Magic

Having secured some essentials in Palm Springs (to be precise; a hat to protect me from the sun, a spare pair of sleeping pants to protect me from nudity, and a retro spaceship-shaped cocktail shaker to protect me from sobriety), we drove the forty miles or so to Joshua Tree, the sleepy little hick town that serves as a launch pad for tourists to access the Joshua Tree National Park.

Even if you’ve never been to the town of Joshua Tree, you’ve seen it before. If you’ve ever watched a movie in which patronising urban protagonists smugly head out into the desert and end up being hunted and murdered by inbred rednecks, it was either shot in Joshua Tree or somewhere nearby. It’s the sort of place with coyote skulls hanging over doors, dead pickup trucks rusting on blocks in front yards, almost dead pickup trucks shedding rust as they rattle down the streets, and retro modernist signage from the 1960s that isn’t employed ironically… it’s just still there because no one could be bothered taking it down after the business closed decades ago.

In fact, all you need to know to get an accurate picture of Joshua Tree is that it has a manicure salon called ‘Sassy Nails’. You just know it’s owned by a dusty bottle-blonde chain smoker named Sholene who knows every speck of gossip in the entire county.

After checking into a hotel distinctly more down-at-heel than the glamorous one in Palm Springs, we headed into the national park.

Joshua Tree National Park is about a lot more than the distinctive eponymous tree. The tree itself has a stark and alien beauty, but it’s just the centre of a vast, evocative environment of mountains, boulder fields and cacti. Photos only capture a hint of the landscape’s grandeur, with aircraft carrier-sized boulders jutting out of the desert floor, split and tumbled and weathered by the eons of wind and rain.

We visited Barker Dam, an area where local ranchers trapped precious water in the years before the site became a national park. After that, we drove along to Hidden Valley, a mile-wide natural amphitheatre of fallen stone – a classical concert there would be absolutely magical.

Then finally we drove up to Key’s View, a lookout on top of one of the western mountains from which one could see Palm Springs, the San Andreas fault, and glimpses of the Mojave desert.

In the evening we adjourned to a bar that the manager at the hotel had recommended called The Tiny Pony. It was a dive bar, but judging by the flair of the menu and the number of forthright women in the place, I gleaned that it was probably an ironic hipster lesbian dive bar, so we were probably safe from being murdered by rednecks. Of course there was always a chance we could be murdered by hipster lesbians, but they can generally be won over with a verse or two from Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’.

I ordered a fried chicken burger and the Big-Ass Gin and Tonic (no snark - that’s what it actually said on the menu). When it arrived, I realised I had found my hipster lesbian brethren.