S4E13: Yuck: The Wild, Weird History of Joshua Trees with Barret Baumgart

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555 think the deserts are barren wastelands.

0:00:35 - (Chris Clarke): It'S time for 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clarke, and in this episode we have a really wonderful interview with author Barret Baumgart, who's put together a book on my favorite desert plant, the Joshua tree, entitled, Yuck. The Birth and Death of the Weird and Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia.

0:01:05 - (Chris Clarke): Barrett's book has a little bit of a different approach from a lot of other writing about desert plants in general. It's irreverent and fun and I think you're going to enjoy our conversation. I'm really grateful to Barret for spending some time with us, but a couple of things first, I almost don't have words for the behavior of the regime currently in power in Washington. It seems like they're in a race to see how many moral laws they can completely disregard and even destroy in the course of a typical workday.

0:01:36 - (Chris Clarke): You know, we all watched this past week as a sitting judge in Wisconsin was arrested for allegedly aiding and abetting a person without legal documentation to be in this country to avoid capture by ice. And that's apparently not even close to what happened. And that's unsurprising given the level of fucked upness Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shown in the last few weeks, sending innocent people to black site gulags in Central America without trial without any charges being filed.

0:02:04 - (Chris Clarke): You've probably heard about Kilmar, Abrego, Garcia, there are a lot of others. And you know, even if most of the people that were sent to CECOT in San Salvador were guilty of horrible crimes, that's what we have courts for. That's why we have trials and juries and legal representation and laws of procedure. And that's why we don't give up our judiciary to let inhuman, invertebrate slugs like Stephen Miller dictate people's fates according to their own hateful whims.

0:02:39 - (Chris Clarke): I don't like to imply that people are less than human. I think that tendency is what's gotten us into the situation in the first place. But it's really, really hard not to fall prey to that when you're talking about somebody like Stephen Miller. I mean, what's more human than Welcoming people that have gone through intense hardship often to get to a place where they feel their life is going to be better.

0:03:05 - (Chris Clarke): And what's more inhuman and even subhuman than rounding up people that have done that kind of hopeful migration just because they look different? This country has a couple of original sins that it still hasn't contended with. The genocide of native people, the slave trade, and the just sheer unmitigated atrocity that was the institution of slavery. It's going to be really, really hard for any administration, even one is venal and incompetent and rage filled and inhuman as the Trump administration, to come even close to the horribleness that those two historic events still echo into the present day.

0:03:46 - (Chris Clarke): But that's not the only shameful list that this country has racked up. From the deportation of American citizens to Mexico in the mid 20th century and the incarceration of Japanese residents and Japanese Americans in desert concentration camps, the Trump administration has already secured a place in history as committing sins that are equal to or worse than some of those things that right thinking people have condemned.

0:04:15 - (Chris Clarke): In retrospect, there really are no words that are sufficient to explain how horrible this situation is and how horrible it is that a third of the people in this country seem to support them and that another third seem not to want to do anything to challenge. I think it is immoral to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's not just politically destructive. It's not just legally inadvisable.

0:04:43 - (Chris Clarke): Cooperating with ICE makes you complicit in this historic atrocity. And ICE is running loose across the country, rounding up innocent people and shipping them to dark sites and gulags is just one tell that this is an authoritarian regime unlike almost any other in the history of the United States. Arresting judges, threatening to jail political opponents for no other reason than that their political opponents attacking the press, attacking the nonprofit sector, planning to revise or rescind landscape level protections like national monument designations that came about because of immense popular support and rescinding those at the behest of a few resource extraction billionaires, gutting environmental protections like its Black Friday sale at the Heritage foundation, the Clean Air act, the Clean Water act, the National Environmental Policy act, the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty act, all these laws that say, hey, we should look at the possible impacts before we bulldoze this forest or build a new city on this wetland or pave the desert with solar.

0:05:50 - (Chris Clarke): All these legal protections, which were very hard won, are under attack and being torn apart so that fossil fuel cronies and strip miners and kleptocrats can cash in while there's still something left to burn. Because nothing says Make America Great again like turning a whole country into an open pit mine with security provided by jerks with mirrored sunglasses and no sense of irony. Being this infuriated for this long gets exhausting. I know.

