Dumpster Fires

Barret Baumgart
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Every writer dreams of a room of their own. Even better, a room with a view… dumpsterfires.substack.com

  1. 12/18/2025

    Argumentum Ad Baculum

    Have you ever heard of the BACULUM? It’s the perfect holiday gift! It’s all natural, affordable, and sure to spark fun family conversation about the FALL of MAN. It’s also dredges up a bit of abysmal trivia I’ve dropped to no avail in a few unpublished essays over the years—trivia which I share now in video form for your morose delectation. As I continue to empty my pockets of choice research nuggets in the form of failed viral content in the hope of increasing my Instagram following to the extent an agent or publisher might imagine me an entity with an organic following potentially deserving of a lucrative book contract, I hope you will share my s****y content and send any hungry gatekeepers you are acquainted with my way. She always kept a dish of vinegar out to keep the fruit flies off the apples. But that day the ramekin lay empty and overturned. The letter had been lying there a long time. The pages, brittle and yellow, were curled up at the edges and had drained the sentences into dry wordless pools of blue punctuated by the bodies of little dead bugs. “You tend to over privilege the role of language in human experience,” she said once. Yet it was she who told me that day that Eve was created from Adam’s baculum. For her it was a kind of game. She never read the news, just played the crossword puzzles. I don’t know where she read the article, probably it was some kind of joke at the back of a science journal. Supposedly, though, in the Old Testament, the word for rib, tzela, could refer to a hillside, the walls of a temple or wooden planks of doors and walls. It also referred to the trunks of trees. “Biblical Hebrew had no term for dick,” she said. “How would they have referred to you?” May you think fondly of our redeemer in the coming days. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    3 min

  2. 12/02/2025

    From Worthlessness to Wealth

    Back in 2018 when Christina ruined my life by telling me she would kill me (by castration) if I wrote about the 1959 nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—the largest nuclear meltdown in US history—I lied to her and told her that I would not actually make my new book about the nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. I told her it would be a book about Los Angeles. It would only pass through the Simi Hills and the meltdown site. The focus would be LA history. My devious little plan was to buy a bunch of books to back up the appearance of this claim and then quickly figure out once and for all just how Los Angeles ever grew so grotesquely gigantic, how it was that it ever swelled all the way out from the feet of humble El Aliso, stretching far and wide, all the way out to the desert and north across the San Fernando Valey, each new tacky tract leapfrogging the last, the sad stucco perimeters of Los Angeles expanding like some kind of monstrous plasm replicating itself every few years, cellular division by subdivision, growth after superfluous growth crusting outward forever into the hills and mountains and valleys in pursuit of more space, more peace and safety until, well… the metastasis landed eventually at the gates of the radioactive Santa Susana Field Laboratory. My plan was to read a bunch of books, not just the one that everyone reads, City of Quartz. I wanted to find out definitively how the city grew. How was it that they started building those faux-Tuscan McMansions in the shadow of America’s largest nuclear meltdown? My plan was to answer that question, and then under cover of dozens of LA history books, go on writing that book about that nuclear meltdown, which needed that question addressed, of course. But I wouldn’t get bogged down in ancient history. No. I was going to go on Oprah, land a full page spread in People, write the first book about the meltdown, sell it off, make a million dollars, go on tour with Erin Brockovich and the lady from Eat, Pray, Love. It was going to be perfect. The plan, however, did not pan out. I read way too many books—an evasion, it seems now looking back, a way of avoiding and not dealing with the psychotic prohibition that launched that crazed reading spree in the first place. And all this confused bibliomania, which left me sprawled all over Southern California, my mind stretched out like the metropolis itself, it made it increasingly difficult to find my way back to Woolsey Canyon Road and the secretive Boeing Facility hiding above the San Fernando Valley that was my whole reason for remaining in Los Angeles after the summer of 2017. One benign offshoot of the meltdown of my relationship and the disaster of the Santa Susana book project, however, has been that I know a s**t ton of Los Angeles history. Rather than saving the above bit about George Chaffey for the six to seven readers that might eventually make it to page 432 of my forthcoming book about the meltdown that has no publisher and is not finished (shoot me a message if you know a good lit agent; I need an agent…) I figured it might be better if I started putting some of my more delectable research nuggets together in pithy little informational packages that might attract more social media followers (agents and publishers want to see your numbers!). The above is extracted not from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz but another equally brilliant but lesser read beast, Material Dreams by Kevin Starr. Consider gifting your cousin this Christmas not City of Quartz but some other Los Angeles classic like Material Dreams, or better, Southern California: An Island on the Land, or The Fragmented Metropolis or, your best option, Barret Baumgart’s absurd and slender opus, YUCK. Speaking of which, I’ll be in conversation with my friend Josh Jackson, author of the important new book The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands at The Last Bookstore in Studio City on December 17th. Our conversation with journalist Dana Covit will raise money for the Mojave Desert Land Trust and beer will be provided by Angel City Brewery. Hope to see you there! Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    3 min

