Soda Springs, once an oasis for indigenous travelers through the Mojave desert, and then for explorers and settlers. Later used as a trading outpost, an army post, a railroad station, and for salt mining. The area was abandoned for a period until, in 1944, radio evangelist and DIY healer Curtis Howe Springer renamed the place Zzyx Springs and set up a health spa and spiritual retreat there.
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| Curtis Howe Springer | |
Importing labour from LA's skid-row, he built a sixty-room hotel, a church, a cross-shaped spa with mineral baths, a radio broadcast studio, a private airstrip dubbed "Zyport" and several other buildings which included a castle. Many of the homeless labourers stayed.
He used the land until 1974, when he was arrested and imprisoned for squatting and probably selling bulk drugs, and the land was reclaimed by the government. Most of the buildings remain in various states of disrepair, and some are used for environmental research by state universities.
LA sucked our lake dry.
Killed the town.
Not really safe, alkali dust.
IV. THE DOG IN THE RIVER
The churl that wants another’s fare
Deserves at least to lose his share.
As through the stream a Dog convey’d
A piece of meat, he spied his shade
In the clear mirror of the flood,
And thinking it was flesh and blood,
Snapp’d to deprive him of the treat:—
But mark the glutton’s self-defeat,
Miss’d both another’s and his own,
Both shade and substance, beef and bone.
PHÆDRUS.
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| Proverbs 11:25, yall | | | | | | | | | | |
I'm taking my son the hell out of Barstow. gonna show the boy the North
Pull the belt across his blessed chest. wipe his sticky fingers after the truck stop
Show him Keeler California up the 395. Where they cling to a dead lake
Take him up that highway between the peaks of the sierra nevada and death valley ridge
Michael Heizer, "Double Negative" (1969).
Northeast of Vegas, outside of Overton, in the Moapa Valley on the Virgin River Mesa. Take Mormon Mesa Road up onto the mesa and to the edge of the mesa. Travel North following the cliff.
You don't really need a four-wheel drive, but you should probably have a spare tyre.
Get a killer sandwich from Inside scoop cafe on Overton's South Main Street.
... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single
Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a
Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers
Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided
point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the
Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless,
and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of
Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that
Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the
Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Jorge Luis Borges, 1946