0:06:18 - (Chris Clarke): I'm exhausted. You probably are too. And we're just starting. It's only a hundred days into this administration, and believe me, as someone who puts this podcast out almost every week, I know what it feels like to feel like you're screaming into the void. It can be demoralizing. Side note, I would love to get some email from you. Chris@90milesfromneedles.com or if you don't do email, P.O. box 127, 29 Palms, CA 92277.

0:06:51 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, I know what it feels like to feel like you're screaming into the void. But giving up is not an option. History isn't written by people who gave up. It's written by people who stayed angry, stayed stubborn, who refused to accept that this country sliding into the fascism is normal. And I'm preaching to the choir here. I know. But stay loud, my friends. Stay furious. Keep at it. And when they tell you that you're being divisive or unconstructive or that you're suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, that's a compliment. It means they're scared of you. And they should be, because they thought that you and me and all the rest of us would be too tired and too upset to fight back.

0:07:39 - (Chris Clarke): They thought that we would just roll over and let them turn our future, the future for all people and all species that we have a right to, into a gated playground for the rich. History is written by people who refuse to give up. So I'm going to keep fighting and speaking and raising hell. And I hope that you will, too. The only thing more powerful than their greedy and they're. Well, let's just use the word evil.

0:08:10 - (Chris Clarke): The only thing more powerful than their evil is our refusal to be silent. And to that end, I want to thank some folks who have stepped up to the plate and either started donating to us or boosted their donations over and above their recurring plans since our last episode on April 15th. Those folks are John Griesemer. There's a longtime supporter who checked in with a special donation. Thanks, John.

0:08:37 - (Chris Clarke): Richard Laugern. Richard, I'm hoping I'm pronouncing your last name right. Carol Corbett and Zachary Peckler thank you all so much for putting a little bit of change into our pockets so we can keep doing this. This particular flavor of yelling into the void on behalf of the deserts has never been more important. 90 miles from needles.com donate and with that, let's go to our conversation with Barrett Baumgart, author of Yuck, which you can read for yourself by going to 90 miles from needles.com

0:09:11 - (Chris Clarke): yuck I hope you like this interview. It's a lot of fun. Remember to breathe. So there's a new entry in the field of Joshua Tree related literature book called Yuck the Birth and death of the weird and wondrous Joshua Tree Yucca vifolia right there. And we are privileged to have the author of Yuck with us in our virtual studio, Barrett Baumgartner. Thank you so much for joining us.

0:10:24 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, Chris, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

0:10:28 - (Chris Clarke): You go into this a little bit in the book, but can you give our listeners a little sense of just what brought you to the point where you decided you needed to write this book?

0:10:39 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, it started almost accidentally as like a wedding favor. I was going to get married in Joshua Tree in 2020. We were going to be dragging all these people from all over the country away from LA out to the Mojave and I wanted to write some kind of poetic ode maybe to the Joshua Tree, to desert and something that would be educational, inform them, hey, this dusty, weird place, you've dragged it, we've dragged you out to. There's actually potentially some meaning, some history here.

0:11:03 - (Barrett Baumgart): And yeah, I began a research dive and it really expanded.

0:11:08 - (Chris Clarke): That's cool. I really like the approach that you've taken and hopefully you can talk a little bit about that. The whole field of nature writing has really been tarred with a sort of excessive reverence for the natural world. And you don't, you're not disrespectful of the natural world, but there's an irreverence to the way you approach it, which is really fun, especially given the the way that the Joshua Tree was introduced to Western audiences in the 19th century.

0:11:38 - (Chris Clarke): And I think you, along with my spouse, have a particular affection for the writing of Joseph Smeaton Chase, who didn't have very nice things to say about the Joshua Tree.

0:11:49 - (Barrett Baumgart): No, he really didn't. And it's fascinating. He's such a mind blowing, incredibly talented prose writer and a stunning visual writer all throughout his books, which I've read and loved. But it is surprising he has nothing positive to say about The Joshua Tree and some of my favorite moments in that book, California Desert Trails, are definitely his prose paintings of the Joshua Tree. But there's not a lot of affection in there.

