S1E14 The Bean Trees! But first, please help us

0:00:00 - (Alicia Pike): This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at 90miles from needles.com Patreon.

0:00:25 - (Chris Clarke): The Sun is a giant blowtorch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. Let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast, with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.

0:00:45 - (Alicia Pike): Hey, Chris, it's Alicia. I'm just calling to let you know that Atlas, my sweet little boy, pulled what could only be described as the flying squirrel maneuver and completely took me the hell out. So I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks moving as little as possible, living on ice packs and heat packs, and hopefully I'll be fully mobile again soon. We can text about all this stuff just letting you know.

0:01:26 - (Alicia Pike): Bye.

0:01:29 - (Chris Clarke): Hey, welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. This is Chris. This is episode 14 of our first season. If you do some abstract and complicated math and consider that we put out two episodes a month and that there are 12 months in a year, that means that we're more than halfway through our first season of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. And so it seems like a good time to take stock of what we've done so far and what we can do coming up.

0:01:57 - (Chris Clarke): First off, I just want to say on behalf of both myself and Alicia, who does make an appearance later, that we are so grateful for you. You. Yep. You listening right now? You are why we're doing this. We have gotten a significant amount of support. People telling us that they like what we're doing. We've had about 80 people sign up on our Patreon subscribers list to throw us a little bit of money every month.

0:02:27 - (Chris Clarke): Some of you throwing more than a little bit of money every month. And I have to say, we couldn't do this without you. You are absolutely crucial to us making this podcast, and we are so grateful to you. If you're one of those few people that has taken yourself off the Patreon list for reasons of economy or prioritization or because we said something you didn't like, which happens, we remain grateful for the support you gave, and we hope that you will continue to listen. And while we are really grateful for the support people have offered us, we're going to need to expand that support a little bit. Both Alicia and I have been putting our own money into this podcast to a considerable degree, and we are happy to do that, but we can't do it forever.

0:03:17 - (Chris Clarke): Ideally, I would like to see at least Alicia getting paid to do the work that she does on this podcast. If she was doing this talking, she would say that she wanted me to get paid, but I've got the mic. So I would also like to see us with the wherewithal to do more promotion of the podcast, to get it out to more people, to do a little bit more traveling, to do live shows, to hire freelancers to work on stories to bring you.

0:03:46 - (Chris Clarke): And none of that can happen without us expanding the range of support we're getting. And we're looking into ways of doing that that do not necessarily involve asking our listeners for money. But right now we're going to spend a minute asking you for money. 90 miles from needles.com Patreon will get you to our Patreon page where you can make a monthly pledge of as little as $5. And that will get you, incidentally, entree to our Joshua Tree National park campout September 9th through 11th. More details available on the Patreon site.

0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): We've heard from some of you that you don't really particularly like Patreon, either because of other people that are on Patreon or because you can't really fit a monthly donation into your budget. You know, maybe your budget is unpredictable. As a former freelancer, I certainly understand that. So we've also set up an account on a similar service called Ko Fi K o Hyphen F I through which you can make a one time donation.

0:04:51 - (Chris Clarke): The first $5,000 that comes in through Ko Fi will go to hiring freelancers to work on stories to bring you. You can reach that page at 90miles from needles.com Kofi K O F I if you've already donated to us, there are a bunch of other ways that you can provide us incredibly important support. Tell your friends about the podcast. You can do that in person. You can be one of those people that asks their dinner party guests if they want to listen to a podcast. But we'd like you to keep your friends. So maybe just suggest they listen to it. Send them a link, an email, mention it as you're talking about desert issues.

0:05:36 - (Chris Clarke): Somebody's talking about, hey, there's no water in the Colorado. Say hey, there was this podcast that did this great interview with Kyle Rohrink from the Great Basin Water Network on just that at 90 miles from Needles. You know the drill. Share us on social media Those of you who do social media, I know some of you don't, and I admire the heck out of you. But those of you who do share links to our episodes.

