Tag Archives: oddities

photography, rambles

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

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Walking around town when I get breaks between meetings I’ve dragged along one of two cameras. One is a trusty roll film camera that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embarrassment of a digital camera, the first digital camera I bought John when digital cameras were just coming out. I haven’t gone shopping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capacity as a My Little Pony digital camera today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impressive than 1.3 megapixels. And on top of the low resolution it eats batteries like crazy. Seriously I thought it had died and gone to digital camera purgatory until I dropped into the gift shop downstairs and fed the camera five bucks in batteries. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real digital camera.

Since most of the pictures I took were with the film camera I’ll have to forgo the immediate gratification and wait to see the pictures until I get them developed. But here’s one of the random digital shots of a structure located just above the downtown tourist district. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubtful that it was ever attached to any operation like a mill. In fact, it’s apparently a bit of a mystery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mystery who built it. Apparently carbon dating of the mortar dates it to various dates, some as late as the late seventeenth century, some to the early 1400s.

Old Mill Tower

Call me a skeptic, but just like people who claim their hotel is haunted, what mystery there might be well could be overblown and might have nothing to do with reality, though it’d certianly be good for business. There are a lots of web pages where it’s discussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The Newport Tower: a Medieval Ruin in America; the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on UnexplainedEarth. If any of those pages have any authority, Wikipedia points to the Redwood Library’s pages, and I might go with that evaluation: The library is located just across the street.

places, rambles

the mojave phonebooth: part 1, weird at first sight

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I first ran across what later came to be known as the Mojave Phone Booth in January of 1993 or 4. I’d been camping that weekend in what was soon to become Mojave National Preserve, and one day was exploring some of the features on the north end of the park-to-be. There the park butts up against I-15 and the thriving tourist waystation of Baker, California, touted on signs throughout town as “Gateway to Death Valley.” Baker is home to what’s claimed as the “world’s largest thermometer,” 134 feet tall–a foot for every degree that made up the hottest temperature ever recorded at Badwater in Death Valley. Baker is also known for the Mad Greek Restaurant, a busy and basically okay eatery that serves up Greek -Mexican-American cuisine in portions that you might expect in a town that owes its success if not existence to travelers heading for that shining shrine of excess, Las Vegas, which at one point in my life was my all-time least favorite swath of soulless human desolation on earth. But enough Vegas-bashing and back to the Preserve…

The most dramatic features on the land are a chain of multicolored volcanic cinder cones. I think of them as single-use volcanoes: Unlike their big brothers that build to some size over long eras, cinder cones mark a short period of eruptions that builds them to a few hundred feet high. And then the eruptions stop, the route to the magma below closes up, and when the ground’s finally ready to erupt again, a new crack opens up, away from the first cinder cone, creating another, separate cone.

Here at the Mojave Preserve there are piles of them–some of them pristine in their perfect pyramidal geometry, others reshaped by mining operations–and they guard the western edge of Cima Dome. Just a few miles south of the world’s largest thermometer, Cima Dome hosts the world’s densest population of joshua trees, and that’s what you notice first. But the feature is called a dome and not a forest, and as remarkable as the j-trees are, growing denser and green as you get farther out on the dome, it’s the geology and not biology that makes this place so amazing.

On a topo map you can easily make out the uniform concentric rings of the dome as it rises over 1500 feet from the lower points around it. In real life it’s a lot more subtle. You look at the ground as it rises, gradually, perfectly, and you get a torqued sensation that something is happening, but you’re not quite sure what. You stare and it looks like you see the curvature of the earth, though instead of flying high over it, you’re standing right on it. Space seems to distort as what you expect to be flat bulges up. Queasiness sets in. Welcome to Cima Dome.

Cima Dome topo


The place has this amazing power and force that the touted 1960s and 1970s earthworks can’t begin to approach. In terms of spatial power, as interesting as they are, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s various constructions, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater can’t hold a candle to it. Sorry guys!

So there I was, jeeping through the j-trees and the spatial queasiness, when I encounter a fence, a cattle guard, a power line and a powerline road crossing the jeep track. And next to the road, next to one of the power poles is a phone booth. A phone booth? A dozen miles from anything? A freaking phone booth? But out in the desert you see a lot of…unusual…things. And I stuck the phone booth as another entry in my brain’s cataloging of desert sights and sightings. Little did I know what I’d just seen.

[ go to part 2, i told you it was weird ]

my garden, plant profiles, rambles

the kindness of strangers

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I love big, splashy plants as much as the next person, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a special attachment to that’s neither big nor splashy.

Green rose

The green rose, Rosa chinensis viridiflora, lives up to its name. When the “flowers” open, what’s inside the protective sepals is certainly green. But there are no rose petals in sight. The blossom just keeps on opening, revealing more and more sepals, all of them green in color, sometimes tinged with a reddish cinnamon color. Inside a typical rose, once the sepals unfurl and the petals open, you finally get to the pistils and stamens, the reproductive parts that enable sexual reproduction and perpetuation of the species. But this plant lacks them too, just like it lacks petals. If this plant were to turn up in nature, it’d go extinct once the single plant passed on.

Its history is a little fuzzy, though it was for sure introduced to the rose-growing world in 1856 by Bembridge and Harrison in England. In The history of the rose by Roy E. Shepperd, the author notes that the plant has been in cultivation since 1743, which for a plant with no hopes of reproduction by seeds is quite a feat. Through the years, people have found something about this plant interesting enough to start cuttings or make grafts onto rootstock or wholesale dig up the plant and take it along with them when they move.

I was a rose geek in my early teen years, growing and exhibiting roses around the Los Angeles area. At one point I had something over a hundred roses, including this one. I moved down to San Diego, and by the later 1980s finally had a house with room for plants. My parents were moving out of the homestead, and for some reason I felt the need to rescue this one rose from an uncertain future. Of all the roses, I dug up this one and moved only this one. Reading through some of the posts on this rose at davesgarden.com–including someone who moved her great grandmother’s plant–I’m not the only with an attachment to it.

And somehow, through the kindness of strangers smitten with this wonderfully weird plant, the green rose has stayed in cultivation for something like 264 years.