0:12:12 - (Chris Clarke): No, that's for sure. And it's interesting because he does have an eye that allows him to see the beauty in other sort of scraggly, pokey, disheveled looking desert plants. So it's maybe just the Joshua Tree was taller than he was or something like that, but yeah.

0:12:29 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, he's not joking. They genuinely, really, truly disliked this tree. And that was something that propelled me in the early stages of this research was the sense that these intelligent people with knowledge of the region, knowledge of the plants, they really had no respect or love for this tree that today we are so fond of, that it's become so popular.

0:12:51 - (Chris Clarke): I will confess, and we said this a little bit before we started recording, I'm really picky when it comes to prose about Joshua trees. I get way more upset about people saying it's not actually a tree than is really warranted. And so I came into reading your book with a little bit of a guarded approach because I was set to be upset by stuff that you wrote and unfortunately you didn't give me anything really to be upset about.

0:13:20 - (Chris Clarke): So that's, that's one count against you right there.

0:13:22 - (Barrett Baumgart): Sorry to disappoint you.

0:13:26 - (Chris Clarke): And in fact, I learned something from the book that I didn't know, which was the story of the Puente Hills landfill.

0:13:35 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah.

0:13:36 - (Chris Clarke): Can you, can you tell us a little bit about what relevance that has to Joshua Trees?

0:13:42 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, the book, like you said, the kind of nature or environmental writing I do is potentially strange. There's some counterintuitive moves and a lot of digressions that I hope are rewarded. One of the major ones is this swerve into Puente Hill, which is the largest landfill in America. Where it was. It's closed now it's a landfill. I think, you know, this particular location really made that term a misnomer. Finally, it's a man made mountain. It's an engineering marvel. I think it's eight stories taller than LA City hall in downtown LA, which puts it at maybe like 30 stories. It's a mountain.

0:14:16 - (Barrett Baumgart): And as you've mentioned in places, one of the things I think in writing this that I found that I absolutely loved and it's a strange place to get to. Maybe what I really revere and admire in the Joshua Tree is its refusal to be useful. We've tried, I guess, historically, everything possible Every use has been attempted, it seems, to find a way to extract, mine, process and make money off this thing. And it has resisted every single attempt, which I find strange, roundabout means to get to the nobility of the Joshua Tree, but there's something really deep and beautiful in that without getting too reverent. But to, to your question, yeah. The outskirts of LA County, Antelope Valley. As the suburbs of Los Angeles have expanded, it's well documented the extent to which Joshua trees have been bulldozed, chopped down, and McMansions expanding through Lancaster, Palmdale, probably out to Victorville.

0:15:07 - (Barrett Baumgart): And some of these trees undoubtedly were at some point hauled en masse to this landfill, Puente Hill, that has been the reservoir for hundreds, tens of millions of lives. There's detritus from this vast microchip of Los Angeles. So much of our material has landed there. So at some point in the book I get to make the lovely point that the Joshua Tree has finally proven itself useful by landing in that landfill, which actually captures a pretty substantial amount of methane daily, which is burned to turn turbines which power 50,000 homes in Los Angeles. Yeah, by that means we can say that the Joshua Tree has finally lent us a hand. He's doing something as we capture that putrefying strata of Yucca brevifolia.

0:15:56 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's interesting. I've often thought of Joshua Tree as a bone in capitalism's throat because as you describe in the book, just a bunch of different ways that people tried to make money off the things from making paper, which didn't really work out that well, to medical use splints and things like that, on all the way to developers sticking oranges on the leaves and claiming that they're orange trees. And you talk about all those aspects pretty amusingly. And it's interesting to me that the most recent attempt to turn Joshua Trees into a money making thing probably, I think has to do with the gentrification of desert towns and places where there are Joshua trees. People want to buy buildings, rent them out to tourists. And ironically, as a, as a side effect of that gentrification that the Joshua Tree is driving, developers are trying to cut down Joshua trees and complain that they're now protected species in California.

0:17:03 - (Chris Clarke): So it's just there really seems to be no, no good way of turning these things into money, which, you know, has sort of been something I have been aspiring to for a long time. And I appreciate the fact that they've been able to do that so flawlessly.

