S3E23: Moonlit Deserts and Lost Love

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355.

0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and it has been a little bit of a slow couple of weeks here at 90 miles from Needles World HQ because it's been next to impossible to spend time in the studio. We've had one excessive temperature alert after another out here in this part of the Mojave desert, and my measly little portable air conditioning unit is really not up to the challenge of keeping an insulated box in the desert below about 103 degrees. Also, a couple of interviews got postponed.

0:01:29 - (Chris Clarke): That's why we didn't put an episode out last week. We're going to have some really good episodes coming up in the next few weeks. Next week we're going to be on hiatus just because I'm going to be traveling, having actually my first visit to my hometown in about 25 years. So that'll be interesting. But I'll be back in the saddle and interviewing folks after Tuesday next, so look for a new episode here on the 20 August. Another thing that's been contributing to my overall lack of productiveness here is that I'm really worried about my dog.

0:02:07 - (Chris Clarke): You know, you get a flat coated dog, like a pit bull, like my dog heart, and put her in the mojave for ten years and she will develop skin cancer. And she had a tumor on her lower belly, a thing called a cutaneous hemangiosarcoma. We had that removed a few weeks ago, and she promptly grew six or seven new tumors. So we're figuring out what to do. Prognosis is kind of vague. She is an older girl, so if she's got a two year life expectancy from this, that pretty much means no impact because she'd have a two year life expectancy anyway.

0:02:45 - (Chris Clarke): She's probably eleven, maybe as old as 13, but probably eleven or twelve. And there's part of me that tells myself that's a really bad excuse for not delivering on an episode. And then I remember the degree to which productivity and lack of work life balance has bitten me in the butt in the last 35 years or so. And what is really important in this life? Taking care of the desert comes from the same root as taking care of your family, taking care of those around you, however you define family, for me, it's Lara and Heart and Jack. I've known too many activists who strip mine their personal life in order to be productive, and that is not me, I'll tell you right up front.

0:03:28 - (Chris Clarke): At any rate, just the degree to which I've been preoccupied by taking care of my girl reminded me of a piece of writing that I put together. Thinking about a previous dog that I had. Some of you who have been following my writing for some time will be very familiar with Zeke the wonder dog, who lived with me up in the San Francisco Bay Area for, yeah, 15 years. He made it to a ripe old age, and my ex wife Becky and I got a lot of joy from him, and he gave a lot to our family.

0:04:01 - (Chris Clarke): And then our family kind of dissolved when he wasn't there anymore. This piece I'm going to read to you before we say goodbye for a couple of weeks is from my book walking with Zeke, which was published in 2008. We will have a link in the show notes to the page on bookshop.org where you can buy walking with Zeke from your local independent bookstore. Before we launch, I also want to thank Thomas Alban and Shiela Sasek from Mazamar art pottery in Pioneer Town.

0:04:37 - (Chris Clarke): I met Shiela for lunch this weekend, and she handed me some of the proceeds from the benefit art show on dark skies that they've been having up there in Pioneer town to benefit 90 miles from needles and the desert advocacy media Network pile of cash that was big enough to be a little bit embarrassing to have handed to me in public. That went right into the podcast savings account. Eventually we might be able to afford a mini split or pay rent on an air conditioned office. At any rate, thank you so much, Thomas and Sheila.

0:05:12 - (Chris Clarke): We just are very, very grateful. So, with no further ado, here is the story of Zeke in the west Mojave.

0:06:07 - (Chris Clarke): My God, the moon. Silver light flows down from it like honey. I could have driven here without headlights, could have wound up and over the shoulder of the San Gabriel mountains by mooning moonlight alone. It seeps into every corner of the desert, under each stone, behind each leaf of the Joshua trees. Here in our campsite, Zeke knocks his food bowl over for the third time. And a third time, I pick each piece of dry food out of the dust, put it back into the shiny metal bowl.

0:06:47 - (Chris Clarke): Each piece of dry food bears a coat of Pliocene lake bed soil. Were Zeke to eat it, his stool samples might confuse the hell out of a paleontologist. What was their extra dose of 10 million year old tree pollen, but he wont eat it. He never eats dog food on the road, but subsists on corners of sandwiches and takeout hamburgers. Zeke watches me refill his bowl, wanders over to drink a bit of dust covered water, then walks off toward the moon.

0:07:21 - (Chris Clarke): He gets 10ft and then his tether goes taut, upending the food bowl again. He has been patient today, so I've been patient with him 400 miles from our house to Altadena. 2 hours spent in the shaded truck as we visited with Becky's friend Lon, and then another 2 hours in the truck bed as I drove back into the Mojave. Lons parents would never let a dog stay in the house, or at least Becky would never presume to ask.

