SALVATION
CANYON
SALVATION
CANYON
A True Story
of Desert Survival in Joshua Tree
Ed Rosenthal
Salvation Canyon: A True Story of Desert Survival in Joshua Tree
© Ed Rosenthal 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover photograph: Don Graham - inkknife_2000, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (color enhanced), taken on March 18, 2017. Interior cover map: National Park Service, Black Rock Canyon Station, September 30, 2010, courtesy Ed Rosenthal.
Cover design: Carrie Paterson
Book design: Jonathan Yamakami
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosenthal, Ed, 1946-, author.
Title: Salvation canyon : a true story of desert survival in Joshua Tree / by Ed Rosenthal.
Description: Los Angeles, CA: DoppelHouse Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN: 2020936494 | ISBN: 9781733957977 (pbk.) | 9781733957960 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH Rosenthal, Ed, 1946-. | Joshua Tree National Park (Calif.) | Mojave Desert. | Desert survival--California. | Wilderness survival--California. | Wilderness survival--Biography. | Adventure and adventurers--United States--Biography. | Outdoor life. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Survival | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Adventurers & Explorers | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish
Classification: LCC GV200.5 .R66 2020 | DDC 613.6/9/092--dc23
Contents
I.
II.
III. Day two Saturday, September 25
V. Day three Sunday September 26
VII. Day four Monday, September 27
VIII. Day five Tuesday, September 28
IX.
X. Day seven Thursday, September 30
PREFACE
TEN YEARS AGO, I survived a baffling near-death experience in the Mojave Desert. To help communicate this astounding event, I researched classics of the survival genre. The first of these was Steven Callahan’s masterpiece Adrift, which describes his unplanned crossing of the Atlantic on a lifeboat. Afterwards, I dove into scores of memoirs. But it’s Callahan’s journey and these few simple words from his preface that mean the most to me:
I am less an individual than part of a continuum, joined to all things and driven by them more than I am in control of my own path.
Unlike Callahan, a world-class sailor and adventurer, I was a real estate broker who took solitary hikes in the desert when I closed a big deal.
Let’s face it. When Mr. Rosenthal was lost in the desert, the temperature was 115 degrees in the shade. People die in two hours in heat like that…
Sheriff Jeff Joling San Bernadino County, California
I.
THREE MEN HELD a massive desk just outside my office. I stepped aside as they hoisted it through the doorway, carried it to the corner, and placed its plain oak top just under the window ledge.
“Thank you.” I held the front edge and leaned over the top of the five-by-eight-foot gift from my client.
The lead man gasped, “Okay,” and I gave them each ten bucks. The last man pulled the yawning door closed. It was a bear of a desk — and it had been a bear of a deal to close. Don Clinton had sent his father’s desk to thank me.
I pulled open the flat middle drawer and found a crinkled ad from 1932 for a meal at Clifton’s Cafeteria. “Two eggs, bacon, and toast for $.05 cents, coffee included.” I pulled the tarnished handle of the top drawer on the left and found an old wooden contraption with a weight and a balance for measuring, and under this, a pamphlet with a drawing of a clock and bold print across the picture that read, “The clock strikes twelve.”
I’d been heading out the door and was already late, so I shoved the pamphlet in my pocket and headed out for the press conference through the marble hallway whose mahogany moldings pointed the way to the elevator. The long corridor was strung with lamps from the 1920s, opaque deco glass in sinuous black metal frames. At the polished brass elevators, I pushed the call button.
In the lobby hung a globe etched with a deco goddess lit from within by a glowing yellow bulb. Through the etched-glass entry doors onto the street, it was a short jaunt to the corner of Fifth and Spring Streets where The Preacher stood, a black man with a bible in his right hand who held forth below the historic cornices and large glass windows. I crossed Spring Street to the Rowan Building and saw, as I did each time, the shadow of the first landlord I dealt with here in Downtown Los Angeles. The vision of him, a bedraggled man in a black raincoat, screamed, “I’m going to kill that mother fucker!”
Walking these streets, my mind was haunted by memories of people I had dealt with. But the upper levels of the street were inhabited by mythological dreams. The bas relief carved into the granite base of the Stock Exchange Building reflected my own weariness with business. Crafted eighty years earlier by radical immigrant stonemasons, the huge central panel shows a goddess of enterprise with her arms draped around Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. At the old Alexandria Hotel, floral moldings and hour-glass balustrades decorate the roof. Classical statues stand out from the corners of the grand old hotel as the ghost of the old hotel owner barks, “I don’t need any fuckin’ broker to tell me what my place is worth.”
Crossing Fifth Street, I was disturbed by ghosts of County policy. A decade ago, councilwoman Jan Perry pleaded with deaf Supervisors for homeless facilities. From south and north, now the sidewalks were lined with people opening and closing their bedrolls. A scene that extended deep into the Toy District.
I stepped over a sleeping woman wrapped in a dirty blanket sprawled across the sidewalk. A