0:17:21 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, definitely. Yeah. There's something so interesting in that, just that Stubborn refusal. And then just the irony that you just described. Described like, what do you do with this thing? I don't know. We love it. We worship it. We used to hate it. Everyone we're hustling out there in mass to get a slice of this new desert paradise and in the process, bulldozing them down. I mean, it's just a strange system out there in the desert right now. I don't know how to encapsulate it.

0:17:49 - (Chris Clarke): Right now, but, yeah, I think you did a pretty good job in the pages here. I want to talk a little bit about genre, because you seem to have your feet solidly planted in about seven different ones with this book. How did you arrive at the stylistic approach that you've gotten with this book?

0:18:08 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. As a writer, I've always been interested in nonfiction writing. I think when I found that I was having more fun and digging up more interesting material and whatever prose writing capability I had was taking off was when I actually grabbed a hold of research and facts and began to work with actual factual information. And I think philosophically, always been interested in the human relationship with the environment.

0:18:35 - (Barrett Baumgart): So, yeah, my writing as it's taken off, it's been environmental writing. And in terms of the form, in the genre, I guess I'm always trying to upset expectation. I'm trying to avoid the next anticipated move. I have avoided traps I don't want to fall into. I don't know, trying to upset expectations, trying to do something different, trying to make it weird. I think a way I can describe my books. I've been saying this more and more. When you read them, you might have the experience, where's this guy getting this? Is any of this true?

0:19:07 - (Barrett Baumgart): I've never heard this. It sounds like he's making this up. Is any of this real? And a lot of the time I spend is continually doing research, digging, investigating, until I find the next pathway forward. That is that it surprises me that has some kind of crazy juxtaposition, some kind of coincidence where I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. And, yeah, if you get to the end of the book, you'll see in all the things I've written, there's 10, 20, 30 pages of notes. So it is all information and carefully researched.

0:19:38 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, you did a great job with that. I just really, really appreciate when a writer gives us someplace to look for more. And it's. That's a really wonderful feature of this book is you glide over some areas, but you give Us a way to dig into those that you chose to not dive all the way into in the writing. That's just such a wonderful thing to give to readers, I think.

0:20:07 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, yeah, it's important to me, especially when some of these things are so weird. Like my first book, China Lake, I intended to write a short essay. I was so astonished by some of the things I was finding. I was like, wow, how could I leave this at 5,000 words when I continually accruing and adding the next brick and the next lane. This strange structure that becomes this kind of genre defined book as you've described. It was always extremely important to me to be able to. To make sure people know, hey, this is not some guy just trying to be weird and blow your mind. And there's obviously so much questionable content out there. Like my. My goal is to take things to a place where you are disoriented. You're not really sure where you stand.

0:20:47 - (Barrett Baumgart): Is this real? Is he making this up? No, it's real. This is a cool, interesting slice of reality here. But yeah, there's a lot of work behind the scenes to build that into a book.

0:20:58 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. The overall approach I found was very much like some of the hikes that I took in Joshua Tree forests with no map and insufficient supplies. When I first moved out to the desert and was going through some boring life crises or other and just walking out and getting disoriented and having to look at a landscape that was without the reference points I'm used to. And it's not a direct map to the way you wrote this because you did a really good job of documenting.

0:21:32 - (Chris Clarke): But there's just some way in which the approach was new enough to me that I had to get my bearings every once in a while. It was just a really fun read.

0:21:44 - (Barrett Baumgart): I'm so happy to hear that.

0:21:46 - (Chris Clarke): I don't know if you have a section of the book that you would like to read.

0:21:51 - (Barrett Baumgart): I could read a short section if you'd like.

0:21:53 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that'd be great.

0:21:54 - (Barrett Baumgart): It's a hard thing to excerpt because it's this gradual factual accrual. Everything that gets dropped down, gets carried forward and comes back. But is there a particular section that you would like to hear?

0:22:06 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe some of the talk about the pros up in the front with Chase and Foltz and Fremont like that.

0:22:14 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah. Yeah. I could just read the first couple pages or something.

0:22:16 - (Chris Clarke): That sounds great.

