[ Lost in the Landscape ]

gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids

I’ve been reread­ing The Poet­ics of Gar­dens, a won­der­ful, witty, thought­ful book by archi­tect Charles Moore, land­scape archi­tect William Turn­bull and the­o­rist William J. Mitchell. In two places it ref­er­ences Igor Stravinsky’s Poet­ics of Music, in which Stravin­sky argues that sounds can’t be con­sid­ered to be music until a human mind has orga­nized them. (John Cage, of course, would argue you blue if you said that to him…) Extend­ing Stravinsky’s argu­ment, Moore and friends argue that a space can’t be con­sid­ered to be a proper gar­den until it’s been shaped by human actions.

The sit­u­a­tion at the Mojave Phone­booth brings their argu­ment to mind. The Mojave National Pre­serve pur­ports to set aside a piece of nature for the enjoy­ment of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion in a way that mir­rors the mis­sion of the Yosemites and Yel­low­stones of the world. One of the main rea­sons that we go to these places is to com­mune with the won­ders and plea­sures of the world beyond our gar­den walls and city gates. We go to com­mune with nature.

But the very names many of these places gives away the real sit­u­a­tion, with many of them called “national parks” or “state parks” or “regional parks.” And parks–think of New York’s Cen­tral Park–raise expec­ta­tions of spaces under human con­trol. The removal of the phone­booth was just an obvi­ous symp­tom of this con­trol, a con­trol that goes througout the nat­ural sys­tem, from the con­struc­tion of roads and vis­i­tor facil­i­ties to restrict­ing what kinds of activ­i­ties a per­son can do in a cer­tain place. Humans are now posi­tioned so that they could exert obvi­ous con­trol any­where on earth. The Amazon’s get­ting slashed and burned and there’s comfy year-round hous­ing on the South Pole. And what’ not under con­trol now could be with vary­ing amounts of effort. I’m in some ways a gullible Roman­tic and I work hard to guard that pre­cious naiveté, but–as much as I hate to admit it–this “nature” thing is now an arti­fi­cial distinction.

I won’t try to answer the “when did nature end” ques­tion, but something’s that inter­ested me is look­ing at the con­trols that ended it. It’s been said in var­i­ous places that one of the meth­ods of con­trol­ling some­thing is to name it–Just think of how many moun­tains bear the names of peo­ple that have had polit­i­cal power and abil­i­ties to con­trol peo­ple and land­scapes. A dis­tinct form of nam­ing fea­tures is where fea­tures in the land­scape are given bear names based on their sup­posed human characteristics.

Over the years I’ve been notic­ing places that have names like “Indian Head” or “Kiss­ing Rocks.” The place that made me really stand up and take notice (and stim­u­late my gag reflex) was Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, in extreme south­east­ern Ari­zona, when I first vis­ited it in the early 90s. Here, a 1930s trail goes through an area known as the “Heart of Rocks,” where there’s a con­cen­tra­tion of fea­tures 10–30 feet tall bear­ing plaques label­ing them in all sorts of dis­tinctly human terms, using names drawn from a hodge­podge of cul­tural ref­er­ents. This is where I saw Kiss­ing Rocks, two just-touching for­ma­tions with lip-like pro­tru­sions. Then there’s “Punch and Judy Rock,” and “Totem Pole,” and “Thor’s Ham­mer.” Mixed in with these, “Big Bal­anced Rock,” “Camel,” and “Mush­room Rock” seemed much more benign.

I returned to Chir­ic­ahua last Spring and decided that it would be and inter­est­ing project to doc­u­ment some of these for­ma­tions. On the way up the moun­tain I was explain­ing what I was doing to a Park Ser­vice ranger. Of all the for­ma­tions, one of the ones that she’d had the most neg­a­tive reac­tions to was “Old Maid.” And, down the moun­tain a ways, be sure to check out “China Boy,” she sug­gested. Then there’s a whole moun­tain­top eas­ily view­able from the park­ing lot at the top of the moun­tain that’s labeled “Cochise Head,” a ques­tion­able homage to Cochise, who held up for sev­eral years in these moun­tains before he was captured.

If you look at the Park Ser­vice lit­er­a­ture for the park you’ll see “Big Bal­anced Rock” men­tioned, but they’ve down­played the other names. The plaques remain, how­ever, maybe as a reli­quar­ies to the1930s mind­set that came up with most of the names. (The ranger I spoke to thought that Cochise Head might date fur­ther back, to the late 1800s.)

