Joshua dreams.

April 3, Twentynine Palms Marine Base, California.

Back in California, where I used to live.
I worked as a photojournalist with The Press-Enterprise, a newspaper based in Riverside, an hour east of Los Angeles. Or Homicide Riverside, as my friend and fellow Press-Enteprise photojournalist Carrie calls it. The area is called the Inland Empire, a rather bombastic name as they go. Riverside county and San Bernardino county, its neighbor, share the sad distinction of being the most polluted region of the country. All the smog from the Los Angeles area gets pushed by ocean-born winds plus its own sitting above it like a dirty camisole, blocked there by the San Bernardino mountains to the east. it is also a congested, expensive stretch of parched land, where no matter where you go the buzz of the freeway is always present, a faithful and appropriate companion to the smog.
I was glad to leave, the I-10 East my highway to freedom and an uncertain future that I didn't know then would include a new life. I didn't think I would ever come back. I went as far away as I could, back home on the other side of the Atlantic, and on this side of it as far east as I could, in Savannah. Then I joined the circus.
It is parked at the Marine base in Twentynine Palms today (the exact name is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center.) The base was surprisingly easy to enter, all you needed was the little piece of paper they had given us at the office before leaving that said "Circus Chimera vehicle." Homeland security. I can only hope there is better surveillance of vehicles moving inside the base. Then again I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't.
I knew Twentynine Palms for having covered the drowning of two women and a child in a flash-flood incident there, among other things, when I photographed for the paper. Not exactly a happy memory; taking pictures of people that have just gone through horrendous personal events has always been my least favorite part of being a photojournalist. The town is a sad-looking place at the door of one of the most beautiful natural areas in this country, the Joshua Tree National Park. In my two and a half years in Southern California I managed not to go there even once, and now it looks like I'm going to have to skip the opportunity again. Growing up in France Joshua Tree was an utterly exotic and fabled place you'd want to go see for yourself once. I know it was also one of my brother Patrick's favorite places to dream of, that and the Mojave Desert that we skirted last night on our way here from Arizona. I thought of him as I was driving on the deserted highway in its shroud of obscurity, miles and miles of empty lonely road. He had wanted to come to Joshua Tree, had loved the desert without ever knowing it. He died at 29. It was in 1993 and I miss him every day.
Today he's with me in the California desert, in the sand and the wind and the Joshua trees.

Photo 1
The evening redness in the West (or hommage to Cormac McCarthy.)

Photo 2
Salty pond behind the circus.