My ever-outgoing father asked him, “Aren’t you Emmett Kelly?”
“I am.” The clown leaned on his broom and took us all in. His eyes sparkled from a face coated in makeup.
My father and Mr. Kelly shook hands like old friends. In a way, they were. Dad had known of Emmett Kelly Sr.’s circus acts in the thirties. He’d even seen Mr. Kelly’s character Weary Willie play for laughs at a time when they were as rare as hundred dollar bills. An existential clown, or tramp clown like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Mr. Kelly Sr. had worked hard or hardly worked, did his best against entire armies, found beauty in fragile garden flowers. He often got the girl, even dressed in an arguably unattractive way: white lips to accentuate a frown, ashen whiskers, clothing that might’ve been fished out of a dumpster. And pushing a broom? Just part of the king-of-the-road lifestyle.
The clown in the alley, I learned later, was Emmett Kelly Jr., the son of the original. Either one would have been as big a celebrity as I’d ever met. At that moment, though, Mr. Kelly Jr. seemed like a regular guy. He’d been acting the janitor, and I knew at least one other like him—the custodian at my school—a man in the realm of the real. Mr. Kelly Jr. was in costume, but not in character. He turned a genuine spotlight of attention upon us for the few minutes we spoke. He wasn’t responsible for this fake-o town. He only worked here.
He warned us kids to “stay away from places like this.” He handed out postcards, signed with a fountain pen, according to my younger brother, who remembers everything.
When I reported to my third-grade class about My Spring Break in the Desert, I mentioned the ethereal beauty of the Grand Canyon. The painted movie sets in Old Tucson. The horses we’d ridden up a dry wash in Wickenburg—a rural landscape that felt to me like wilderness. I wowed my peers with talk of a mountain lion I’d seen, even though it lived behind glass at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. No one questioned any of these fantastical events until I mentioned Las Vegas and meeting a famous clown.
“Emmett Kelly was sweeping an alley?” my teacher asked. She didn’t say anything more, but her reproachful look spoke plenty.
I held up a postcard, evidence that I’d seen him. I didn’t have the words, though, to convey that he’d been working with the care of someone whose job it was to clean up after a show. At the moment of our meeting, he was no more part of an act than my family. Among artificial lights in a growing faux oasis, fed by elaborate waterworks irrigating a stopover in the desert where the ecotone was being turned to toast, Mr. Kelly Jr. was the real deal. He knew his craft by heart, learned from his father before him. He played his role alongside that old shapeshifter water, which poured through fountains and canals and sprinklers and spas to nourish the Las Vegas sleight of hand: let me separate you from your purse. He, however, was authentic to the core—as real as the river harnessed to liven the adult playground. As real as Mike’s father, the World War II pilot who is buried there.
I could tell. I was still a kid. I’d have known a phony when I saw one.
3.
SEVENTEEN PALMS
JIM DICE PHONES AS SOON AS HE GETS MY EMAIL. HIS VOICE is urgent. He’s just read my proposal to study the connection between palm oases and declining groundwater near the town of Borrego Springs, where he lives. “Palms grow in spring-fed canyons,” he says, “mostly along fractures and faults, where they’re still getting good water.” He thinks I might not see immediate visual evidence of a falling water table on the palms in his area. Jim knows his business, so I take note. He was a ranger and resource manager in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park; now he’s the first reserve manager of UC Irvine’s Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center. He talks to visiting biologists, geologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists, some of whom come to the community for research and never leave. He’s explored most of the region. His laidback style disguises a fierce intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of the desert.
Mid-conversation, Jim pauses to consider. “But some mesquite groves have died off from lack of water. And Seventeen Palms, one of the oases, did dry up.”
Seventeen Palms: rather than a narrow-canyon refuge, with tumbling falls and riparian plants like willows and sedges, it’s an exposed stand of palms in a wide arroyo near the park’s badlands. A longtime docent at the state park visitor center tells me it’s his favorite grove. “It’s not hidden up hard-to-climb canyons like most palm groves around here. It’s standing right out in the middle of nowhere. You just come around the corner, and there it is.” His description rings a bell in my memory. On Christmas Eve in 2003, I traveled to Seventeen Palms with eleven relatives ranging in age from four to eighty. We drove three cars into Arroyo Salado on a soft, dirt road. Crumbling alluvial bluffs stood on either side of us, blocking vistas and providing the singular isolation that comes with dropping below the horizon. The arroyo is only safely negotiated in four-wheel-drive vehicles, and still it’s a fishtailing, potentially high-centering experience. We dodged all the dangers, going at a conservative pace, reaching a packed-down parking area around noon. From there we hiked a short distance over the bald canyon floor with our lunch in coolers and grocery sacks. On a sandy slope safely away from the palms’ network of roots, we set up a picnic.
Like the Oasis of Mara, Seventeen Palms has no central pool of standing water or ring of supporting desert plants. It’s simply a few clusters of palms in a wide canyon aligned northwest-southeast and aimed at the corrugated Santa Rosa Mountains. A jumble of fallen fronds hides a spring, invisible but for a wooden sign warning, Not for Cooking or Drinking. Camping is prohibited to protect the water source for nighttime visits by wildlife. A makeshift “post office” consists of handwritten notes stuffed into a tin can tucked among the trees. Plastic bottles standing nearby hold only a swallow or two of water.
Visitors from older times who’d left notes in this same post office claim to have found the spring drinkable. A century ago, the US Geological Survey deemed the water potable even though best taken only in an emergency. In 1909, geologist W. C. Mendenhall wrote, “When the spring is kept open, the water is fairly good, but it becomes bitter and bad from disuse. The soil is impregnated with alkaline and salts.” Hence the canyon’s name Arroyo Salado, or “salty gulch.”
Nonetheless, native people may have known the spring and used it. The region around Seventeen Palms drew cross-country foot traffic of prehistoric people, Cahuilla who lived north of the oasis and Kumeyaay who lived south. Archaeologists say the most intensive times of indigenous occupation near present-day Anza-Borrego Desert State Park were about 1,100 years ago and then again 800 years later (310 to 360 years before today). Numerous trails throughout the Colorado Desert still show the routes along which wide-ranging, food-gathering forays and extensive trade networking occurred. Paths wind into the hills and then down to the desert floor, where people were drawn during inclement seasons.
Similarly, my family finished our Christmas Eve lunch in the protection of a sandy wash, at Seventeen Palms oasis. My brothers entertained us with a skit they’d learned at Boy Scout camp (one of the more innocent acts, they claimed). My older brother walked on all fours portraying a mule while my younger brother, playing the animal’s prospector-owner, snapped a fallen palm frond over its head. “Patience, jackass, patience,” the cruel owner said, more times than I can remember.
They circled outside the clusters of trees, the “mule” begging for water over and over while his owner denied him. This scenario repeated for many minutes until my eighty-year-old father asked when something was going to happen. To which my brothers answered in unison, “Patience, jackass, patience,” amusing everyone, especially the teenagers.
THE FIRST THING TO KNOW ABOUT SEVENTEEN PALMS—OR about many groves of California fan palms, for that matter—is that it does not contain the exact number of trees in its name. As in the Oasis of Mara outside Twentynine Palms,