So why all these names? Sure, some­one was hav­ing some fun with it all, but I’m inter­ested in the ques­tions bub­bling below the sur­face. Are humans so scared of or alien­ated by “nature” that they have to project human traits on it to be able to begin to deal with it? Are we so blind to nat­ural processes and geol­ogy that we can only under­stand it on our terms? Is nam­ing some­thing the begin­ning of a long chain of con­trol­ling actions that ulti­mately leads to its destruction?

James SOE NYUN: “China Boy,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Cochise Head,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Kiss­ing Rocks,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Old Maid,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

January 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • rambles | Tags: Chiricahua Mountains • mojave national preserve • mojave phone booth • mojave phonebooth • parks | 1 Comment »

the mojave phonebooth: part 2, i told you it was weird

[ con­tin­ued from part 1 ]

My sec­ond trip to the Mojave Phone­booth was a few years later when I was lead­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy trip for some fel­low pho­tog­ra­phy geeks with the local Sierra Club chap­ter. My trips are often a lit­tle off­beat, par­tic­u­larly for peo­ple want­ing to pad their port­fo­lios with more pho­tos of rocks and sun­sets. (Don’t get me wrong–I still have a weak­ness for “nature pho­tog­ra­phy” or what­ever you call this West Coast, Weston– and Adams– and Porter-influenced way of see­ing the world.) The peo­ple on this trip were a tad puz­zled by my insist­ing that we visit this phone­booth in the mid­dle of Cima Dome, but I promised them it’d be an inter­est­ing detour.

By this point the phone­booth had acquired an inter­na­tional fol­low­ing. I won’t repeat all the details, but through the efforts of a cer­tain God­frey Daniels, who called and called the phone until he got through to a human being, who logged all his attempts, and who detailed his crazi­ness on the web, the phone­booth began to get a cer­tain rep­u­ta­tion for weird­ness. Peo­ple from all over started to make calls to this lost phone­booth, and peo­ple would go there to answer them. And then Europe found out. What bet­ter thing to rep­re­sent a roman­tic Euro­pean notion of the Amer­i­can West than a lone phone­booth, miles from any­thing, set in the mid­dle of the desert with j-trees all around it?

My group finally made it there, but we weren’t the only ones that day. A DJ from a Florida radio sta­tion was there in a low, bat­tered sedan with “Mojave Phone­booth or bust” signs all over it. He’d been camp­ing out there, tak­ing calls from lis­ten­ers, and he was look­ing a lit­tle bat­tered him­self. In a more deluxe rented SUV was another group of peo­ple which con­sisted of a Ger­man film crew and an opera singer. Appar­ently the opera singer had made a cer­tain rep­u­ta­tion for him­self by singing arias while stand­ing in the phone booth. Maybe while wait­ing for La Scala to call him.

We weren’t there long before the phone rang and con­tin­ued to ring. Peo­ple from Texas, Florida, Italy, Ger­many, all over. We didn’t hear the opera singer sing, though the crew got some shots of him stand­ing at the phone, answer­ing a call. Then the film crew turned their atten­tion to my group. Richard got some ques­tions, then some­one else, then me. What was I doing here? How did I hear about the phone­booth? Who was in my group? I had no idea if these peo­ple were the equiv­a­lent of the major Amer­i­can net­works, some lit­tle cable out­fit, or some pre­cur­sor to Youtube. But what the hell, I’ve been on Euro­pean television!

The phone booth that day:

Nicole, one of my group, tak­ing a call–in French–from some­one in Europe:

Post­script: All this was in the late 1990s, after the Mojave National Pre­serve came into being offi­cially. The thought of hav­ing some­thing so anti­thet­i­cal the mis­sion of a nat­ural pre­serve rubbed the National Park Ser­vice the wrong way, and with the col­lu­sion of SBC Pacific Bell (now AT&T) the phone was removed and the phone num­ber ((619) 733‑9969) retired for­ever. While the Mojave Phone­booth was def­i­nitely an unnat­ural fea­ture in the land­scape, it was no worse than golf courses in Yosemite or mega-lodges in Yel­low­stone. But through their greater wis­dom the NPS saw it fit to kill off this piece of wacked Amer­i­cana. So that’s one less thing out in the wilds to makes roam­ing the deserts such an inter­est­ing thing to do.