  3. 10/27/2025

    The "Infernal" "Grotesque" "Demoniacal" Joshua Tree

    Did you know that Joshua Tree National Park was founded on Halloween Day, 1994? It’s almost as if federal government had some inkling of the vast hate once heaped upon the lowly, humble, “demoniacal” Joshua Tree. The strange saga of Joshua Tree antipathy was largely forgotten until, well, I dug it up and turned it into a new book—YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. For Halloween, I thought I’d toss out a couple of the more merciless and inspired attacks I came across in my research. These choice bits all come from the astonishing and largely overlooked California Desert Trails, written by Joseph Smeaton Chase in 1919. “It is a weird menacing object more like some conception of Poe’s or Doré’s than any work of wholesome Mother Nature. One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant… A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal.” “Wild-looking shrubs leaned out overhead and stared down at us with startled air. Strangest of these were the so-called Joshua trees… Nothing in the vegetable world is more unprepossessing than this scarecrow, all knees and elbows, with handfuls and mouthfuls of daggers for leaves.” “My friendly trees ceased at once at the foot of the canyon, leaving only the Joshuas, which always seem to have been arrested in the midst of some uncouth antics, brandishing daggers like a juggler.” Please, will somebody be a Joshua Tree for Halloween already? Like the Sphinx, there is no answer to its riddle. It is in the fascination of the unknowable, in the challenge of some old unbroken secret, that the charm of the desert consists. And the charm is undying, for the secret is: Secrecy.” —Joseph Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails, 1919 For more on the mysterious forgotten master of American nature writing, JS Chase, see my previous post, “Cosmic Bard of the California Badlands.” In other news, you can catch myself and writer, photographer, and adventurer Josh Jackson—founder of the Forgotten Lands Project and author of the important and powerful new book, The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands—live in conversation in Los Angeles at the Last Bookstore on ✦ Wednesday, December 17th ✦ We’ll be speaking with journalist Dana Covit about forgotten lands, forgotten histories, and the importance of preserving both. And if you haven’t checked out YUCK yet, published last spring by Wandering Aengus Press, you can get a feel for it in the above Halloween-themed video. You can also purchase it in paperback or audio here. For now, be very afraid… Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    2 min