0:05:59 - (Chris Clarke): We are on Facebook, we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter. But even if we're not on a particular social media page, we have a sort of a foothold on Reddit and we have not ventured into TikTok or anything like that. But that doesn't mean you can't promote us on those social media sites. So feel free to just link us all over. If you would rather do stuff in the real world, let us know. You can call us at 760392 1996.

0:06:31 - (Chris Clarke): If you're a business owner with a storefront or you have a place that has a lot of traffic where you can put up a beautifully designed 5 by 5 inch sticker promoting our podcast, let us know. We'll send you a sticker or two or five. Call us at 760392 1996. Give us a mailing address. We'll send them out. If you're a business owner that is either involved in working in the wild desert or you just really love the desert, contact us. I'm emailable at Chris 90 miles from needles.com

0:07:08 - (Chris Clarke): reach out. We can talk about underwriting. Even a couple hundred bucks will make a huge difference in how much we can do. Here's another way you can help us. That's pretty easy. If you listen to this podcast or other podcasts through one of those podcast services like Apple Podcasts or Google or Spotify or any of the others that offers you the chance to write a review of a podcast. Write a review of us. You would be amazed how much it helps.

0:07:40 - (Chris Clarke): Every time we've gotten a review and there have been really wonderful ones, our listenership jumps by several percentage points. It's really helpful and it doesn't take all that much time. It helps us out and we are grateful for the reviews we've gotten. If you have stories to share, let us know. Call us again. 760-392-1996. You don't have to worry about talking to a live person. Nobody answers that phone. It's all voicemail.

0:08:09 - (Chris Clarke): Talk to us about the show. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you don't like. Tell us what you want to see more of. Tell us what you want to see less of. We have been asking for stories of Mylar balloons and we've gotten two really good responses. But we could use more those Mylar balloons that are all over the desert for an upcoming episode that Alicia is working on. Also, we knew this going in, but it strikes us Looking back at the last 13 episodes that there is a lot of bad news out there in the desert conservation world and the desert protection world.

0:08:43 - (Chris Clarke): And we are doing our best to find ways to balance that out, to make that bad news a little bit easier to listen to. Nobody wants to doom scroll constantly. We're all all more about the hope scrolling here. And we're trying to figure out ways to make sure that people don't get terminally depressed listening to our podcast. I mean, even just the fact that you are listening, you are finding out that things are going on and you are very likely wondering what you can do about it, that's a really positive sign. That's a great thing and we thank you for that.

0:09:19 - (Chris Clarke): But one of the things we're going to be doing is asking people we interview how they keep going. If they're working on these big, seemingly insurmountable existential crises, climate change, loss of biological diversity, development on rare plant habitat or rare toad habitat, we're going to be asking them how they keep going, what sustains them. We've already started asking our interviewees that and we're asking you, given all the horrible things going on in the world right now, whether they're desert related or not.

0:09:55 - (Chris Clarke): We're just all crowded into this handbasket. How do you handle it? What keeps you going? Let us know. 7603921996 we have high hopes for the rest of this season and even more hopes for season number two. We have big ideas. We want to travel. In the last half a year, we have traveled to Arizona, to Death Valley, to Ward Valley. We've traveled throughout the southwestern parts of the desert. We've had wonderful interviews with people further afield.

0:10:30 - (Chris Clarke): But there's something really important about recording on location and we'd like to do more of that. We'd like to work on long term projects, long term reporting projects, long term research. We need your help to do that. So for those of you that have consistently supported us on Patreon, you are our heroes. You have made this possible. I'm just the guy talking. You're the folks that are bankrolling this and we love you, we are thankful for you and we'd like very much to increase the size of the club you're in.

0:11:05 - (Chris Clarke): So 90 miles from needles.com patreon or 90 miles from needles.com kofi or just go to our website and click Support us and both of those options will drop down and you can proceed from there. And we thank you for that. So here's Some entirely good news from the desert, though. The drought is deepening, food shortages loom. There is a desert species that might offer a partial solution to the problem of getting enough to eat.

0:12:18 - (Chris Clarke): This is a plant that we're talking about. It's native to the deserts of North America. It grows quite well without any of our help, if it's in the right place. But it grows even better with our help and we sometimes give it help by trying to hurt it. It's kind of like a vegetative coyote that way. The more we wipe it out, the harder it comes back. I'm talking about the mesquite. Now, there are 44 species of mesquite found throughout the world in genus Prospis.

