Grievous

Why has Gram Parsons' makeshift memorial in Joshua Tree National Park been removed, and why don't park service personnel acknowledge that it's been done?

As a member of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers and a solo artist, the Florida-born Parsons mixed rock and country music, setting the stage for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt in the '70s and the alt.-country movement in the '80 and '90s (Wilco, the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, Ryan Adams, those guys). He distracted Keith Richards in France when the Rolling Stones were trying to finish "Exile On Main St." and helped launch the career of his talented backup singer, Emmylou Harris. His recording of one of his greatest songs, "Return of the Grievous Angel," is available here; hers is on a 1982 live album, "Last Date," that iTunes hasn't made available yet. You can hear and see her performing the song in July 2008 here.

After he died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of 26, an overzealous friend stole his body and set fire to it in Parsons' beloved Joshua Tree. Fans have been making the pilgrimage to Cap Rock every since, carving and painting crosses, poems, and other tributes. I visited in April and took the photos at right.

When I returned on Tuesday to what I was pretty sure was the spot, everything had been sandblasted away. While my photo below doesn't show it, the red cross and the legend "God Bless GP" are gone.

Thinking I just might have gone to the the wrong place, I dropped by park headquarters in Twentynine Palms to check. Two guys behind the counter, one a uniformed park ranger, insisted that the memorial was intact. The one in street clothes said he'd been there in the last two weeks and even drew me a map. Just to be sure, I returned this afternoon. I'd been right the first time. The crosses and inscriptions were gone.

The devotion of Parsons' fans notwithstanding, I can understand the feds being loath to appear to be celebrating drug overdoses and illegal cremations. Nor should people be permitted to deface publicly-owned natural wonders. As a nostalgic babyboomer, I could see making an exception in this case; I can also understand closing it down. What I can't understand is why my two friends at park HQ didn't just cop to it.

Three High Desert Days

Phil Hendrie, the radio host, said that you could tell a neighborhood was coming back when they put in a Starbucks and a Jamba Juice. There's neither in Barstow, California, at least in the part of town I wanted to see yesterday.

For a few blocks you get a flavor of old Route 66, the fabled cross-country blacktop that was superseded by the interstates a half-century ago. While I saw two Route 66 Motels, I fear the trademark is losing value. I wonder if my daughters, both in their twenties, have heard of it. Even if they have, I'll bet they'd blank on Burma Shave.

During this holiday week, I felt a little lonely as a tourist. I'd hoped to visit the Route 66 Museum, but it's run by volunteers and only open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Not their fault. The information is probably available on-line. I'd driven in from Twentynine Palms, about 110 miles away, as an excuse to take a drive. After my visit, I wasn't surprised to learn that Barstow was recently ranked as one of California's ten poorest cities, with a third of its people on public assistance. There just aren't any jobs. Some economists will tell you that with the decline in manufacturing in the U.S. and throughout the developed world, intractable poverty such as Barstow's is what we get. It's a pretty spot, wedged between foothills and the desert. Its people deserve better.

I didn't mind driving back the same way, along state Route 247, for the same reason Monet didn't mind seeing the Rouen cathedral at different times of day. Driving through the desert, you find weather rather than the other way around, and I was in and out of sun and clouds the whole way. About three miles north of Lucerne Valley, the road became a causeway between lake beds that are usually dry and teeming with off-roaders. Either that, or they were alfalfa fields flooded with reclaimed wastewater. I'd have had to ask someone to know for sure. Maybe next time.

A few miles south, in Johnson Valley, I got plenty of information from the locals at a rock formation the kids are using for high desert IMs. When I drive back into Joshua Tree National Park later this morning, I'll check out some more rock graffiti at the unofficial Gram Parsons memorial. My three-day retreat comes to an end today, after a night when my most pleasant of hotels (free wireless and crispy bacon) was buffeted by the same cold system that's giving northern Arizona a white New Year's. I hope it was quieter in Yorba Linda. Kathy doesn't enjoy enjoy hearing the wind at night quite so much.

Joshua Tree National Park, near Ryan Mountain, Tuesday afternoon

Radio, Radio

Another reason to love Elvis Costello: His influences, according to Nick Paumgarten's wonderful profile in the Nov. 8 "New Yorker":

His [jazz musician] father turned him on to the Grateful Dead, which became Costello's band, in part because it was no one else's. (While Costello makes no apologies for his Deadhead phase, his biographers always seem to.) It was through the Dead, and subsequently the Band and Gram Parsons, among others, that he discovered the traditional American music they'd tapped into, such as Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. This in turn became the foundation, along with the likes of Van Morrison, for the kind of music he was starting to write and perform himself...The Band's Rick Danko was a major influence on Costello's style of singing.

And They Weren't Even Free-Roaming Elephants

You don't meet anyone who has visited the Joshua Tree National Park, in the southern California high desert, and not loved it. Looking up from a Grand Slam at Denny's, you'll meet brave young Marines and their families from the base about three miles north of town. At the Twentynine Palms Inn, while eavesdropping on the conversations of Marine officers and LA intelligentsia in the cozy dining room and bar whose walls brim with the work of local artists and photographers, you could look up from your prime rib and homegrown pickled vegetables and see famed LA video diarist Huell Howser picking up an order of cheesecake to take home for dessert. On his "California's Gold," Huell's done programs about his getaway home of Twentynine Palms, but evidently not for 11 years. Kathy and I are selfishly pleased he's keeping reasonably quiet about our favorite place in the world.

And in the desert, sentinel trees, living rocks, and silence, although sometimes you think you hear Gram Parsons' voice on the wind. Ohio-born writer and essayist Deanne Stillman has written several books and essays about Joshua Tree and its denizens. Her latest book is Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (June 2008). You can visit her website and read the first chapter here. Before I left the Nixon Library in February, we corresponded about the possibility of her giving a talk in Yorba Linda -- especially since, as it turns out, President Nixon signed the Wild Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which Stillman features in her book.

A Free Man In Joshua Tree

The morning sky over Joshua Tree National Park is crisscrossed with vapor trails left by planes flying east from Los Angeles, heading west to Hawaii, coming north from Mexico. After a while they look like clouds. All those people going somewhere, while Twentynine Palms stays the same, or seems to. Just two miles away from the quiet center of town is a teeming Marine base. An expansion of the massive facility will soon be underway, we understand. The high desert-based 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marines lost 20 of their number at the hands of the Taliban during a difficult recent deployment in Afghanistan. So there are plenty of opportunities around town to thank young men and women for their service. But by and large visitors come to Joshua Tree for the peace and silence, the rock climbing, and, in the springtime, the desert flowers.

Yesterday it was 92 degrees at Cottonwood Spring, at the southern end of the park; today, around 86. Kathy and I climbed to the top of Mastodon Peak, which sounds a lot tougher than it really was. A few miles north, acres of cholla cactus spread across the desert, their spines glowing in the sun and seemingly from within. Of course everyone, including U2 and Gram Parsons, who died near the park in September 1973, comes for the Joshua trees, named by 19th century Mormon pioneers who were reminded of the great Hebrew Testament general gesturing heavenward. As sturdy as they look, they're prone to disease. They're pollinated only by a certain species of moth, so keep the mutually interdependent Joshua trees and yucca moths in your prayers. Tomorrow we're thinking of visiting Samuelson's Rocks, on which a Swedish gold miner carved his theological reflections. Can't miss that!

Perfect Songs: "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes In the Morning" (1969)

Joe Doe and Kathleen Edwards (written by Gram Parsons)