  4. 09/27/2025

    The Most Sexually Frustrated Cat on Earth

    For years I’ve wanted to say something about P-22, formerly the world’s most famous mountain lion (RIP-22). And, well, I finally got around to it—albeit in the form of a deranged 3 minute Instagram Reel, created largely in the hopes of improving my numbers on social media so that I might eventually attract a literary agent to sell my next book, an agent search now being a regrettable necessity as I foolishly fired my previous representation some years ago after he proved unable to seize the moment, i.e. that week Kim Kardashian started Tweeting about her discovery of the nuclear meltdown site hiding behind her mansion in Hidden Hills, a site whose radioactive fallout the Woolsey Fire was then in the process, possibly, of seeding all across Southern California. Anyways, Santa Susana is safe now for people and mountain lions—if you would believe the glossy brochures produced by the Boeing Corporation. Of course, P-22 is hardly hidden history. I’m not sharing anything new. And yet, as my Reel makes clear, and perhaps the below paragraph… I’m constantly astonished how few people—even Angelenos—know the improbable true story of the Mad King of Griffith Park. One of my favorite experiences bartending at Angel City Brewery has always been educating people about mountain lion habitat in Southern California… “Give me a P-22, people will say.” “P-22?” “Yeah,” they’ll say, “the mountain lion one.” I’ll pour it and come back, a twinkle in my eye, voice a soft purr. “Do you know who P-22 is?” They’ll say, “Uh. Who? It’s like some kind of hop,” they declare, an educated guess. And say, “No, bro. It’s not a hop. P-22 is the world’s most famous mountain lion. He lives alone on an island.” And when they look at me like I’m crazy, I’ll say: “He’s the most sexually frustrated cat on earth.” And when they’re starting to look afraid, I’ll say: “He lives alone on an island at the center of Los Angeles, and he’s never had sex.” And when they’re trying to rapidly complete the transaction and move away as quickly as possible, I say: “He crossed like six freeways. Most mountain lions get obliterated by a semi-truck trying to cross like one. But he’s tough. He crossed like six. All to eventually maroon himself friendless and sexless at the center of Los Angeles. Most thought he’d move on in search of a mate, but instead he stayed.” “An island?” they’ll say. “Yes,” I say, “Griffith Park, a figurative island surrounded by the wasteland of like 50 freeways, the largest urban-wilderness preserve in the United States at 4,300 acres.” Most people, even if they’re from LA, still haven’t heard of P-22. “Is this, like, a myth?” they’ll say, and I say, “No, bro. It’s P-22. P stands for puma. He’s numbered and has a radio collar. There’s some scientist somewhere who can look on a computer and see where he’s chilling all the time. But he just stays on his island at the center of Los Angeles, not bothering anybody, never seeking a mate, just feasting on mule deer, jack rabbits, and recently, a chihuahua until...” P-22 passed away near the end of his natural life cycle in 2022. Angel City Brewery began brewing the beer in honor of the boy in the Fall of 2018. October 25, 2025, is P-22 Day in Los Angeles. To learn about events and help protect SoCal cougars go to SAVELACOUGARS.ORG. Hiking in Griffith Park just isn’t the same anymore… Dumpster Fires is beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    3 min

