Here in the very quiet Tennis Club neighborhood tucked up against the San Jacinto Mountains, I wake every morning to birdsongs, some beautiful, some shrill. Only after several days here in the desert did I realize that they’re all coming from the same bird, a Western Mockingbird who perches outside my room on the same branch of a big Aleppo Pine Tree, producing a vast range of sounds for hours at a time. I Googled him and found a 7-minute recording of the Western Mockingbird on YouTube and played it outside on the iPad. The recorded Mockingbird drove the real one insane, hopping from tree to tree and buzzing the iPad. I felt bad for interfering digitally with nature in this way, though for all I know it was Mockingbird porn and I made him the happiest bird in the desert. Isn’t that what iPads are for?

 
Each morning’s first step outside is key in planning the day’s activities, or lack thereof, as the only clue to the heat from inside is that the AC, set the night before to 78, is still running—it’s always running. This morning though I was met by something putrid in the air when I walked outside with my coffee for the day’s first temperature check—the smell of the Salton Sea—which is not a sea smell at all, but more like rotten eggs. I would not have known what it was if reports of the high levels of Hydrogen sulfide hadn’t been in the news the night before. It’s a gas created by decaying plants and animals that is both deadly and flammable in high concentration we were told by the local news channel. It’s not a real sea either, having been created by an engineering accident in the early 20th century, then briefly becoming a recreation, boating and fishing hot spot before slowly beginning to die, being fed only by irrigation run-off. The desert is a place of contrasts and surprises; tricks of light and shadow, extremes of beauty and ugliness both natural and man-made, and I love it here.

 
What started for us as a stopover in civilization on the way to and from more wild southwest destinations during our backpacking years—“a bath, a shave and a whore” in Wild West terms—has since become our getaway of choice. Now with the dog, and Palm Springs being the most dog-friendly town anywhere, it’s a must that we get here once a year and stay as long as possible. We do exactly the same thing here that the Hollywood stars did before us—we escape—in our case at least from reality. Of course this desert was occupied long before Los Angeles existed or Europeans walked the Americas, but it is what it is today because of Hollywood. There’s a scene in 1950’s “The Damned don’t Cry” where the police drive up a dusty road to villain Nick Prenta’s house, which at that time sat in the middle of the desert. Nick the gangster is played by a young hot Steve Cochran, the house was actually Frank Sinatra’s and is now tucked into a dense well established residential neighborhood. The diving party scene in the same movie where the much older Joan Crawford wears those super dark round sun glasses was also shot at Sinatra’s, though what you can’t see in the movie is that the pool is shaped like a grand piano. I recently ran across an article about the use of modern architecture in film as a signifier of evil; take Hitchcock’s fantastical cantilevered house in “North by Northwest” perched just behind the 4 heads of Mt Rushmore and occupied by the ever-creepy Ray Milland, or the very real Ennis Brown House in “House on Haunted Hill” with Vincent Price answering that curious door with no knob. I’ll need to do more research into this.

 

The stars came out to the desert to play in private; to escape the prying eyes of reporters. They built walled compounds and hosted private parties, a pattern that is most pronounced today in the 1920s era Movie Colony and Old Las Palmas neighborhoods where massive hedges surround large invisible estates that when you can see in, reveal surprisingly small Spanish Colonial houses, though a few are worthy of Gloria Swanson and her dead monkey. All have lush gardens, pools and tennis courts. I once read that during the studio contract days there was a rule that stars had to be essentially on-call, and couldn’t travel more than 100 miles from Los Angeles without approval. It’s actually 114 miles from Hollywood to Palm Springs, and presumably on some pretty sketchy roads before the 1960s, so the rules must have been lax. Actually the roads may have been another paparazzi deterrent. A long hot bumpy ride only to be met by a high gate or hedge must have been frustrating to reporters—if their old cars didn’t overheat. Palm Springs wasn’t then and isn’t now a place to be seen. It has a certain rough glamour here and there, but it’s no place for star gazing—except for the ones in the night sky as there are very few street lights here, which makes driving at night a bit unnerving. I’ve seen Barbara’s Rolls but never her, and we thought we saw Jason Gould jogging the other day but couldn’t be sure. Her house is a hideous pile built in 1983 on the mountainside above Old Las Palmas. Like a strip mall looking down over the green mini-estates below, it is neither neo-old world romantic nor optimistically modernist; it is bland post-modern in the strictest sense, and will never be used in the movies therefor to signify anything.