0:07:55 - (Chris Clarke): She works into the night in Altadena, preparing for lons wedding feast tomorrow, and Zeke and I shiver in the desert. It is summer and were only at 2600 ft, but the wind is strong and constant in this part of the Mojave. It might as well be winter for the numbness of my fingers. This morning Zeke took off full tilt after a ground squirrel at a gas station in the central valley, skidding to a comical halt, a foot in front of the barbed wire fence between them all in less time than I needed to tell him no.

0:08:31 - (Chris Clarke): I have told him no. Today, with remarkable frequency, I primed the gas stove, light the burner, watch the flame leap and smoke until the burner warms. After we left Becky in La, he balked at getting in the truck bed. He always wants to ride up front with me, to stand on the shift lever and pull up on the handbrake with his dew claws to drip friendly spit on my right shoulder. His nails punctuated the rhythm of truck tires slapping the concrete slabs on the antelope Valley freeway.

0:09:09 - (Chris Clarke): Every two minutes, hed claw at the window of the cab in Rosamund. I relented, opened the window as I filled the tank, and he surprised me. Instead of slithering awkward through the tiny window as usual, he just stuck his head into the cab and grinned. The rest of the trip, an interminable 35 dead tired miles blinking with me at the brief bright lights of Mojave and then back out into the illuminated lunar desert.

0:09:39 - (Chris Clarke): He is remarkably tolerant of his tether tonight. He usually complains he chewed through three of them before I found this one, a braided metal cord sheathed in thick vinyl. He sits at my feet as the water starts to boil, his tether in slack and dusty loops lid off the potential four scoops of coffee lid back on the pot. In his first month with me, we went to San Juan Ridge in the Sierra. A dear friend was living there, dating the son of a famous poet, and she invited Zeke and I to visit while Becky was in China.

0:10:23 - (Chris Clarke): Famous poet's son was glad to see us. He and I had worked together for a year. We left Zeke at my friend's house and went to watch the solstice sunset on a nearby hill with some locals, then sang Carol's outside famous poets workshed. Son introduced us all. I was apparently the only one there with a last name, and then we trooped off to a party. I decided to check on Zeke first. It was only a miles walk out of the way.

0:10:56 - (Chris Clarke): He was gone when I got there, the flimsy side door ajar. Five minutes of panicked searching, and I heard a metallic clinking. The house stood at the edge of a cliff above the diggings, and he was hiding in a small cave below the lip. If not for his trembling, making his tags jingle, I wouldn't have found him until morning. Something had spooked him but good, and after a brief, joyous dance at seeing me again, he resolved not to part from me for the rest of the evening.

0:11:27 - (Chris Clarke): At the party, he nearly chewed through the leash I used to tie him to the porch rail in the half hour it took me to realize he was the only one at the party at all interested in me. I sat on the porch for 2 hours with his head on my lap as the ridge folks talked to each other. That was five years ago, and he has only started to relax, his separation anxiety abating to the point where he no longer howls every single day while we're at work, a few drops of cold water in the pot to settle the grounds.

0:12:01 - (Chris Clarke): I tap on the side of the pot to speed things along, hold my hands up to the moon as if to warm them. Old Luna has moved westward the way she does, and the white and crenellated badland cliffs across the valley grow striped shadows where wind and rain have furrowed them. We arrived too late to claim the sheltered campsites at the base of those cliffs. The wind has scoured this campsite clean of all but the Joshua trees.

0:12:31 - (Chris Clarke): It rakes Zeke's fir, the moon so bright I can nearly count the hares. The ranger station was closed when we arrived at 10:00 p.m. or so, and I didn't put $6 in the box. Not having anything smaller than a 20, I wonder if well be roasted tonight. I pour myself a cup of coffee. There is a small bald hill behind us, a mound of white Pliocene sediment, fair, glowing, bathed in moon. I take Zeke off his tether and we climb the hill.

0:13:06 - (Chris Clarke): It seems taller from the top than it did from the bottom. The truck is surprisingly small. The moon washes out all but the brightest stars. No tragedy there, as I mainly know the winter sky. Polaris is at my back. I would recognize the great bear if I turned around, and not much else. No matter. The earth and moon are cosmos enough tonight. Zeke trots up and down the hill a few times, tail wagging hard against the wind, and then he comes to sit with me.