  5. 08/14/2025

    The LA Times Stole my Viral Reporting

    On Monday, it came to my attention that one of the most prominent journalists in Southern California, Gustavo Arellano, lifted the contents of the viral Reel I shared with you and thousands of other people last week. My El Aliso Instagram Reel, viewed 23,000 times, with a total watch time of 127 hours, 526 shares, 193 saves, and 59 comments, “broke” the story (earth-shaking news, I know!) that the historic plaque for this sacred, little-known, long-dead tree was missing. Beyond that, in a brief and pithy little package, it unpacked some serious virtually unknown history that stunned and delighted thousands of viewers with its combination of humor, heaviness, and meaningful informational content. On Monday, I was shocked to see dozens of messages coming at me from friends and strangers alerting me to the fact that the LA Times, and its star ‘reporter’ Gustavo Arellano, had traveled to the exact same site and reproduced the same shots as my Reel in their own wildly popular video posted to Instagram, YouTube, and the LA Times website. Their video even drew attention to the strip club behind the plaque’s location, as I did at the start of my video (to humorous effect), and of course pointed out the tragic, unacceptable fact that the one forlorn, miniscule memento this once sacred tree has been allowed (the plaque) is now gone. Stolen. #stolen Gustavo Arellano denies knowing of the existence of my Reel. He told me when I reached out to him that he had no idea of its existence. He said he had arrived at the location by the same means I did, “reporting.” He also said, “I always cite sources.” The LA Times has been expanding their reach and staying afloat through an increasing pivot to social media content creation under new billionaire ownership. It’s hard not to see Gustavo’s posting on the El Aliso just six days later, after my Reel had been seen tens of thousands of times, as mere coincidence. This was an opportunity for some great content to bolster the Lard King of The Los Angeles Times. #coincidence Of course, I don’t own the topic. It’s public knowledge. In some ways I’m flattered by this flagrant and obvious copy of my quality original content. This could have turned into a great opportunity. Gustavo could have credited me in the first place, complimented the quality of my video, the writing that went into it, the time it took to produce, cut together, etc. He also could have done none of that. When approached, he could have said, “Man, what a coincidence!” He could have continued that line for some time, whether true or not. “What are the odds! Wow! I can’t believe! I’m so sorry! I had no idea! That’s so cool! You’re Reel is really great, man! Jeez. Again, what are the odds!?” He could have acknowledged the extremely unlikely concurrence of our arrival at the same place to produce the same content—with him stumbling up a mere six days later. I would have accepted this, and bought him a beer, and we could have become friends. Perhaps this is still possible. But his defensive tone and utter dismissal of my concerns felt immediately disingenuous, and I’m now persuaded it demonstrates a genuine lack of integrity. I have spoken to dozens of people on this matter, and as the unrelenting onslaught of critical comments posted on Instagram beneath his and the LA Times’s Reel shows, nobody is buying his “reporting” line. The fact that the LA Times lifted and repackaged my work becomes even more preposterous when I ponder the fact that the publication has utterly ignored every pitch I’ve ever sent them, offered not one response, not a single sentence to the numerous requests for op-eds and articles I’ve sent, to say nothing of having ever reviewed or looked at my books which offer, possibly, serious and sustained value to our understanding of Los Angeles, Southern California, and the landscape and history of the West. But sure, go ahead and allow one of your biggest reporters—one of the most visible media figures in Southern California—to lift the first piece of social media content I create that reaches a broad, general audience. Thanks a lot! This is all pretty small potatoes, but it’s left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I used to enjoy hearing Gustavo’s voice on the radio around SoCal. I’ve always appreciated his reporting and writing and sense of humor. But in this instance he has flopped, and people have taken notice. Further, his trite take on the tree in the second half of his LA Times video represents a watered down, feel-good Disneyification of history that is very nearly offensive. His breezy, upbeat suggestion that El Aliso constitutes some universal symbol of resistance for all the oppressed of Los Angeles whitewashes that actual, grim reality at the root of this tree—a history of literal slavery in Los Angeles. To claim that El Aliso was a place of gathering for Spanish, Mexicans, and Native Americans is inaccurate and it cheapens and glosses over the history and is potentially insulting to the Native American community for whom this tree was literally the center of a world, a world that the Spanish, then Mexico, and later rapacious white landowners literally raped, enslaved, and erased. Such a claim, however, does fit his Gustavo’s blasé brand. But it does not fit the history. And if there is anything I’ve learned this week, reviewing the history of the past few days, is that I should not be surprised if the LA Times refuses to publish me but happily steals from me. But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s all coincidence! But I don’t believe so. If I am wrong, however, I will happily apologize and retract and buy Gustavo two beers! If you want you can read a bit of the note I sent to the LA Times below, which speaks to the unlikelihood of the coincidence angle, the easiest thing for Gustavo to have countered with. No doubt books are built out of other books. The world is an interconnected web of reference. We all steal and repurpose. But don’t steal from the little guy at Dumpster Fires. My two books rest upon a massive foundation of journalism and history, which I credit (at times in the end notes to excess). The LA Times should have credited my reporting—or at the very least waited more than 6 days, at which point my Reel would have burnt itself out and no one would have noticed their flagrant rip-off. * See the comments below the Gustavo/LA Times’s Reel if you want to wade into the muck and fun. * See the comments below the Reel I created in response to the LA Times plagiarism. The exchange with user sexington is illuminating. Below is an excerpt of the letter I sent to the LA Times. Coincidentally, this was the first time I ever heard back from them. “Thank you, Mr. Baumgart, for this detailed message which I'm forwarding to Gustavo and editor. I appreciate your thoughtful outreach.” Of course, the timing could just be coincidence. However, this seems unlikely as the site in question, the subject of the Reel (El Aliso), is not widely known at all. To illustrate, on Instagram and across social media and the blogosphere there are virtually no Reels or popular posts of any substance on the subject of the El Aliso tree (it remains totally hidden history, overlooked). Over Instagram’s ~15 year existence there seems to be one Reel that was made three years ago, and it is very generic, superficial info that does not approach the informative deep dive that my Reel attempts. Given the lack of general information, public knowledge, and total absence of anything viral, creative, entertaining, etc. on social media regarding this El Aliso tree...I'm left with the impression that Gustavo and the LA Times simply saw a very well-crafted, entertaining, informative viral Reel produced by a small, largely unknown writer/creator (Myself) and then proceeded to travel to the exact same location, reproduce the same shots, lift the topic of tree entirely, and report its pertinent information as though it were their own, particularly the fact of the stolen historical plaque. Is there anything that can be done about this? Is there anything you can do? Reach out to the LA Times HERE and let them know you are concerned about the quality and integrity of their reporting. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    2 min

