Don't Let Them Take Our Western Public Lands

Desert Oracle Radio The voice of the desert Night has fallen on the desert Summer solstice has passed. And here we are in the second half of the year, just like that. And the beautiful but cruel Mojave these next three months are the tough ones. I don't need to tell you that. You get used to it after a decade or two if you don't give up and die first. But the seasons do have their various advantages, and in the high desert...

The summer nights, at least, are usually pleasant. Good for having people over, grill some steaks, speak freely, drink in hand, beneath the sky of stars. And keep an eye out for those enchanting golden lights. The ones that have appeared in our high desert skies on recent nights. Not flares, not planes, not fireworks, but soft golden orbs. Several seen playing over the mountain ridge between Yucca Valley and Pioneertown. I've seen them myself.

There was another pretty one over the northwest corner of the National Park. I saw that one, too. Was walking out to shut the gate for the night, and there it was, right in front of me, a golden ball of light. And then it arced gracefully over maybe five degrees of sky. Toward the sun. West, not east. Then it faded out to nothing. I don't know what they are. Exactly. But people living around mountains and marshes and other natural places have been reporting such things for centuries.

countable lights, as William Butler Yeats called them when he and his friends walked a dark road in rural Ireland more than a century ago. and saw these mysterious orbs flying around the baffled cattle at twilight. I like to think of these golden orbs as the whimsical spirit of this place, the spirit of place, the place of spirits. I do not see such things with any frequency. It has been nearly three years since I witnessed such lights over our Mojave High Desert mountains and foothills.

Despite walking every evening, every day that I'm here, I've been logging them, these strange visions and other such uncanny things over... The past 20 years or so? If you don't write it down, even if you're with other people, other witnesses, well, it just gets forgotten. It's a mystery. The actor Kurt Russell talked about this on a TV interview you can find on the computer. How he completely forgot.

that he was the one aviator to report his encounter with the Phoenix Lights on his approach to Sky Harbor Airport in March 1997. And he did not think about it until a year or two later and not on his own. He says he got home from work one day and his wife, Goldie Hawn, was watching a UFO show on television, one of those unsolved mysteries type TV shows. And Kurt Russell hears the TV narrator read off Kurt Russell's tail number, the number on his plane. His teenage son was in the plane, too.

and was the first to notice the big bright lights hovering over the Phoenix airport. But then the sun forgot too. How do you forget that? Such moments do not fit into our time, so it seems. And so we are compelled to forget about them. But if you're lucky enough to live out in the open country, you will see such things eventually. Maybe. If you got the right kind of eyes. Desert Oracle Radio.

For myself and so many others who live in the rural American West, life is just not right when we're not surrounded by open and scenic space. Not just any open and scenic space, it must be a land of mountains and pure air. Of regular encounters with the wild beasts. The wild birds and maybe the wild spirits too. It is not silence we demand, but the natural sounds of the natural landscape went through trees and brush.

The charming chatter of quail, the glorious song of the coyote coming from several points over many miles. And the sound of our own voice lifted in song, walking a lonesome trail. Makes you feel good, and maybe it keeps the mountain lion away. Who knows? work with livestock on open range herding sheep and goat to summer mountain meadows like the old basque shepherds still do and isolated pockets of the big mountains

Maybe rounding up the cattle once a year. Maybe we take visitors out to see rare sites. Herding tourists like cattle or... Go fly fishing on the broad but shallow streams after the spring melt. With the constant... Barrage of news that has little to do with our life in the open West. It's easy to tune out the schemes that are into you. And me. The people like you of noble human spirit who require the open landscape, mountain and desert and wild river. So here's the...

bad news if you haven't already heard it. I promise I won't make a habit of bad news. One of the senators Utah sent to Washington has slipped in some very dangerous legal language into the big federal budgeting bill, language that's vague enough. To allow the beginning of the end, the beginning of the sell-off of our western public lands. Including national forests.

Not including national parks, etc., but very much including Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands. In fact, that's what this senator... Mike Lee titled this section of the Senate legislation Mandatory Disposal of Bureau of Land Management Land and National Forest System Land. For what? Policy for housing. Housing of what? Obviously, there's no intention.

