AJ
ASPHALT
JUNGLE
THE
Arthur St. Antoine
ILLUST
RATION
by
TIM
MARRS16
AUTOMOBILEMAG.COMshow him some of my favorite haunts (er, sorry)
in the Mojave. Earlier in the day, we drove north
from Los Angeles on Highway 395 before cutting
east on 178 at Ridgecrest to check out the first
site on my tour, the Trona Pinnacles, an alien
landscape of towering tufa-rock spires—some
as tall as 140 feet—rising from a dry lake bed.
You’ve seen them in a million car commercials
and such movies as “Planet of the Apes,” “Star
Trek V,” and “Star Wars.” We crawled around the
moonscape in the 4Runner then hiked on foot.
“Any poisonous snakes out here?” Case asked.
“Mojave rattler is the deadliest of ’em all.
Take out a man with a single bite.”
“What does it look like?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll never see it coming.”
Several hours later, after winding down into
Death Valley and then just across the California
border into Nevada, we were eating burgers
at the Sourdough Saloon in Beatty. The walls
of the rustic roadhouse are crowded with car
parts—mostly German—left behind and signed
by the manufacturer teams that come to DV for
hot-weather testing in the 120-degree summers.
We found the MotorTrend license plate I left
here years ago. A couple of old-timers—they
looked like regulars—sat behind tall beers at
the bar, each sucking hard on a cigarette. Santa
Monica boy Case popped a fry into his mouth.
“I almost forgot what smoking looks like.”
After nightfall, leaving the ghosts behind,
we pointed the 4Runner southwest, back into
Death Valley, and soon arrived at yet more“THOSE THINGS ARE really freaking
me out. Especially seeing ’em way out here.” My
friend Case was studying a row of 12 ghosts, their
white, hooded shrouds reflecting the last rays of
twilight as the sun settled into the vastness of
the Mojave Desert. He turned to me. “You told me
we were driving to a ghost town. You didn’t say
we’d actually see any.”
Case and I were standing in front of “The Last
Supper,” an outdoor sculpture created in 1984
by the late Belgian-Polish artist Charles Albert
Szukalski. It’s near the ghost town of Rhyolite,
Nevada, itself a spooky apparition formed by the
cadaverous remains of a gold-rush boomtown where, from roughly 1905
to 1908, as many as 5,000 people lived and worked and even attended
performances at the local opera house.
Szukalski figured his fiberglass revenants—exposed as they are to the
brutal environment here outside the eastern edge of Death Valley—would
survive for two years at most. Instead, almost supernaturally, they’ve endured—
and today form the centerpiece of what’s since become the small Goldwell
Open Air Museum. We poked around a bit, studying the other peculiar statues
rising from the surrounding sand, the wind whistling over the Bullfrog Hills
and rustling the creosote bushes, not another human in sight. Szukalski’s
ghosts had dimmed to shadows, their robelike forms, arms outstretched in
benediction, somehow even more disquieting now, as if living souls might be
shaping those black figures silhouetted against the ink-blue sky. Case tapped
me on the shoulder and made a “let’s go” motion with his thumb. “We stay
out here any longer, and those things are gonna start moanin’.”
Three weeks earlier, Case had become the proud owner of a low-mile
2017 Toyota 4Runner TRD Off-Road, and ever since, he’d been bugging me to“NOT WHAT I EXPECTED
WHEN I SAID, ‘LET’S
GO FOUR-WHEELING.’”
“THIS IS WHERE
MANSON HOLED UP
WITH HIS ‘FAMILY’
AFTER THE TATE AND
LABIANCA MURDERS.”MARVELS, MIRAGES,
AND MANSON
surrealism. Namely, the Furnace Creek Inn.
Right smack in the middle of the frying pan,
near desiccated borax mines, heat-baked alluvial
fans, and the Badwater Basin—at 282 feet below
sea level, the lowest point in North America—
the Inn is what you see in the dictionary when
you look up the word “oasis.” Or maybe “mirage.”
Rising out of the wasteland stands a grand,
warm-lighted edifice of stone and stucco, an 88-
room hotel built in 1927 and lovingly restored,
rated four-diamond by AAA, date palms swaying
in the evening air, a spring-fed pool beckoning