0:22:17 - (Barrett Baumgart): The first page we have Fremont, which is well known. Would you like to start there or somewhere further in? Stranger.

0:22:24 - (Chris Clarke): Why don't we start with Fremont.

0:22:26 - (Barrett Baumgart): Native Americans referred to it by different names, but for all of them it was the same. A bridge. Sovarampi, the southern Paiute, said. Oompu intoned the Western Shoshone. The Cuia called it Humwichawa. The Spanish, traveling overland from Mexico did not see it as a connecting force, but more an inconvenience. Likely to sever the leather straps of saddlebags, they likened its stiff, sharp leaves to swords.

0:22:54 - (Barrett Baumgart): Isote de desierto, they said when they saw them. Desert Dagger Federal Western land surveyors first stumbled upon them in 1844. The daggers did make an impression. The famed Pathfinder Captain John C. Vermont wrote that their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler, the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom. Fremont called them yucca trees. Until recently, scientists assumed they were a member of the lilly family. This despite the fact that some grew over 40ft tall, lived 800 years and, unlike the lily, produced flowers that were greenish white and ill smelling. According to an early observer, they are not at all attractive, Mary Parsons concurred in 1900 in the wildflowers of California, Edna Brush Perkins wrote in 1922 that they were dull lead colored things.

0:23:49 - (Barrett Baumgart): They have a soiled white color, parsons added, with a disagreeable fetid odor. Francis M. Fultz wrote in 1919 that it is well that you view the flowers from some little distance, for they give off a strong fetid odor that is exceedingly disagreeable. Nathaniel Britten's 1908 North American trees claim that the petals are unpleasantly odorous flowers, white, rather ill smelling, charles Francis Saunders scribbled in 1917.

0:24:19 - (Barrett Baumgart): It is a musty odor similar to that of a toadstool, another commentator offered. The horrible smell, moaned a back page of Scientific American. And still none claim to know the precise origin of the word yucca. After the putrid petals bloom, they wither and fall away and leave behind a hard fruit that somewhat resembles green bananas, Lou V. Chapin noted in 1894. Although they are the last thing in vegetable rankness, the English born travel writer Joseph Smeaton Chase agreed the fruit was just a cluster of nubby pods, bitter and useless.

0:24:58 - (Barrett Baumgart): The Indians are said to have eaten its pods in times of famine, a writer for Land of Sunshine quipped around 1890, and they must have been near indeed to starvation. Recent found samples of fossilized dung persuaded several scientists that at least one dismal animal tolerated the bitter berries. Or at least it tried to for a time. The giant Shasta ground sloth vanished into extinction around the dawn of the holocene epoch, about 10,000 years ago, in AD 1853, an optimistic railroad reporter, one Gwyn Harris Heap, likened the sight of the repulsive trees to armed sentries guarding a remote desert sanctum.

0:25:39 - (Barrett Baumgart): He offered an appropriately biblical name, the Palmyra Cactus, after the renowned ruins of that ancient oasis of desert trade. But the camel caravans of the Silk Road never crossed the Mojave. The railroad was never built. The name didn't stick. The promised land lay elsewhere. In 1854, the famed botanist John Torrey received a parcel of unknown leaves. He read in them a relative of Dracaena draco, a plant long famed as a source of dragon's blood.

0:26:10 - (Barrett Baumgart): Sangre de drago in ancient Rome, a red medicinal powder prized by Egyptian priests during mummification. Tori supplied the scientific name, Yucca draconis, the dragon yucca. Wind of such wondrous taxonomic advancements, however, failed to reach the ears of Western wagon trains. In an apparent attempt at gallows humor, starving desert travelers often referred to the snarling dragons and their fetid flesh not as yuccas, but cabbage.

0:26:40 - (Barrett Baumgart): Heavens ahead. The good Lord has bequeathed us a kindly orchard of giant cabbage trees. A folio of dagger like leaves landed on the desk of botanist George Engelman in 1871. He determined that Mr. Torrey had erred, neither impressed nor repulsed. He named them plain Yucca brevifolia, the short lived yucca.