You may be unlikely to encounter celebrities out and about in Palm Springs, but you will most definitely run into some real characters, and people here generally lean toward overly friendly. The dog again makes for the perfect ice-breaker. Eccentric and elderly women seem to find touching her irresistible. Dogs in Palm Springs on the other hand tend to be snippy and poorly socialized when it comes to their own kind. I think most of them must spend their days locked away in air-conditioned houses with their own yards and pools and no real reason to be around other dogs. I sat in a make-shift waiting area at CVS Pharmacy the other day, without the dog, and before I knew what had happened I was having a conversation with a lovely bejeweled and bedazzled 70-something tanned and leathery woman (it just happens here). Her most prominent piece was the sparkling blue heart-shaped crystal pendant that reminded me of the Titanic movie—as did she actually. Her conversation opener was something about how she had met some really interesting people right on that spot in that suburban CVS, but how disappointing that she had never shared phone numbers or contact info with any of them. I answered with a flippant “you mean like dates?” I am never in the mood for a long convo with a stranger. She answered with a scolding “of course not,” and I fidgeted, hoping my name would be called by the pharmacist, but just then her banter did get interesting. She was about to leave the desert and move home to Catalina Island where she had grown up. I’ve never been out there, even after spending a great deal of time at the Port of Los Angeles where hopping on a ferry or helicopter would have been simple. The place has always intrigued me but I guess to be honest I was also a little afraid of being trapped on an island if it turns out to be a total bore—much the way I used to feel about cruises before my worst fears were confirmed by taking one—but the idea that someone could actually grow up out there on that little rock was fascinating. I told her I knew San Pedro very well, but had never been to Catalina. She explained that her father had worked on building the breakwater that guards the port. To that I’m afraid I let my shock come out unchecked and replied “that was the 19th century!” “Yes” she said, “I guess I’m dating myself.” I didn’t stop to do the math. Other little stories were exchanged. At one point she subtly waved her son away who had approached from behind me and was clearly ready to leave. He was also most probably very used to his mother’s encounters with strangers because he disappeared without a sound. It was in fact a very pleasant encounter, and while no phone numbers were exchanged, I know where to find her.

 

One of those tricks of desert lighting is how it flattens out the mountainside from most vantage points in the valley. Like bright portrait studio lighting, the sun blasts the eastern slopes and fills in all the wrinkles and cracks. From here in the Tennis Club, the mountain that meets the desert just two blocks to the west appears as monolithic, an evenly steep and evenly textured plane, and though it changes colors throughout the day, it never reveals its deep incisions and plateaus. From below it appears completely un-hikeable, but there is depth and there are trails. Some days the mountains look like a cardboard cutout with the crisp pink craggy edge against the deepest blue sky high above. The mountains are so close and so high that the horizon doesn’t have time to lighten as it descends to meet earth the way we were taught to paint it in art class; that familiar effect happens somewhere far on the other side of the range to the west. The hidden secret of just how much depth there is to these eastern facing slopes is only discovered by hiking them. Strange that we would have come here so many times before discovering the great hikes that are to be had. On our earliest trips here we would have had an SUV full of hiking and camping gear slated for use elsewhere but it never occurred to us that there were good hikes right here. Maybe we just assumed it would be too urban for our taste. I had once by accident stumbled upon the trail that winds up behind Bob Hope’s shopping-center-sized house, but that was it. We even went to the visitor’s center once to ask about local hikes and were handed a single page black and white Xerox of a crude hand drawn map of the area and ended up somewhere up by the windmills in a flat dry riverbed. I recognized that spot later in a porn video, but it was otherwise not worth the drive out there. These were pre-internet days though and now we take for granted that we have all the information there ever was in the palm of one hand. Now we hike at least both the North and South Lykken Trails whenever we’re here—they allow dogs—trails that are as old as the town. This morning we did a variation on the South Lykken, taking an unmarked but well-worn offshoot from the main trail. When we thought we might be somewhere we shouldn’t be, suddenly there were picnic tables and a sign on a low plateau just above The Mesa neighborhood. A sign pointing back up the way we had just come even bore the name of this little trail. The thing about these mountains though is that even though they are all public or Indian lands, they are not easily accessible from the town below where private houses and resorts back right up to the rocks like a castle wall. Comforted by the signs that we were on an actual trail we proceeded to descend admiring the roofs and gardens of mini-estates below. I suppose we knew it was inevitable, being familiar with the neighborhood, but there it was: the closed gate and the “no trespassing” sign. I’ve done a lot of hiking and would never chose a trail that started with a descent and ended with a climb, and now that I’m just plain old and cranky I wasn’t about to let a sign send me back up a steep 900 feet as the morning temperature climbed. So through the gate, and then another and some intimate garden views and we made it back to Indian Canyon Drive. I highly recommend this route, but I’m not going back to find the trail’s name on this trip. North Lykken Trail is just above this house and is a pretty easy loop with no car required from here. Last year we met a local character on the trail, an elderly English woman (she felt compelled to tell us this) who hikes it every day, though returns to Ramon and her house rather than taking the knee jarring descent to the Art Museum. Gee she must be our neighbor though we haven’t seen her this year. I do hope she’s alright.