0:13:40 - (Chris Clarke): We look out southward over the desert. My God, the moon. We can see the layers of annual pliocene flood in the lakebed cliffs a quarter mile south. The windshield streaks where I hit the wiper fluid lever to clear the worst of the dust. We can see the veins in each Joshua tree leaf. I sip my coffee, strong and still warm in the cup, and look at Zeke. He is grinning at the landscape. He leans into me companionably, still watching the cliffs.

0:14:17 - (Chris Clarke): It is a thigmatropic partnership, this pairing of dog and human. We crave each other's touch. Some touches reach deeper than others. The first long, drowsy embraces Becky and I shared as a couple were like none I had ever felt. We fit somehow and undeniably, one past lovers fingertips rooted themselves comfortably in my central nervous system, and all she did was trace light as air, the tendons in the back of my neck as I drove.

0:14:52 - (Chris Clarke): How many times has Zeke rubbed up against me, stood there in the way as I walked in the door with the groceries and I would chide him, not tonight. He leans into me and I am drowned in light. I sip my coffee and he leans into me. My dog breathes soft against my ribs and an owl takes wing from the far cliffs and I sit here and Zeke with me, and he leans tonight, this moment, atop this hill, under this moon, tonight is the distillation of Zeke and me.

0:15:38 - (Chris Clarke): It is endless, and yet it will end, and we will sleep fitfully in the truck bed, and tomorrow Zeke will wait patiently as I buy a truck stop shower, and he will sit in the cab under a shade tree during the wedding with his guilt stricken man checking on him every 15 minutes, and then the drive home. Years will pass. Time will be taken for granted. He will look longingly at me as depression settles in for months, as I can barely rouse myself to walk him, he will stand with Becky and me as we argue toward divorce and back again.

0:16:37 - (Chris Clarke): He will move with us from house to house, walk with me in desert heat and mountain snow and coastal stream. And I will recall this moment. I will remember this moment forever, I think to myself. And one day, ten or eleven years from now, a week before Christmas, when he collapses in the little park near our house, cannot get up again and tears steal their way down my face as the park staff console me kindly.

0:17:12 - (Chris Clarke): And I wonder whether he will ever have a good day again, and whether the time has come. And I wonder how cruel it will be to wait until Becky's winter break so that she might spend a few days with him. And I'll hoist him. And after a moment of resistance, he will relax and lean his shoulder into mine as I carry him all the way home. And I will remember for the thousandth time this night in Red Rock Canyon, I will long again to have just stayed here, frozen in time, atop this little hill, under this cold summer moon.

0:17:54 - (Chris Clarke): Zeke leaning into me. Content.

0:20:21 - (Chris Clarke): You ever listen to a podcast? And then they have a long segment at the very end where they're giving credit to everybody that worked on that episode. And sometimes, especially if it's a podcast that comes out more than once a week, there are a dozen or more people that work on putting the podcast together. And since my co host left, that number of people that worked on each episode went down to one.

0:20:46 - (Chris Clarke): If you haven't gone to 90 milesfromneedles.com donate and picked a way to get us some cash on either a one time or recurring basis, now would be an okay time. We have about 150 people that donate on a regular basis, and that's wonderful. And if we're going to get more outreach, if we're going to be able to put out episodes, even when one of us has been out of shape over a sick dog, we're going to need to boost that by a significant amount.

0:21:15 - (Chris Clarke): Again, we're very, very grateful to all of you who have donated. To be honest, I wasn't sure that we'd reached this level of success when we started this thing, and it's very gratifying to hear that this is making a difference for you folks. So if you are giving and you're not in a position to increase your donation, which, you know, some of you have done, and thank you. Share us on social media. Send other people our way. Word of mouth is really important, and we thank you for that as well. And with enough support, maybe we can get a couple three people to work on this project in conditions that don't cause heat injury.

0:21:50 - (Chris Clarke): In any event, we would like to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork purveyor. Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode comes to us via envato.com dot. Thank you again to the wonderful folks at Mazamar pottery for putting together a fundraiser. It was just a really wonderful thing. Very inspiring to see how people reacted.

0:22:18 - (Chris Clarke): We'll have a more thorough recounting of all the different people that donated artwork, et cetera, to that show in an upcoming episode. We will see you on the 20 August with a new episode. Until then, Heart and I would like to wish you heart is actually here in the studio drinking a little bit of water because it's warm. But we would like to wish you a very happy summer. Please stay safe. The desert needs you and she and I will see you at the next watering hole.

0:22:50 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:24:26 - (C): Sadeena.

0:24:58 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles, is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.