On this Easter weekend, let’s do our best to bring back the ghosts, the supernatural. Let us recognize and respect the mysterious entities that come not from some imagined, distant star system in the cold lifeless vacuum of space, but from right here where we experience them: backroads, mountains, spooky desert trails at dusk. Jesus loved wilderness and often talked to ghosts, after all. And that’s something people of any philosophy can enjoy.
The pyramids of Guinness 12-packs at our High Desert grocery stores reminded us of St. Patrick’s Day coming up, but the grey cloudy skies and green hillsides of the Mojave Desert this month are reminders that the old pagan tales are with us still, wherever the landscape is haunted and strange. And that supernatural entities always gather in their ancient homes: wild forests, dramatic outcroppings of rock, and any lonesome place whipped by the winter winds.
The storms continue, the wildflowers begin to appear, and Chantel (our mysterious PCT through-hiker) probably made it to the Canadian border without any kind of Mountain Monster getting her, which is good. Also: What is the Voice of the Desert?
Nothing is sacred unless we set it aside as sacred. As Americans rapidly abandon organized religion, and the formerly sanctified church and temple sites go up for sale as designer homes, where are the places that are truly sacred? The places set aside for contemplation, meditation, festivals, the rituals of life & death?
Where’s the beautiful part, anyway? Well, start by walking about a mile past the last parking lot or dirt road or residential car-parts dump or informal halfway house or accidental pit-bull breeding farm, and keep going in the direction of the difficult terrain: the hills and the mountains and the boulders. Not the hills covered in radio relay towers, but the ones with nothing up there at all, nothing except more boulders, more spiky yucca trees that slash your arms, gnarled junipers and needle-armed Joshua trees, up to the craggy peak where the stately pinyons stand proud. Keep going that way.
We are releasing this beast from the Patreon Archives — where you can find many more Patreon-only/Patreon-first episodes. A month ago, our old friend & collaborator Matt Welch joined us by telephone from New York City to talk about a magical time in California. Between 1999 and 2002, a wave of “news bloggers” washed over the calcified Los Angeles media landscape, and the effects were both surprising and long-lasting. Your host Ken Layne was part of that strange time, along with Mr. Welch and a cast of dozens.
We ain’t whining about it, nor excessively celebrating it. Just telling funny stories from the turn of the century. This episode wasn’t on the radio, which it why it runs 35 minutes instead of the usual 28 minutes. Thanks for supporting this advertising-free podcast on our Patreon Desert Oracle page. EPISODE #212: THE TYPING LIFE, WITH GUEST MATT WELCH
For some of us, the only peace of mind comes in absolute solitude, in those still numerous places where the calamitous noise of our civilization is mostly kept at bay. Ask anybody who completed a long hike — such as the PCT up the Western Spine of America — what they loved most, what made it such an unforgettable time. The solitude, they will often say. The quiet. Not the absence of sound, that’s rarely what anyone means, but the absence of the sounds of civilization. That awful, unending racket.
The first new Desert Oracle Radio of the year: The strange true tale of a missing child, a newspaper that hired a talk-show psychic to find that child, and the cops reporter who covered the grim & baffling end of the case.
A wet winter is visiting the American High Desert this Week of the Winter Solstice … which used to be the same day as Christmas and New Year’s and the Birthday of Dionysus, until Big Government caused the chaos and disorder of the present. Thanks for supporting this advertising-free show via our Desert Oracle Patreon.