 

Another pre-internet challenge was finding places to stay—here and everywhere. There was a book in the 90s called “Inn Places” that was a guide to hotels and inns that were gay-owned or “gay-friendly,” the latter of which was never to be trusted. There’s a great hotel in Barcelona whose tag line is “hetero-friendly” which actually makes a lot more sense. Yes it matters, but I’ll save that for another post. I’m sure the first time we stayed in Palm Springs we would have found our hotel in Inn Places. I know where it is on Grenfall in the little gay ghetto of resorts in Warm Sands, but it’s probably changed hands and names many times since. Not much to remember about that place except that the elderly gentlemen proprietors were New Yorkers who really did want to know if you would make it to breakfast at the allotted time (I hate that) and it was our first encounter with non-stop in-room porn, which we would later discover is de rigueur in gay Palm Springs “whoretels.” On subsequent trips we stayed either with friends or at the “waterfall place,” a notoriously sleazy place back then and probably still, but these places have “day rates” so staying there isn’t really necessary. Our friend who had a house here also taught us the trick of telling the voice over the intercom at the front gate that you’re a “local” to get in for free, of course there’s a closed circuit camera so I always chose to believe I got buzzed in for other reasons.

 
Now that we’re all grown up we’ve adopted the practice of renting a house. It started in the winter after the bridge incident. Rikk’s sister came out from New York and a friend from LA also joined us on Rose Street in Las Palmas Estates, a tawny neighborhood in the Indian-owned half of Las Palmas known for its Alexander houses from the 1960s. Interestingly Indians weren’t allowed to lease their own lands until Eisenhower signed an act allowing it in 1959. Political patterns like that actually become legible in the fabric of the town, 50% of which is Indian owned, creating in a checkerboard of ownership. Apparently the white man didn’t think it a good idea for Indians to hold too much contiguous land so it was “allotted” every other square mile, and then held in trust for them by the US Government because they really couldn’t be trusted with land. I wonder now who won in this deal. Indians may own half the land but they are conspicuous in their absence, and the resulting real estate pattern illustrates the stark contrast between a collectivist tribal culture and the individualistic white settlers who made the rules. I must look into this more.

 
Winter is warm enough to swim at midday and cool enough at night for a fire, making it the season when all four of what I call the essential elements for a rental house come into play: pool, spa, fireplace and outdoor fire pit. In later years we discovered the magic month of October, the last month of the “off” season, still hot and very quiet but gearing up for the busier cooler months. Rental rates are cheaper in summer and cheaper by the month, so booking a house for all of October is the best value—even if you can’t use every single day—and it’s long enough that you start to feel it’s yours. That’s the make believe part, living for a time in a house we could never afford to own. We’re on our 6th house this year. They’ve each been quite different and in different neighborhoods and that’s half the fun of it, including scoping out next year’s house before we leave each year. The rental agency we use doesn’t show actual addresses on line, but anyone skilled at using Google Earth can find the exact house easily. Pool shape is a good place to start. Amazing that with 50,000 pools in the valley, there never seem to be two alike in a neighborhood. The Tennis Club is by far the quietest neighborhood and the house has the most ideal relationship of house to pool to mountains—a critical formula that when got wrong can truly diminish the Palm Springs experience. As wonderful as most of midcentury houses here are, it is appalling how few were sited with this formula in mind—but then they are only tract houses for the most part—cookie-cutter stamped at various rotations across a development. My criteria are pretty simple: the four essential elements listed above, MIDCENTURY, a view to the mountains from the main living area (rare) and more importantly a view to the mountains from the spa and pool. What you don’t want is to look over your own house or power lines to the mountains, roofs here aren’t pretty and they’re low so you see them and the crap perched up there to keep you comfy inside when it’s 110 degrees. As for power lines, they are typically underground on Indian-owned land and above on non-Indian land—go figure—I’ll try to find out why. This house is the oldest we’ve stayed in (1956) and it has a bit of a grandmotherly feel with actual pink and green tiled bathrooms. The 1947 Kaufman House notwithstanding, this house feels more 40s than 50s. I prefer 60s, and my favorites are late 60s—they tend toward glamour a bit more. What this house lacks in house though is made up for outside, a lush garden complete with waterfall and koi pond. Not something I would design, but nice. In fact landscape design is generally a disappointing afterthought here in a town that is otherwise obsessed with design. In a place where plants are essentially abstract shapes, spheres and lines, too few homeowners are having much fun with their gardens geometrically.