0:12:57 - (Chris Clarke): In the North American deserts, we have three that are native. There's the honey mesquite, Prosopis glandulosa, and the velvet mesquite, Prosopus velutena, often considered to be varieties of the same species. And the screw bean mesquite, Prosopus pubescens. These trees can get as high as about 20 to 30ft. They have typical bean family leaves. The flowers are about 2 to 3 inches long and they look like tassels. Just huge, huge numbers of very, very small flowers.

0:13:37 - (Chris Clarke): The seed pods tend to ripen in early summer, and depending on where you are and what kind of mesquite you have, they're about 3 to 8 inches long. The ones that we grow here tend to be around 6. The pods are what we're interested in today, though. The mesquite is certainly, certainly useful for other reasons than just feeding hungry humans. The trees provide habitat for any number of different desert animals, migratory birds, insects, lizards.

0:14:10 - (Chris Clarke): They provide a semi reliable source of shade in the summer. Depending on where you are in the desert, you'll see coyotes or bobcats or javelinas or desert iguanas, or occasionally stranded tourists taking advantage of the shade of a mesquite. The pitch of the mesquite, the dried SAP is a beautiful black color, is very gummy, somewhat bitter, reputed to have some medicinal properties which I don't know anything about and certainly don't recommend officially in traditional times and to some extent in the present day, was used as a black hair dye for people that were self conscious about increasingly gray hairs.

0:14:53 - (Chris Clarke): And the leaves make a tea that I have never tried, but which I've had recommended to me by a couple of different people. And these couple of different people I think like me. So I don't think they had any nefarious intent. But it's the pods that we're talking about. These pods have been a staple food for desert peoples for quite a long time. You can buy flower from the ground pods of a related species, the Chilean mesquite, in fancy health food stores.

0:15:23 - (Chris Clarke): And it's okay. You can find Chilean mesquites planted in the desert. They are considered a desirable landscape tree because they lack the thorns that the native species of mesquite have in abundance. I like the thorns. I like the fact that when you prune a mesquite hard if you have to, or if your cow does it for you, or random lawnmower or off road vehicle, the mesquite will grow back fairly readily and it will have much larger thorns.

0:15:55 - (Chris Clarke): Doesn't waste effort growing the thorns until it realizes it needs them. There's something marvelous about that. Mesquites can send their roots so far down into the desert soil that they would seem to be almost drought proof. They aren't, of course. Nothing is. But they can survive droughts a lot more readily than a lot of other desert plants because other desert plants don't tend to have their roots 100ft down into the soil. Tapping the close aquifers. There you see them growing in washes or near washes, in canyons, cracks and rocks.

0:16:31 - (Chris Clarke): When Lara and I first saw this house, we saw a mature mesquite that was. I'm lousy at estimating tree height, even though I used to do it for a living. It was probably 35ft tall, had a canopy that shaded probably 400 square feet. Just an absolutely magnificent tree that the previous owner said she planted in 1990 from a tiny little seedling. Probably doesn't hurt that it is about 12ft from a septic tank.

0:16:59 - (Chris Clarke): So we are actually recycling by consuming the pods from this mesquite. Of course, don't recommend planting mesquites near your septic tank. I expect that we'll have to do something about mesquite roots getting into that septic tank at some point in the next couple decades. But it's a beautiful tree. And since we moved in, I've planted four more. The tree that was here in the first place is a honey mesquite.

0:17:20 - (Chris Clarke): Planted three velvet mesquites which are doing wonderfully. They are now taller than either of us. And I planted a screw bean, which is itself doing remarkably well. And that's not true of screw beans everywhere. We'll have a subsequent episode on the problems facing screw bean mesquites elsewhere in the desert. But in our yard, the one that's here is doing great. So this year, after having wasted a crop left for the rabbits and the birds to pick at, we were resolved to collect some of the mesquite pods that fell off the big honey mesquite and use them for our own culinary purposes.