The Park Service’s action hasn’t ended the weird romance of the phone­booth, how­ever. A film pro­duced in 2006, Mojave Phone Booth, played the fes­ti­val cir­cuit in 2006 and 2007 and gath­ered a num­ber of awards.

January 10 2008 | Categories: landscape • photography • places • rambles | Tags: mojave phone booth • mojave phonebooth | 1 Comment »

the mojave phonebooth: part 1, weird at first sight

I first ran across what later came to be known as the Mojave Phone Booth in Jan­u­ary of 1993 or 4. I’d been camp­ing that week­end in what was soon to become Mojave National Pre­serve, and one day was explor­ing some of the fea­tures on the north end of the park-to-be. There the park butts up against I-15 and the thriv­ing tourist waysta­tion of Baker, Cal­i­for­nia, touted on signs through­out town as “Gate­way to Death Val­ley.” Baker is home to what’s claimed as the “world’s largest ther­mome­ter,” 134 feet tall–a foot for every degree that made up the hottest tem­per­a­ture ever recorded at Bad­wa­ter in Death Val­ley. Baker is also known for the Mad Greek Restau­rant, a busy and basi­cally okay eatery that serves up Greek –Mexican-American cui­sine in por­tions that you might expect in a town that owes its suc­cess if not exis­tence to trav­el­ers head­ing for that shin­ing shrine of excess, Las Vegas, which at one point in my life was my all-time least favorite swath of soul­less human des­o­la­tion on earth. But enough Vegas-bashing and back to the Preserve…

The most dra­matic fea­tures on the land are a chain of mul­ti­col­ored vol­canic cin­der cones. I think of them as single-use vol­ca­noes: Unlike their big broth­ers that build to some size over long eras, cin­der cones mark a short period of erup­tions that builds them to a few hun­dred feet high. And then the erup­tions stop, the route to the magma below closes up, and when the ground’s finally ready to erupt again, a new crack opens up, away from the first cin­der cone, cre­at­ing another, sep­a­rate cone.

Here at the Mojave Pre­serve there are piles of them–some of them pris­tine in their per­fect pyra­mi­dal geom­e­try, oth­ers reshaped by min­ing operations–and they guard the west­ern edge of Cima Dome. Just a few miles south of the world’s largest ther­mome­ter, Cima Dome hosts the world’s dens­est pop­u­la­tion of joshua trees, and that’s what you notice first. But the fea­ture is called a dome and not a for­est, and as remark­able as the j-trees are, grow­ing denser and green as you get far­ther out on the dome, it’s the geol­ogy and not biol­ogy that makes this place so amazing.

On a topo map you can eas­ily make out the uni­form con­cen­tric rings of the dome as it rises over 1500 feet from the lower points around it. In real life it’s a lot more sub­tle. You look at the ground as it rises, grad­u­ally, per­fectly, and you get a torqued sen­sa­tion that some­thing is hap­pen­ing, but you’re not quite sure what. You stare and it looks like you see the cur­va­ture of the earth, though instead of fly­ing high over it, you’re stand­ing right on it. Space seems to dis­tort as what you expect to be flat bulges up. Queasi­ness sets in. Wel­come to Cima Dome.

The place has this amaz­ing power and force that the touted 1960s and 1970s earth­works can’t begin to approach. In terms of spa­tial power, as inter­est­ing as they are, Robert Smithson’s Spi­ral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s var­i­ous con­struc­tions, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater can’t hold a can­dle to it. Sorry guys!

So there I was, jeep­ing through the j-trees and the spa­tial queasi­ness, when I encounter a fence, a cat­tle guard, a power line and a pow­er­line road cross­ing the jeep track. And next to the road, next to one of the power poles is a phone booth. A phone booth? A dozen miles from any­thing? A freak­ing phone booth? But out in the desert you see a lot of…unusual…things. And I stuck the phone booth as another entry in my brain’s cat­a­loging of desert sights and sight­ings. Lit­tle did I know what I’d just seen.

[ go to part 2, i told you it was weird ]

January 06 2008 | Categories: places • rambles | Tags: baker california • cima dome • cinder cones • desert towns • joshua trees • las vegas • mojave national preserve • mojave phone booth • mojave phonebooth • oddities | 1 Comment »