 
Our month-long magic was thwarted this year thanks in part to the new Mid Century Modernism Week weekend event in mid-October (actual Modernism Week is in February). When I was ready to book, every house it seems was already full up, but for just that single weekend, making it impossible to get the entire month and thus the bargain rate at any one house, and pushing us instead into September. Since we think we want to live here full-time someday this turned out to be a good experiment as temperatures have topped 100 every single day and even reached 110 the first week. We’re OK with the heat; however, what we didn’t count on is how much the town shuts down in September. Our favorite restaurants have only just reopened in time for us to dine and dash back to SF, but the dog has got some good use out of those red shoes we got her last year, designed to protect her feet from hot asphalt—and of course we are in the town with more swimming pools per capita than any other.

 
Architect Albert Frey’s famous little glass house with yellow curtains is perched just above our house for 2014 nestled into the rocks, and so we set out this trip to see as many of his buildings as we could. One of those is the old yacht club on the north shore of the Salton Sea, so after waiting for the poisonous gas warnings to settle down we headed down there. At first it didn’t look as desolate as I’d expected, having seen it once as a tween with my uncle from San Diego and remembering abandoned shopping centers whose occupants were rattle snakes. On the contrary the land around the “sea” is lush and green with dates and berries and bare earth plots with sprinklers in top gear, even if the source of irrigation water is dubious, and from a distance the sea itself is as beautifully blue as can be. We made our way to the north shore and easily found Frey’s building as there’s little else there in the third dimension. It gleams with what appears to be a fresh restoration job, by whom and for what is a mystery and it’s an odd unpleasantly nautical form, perhaps more influenced by his place of birth than this place. Brand new asphalt awaits in the parking lot. When the car doors are opened though, it’s those eggs again. One other car is there, a woman and her two small children are playing near brand new picnic tables. We hear her say to the youngest: “do you want to go see the fish?” and she takes her by the hand toward the water. It becomes quickly apparent that the fish she refers to are in fact dead, bobbing around in the lapping brown serf that rings the empty marina. When did they die? Why are there fish here at all, presumably saltwater ones, living or dead? Who is here to care about Frey’s Yacht Club now “community center?” This place is dead, but the pristine restored modernist building on the edge of liquid death did not satisfy my lust for what Detroiters call “ruin porn” so I entered “Salton City” into the car’s nav in hopes of finding more honest decay, the kind I remembered from being 12 with my uncle. 20-something more miles down highway 111 and the glowing map in the dash starts to look like a city, with elaborate symmetrical neighborhood street patterns that could be the Movie Colony or Old Las Palmas, yet a look out the window reveals nothing of the kind. Why are these nonexistent streets in a nonexistent city even mapped at all—and when were they? Is this some kind of weird western optimism that says if we draw it, it will become real, no matter how long it takes or how dead that sea next door is? The default destination when you enter a city into the nav with no further address is the town’s city hall. “Make a U-turn in 500 feet,” she said; which we were able to do because the four lane expressway has lots of places for U-turns even if no other kinds of turns. It seems we had passed our destination. A few minutes later and we are told “you have reached your destination.” What we saw on the screen was the little black and white checkered flag next to a very blue river. What we saw outside the car windows was a dry wash and absolutely nothing but desert with the very blue Salton Sea in the background. Ah but what the midcentury mind could not imagine—and then map.

 

A lot of people come and go around here, gardeners, a pool boy twice a week and even a special company to take care of the Koi pond, so doorbells ringing and strangers popping up in the back garden are never a surprise. It seems the whole town’s economy is based one way or another on the house, its care and feeding. Just now though the bell rang and standing outside was a very different kind of visitor, an FBI agent canvassing the neighborhood about yesterday’s kidnapping. Yesterday morning a plane with “Highway Patrol” in huge letters on the underside of the wings circled directly above our pool for over an hour. Later we caught the story on the local evening news quite by accident, as news is generally something to be avoided on vacation. A girl had been kidnapped the night before, raped, beaten and dumped on the vacant parcel of desert at Ramon and Cahuilla, two blocks from here, where she was found by neighbors in the morning. I didn’t have anything to offer the officer, but I asked if she was OK and he quietly shook his head.  A bitter reminder that this isn’t a movie set oasis or a fantasy escape, but a real town with real people and all the ugliness that goes along. Someday it may be our town.