0:17:56 - (Chris Clarke): So we spread out tarps under the tree. Here's something that's important to remember. If you decide to experiment with mesquite pods, which I very much recommend, do not pick them off the ground. If you're just walking through the desert and you see mesquite pods on the ground, do not eat those. There are molds that work their way out of the soil with any moisture at all that will colonize those mesquite pods and produce aflatoxins, which are those toxins that occasionally make peanut butter unsafe to eat. You want to avoid that.

0:18:28 - (Chris Clarke): So ideally, you want to just walk up to the mesquite, put your hand gently around a group of pods, and try and coax them softly into your hand without yanking. If they're ripe, they will come right off in your hand. It's a very, very graceful and beautiful way of harvesting food. But given that our mosquitoes 35ft tall, we figured it would probably be good to have a way of allowing them to hit the ground but remaining safe from mold.

0:18:57 - (Chris Clarke): So we spread out plastic tarps. So here I am on the next afternoon after we put the tarps down. And it really is nice here under the mesquite. Triple digit temperatures don't seem quite as forbidding when you're in the shade and there's a little bit of a breeze, a little bit of wind rustling in the branches. If you listen, you can hear the house finches being uncharacteristically busy this time of day.

0:19:24 - (Chris Clarke): Eurasian collared doves and mourning doves, taking naps and occasionally taking wing tarps, are almost completely covered with fallen mesquite pods. Every now and then, another one falls out of the tree and hits the tarp with a smack or hits the other pods below it. And that has happened too many times. And there are way too many mesquite pods on these tarps for me to pick them up one by one. It would take forever.

0:19:55 - (Chris Clarke): So I lift an edge of the tarp and the pods on it cascade into a pile. To me, it sounds almost like a wind chime. It's a beautiful sound. I find my leather gloves so that I won't impale myself too much on the pointy ends of each pod, and I scoop the pods up from the pile on the big tarp. I put them into bags. It's about a bushel of mesquite pods. Quite a haul for a lazy afternoon in the shade of a beautiful mesquite.

0:20:53 - (Chris Clarke): Now, if you do any research on harvesting mesquite, and you should, because it's fascinating, you will read that a lot of people recommend putting the pods in an oven set at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours just to speed the drying process. We had a bushel of mesquite pods. Our oven is not big enough. However, we also have a motor vehicle with windows all around that is parked in the Mojave Desert in full sun.

0:21:20 - (Chris Clarke): And so the bags went into the Subaru and there they stayed for a week. Lara put a couple of oven thermometers on the dashboard. She's a field scientist and she likes data. And depending on which oven thermometer you believe the temperature reached as high as 180 or 200 degrees Fahrenheit at the end of one long day. The one piece of data I can offer is this best car air freshener ever. It's like driving around in a piece of cinnamon roll.

0:21:55 - (Chris Clarke): And then came the day when, to be honest, I needed to record some audio of milling these mesquite pods if we were going to get it into this episode. Thankfully, Alicia felt well enough to come help mill the pods. I'd missed my favorite co host. I was especially concerned about drying these pods thoroughly because a spike in temperature had caused the tree to drop a lot of pods earlier than I think it would have.

0:22:22 - (Chris Clarke): It may have been a way of reacting to drought stress by jettisoning a certain number of the pods so it could focus on ripening the ones it liked best. And it may be that these pods are too unripe to use. We still haven't found that out, but we're all about the spirit of experimentation here, and so we're going to try. So there are plenty of plants to eat in the world. Why mesquite? Well, aside from the fact that it's a low water and low fertilizer input crop that grows really well in the desert, it's also really good for you.

0:22:59 - (Chris Clarke): Every tablespoon of mesquite, according to the University of Arizona, has a gram of protein in it, which is the same amount as whole wheat flour. It has 7 grams of carbohydrate, which is a little bit more than whole wheat has half a Gram of fat healthy plant oil, while whole wheat has none. And while that tablespoon of whole wheat flour has 1 gram of soluble fiber, the same amount of Mesquite has 3 grams, which basically means that mesquite is much, much better to eat. If you were worried about regulating your blood sugar, if you are concerned about cholesterol, soluble fiber is the thing.

