Palm Springs, 12/13/08.  There were palm trees in Palm Springs in 1904 too [USC Digital Archive].

Many years ago my friend John, a DJ who played all the important London dance clubs at the time, took me with him on a visit to his parents in Wales.  They were a tiny couple; I remember the silent father's hands like small paws of blackened meat and the sweet little mum who did all the talking of which I understood not a word except that she enjoyed watching snooker competitions on the telly and was very proud of a commemorative plate depicting Southfork Ranch (of Dallas fame) on the mantle in the little parlor.  

This was the occasion of my first view of a slag heap, an unspeakably enormous mountain that rose up behind the doll-sized cottage and miniature village.  As I recall a school (and the children inside) in a nearby hamlet had recently perished in a slide.  Or a school bus (one of the two; it was a long time ago).  I had a restless night of it, I can tell you.  Waiting for what I imagined would be some slow deep bass rumbling in the bowels of the earth heralding my being trapped and buried alive beneath a black slimy lava flow of coal droppings, which is what I imagined slag to be.  "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" -- the hit single at the time -- played on a continuous loop in my agitated mind as I lay there, sleepless and distinctly unamorous.  I lost touch with John sometime after that visit, (fool that I was, he was a lovely man), and so concludes my brief but memorable "How-Green-Was-My-Valley" adventure.

Still, I am reminded of that Welsh landscape whenever I am in Palm Springs, which has its own vast and overwhelming mountain.  A very near and abrupt horizon, more gravel-like than slag, but the resemblance is striking; it dwarfs everything man has to offer.  And in that respect It is a view that defeats me; I don't know how to photograph it properly.  As a vista it is definitely worthy of note.  Impressive is one word to describe it.  But I don't know how to connect it to the rest, to man's contribution.  I don't know how to give you a sense of the scale of it all.  The town's architecture -- low, mostly mid-century, unassuming -- is wildly out of scale.  The truth is, Palm Springs as a whole defeats me.  Which says more about me than about the place, and I attach no virtue to this confession.  I am simply not a fan of golf, gambling, the heat, air-conditioning or pools, and clothing optional resorts make me nervous.  Besides, everyone always seems so preoccupied and distracted, the way really intense chess players are, focused on their opponent's next move, or in this case, on who's going to be in the hot tub later.  Perhaps as a defensive measure all I can think of to do is slip away and curl up with a good book.  Surely in some respects it is my loss.   

But my visit to this little desert village at the foot of a gargantuan mountain range has gotten me thinking about scenery and views in general, and man's relationship to the land.  One of my father's few observations on domestic architecture had to do with the subject.  The occasion was one of those family outings involving the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Dad at the wheel of the trusty Plymouth station wagon, my mother beside him, five kids loaded in the back.  This was back in the days when "home improvement" involved such ill-advised alterations as knocking down the front porch, slapping up aluminum siding and punching a picture window in the front of an otherwise perfectly respectable Greek Revival farmhouse with the dubious consequence that the owners could then enjoy an uninterrupted expanse of turnpike and local truck stop traffic, or if they were lucky, their neighbor's field, as yet unsold for development.

Dad was no anti-modernist, believe me.  He saw the charm in aluminum siding, especially the never having to paint again part, if my mother had let him get away with it, but she was a staunch Williamsburg restorationist and took a dim view of the fad for modernizing the daylights out of a house.  She and I -- both ardent fans of candle and soap-making as a spectator sport -- were firm believers in suffering for historical accuracy.    

My father's concern, however, had to do with ownership; more specifically, about what your neighbors could do to the property on the other side of the road, which you now faced unavoidably through that big new window of yours.  What about their as yet unrevealed but questionable taste in lawn ornaments, for instance, or their sale of the land for use as a dump or waste treatment plant?  Even the construction of a turnpike interchange could irrevocably alter your outlook on the world. 

"Make sure you own your own view," he admonished us.  

What he meant is fairly obvious, I think.  Yet I believe one can expand on his meaning of ownership, at least when it comes to taking pictures.  I think perhaps I should work on owning the whole frame, not cropping out the parts I don't like.  I need to try incorporating the whole, not just the pretty bits of the mountains with the snow on the tops and the clouds.  I need to include the rest, the parking lot and mobile home park nestled right below, the cinderblock walls, the neon and the foot traffic at night, the long looks in the shadows of the full moon through the palm trees by the pool, and the encouraging nods in the direction of the hot tub.

And pulling back even further, maybe the point is for all of us to try and own that overwhelming mountain of truth out there.  I mean that out-of-scale slag heap of news piled up at the cottage door, making the present moment seem so puny and small.  If I don't look up, I can get so obsessed with my own trivial worries.  I can ignore the big stuff going on entirely. 

Or I can try to admire the view without connecting to it, in the way that, at least before the bubble burst,  "mountain view" was a major selling point of Palm Springs real estate.  Even better with no view of the neighbors and no obstructing power lines or poles. 

But you see, here I am back to that "only connect" connundrum.  How do you do it?  How do you relate to the immensity of that big landscape out there?  What's your connection?  What's your contribution?  How do you own your part in it all?