  6. 08/05/2025

    El Aliso Tree

    Happy #NationalWhiteWineDay #winelover #winetasting Actually that was yesterday. For years I’ve wanted to create some “content” about this insane spot in downtown LA, a couple blocks a from where I work. And, well, I finally got my s**t together and did it. Watch the video and weep. The below is a brief written excerpt from a chunk of my next book, which is about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s 1959 nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles, an event which basically no one has ever heard of and that has perhaps killed thousands. A chunk of this book follows the Los Angeles River and marinates in the beauty and misery that once existed alongside the famous El Aliso sycamore tree. In the book, I imagine my favorite painter, Ralph Albert Blakelock, camped at the base of the tree in the 1860s and sketching the LA River and El Aliso in his journal, sketches he later translated into one of his famous, haunting nocturnes (all of this, of course, before he went insane, was put in an asylum, and started painted American money while his family lived in poverty and his paintings fetched record-breaking sums at auctions, none of which he saw a dollar of; cheerful story). I’ll eventually post this long section featuring Blakelock and the El Aliso tree. It connects to the crazy Terminal Island post I made a year ago. Over the years I’ve tried to determine if more vines were planted or people buried in 1853, the year LA supposedly suffered more murders than any other municipality in the country. It’s hard to say for certain. What we do know is that most who visited Los at the time left either calling the place the City of Demons or the City of Vines. Not surprisingly, the city’s two competing faces actually constituted two sides of the same coin. Few understood the fact better than the Gabrielino Indians. As it turns out, progressive California’s very first law, passed by the new state congress on April 19, 1850, happened to be a perverse bit of legislation known as "The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. The law ensured the protection of Native Americans by denying them the right to vote or testify in court, and it allowed for their immediate arrest should “any reasonable citizen” discover or suspect them of being unemployed or drunk. Horace Bell, an influential lawyer and publisher for whom Bell Creek is named—a small stream among the red rocks of the Santa Susana Mountains that constitutes the ultimate headwater of the Los Angeles River—recalled the city of Los Angeles’s steadfast and ingenious application of California’s inaugural law in an 1881 memoir: “By four o’clock on Sunday afternoon Los Angeles Street from Commercial to Nigger Alley, Aliso Street from Los Angeles to Alameda, and Nigger Alley, would be crowded with a mass of drunken Indians yelling and fighting. Men and women, boys and girls, tooth and toenail, sometimes, and frequently with knives, but always in a manner that would strike the beholder with awe and horror. About sundown the pompous marshal, with his Indian special deputies, who had been kept in jail all day to keep them sober, would drive and drag the herd to a big corral in the rear of Downey Block, where they would sleep away their intoxication, and in the morning they would be exposed for sale, as slaves for the week. Los Angeles has a slave mart as well as New Orleans and Constantinople, only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which generally did not exceed one, two, or three years under the new dispensation. They would be sold for a week, and bought up by the vineyard men and others at prices ranging from one to three dollars, one-third of which was to be paid to the peon at the end of the week, which debt, due for well performed labor, would invariably be paid in ‘aguardiente,’”—a cheap distilled wine of 50% alcohol whose name meant ‘firewater,’ ardent being the Catalan word for flame—“and the Indian would be made happy until the following Monday morning, having passed through another Saturday night and Sunday’s saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality. Those thousands of honest useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way. Vineyards were of great profit in those days, and would be today, if we could recall the times as they were before the conquering Saxon came with his boasted perfection of laws, and his much-vaunted ‘advance civilization.’” Thus the city of Los Angeles, employing a system of exploitation truly befitting a City of Demons, protected Native Americans from “leading an immoral or profligate course of life”—as Section 20 of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians stipulated—and as a cheerful spin-off of such legally sanctioned darkness, a sunny agricultural Eden began to take root at the bottom corner of the continent. Naturally, the city took for its first official seal not a grinning man with horns but a cluster of ripe grapes. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    3 min