0:23:43 - (Chris Clarke): And so aside from those fancy health food stores with the expensive Chilean mesquite flour, where do you find mesquite that you can eat? Well, you got to make it yourself. And so that's what we're doing. Okay, so we got the mill set up. We need a tray for the stuff to go in.

0:24:04 - (Alicia Pike): Where does it come out? Right here?

0:24:06 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. So here we are in the milling porch. We start fishing pods out of the bags and putting them in the red cast iron mills stainless steel hopper. We pay close attention to which pods have little holes in them. These are pods that mesquite weevils had laid eggs in. Now, you wouldn't even notice the eggs really if they ended up in a mesquite flower. It's kind of a cosmetic thing to take them out. But we are trying to promote the idea of you trying this and not dissuade you from eating mesquite pods. So out the bugs go.

0:24:37 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. So ideally we would go through these and flip through little shot holes. But. But I don't think there's going to be a whole lot with the shot holes here.

0:24:48 - (Alicia Pike): I did look. I did read your letters from the desert.

0:24:52 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:24:53 - (Alicia Pike): And supposed to break them in half. Do we just load them in here when we're.

0:24:56 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:24:58 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, here's some. So we only. You said keep the half if there's no holes. There's one there and one there.

0:25:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:25:06 - (Alicia Pike): So we would keep this.

0:25:07 - (Chris Clarke): Just break off, put parts that don't have holes into the mill. And I tend to see this half.

0:25:14 - (Alicia Pike): Looks like it has some funk in it. You see that?

0:25:17 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:25:18 - (Alicia Pike): So maybe not this one.

0:25:19 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And I tend to break off these little pointy things too.

0:25:22 - (Alicia Pike): You mean you don't want to eat the stems?

0:25:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, they don't grind real well. Each mesquite pod has a sharp tip at each end. They're mostly just made out of pod skin. There's not much meal in them. So it's easier to break them off than to fish them out after milling.

0:25:42 - (Alicia Pike): Couldn't.

0:25:52 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. So normally if we were doing this in the most efficient way, we would not be doing this in tiny little stages where we Take individual pods and put them into the grinder.

0:26:04 - (Alicia Pike): We'd be doing the batch prep.

0:26:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. But this is probably better for our repetitive stress syndrome.

0:26:12 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. With any mega food processing project, it. That's the way it goes. I've spent 18 hours canning. Oop. This has a borehole in it.

0:26:26 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. Pull it out. Worst case scenario is they get put in the yard, and eventually. Eventually, maybe the seeds will germinate and we'll get a new mesquite tree.

0:26:41 - (Alicia Pike): These still seem a little. There's still a little moisture in them.

0:26:44 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Not thoroughly dried out. These. There's some sugar still in them. This may not be the sweetest batch that we have ever had, just because a lot of them blew off the tree early, because we got such high temperature, that I think the. The tree jettison a lot of the pods when they're in the greener stage. There's a little bit of a pucker taste to the green ones that I actually like. Given the likelihood of increasingly hot summers like this one, we may have to figure out how to use the unripe mesquite pods like the ones we have this season.

0:27:27 - (Chris Clarke): Now, see this one? That one broke. Right. Very clean.

0:27:30 - (Alicia Pike): So that's in the right dry stage for grinding.

0:27:34 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. Okay. That's a good hopper full.

0:27:49 - (Alicia Pike): All right, so.

0:27:51 - (Chris Clarke): So let's just see how we are with.

0:27:59 - (Alicia Pike): So that determines the fineness of the grind, I assume.

0:28:04 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. This is a bad sign. You hear that mill turning freely, metal on metal. That means the pods aren't getting fed through to the grindstone. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you tighten that and I'll examine this one here because we're getting plenty of grind, but nothing coming out. There we go. Thank you. Yeah.

0:28:51 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. Just keep tightening it a little bit. It's definitely a little tricky when they're still moist. I can see it's coming out real sticky.