0:27:04 - (Chris Clarke): That's a great taste. It's interesting to me that, that so many people had such negative opinions about the way the flowers smelled, because I've spent probably altogether months and months camping under Joshua trees that are in full bloom over the last 30 years. And I have never thought of them as particularly strong smelling. That might be my own sensory deprivation. My wife is always finding stuff that's gone bad in the fridge that I can't tell is there.

0:27:37 - (Chris Clarke): But I think of it more as if you're in your grandmother's attic and you open a trunk that she hasn't opened in a while but had some ball gowns in it or something like that. It's just a little musty for sure. But it's not that unpleasant.

0:27:50 - (Barrett Baumgart): No, it's really strange. I don't understand it, this loathing and just the negativity heaped on this thing. It just seems extremely exaggerated and like you said, I mean, it's not exactly like some stunning, like floral aroma like jasmine or something, but to call it fetid and exceedingly disagreeable, it seems extremely hyperbolic.

0:28:10 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. I also have for a Long time. I've been really taken with Torrey's attempt to name Yucca draconis and just wondering about what life is like in the universe where Angelenos flock to Dragon Tree national park on the weekends. And it's just such a more evocative name. And damn those rules of botanical nomenclature and priority and things like that, because that would have been really cool.

0:28:36 - (Barrett Baumgart): That would have been cool. Yeah. Draconis. Yeah. Yeah. Joshua Tree is pretty boring. Brevo folia. Not a very exciting name. Shortle. Yucca. Yeah. I don't know. Draconis would have been cooler.

0:28:47 - (Chris Clarke): And we just split out Joshua trees into two species, and the one with shorter leaves, the other is not Brevifolia.

0:28:54 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah.

0:28:54 - (Chris Clarke): So the Brevifolia is the Joshua Tree with longer leaves than the other Joshua Tree. So it's.

0:28:59 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah.

0:29:01 - (Chris Clarke): Just doesn't make as much sense as we would like, I think.

0:29:04 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah.

0:29:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. It's interesting to me. I'm still. Still digging into the. The origin of the Joshua Tree name, and there's some confusion as to whether that actually came about in the way that you usually hear about Mormon pioneers approaching the Promised Land, whether that promised land was Utah or San Bernardino or whatever. And that does not seem to be true. But it does seem that the Mormons had a hand in naming at least the Joshua part.

0:29:32 - (Chris Clarke): It's just really always been striking to me that the. The name that we call them by now really didn't take off until the 20s or 30s. So it's about 100 years ago and about the same time as the naming origin story that is more or less apocryphal came up. So what we call this tree is just a fascinating story in itself for certain values of fascinating that apply mostly to plant nerds.

0:30:02 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah. That was one of the fun things I found documenting this was. Yeah, there's, like. In the later pages of the book, at times I try and recapitulate and relist, like, all these names we've been through, it seems like there was. It's just fascinating to dig up. There could have been 20, 30 different contenders for this name. People were calling it all kinds of different things all over the desert.

0:30:25 - (Barrett Baumgart): And for what, whatever reason, Joshua stuck. And I was fascinated. Yeah. Like, why this name Joshua, this friendly, appealing, humanizing term for this thing that for so long was almost described as demoniacal or infernal. How did we settle on Joshua? And I'd be curious. Yeah. What if that story is apocryphal? What your findings are on that?

0:30:46 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, actually, the little bit that I have found is that there's a 1875 peer reviewed paper by Perry, the same Perry that had Agaves named after him and that kind of thing. And he refers to the tree as being universally known among the Mormons as the Joshua. There was a book by Maureen Whipple that came out a little bit more than a century ago that was kind of a Mormon romance novel. It was called the Giant Joshua.

0:31:18 - (Chris Clarke): And so how that suffix tree got attached to it. Still haven't been able to find out when that happened. Yeah, it's just a relatively recent piece of lost history for the most part.

0:31:33 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, I didn't want to get stuck on that, but I was really drawn to that too. Yeah. Just where did this truly originate and how did it catch on? Yeah, couldn't find the answer. I hope you can detail that in your book.

0:31:45 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, we'll see. And now I have another book to cite in the back pages. We've taken up a little bit of your time, but I do want to ask you what you're working on now.