  7. 05/07/2025

    Full Metal Book Jacket - Documentary Footage

    “Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.” —W.G. Sebald Weird is an older, stranger word than most realize. It derives from the ancient root wert, “to twist or to wind.” When we ask, “How did you wind up here?” or when we say, “I lost my keys, but then they turned up,” we get a hint of what WEIRD used to mean. Originally weird meant something like fate. Weird was “that which comes…” Whatever arrives unbidden, carrying some kind of import or meaning, as if somehow sent, directed, dispatched from somewhere beyond is… weird. Or so I claim at the start of the above mini-doc produced by Nick Lacy that captures the magic and misery of my book release party at Angel City Brewery last month. Between this brewery presentation, and a few other speaking engagements and podcasts, I seem to have irrevocably committed my art and soul to word weird. But if you’ve been following me or read any of my series “The Heights of Weird,” you might not be surprised. Many thanks to Nick Lacy for producing the above short film, Brandon Lien & Brandon Tran for shooting and editing, and Anton Lieberman for loaning the Joshua Tree video art which you can see on loop at Autry Museum of the West in Los Angeles. Thank you as well to Jessica Jelley and Angel City Brewery, and Christina Catania at Burro Social Co. After this release party, YUCK has had a pretty fun run: * YUCK has been featured on local radio in Joshua Tree at Z107.7 FM. * For the past month YUCK has hovered at or just below #1 Best Seller slot in Amazon’s “Desert Ecosystems” (Amazon’s most competitive category). * I was honored to be featured on Chris Clarke’s phenomenal desert conservation podcast 90 Miles From Needles. * I read and did an interview with Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. * I read and did a Q&A Hi Desert Times Magazines in Twentynine Palms. * More interviews/content on my Instagram, too much to list. * Find YUCK at all the cool stops: The Station in Joshua Tree, Mojave Flea in Yucca Valley, Hi Desert Times in Twentynine Palms, and in Los Angeles at Skylight Books, The Last Bookstore and Book Soup. * Two more podcast appearances booked in the next week and several requests in the works. * Readings being planned in San Diego and West Hollywood. A presentation of YUCK is also scheduled in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz on June 26th. Thank you to everyone who has bought and read the book and/or listened to the Audiobook. If you’ve enjoyed YUCK, please leave a review on Amazon right now!!! Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe

