Joshua Tree is Evil
Hipness and Hatred in the Heart of the Mojave
Update: The book this post refers to was published on March 25, 2025 by Wandering Aengus Press. Buy YUCK, The Birth and Death of Weird and Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia here.
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.
These were places that few frequented then, hot and miserable to most opinion, unlivable and unattractive to the common traveler, nowhere for a relaxing weekend sojourn far from the crowding of LA. But for myself, and later Christina, just like many long before us, slowly and mysteriously something about the desert’s very hostility began to work on us.
For years, neither for work nor pleasure, we kept going back, drawn by some unknown impulse.
At the very least it was a desire to feel closer to something elemental, primitive, and most of all unpeopled. Surely it was not love that brought us back. You cannot love something that would erase you. And yet strangely, somehow, beneath the desert’s spell, our love continued to grow.
“What do you do out there?” “Isn’t it hot!?” Those who had not discovered the desert’s deadly appeal could not understand. “Nope! Don’t invite me. You won’t catch me within a thousand miles of Death Valley.”
People assumed the desert outskirts held a reach of solitude fit only for vultures, venomous lizards, and solar farms; bland tracts of burning sand with nothing to see and where nothing would grow and nothing survived long save a few cinder cone volcanoes. Twelve, fifteen years ago, you could drive into any park and find every campground a ghost town. At the main gate of Death Valley they didn’t even collect entrance fees. The thought of a prepaid reservation never entered your brain.
And in the dark, in the dusty little towns and tiny oases that hung on between the supposed desert ‘destinations,’ the bright vacancy signs still burned but the only ones who came knocking through the night were yucca moths, a fine mist falling through the burning pink as they beat the pollen from their wings on tubes of twisted neon. $30 a night for air conditioning, a bed, a mini fridge. Beyond the parking lot dirt, a beer in your hand, an impossible carpet of stars paved a glittering trail off into some hinterland of infinity. It was tempting to follow, and the thought of supply and demand never entered any calculus. There was no demand. Surely that was part of the desert’s mysterious appeal. The bargains abounded. Nobody wanted to bargain with death.
Years later, in the summer of 2019, when Christina and I announced our wedding plans we were met with the same old skepticism.
Christina’s mother especially didn’t want a desert wedding.
“Can’t you get married someplace that isn’t…?”
She stopped short of calling it repulsive. “Someplace that isn’t so depressing?” I remember that day we met halfway on the central coast. Her mother gestured toward the hills. “Why not wine country, honey?” Christina and I both cringed. California wine country was so cliché. We wanted something true to our style, our sensibility.
“And what is that?” her mother asked, lowering her nose toward the bouquet of the blood red cabernet swirling in the crystal ball of her fishbowl glass. “Death?”
It was depressing to learn later that summer how much demand had grown for the spectacular hostility of the desert in our absence. After a stint in the Northwest, then the Midwest, I’d finally returned home to Southern California and much looked the same—everything except the Mojave. Traffic jams greeted you at the gates of the parks where the campgrounds were full and often overrun with trash. Instead of that thick lunar silence that slid over the land as the sun set and the shadows pooled and the quail fretted among the creosote, you now saw pink frisbees floating between the bony arms of the ocotillo as top forty hits pumped from Bluetooth speakers tossed among the boulders and meat smoke rose above the laughter of children. Motel prices tripled, quadrupled. Outside the only bar in town, people waited hours for a table. Families in brand new bright athletic gear spoke Indian, German, Japanese and French. Here in the California desert, the masses had arrived… And greatest among them numbered the Americans, millions of them lining up to mine the sublime and ancient bliss of the brutal Mojave.
The secret was out—the desert had suddenly become cool.
The millennials, like myself, thought it authentic.
But that was not precisely accurate. As Christina and I began our wedding research online, a clearer picture began to develop: throughout the American west, the Mojave had suddenly emerged as the canvas par excellence against which to capture… what? I wasn’t exactly sure, but the tables appeared to have turned. People seemed to now hold the desert captive rather than being taken captive by it. No personal Instagram feed was complete without a pilgrimage to the town of Joshua Tree and beyond it the National Park where, undoubtedly, somewhere between the overflowing dumpsters and the blaring boomboxes and the fake Native American dreamcatchers dangling above the tent doors that opened onto forests full of those strange gnarled trees that stood arrayed like monsters in pain many must have glimpsed something of the great web that binds all things.
Even more sophisticated performances of self lurked inside the world wide web if you cared to peer a little deeper, as Christina and I were compelled to do. “It’s so bizarre,” she said, doom scrolling the bottomless depths of a Google image search. Innumerable photo blogs impeccably curated showcased thousands of brides and grooms traipsing over rugged boulders amidst the outstretched arms of ancient Joshuas. Suddenly, all across the Mojave, couples and families were saying “I do” not only to each other, but to caterers, wedding venues, florists, Airbnbs, DJs, and of course, the photographers.
