The Raven had come up to spend Thanksgiving in the desert, and we did. Rather than feasting, we whiled away that holiday with a long walk in the rainy creosote, watching dark winter storms trail through the Ivanpah Valley. Friday was taken up with moving belongings to my storage locker in Barstow.
Saturday was my last full day in Nipton. So, of course The Raven and I spent most of the day not in Nipton. Instead, we headed for the Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains, a visit to which I’d been promising her since she started spending time with me in the Mojave.
We stopped en route at my mailbox. The Post Office staff person was there, greeted us kindly, and asked again whether I was interested in her job. She’d offered it to me some time before, and I was tempted, but it would have been six days a week and four hours a day and less than ten bucks an hour to start and when I did the math the rosy romantic glow at the thought of becoming Cima’s postmaster faded in my mind. I told her I’d decided against it. Her attempt at PR thus made moot, she showed us a little of the conditions under which she was expected to work, including desk drawers full of rodent nests dating to the Eisenhower administration. Or perhaps the Pluvial.
Up Cedar Canyon Road a ways, I decided we’d need to fill the Zheep’s gas tank before we went on any cave tour, and so — forgetting that Fenner and its gas pumps existed — we went on past the turnoff to the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area and made for Needles.
We made it back to the park just in time to watch the sold-out last tour of the day head up the trail to the cave mouth. Our disappointment was tempered by the presence of screaming kids on the tour. “One more reason to come back,” quoth The Raven.
We went uphill to the Visitor Center instead.
The Providence Mountains State Recreation Area’s visitor center is a sweet little underfunded place in an old cabin of stone and wooden beams, with your usual assortment of natural items from the area, tortoise shells and bighorn skulls and the like. One of the items on display is a very old leg bone, labeled carefully in the display as “from either a Harlans’ or Shasta ground sloth.” I was looking at the bone in its glass case. The Raven made a noise of choked astonishment.
“Ground sloth leg bone,” I said, not particularly helpfully.
“No,” she replied, “look. On top of the case.”
In a freestanding plastic photo frame atop the case was an image the park staff had Photoshopped to provide visitors with a sense of the size of your typical ground sloth.
I got a copy of it.
There may be some readers here who don’t quite grasp the effect, on The Raven and me, of walking into a stray park visitor center and finding the above image in a paleontology exhibit. I can only explain by offering a link to this painting Carl Buell did of me and my dog Zeke and a friend a couple of years ago.
I’m pretty sure I actually pushed my gaping jaw shut with my hand.
A ranger was sitting at the information desk. I called out to him. “I have a question for you.” He looked up helpfully. I grabbed the photo frame and brought it over to him. “Does this guy look familiar to you?” It took him about ten seconds.
It was a nice chat, once he realized I wasn’t upset, and that the artist probably wasn’t going to be upset either. (He wasn’t.) And what else could The Raven and I do but stage a reenactment?
I spent the evening considering what meaning I should derive from the experience.
I mean, visiting a natural history display in the Mojave Desert and finding myself as one of the exhibits? That has to mean something.
Maybe I belong there.
Cool!
I can relate about the moving and storage unit. I have to get the last of my mother’s stuff out of her storage unit today.
What a moment!
I’m surprised, though, that a visitor’s center would use something like that without permissions/licensing. Sounds like the artist was gracious, but a lot of them may not have been and that could have been some hot water. I wouldn’t have thought they’d be interested in taking that chance.
*laughs*
What a wonderfully surreal experience!
It was one of the strangest “Wait… what?! ” experiences I’ve had in some time.
It’s almost like the time I inadvertently used the WWF panda in a verra popular blog design and totally got called out. Except less serendpitous.
Or serendipitous, even.
They were so busted. But at least it was in the pursuit of sharing knowledge. The whole thing, the photoshopped picture, and your discovering it is too cool.
I would have demanded that they at least identify the hairy mammal. The one on the left I mean.
Ha! Wow.
I’m with Spyder. This “hummin’ bean” just read a story about the universe putting needed things in the way of another “hummin’ bean who won’t pay attention. Just sayin’. Blessings Chris.
Yeah, well, I’m not gonna chain myself to a sub-minimum wage 6 day a week job in shitty, unsafe and unhealthy conditions that would keep me from doing the things I want to do with my life just because someone reads one damn entry on my website and decides they know better what I need to do with my life than I do myself. Just sayin’.
Aw come on Rob! That would be the well known Canis antiquus sierrae
Hehe. I can imagine the folks at Mitchell Caverns putting this up and not thinking twice about it. They were some of the nicest park staff members we’ve met. Actually, Eric was interested in a certain spider that exists in the caves (and is apparently blind). The employee there took our name and address and later mailed a packet of info to us (said info was probably breaking copyright laws - but was appreciated). I’m sure they are tickled to read about the desert in your blog, and thought they were being cute. Heck, I think they were being pretty cute! I would have loved to have seen it myself.
The garbage can is doing a pretty sorry sloth impersonation.
Didn’t mean to poke a nerve. Just relating a story I read once. To me it had less to do with a job and more to do with a location. But, per usual silly me. Blessings.
My earlier flippant comment aside, I am glad your move was calm, peaceful and even somewhat entertaining. Except, I assume, for the normal sadness of leaving a loved place. I was looking forward to a calm and relaxing long weekend too, but it ended up being intensely agonizing instead. I had to fight demons I thought I’d laid to rest. Old vengeful, bloodthirsty demons from a more hotblooded, unthinking youth. What I imbibed from your writings over the years was a pretty fucking awesome anchor in the storm.