    36 min

  8. 11/14/2024

    In a Future Far, Far Beyond the Festival

    At the start of November I returned to the Mojave Desert to attend Ridgecrest’s 10th annual Petroglyph Festival. I’d been following the event for a decade, ever since I became obsessed with the petroglyphs on the China Lake naval base while writing my first book, but something felt different this year. At first I couldn’t figure it out. Outside the main gates I met the same protestors, members of the local Kawaiisu Nation, who continue to oppose the festival and the permanent petroglyph reproductions displayed throughout the city. Inside, beyond the quiet picket line, there were the same paid Native Americans who had traveled from New York, North Carolina and elsewhere out of state to don feathers, pound drums, and offer up prayers to a Christian God. I bought a corn dog, skipped the kettle corn, admired the dreamcatchers galore and cedar incense and saw the same howling wolf hoodie made in Bangladesh I bought way back in 2010 at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. A wild donkey rescue called Breakfast Burrito kept Christina engaged as I wandered on, circling the arena where a hoop dancer, Eric Hernandez, who’d driven up the night before from Los Angeles, like us, put on an impressive, athletic performance for families and children perched on bright haybales. And none of it, the same as always, had anything to do with the petroglyphs, the ancients who created them, nor the local tribes who revere the Coso Range as the hallowed ground of all creation. A little after noon, in a large tent that functioned as a green room, Bob Blackwell, a representative of the Kawaiisu, approached Eric as he sat breathing through an inhaler, winded from another masterful hoop performance. Bob handed him a flyer. “I didn’t know anything about this,” Eric said, referring to the Kawaiisu’s ongoing condemnation of the festival, which the Kawaiisu have not been invited to join. “It would be like back east if the city hosted a pow-wow and did not invite the Lumbee.” A Ridgecrest city official then entered and told Blackwell he was trespassing. He was invited to leave, and I was informed I’d be receiving emails from the city attesting to the fact that Kawaiisu had been invited to attend the festival. Those emails, however—I suspect much like the actual invitation—have yet to be sent. A Petroglyph Festival that invited the culture of the Kawaiisu would not help fill city hotels. A festival that invited the history of local tribes would not be good for business. Their lodgings would take longer to erect than the Costco pop-up tents. Their clothes would look less colorful before the cameras. And the prayers, not offered in English, might fall on deaf ears. Rather than the PA-amplified tales about Coyote and Rabbit, the history of the locals would have to include the horrors of being hunted, mass slaughter, forced removal, slavery, disinheritance and—finally now, at last—their sacred symbols, the petroglyphs, being sold off as crappy kitsch for bored tourists. Or perhaps not. In all fairness, there was one element absent from the festival this year. And it was this omission that took me a moment to notice. Petroglyphs. There were no petroglyphs displayed throughout the actual festival grounds. Not that I saw. On the one hand it is a profound victory for the local tribes who object to the exploitation of their culture and religion for monetary gain. On the other, the defeat of the festival, so complete it can no longer display its namesake images, lent an eerie atmosphere to the day’s proceedings, especially after the wind picked up. The artwork was both there and not there. Palpable, a possibility scintillating at the periphery, but everywhere absent, omitted. Named but refrained. It felt off, ghostly even, like the glyphs that line the long lava hallway of Renegade Canyon, climbing higher and higher along the walls in layers of tortured palimpsest until the artwork and eons end abruptly at the cliff edge and your eyes empty out the swarms of bighorns into the blinking pale salts of the dead lakebed miles below. The artwork of the Coso Range could be a UNESCO World Heritage site, revered alongside other awesome and even lesser ancient achievements scattered across the globe. But it is not. Few have ever even heard of the place. This despite the best efforts of the town of Ridgecrest. And of course, behind it all, sequestered in the research silos scattered underground throughout the desert highlands, like a sidewinder coiled in the shadows, the US Navy—current owner of the petroglyphs—remains silent, its slick tongue sniffing the air, always sniffing, but never saying a word. What do the images mean? Who created them? Who do the petroglyphs belong to? To where have they vanished? The answer today is the Navy. The Navy owns 300 miles of petroglyphs carved throughout the canyons of the Cosos that no one can access at present—not even the local tribes. It is the Navy who, through negation, decides what the images mean. The Navy that carefully hoards them in the name of National