONE have ever delved deeper, further and darker in the course of their inquiries than I have…
Which reminds me:
Do you know any individual or press looking to lose money by investing in the publishing of a small experimental book of research-based prose poetry centered around the historical ironies of America’s fastest growing national park?
Call the suicide prevention hotline, i.e., my cellphone at (619) 572-8084
My next few posts, extracts from my unpublished short book, The Weight of the Sky, will lay plain once and for all why you should stay in Los Angeles and go to Disneyland or check out the Hollywood sign this summer, and never drive out to Joshua Tree, California #NEVER.
But how, you might further reasonably wonder, did I ever manage to embark upon the disastrous task of tackling a vast and sprawling prose poem about the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree, yucca brevifolia, in California’s Mojave Desert?
For that I leave you with the following prologue.
In the fall of 2019, Christina and I finally settled on a location for our wedding. We decided to get married in Joshua Tree, California, a small desert town of seven thousand people nestled outside the main gate of Joshua Tree National Park, three hours from Los Angeles. Both of us being Southern California natives with a penchant for adventure, we had spent a number of years plying the back roads of the Mojave Desert. It started for me in college working summers for the US Forest Service maintaining trails on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Downtime led to day trips and overnights around Death Valley, the Coso Range, and one weekend Joshua Tree.