0:28:58 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. Eventually, the pods start going through the mill, and instead of a beautiful dry flower emerging, a sticky almost paste the same color as the flour comes out of the mill. I keep cranking, but it gets a lot harder.

0:29:19 - (Alicia Pike): Now, how would have these traditionally been milled? Rock on rock?

0:29:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Native people did it with a hand mortar, grinding rock. These are way too moist. Yeah. But Alicia can't help herself. She reaches into the pan where the milled mosquito is accumulating, takes a finger full and tastes it.

0:29:57 - (Alicia Pike): Could see how that would have all sorts of applications. The flavor is delicious. Chris is really struggling to get the grinder to grind because it is very moist. It is Definitely grinding. Creating a delicious moist chaff.

0:30:19 - (Chris Clarke): So you can see that the seeds.

0:30:22 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, there they are.

0:30:23 - (Chris Clarke): Will come out at this ground.

0:30:24 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, yeah. And the seeds are edible.

0:30:27 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, the seeds are edible.

0:30:28 - (Alicia Pike): They're hard.

0:30:29 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, they are very hard. They're chock full of protein. So generally the idea is you get the pods ground, and then once they're ground, you take the seeds out, put them back in the mill, and grind at a finer setting.

0:30:45 - (Alicia Pike): So you grind the pods, then you grind the seeds. These seeds are so hard, I can just barely crack it with my canine tooth.

0:30:51 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I wouldn't even bother trying.

0:30:52 - (Alicia Pike): I just wanted to see how hard it was. But now I know. Not trying to lose any teeth at.

0:30:58 - (Chris Clarke): This point, it's really clear that the pods need more drying time, and we decide to call this a test run. Okay, these definitely have to get dried longer.

0:31:07 - (Alicia Pike): Yep. I would agree with that assessment, but.

0:31:11 - (Chris Clarke): You do get this sort of general idea and put these back in the bag. We'll spread this out on a. On a tarp in the driveway for a couple of sunny days. Just so much sugar in that.

0:31:24 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.

0:31:25 - (Chris Clarke): Sticky like candy.

0:31:28 - (Alicia Pike): I was really not expecting that surprise flavor.

0:31:35 - (Chris Clarke): So, yeah, still not very dry. Getting some sticky, sugary goodness out of there.

0:31:41 - (Alicia Pike): Getting some flavor. It is drying quick now that it's been pulverized. Stuff was really moist a moment ago when I grabbed it, and now it's, like, drying out. I can't get over that flavor.

0:31:51 - (Chris Clarke): Isn't that amazing?

0:31:52 - (Alicia Pike): It should be in all the baked goods. It's so tasty. Tastes sweet.

0:32:00 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. The way I.

0:32:01 - (Alicia Pike): Nutty.

0:32:01 - (Chris Clarke): The way I first thought of it was like, it's like cinnamon toast crunch without the sugar. Except it has sugar in it.

0:32:07 - (Alicia Pike): You're right, it does have that cinnamon. Slight cinnamon flavor to it, but yeah.

0:32:12 - (Chris Clarke): It'S some awfully nice stuff. Thanks for coming over to help you mill some mesquite.

0:32:19 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.

0:32:23 - (Bouse Parker): This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia pike and Chris Clarke. Editing by Chris. Podcast artwork by our good friend Martin Moncha. Theme music is by Bright side Studios, other music by Slipstream. Follow us on Twitter or on Instagram @90from needles and on Facebook at facebook.com 90miles from needles. Listen to us at 90miles from needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our newest Patreon supporter, Mason Vale. Support this podcast by visiting us at 90miles from needles.com

0:32:59 - (Bouse Parker): Patreon and making a monthly plus pledge of as little as 5 bucks or visit90miles from needles.comkofi to make a one time contribution. Our Patreon supporters enjoy privileges including early access to this episode and an exclusive Joshua Tree national park camp out in September 2022. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Laura Roselle. All characters on this podcast wail weirdly as they go go those hoarse and dismal cadences from out their depths of woe. This is B. Parker reminding you that the desert has a sweetness that can gum up your simple machinery. See you next time.

0:34:18 - (Chris Clarke): Sit, Heart. Sit. Good dog.