Security. The Navy says who can see them. The Navy that forces the tiny tagalong town beside the base to suck whatever magic it can from the distant walls of desert varnish, cramming it into the increasingly sad package of a ‘Petroglyph Festival’ that no longer contains any petroglyphs. A lousy country fair is all the festival will ever be so long as the city can only mime the mystery in the distance, reproduce the petroglyphs in parking lots, and pay Cherokees to point vaguely toward the distance, their elders and chiefs not even knowing which mountain range contains the riches few eyes will ever see. Why doesn’t the base help out their little city? Why won’t they assist? Why, as President David Laughing Horse Robinson of the Kawaiisu Nation told me, why are the tribes unable to access the petroglyphs in recent years? What changed? Have the petroglyphs in fact disappeared, vanished far beyond the counters, craft tables, and credit card machines of the festival grounds, into some interdimensional rift opened up by some disastrous new weapon the Navy’s testing? The base says they take the business of preservation seriously. I believe them. My guess is that that they need the petroglyphs. For a long time, they’ve required them for something. I’ve come to believe after more than a decade orbiting the base that it’s not a coincidence that the US military owns this supreme source of ancient supernatural power. US National Security doctrine rests upon an unchallenged ability to visit egregious harm on one’s enemies. It does not rest upon an expanding awareness of our shared human destiny and common heritage on this fragile paradise of a planet. If the local tribes, the out of towners, and the city officials all want to come together to fight one another at a festival outside Death Valley each year, why would DoD give a s**t? Such scuffles keep the focus on the foreground. The one thing they don’t want is for you to turn around and train your gaze on the vast and implacable base. The one thing you’re not supposed to do—whether you’re the town of Ridgecrest, the Kawaiisu Nation, or a nonfiction writer living in Los Angeles—is to perk up and peer past the dumpsters and strip malls, out beyond highways and power lines to the volcanic headland looming over the dry lakebed. Indeed, the tens of thousands of signs pinned around the base’s perimeter tell you just that: Look Away, Go Away. WARNING. NO TRESPASSING. Is it treasonous, a breach of faith, a futile confession of naivete to look to that larger background and ask, seriously, who really owns the petroglyphs—and why—and what does that ownership really mean? Would America be less safe if China Lake surrendered a small corner of the base? Would the fleet forfeit dominance if some precious scrap of land slipped out of their 1.2-million-acre hands? Haven’t they held onto all those canyons long enough? Is there not one they might slough off some year, like a snake shedding its skin, as the battlefield shapeshifts into further unfathomable cyber bits? Isn’t over 80 years on lockdown long enough? If for some reason the in-house techno shamans and wizards of defense must keep those hunting scenes in their war cabinet a little longer, at least let them set a time limit. Conflicting interest groups across the region should recognize the sidewinder in the room. A broader vision for the Coso Range and its petroglyphs and hot springs might see the sacred lands of the Cosos returned to those Native Americans to whom they once belonged and for whom they remain the most sacred site on earth. Such lands, once transferred, might be organized not into a National Park but a Tribal Park administered by and for the benefit of the indigenous peoples of the region. Or not. It would be up to them to decide their destiny. Such a path forward may appear impossible, it may take decades, it may be insane, but I believe it’s time to peek beyond the puny festival and the inviolable prerogatives of the Navy and ask why—why couldn’t, and why shouldn’t, such a future exist? And who knows… maybe, down the road, the hotels are full. * Listen to clips from my interview with David Laughing Horse Robinson in the video above or click here. * To learn more about the Kawaiisu Nation, their history, and their protest of the festival, visit their website. * To learn about how I ever became involved in any of this—the story is weird—you can read my ongoing series, “The Heights of Weird.” * If anyone from the city would like to broaden this reporting, they can email me at barretbaumgart/gmail or they can again create a new Substack account under a random name and have ChatGPT crank more sophist tripe about behavior rooted in White Saviorism that upholds colonial power structures. * Read my original Petroglyph Festival essay here.

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About

Every writer dreams of a room of their own. Even better, a room with a view… dumpsterfires.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Barret Baumgart
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Barret Baumgart
  • Show Website
    Dumpster Fires