“I do agree to pay above total amount according to card issuer agreement.”
As it turned out our desire for a desert wedding was just another transaction to assimilate into an expanding tourist industry of manufactured contentment flourishing on the fringes of Joshua Tree National Park, which since 2015, unbeknownst to both of us, had been the fastest growing National Park in the United States. The bargains abounded no more. “Tying the knot in Joshua Tree!?” We were so cliché—a cliché even more ripe than cabernet grapes in an October wine country wedding.
But we decided to go along with it.
Anyone who plans a wedding eventually discovers there is no avoidance and bites the bullet of the beaming legions of vendors eager to satisfy another greedy family hell-bent upon the happiest day of their lives. They may chop you to pieces and scatter your financial remains, but at the end of it all, on the big day, you do look perfect. And you—we—we had to pick somewhere. Why not let them devour us in the desert? Plus there were so many still, like Christina’s mother, my mother, indeed most of our entire families, who had not yet been introduced to the harsh splendor of the Mojave. But Christina and I agreed: we would have to make the wedding our own, true to our style, our sensibility. We couldn’t just mimic the breezy complacence broadcast on all the uncountable blogs where the couples marched hand in hand like gorgeous conquistadors taming the elements with their elegance and an inexhaustible grin. For us, the desert was more than just a dramatic background to pillage in expensive clothes we’d wear only once. But what did it mean to us? If Joshua Tree was more than just an obligatory signifier of some inspired soul journey one had to complete at least once in life for the sake of an Instagram or wedding pic, then what was it?
What was the place? And what was the tree?
I will do a little digging, I told myself. A small research dive. Emerge with some pithy little prose blocks that might justify the location, perhaps enlighten our guests, and maybe inspire some poetic wedding vows. Whatever the dig amounted to, I decided, I’d have it printed and folded as a little book on fine paper—the center piece of a small wedding favor each guest would receive for their troubles. But those guests, especially on Christina’s side, would be traveling from far away, Washington, New York, and Delaware. They would be wondering why the hell, in this region long-famed for having the country’s best climate, they weren’t headed directly to the beach—the Hotel Del Coronado, Cabrillo National Monument, an Airbnb off Cibola Drive, or a patio spot atop El Cortez—but out to the Mojave, home to the hottest surface level temperature reading ever taken on earth.
134° Fahrenheit. Death Valley, California. July 10, 1913.
Part of unpacking the appeal of the desert was also then, for me, explaining its positioning. The Mojave was a parched and starving world in the backyard of Los Angeles, the largest city on earth built near a major fault line, a city that many of Christina’s relatives would no doubt see glittering below on the clear night of their arrival as they stared out the window of a Boeing 737 Max choking down complimentary bags of peanuts between small nips of cheap champagne. But of course it wouldn’t just be Los Angeles they would see below—the most populous county in America with more people than 41 individual states, a county itself comprised of 88 individual cities each with their own mayor and city council, a county that ranged over a patchwork of beaches, sheer mountains and baneful desert, extending from the Joshua Trees of the Mojave to the palm trees of Malibu to cover a combined land area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island—but all the others counties too—Riverside, Orange, Ventura, San Bernadino, and San Diego—and all their incorporated cities as well, 114 in total on top of LA’s 88, and all their borders invisible so that the irrigated crops of trees, the warm clay of interstates, the cement of storm drains, crust of stucco, the flash of tiles, cars, glass, and traffic lights all appeared printed together in a single unbroken circuit, a glowing, humming, living, smoking, and swelling babel of gold—the largest interconnected built environment on earth—covering 60,000 square miles and home to 26 million souls and running 235 miles from Oprah’s mansion in Santa Barbara south through the radiated hills of Santa Susana and onward down to Tijuana where an abandoned bullfighting arena named Plaza Monumental clung to the top of a cliff just beyond the border, hovering over Baja California like some exhausted old alien saucer left to rust out in the fog and wind at the end of the world.
It would be all this that they would see as well. But none of it their destination. Upon it all they would turn their back, driving the rental car east as the temperature rose and the road followed, lifting invisibly, climbing quietly toward the tablelands of the high desert. The bright lights below the Boeing 747 were not for them. It was to the blackness beyond, that emptiness, the inexorable ocean of lightless waste that lapped the transient walls of civilization’s blinking borders that they were headed. Into that darkness that seemed to stretch forever, a timeless rebuke against the ancient fires of human survival. Aridity, the only check against the monstrous and seemingly limitless growth of Los Angeles, capital of the West—where we finally ran out of land.
I like Joshua Tree too.
I love the alien landscapes of this harsh environment, the weirdness of places like the Integratron. The desert both appeals and disgusts. Excited to read more.