To build affordable housing in isolated western lands, roadless areas, canyons, mountains. High desert plains, hours from the cities. And the BLM already has well-known and oft-used methods of turning over public land parcels to developers when those developments are part of existing metropolitan areas. This has happened around Las Vegas for many decades. So what's this about? To my great delight, people and organizations very often on very different sides of the various public lands battles.

have found common ground in robust opposition to any such scheme to sell off our national birthright. Our western frontier. The Great American West is preserved today by the works, words, and deeds of great Americans such as John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, John Wesley Powell, Stephen T. Mather,

Abraham Lincoln. People who, because of their position in the world, have played an enormous role in the creation of national forest reserves, wildlife refuges, the national parks and monument system, and the vast public lands of the Intermountain West that are much less known. and much more loved by the people who live, work, hunt, fish, hike, camp, bird watch, mountain bike, rock climb, and otherwise make proper use of our wonderful American West.

in a way that leaves it pristine and wild for the many generations to come.

environmental organizations seem paralyzed and baffled. shackled to political purity rules so stringent that they'll take the L on American public lands rather than forge new alliances. Especially with Mountain State conservatives who have truly blasted this news far and wide. And they're fighting it hard. So that every time you open social media, you see beautiful pictures of the wild backcountry of America. The eternal frontier, if we keep it that way.

The rich old boomers on the board of directors of the big enviro orgs, the big donors in Malibu or Martha's Vineyard, well, they're not going to mess up their manicures by engaging with actual rural Western people who don't. want to be fenced out of America's wild nature. The executives who run these organizations are no different than the politicians in Washington, which is where the environmental lobbying groups are based, too.

necessary, but if you've spent much time in Washington or its expensive suburbs, you understand that those people comprise their own social class. And it has very little overlap with the people who live in remote parts of this big country, in large part to avoid the busybodies and traffic jams of Byzantium. The good news for the moment is that the first version of this Utah Senator's mandatory disposal of BLM and Forest Service lands law is dead for now.

There's a secret elf of some kind that has lived beneath the U.S. Capitol for centuries in the crypt they built for George Washington. And this creature is called the Parliamentarian. It is summoned now and then to get rid of some stinky legislation that caused an uproar, whether among voters or the far more important class, the big money donors. But little Mike Lee is determined that he's got promises to keep and they're not to Americans. So he squirted out another version.

And to the people of Utah, especially, it's much worse. So go ahead and call your senator's office and be nice to whatever beleaguered intern is answering the phone, the nut line. And just say you're completely against Senator Mike Lee's mandatory disposal of U.S. public lands. Lands administered by the BLM and Forest Service or any other U.S. public lands now or in the future. You can email to

But in general, don't engage in this kind of stuff too often. It's bad for the soul. It creates a smallness, a pettiness in the human character. To be too concerned about national politics. I've seen this happen. I've watched so many people turn into full-time consumers of political media slop. So I'll change the subject for the sake of poetry.

We have been celebrating and mythologizing American public lands since the first issue of Desert Oracle Magazine back in 2015 and the first radio broadcast in 2017. Wilderness, national parks and monuments and preserves. National forests and wildlife refuges. but especially the priceless open desert of the Southwest, the federal lands administered by our BLM, our Bureau of Land Mismanagement. But it's better than nothing, isn't it?

I remember when the fun rednecks got run out of the land conservation movement back in the 1980s. Earth first. Hunters and hard-drinking backcountry guides, Vietnam veterans who like to let off steam on what was left of the Wild West. Earth First collapsed that way. Way back in the late 1980s. The very people who started the intentionally confrontational prankster gang of backwoods weirdos.

were run out of their own band of pirates for the usual Human Resources Department crimes of thought and behavior, a sign of what was to come. Now, if you know anything at all about rural real estate, you know that such land has much more value when it borders or otherwise has easy access to public lands. to the flora and fauna and mountains and streams and trails. And yet sometimes this means wealthy people have a collection of...

Vulgar log mansions with those 500 antler chandeliers around choice public lands. Near towns with a couple of good restaurants and a Charles Schwab branch office. next to the artisan bakery in the yoga studio. But for 95% of public lands, the bordering properties... If they're not protected U.S. public lands like parks, our farms, branches, two-lane state highway easements, or...

Proud country folk living off the grid in a trailer on 20 acres of scrub 40 miles from nothing. We need these lands more than ever. These undeveloped public lands in the American West and wherever else they've managed to survive the modern world. And for the very reason that Edward Abbey made very clear a half century ago, we need somewhere to run, to hide, to retreat and regroup.

Away from the surveillance cameras, the tracking cookies, the human resources departments. Some of us will be returning to meeting in secret groves. Like... Druids. Without phones, without cameras, on hallowed ground. Nothing else will be trusted. All digital communication is potentially false. All business meetings are prone to targeted airstrikes. God bless America. Let's save some of it. Protect our wild public lands.

This is Desert Oracle Radio, and we are in the studio with our friend from up on the mesa, Herb Benham, who... performs music around here under the name Rove. Rove. R-O-V-E. You can see him around town. You got something coming up? You know, Ken, I'm taking a little hiatus for the summer because I can't really bear to load my equipment out from my house 10 feet into my car.

