WORKING MAN'S HANDS

Wayne from Spencer, IA tells me in his Midwestern drawl, “I sit here in the sun to warm my old bones shelling pecans for something to do. I never took to reading or sittin’ idle, got to keep my hands moving,” He tells me with the soft voice of a man dreaming of yesterday.  “I had a big farm back home, 640 acres, cattle and corn, worked it from the time I left high school back in 1941, now my boy runs the the old homestead and for thanks he put me out to pasture 25 years ago as soon as Uncle Sugar started sending me my rocking chair check, been cracking nuts ever since,”  Flashing a wide grin at me through sun weathered lips.

We’ve moved from the Parking lot of the AVI Fort Mojave casino, where roaring generators, barking dogs and the neighbor’s nighttime snoring snorts are apt to bring you from a deep sleep.  Now it's absolute tranquility where dancing dust devils and a hushed quiet of the desert demands little but a look within one‘s own soul.

  5 miles to Stepladder Mountain and Chemehueui Wash

We're five miles west of California Highway 95, south of Needles by 25 miles into the Stepladder Wilderness camping next to a dry wash called Chemehueui..   Like a column of soldiers, a solitary line of Palo Verde trees stretches dozens of miles along the banks of the wash calling us to come visit.  The trees give a stark reminder that without water life is not sustainable and look somehow out of place here in the dry creosote-bush landscape.  A false hope of water for the thirsty traveler.  Only when it rains, and rains hard, will water deluge down the wash, rolling rocks with it’s muddy torrent and changing the landscape by inches but will be greatly altered and shifted in another million years.  The heavy, land-altering rains fall  maybe once a year leaving behind a sustaining drink for the Palo Verde and returning back to dust in a day or two.

                               Teddy bear cholla cactus