0:31:54 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, there's a third book in the works. I've been working on it for years. It relates to something in the San Fernando Valley that's not very well known. There's a nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles in 1959 that's been was covered up for 20 years. And it was accidentally revealed in 1979 by a UCLA graduate student digging through an engineering library who happened on some strange looking photos. And the site is called Santa Susanna. It's owned by the Boeing Corporation.

0:32:21 - (Barrett Baumgart): So I've been working on a book on that for years and yeah, I guess that's still in the works. So yeah, I don't want to say too much about it, but it's similar to my first book, China Lake. It is. Would be something environmentally related, but yeah, would have some interesting ties to the military industrial complex. History of Southern California, Native American rock art as well.

0:32:41 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I look forward to seeing that when, when you put it together. And how do people find your work?

0:32:49 - (Barrett Baumgart): You can go to my website. It's my name, barrettbomgart.com I'm posting a lot of terrible content on Instagram right now. Some kind of fun reels. I have a blog, Dumpster Fires about started about my back alley in LA where there seemed to be a dumpster fire every day. Short pieces of research and writing that I'm doing currently. You can see them pop up on there occasionally. I just wrote something about Joseph Smee and Chase on there. So that book Needs a new edition. It needs a new edition with a proper introduction.

0:33:17 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I will say that there's. I guess there's some potential fundraising for a very select group of people that read century old desert books. Because my wife figured out the path that he took through the Coachella Valley and we actually drove that a few years ago. It was pre pandemic, so we were able to like go in and look at things at various locations. But it seems like there would be like the JS Chase Trail, like with various stops throughout the Coachella Valley and what's now Joshua Tree national park and such.

0:33:51 - (Barrett Baumgart): That's a great idea. Yeah. If we can revive him. Yeah. So few people know about him, but those that read him are pretty astonished. Yeah, that's a good idea.

0:34:00 - (Chris Clarke): And for people who are interested in picking up a copy of Yuck, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com yuck and it'll take you to our bookstore, which does not use any billionaire owned online book retailers, but we go through bookshop.org, which lets you buy from your favorite local independent and highly recommend it.

0:34:29 - (Barrett Baumgart): Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much. Really appreciate you having me, Chris.

0:34:32 - (Chris Clarke): Really, really appreciate you spending some time with us and keep writing some great stuff.

0:34:39 - (Barrett Baumgart): Yeah, it's an honor to be here and I will do that. And yeah, thanks again for having me.

0:35:38 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. I want to thank Barrett Baumgart for joining us in the studio. A little secret here, we don't actually have a studio that people come to all that often. I mean, it is a possibility, but we do this remotely. It's a lot easier, lower carbon footprint. But thanks to Barrett, hopefully we'll get a chance to go hiking soon and point and laugh at various funny things growing in the desert.

0:36:03 - (Chris Clarke): I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, who is responsible for our award winning, if it had actually won an award, but is certainly worthy of one podcast artwork. In addition, I'd also like to thank again John Griesemer, Richard Larne, Carol Corbett, and Zachary Peckler for helping us out with their generosity. You can join them by going to 90 miles from needles.com donate and making a donation of a size and frequency that suits you.

0:36:36 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, Moody Western is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is by Cinemedia. Now I say remember to breathe because it's really easy to forget in times like this. But whenever a group of us get together and we all together, remember to breathe. That is the literal definition of a conspiracy. It's a good kind of conspiracy. The English word conspire comes from Latin, conspirare, to agree, to unite, to plot, but literally to breathe together.

0:37:11 - (Chris Clarke): So, folks, let us breathe together to bring this hateful, evil and unlawful regime to justice, and let us protect each other and have each other's backs while we do that. There's a lot hanging in the balance. And your voice. Yep, You. You talking to you. Your voice is crucial. I want to thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with our interview with Teal Lehto, also known as Western Water Girl, on social media.

0:37:47 - (Chris Clarke): We'll be talking with her about water politics in the Southwest, about being a young woman activist in these still regrettably patriarchal times, and what she's learned on how social media can and cannot be used to affect social change. I'm really looking forward to bringing you that one. In the meantime, stay safe, pay attention, and I'll see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.