At the moment. You're talking about the summer? Yeah, I'm talking about the desert summer, which this will be my seventh desert summer. You know, I'm from Bakersfield, so I'm no stranger to the heat. We are in the hottest, driest desert in the Americas. Well, in North America. Yeah. I guess Atacama is drier. Where's Atacama? South America, where you get the mummies, you know? Mm-hmm.

we just get swollen dead bodies and like Nissan's totally yeah I've been feeling a little bit like a mummy I've got these cracks on my knuckles oh yeah heal up you know you start you start getting you're like is this psoriasis or is just this is the mojave just take yes this is why long before the rest of america became a place where everything was locked up behind smudged, disease-ridden plexiglass in every retailer. Phoenix was long famous for locking up its moisturizer. You forget.

how bad and how miserable it really is. Well, I think you have to forget. If you don't forget, you're going to move when the weather's nice. You forget. It's cool. It's beautiful. You can walk during the day. You can get the dog to go for a walk. I've got to bribe the dog now. It's going to be fine once we get there. The sun's going down. Can't blame him. Smart dog. What kind of air conditioners are you using this summer?

So I'm slightly ashamed to say, because I know your great affinity and fondness for swamp coolers, I've not turned mine on yet this year because I've just been... ripping that good old-fashioned central AC. Yeah. I've been using it basically all day and night, so I'm expecting a $500, you know. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the beauty of the swamp cooler.

get it going. You can run a swamp cooler. Well, 10 years ago, this was true. I think water and electrical rates have gone up like everything, but 10 years ago, A dollar a day would power a swamp cooler. Wow. Which is pretty wild. Because a swamp cooler is a different kind of cool. It's moist, for one thing, so your skin isn't cracking open. quite so much. Your books aren't turning to charred papers. You flip through the pages and it takes a little...

Finessing, you open up some windows on one side of the house and you crack some on the other side. It's loud. Ideally, you'd have... A couple of different systems, like you can't use a swamp cooler in August and monsoon season because you don't want more humidity then. That's not going to help. That's right. I also remember, you know, every year.

The first time you turn it on, it blows just a ton of dust and kind of whatever's been, like, building up in the swamp cooler. Oh, yeah. And sort of even getting through whatever. You're supposed to service it. Yeah, yeah. You're not supposed to get in there with a hose and a... A tool to scrape the calcification off the pads and the motor and everything else. There's all these things. I used to have to do that working for my dad. He had an AC.

AC Service Company. It was called AC Service, in fact. Aptly named. Yeah. It wasn't taken in our area in front of the phone book. That's what you want. That's why you look. Look in your phone. Well, we don't have phone books anymore. We've got listeners who are like 35. What is a phone book? Is that like an iPhone that you can read a book on? Or is it something like that?

It was this magical thing that would be delivered to your house, your apartment, wherever you were, for free. And it weighed about three pounds. Great big things at yellow pages, white pages, etc. Yellow pages for business, white pages for residential. And you could just open that book up. by the letter of the thing you were looking for. And there would be a list of businesses that were in business that year.

It worked perfectly. Yeah, they were incredible. And if there was like a girl you liked at school or something like that, you knew one of her parents' names. Or even if you didn't know the names, you could sort of look it up and just be like, okay, you know, Bill. Marcy, okay, I'm going to, you know, that seems like it. Yeah, yeah. I think she lived on this street.

Which now we're talking about it, you know, in this age, the modern age that we're living in, maybe not the best to have everybody's addresses just, you know. Probably not. Probably not. Now you get. PeopleFinder, where they'll show you that for only $25.99 a month. Right, right. You can see how many felony convictions your new Tinder match has.

Amboy to Zizek's and across the Great Mojave Wilderness, this has been Desert Oracle Radio with Soundscapes by Red Blue Black Silver. Listen to us on the radio in Joshua Tree, Z107.7 FM, Friday nights at 10 p.m. Our website, basically unchanged. Since I built it back in the autumn of 2014 is desertoracle.com. Hit radio for the blog covering every episode of this radio program.

There's an old saying, a proverb from the Stoics of ancient Greece that says a society is great when old men plant trees whose shade they'll never sit in. That's especially true with Joshua trees. They only grow about three inches a year during the first decade, and then it slows down considerably after that. I guess my big old tree was about 150 years old. I was only around for its final half dozen years, so I can't claim to know it really well, but I knew it.

It's hot out there. Watch yourself. Watch your pets. And good night from the voice of the desert.