Men in the Dunes

Men in the Dunes 1 Susan Zakin We’re the bad people who are ruining the earth.” I smile. He smiles. He looks like Sam Peckinpah, road-worn and grizzled. His friend is younger, a Brad Pitt look-alike stalled out somewhere east of Hollywood. The Southern California desert always reminds me of Charlie Manson, and I am alone with two unshaven stragglers from the annual orgy of off-road vehicle recreation in the Algodones Dunes, one hundred miles southeast of Palm Springs. Dunes, these dunes, any dunes, have a look of eternity about them. They mark time, moving in the wind, yet their spareness evokes timelessness . Dust to dust, one recalls, seeing the way sand dunes reach for—yet never quite—touch the horizon. In our time the Algodones Dunes have been notable for this simultaneous evocation of the eternal and the immediate. Perhaps it’s the proximity to Los Angeles that makes the elevated and the profane rub up against each other in such a casual, postmodern way: the campy sci-fi movie StarGate was filmed here, using the dunes as a backdrop for Egypt in 8,000 BC, when a malevolent alien took over the body of a young boy who might easily have been mistaken for Isaac Mizrahi’s assistant during Fashion Week. (“Give my regards to King Tut, asshole !” was one of the film’s more memorable lines.) Well, this is America. Eternity is a mass-market enterprise. Offroad vehicle enthusiasts flock to the dunes on winter weekends and holidays. One Thanksgiving weekend saw a veritable pupu platter of violent crime among off-roaders: one murder, two stabbings, two fatal accidents, and in the words of a New York Times reporter “innumerable brawls.” I have driven out here on the advice of an environmental lawyer who told me that this lookout point is a good place to see the damage done by off-road vehicles: this is the line between the protected wilderness and the degraded landscape, pristine and debauched nature. But Ecotone: reimagining place 2 I’m not concentrating on the view. I’m wondering if I’m going to be raped and killed. “What do you guys do for a living?” I ask heartily. “We’re safecrackers,” says Sam Peckinpah. The younger man nods solemnly. The older man hands me a business card. He explains that he—Dave Beck—and the younger man, whose name is Kidd, David Kidd, reclaim safes that have been abandoned. The card is reassuring, although I’m not entirely convinced. I comfort myself by thinking that if they are safecrackers, at least they’re professional enough to have a business card. “Have a seat,” the older Dave offers. I hesitate and again the thought occurs that I’m about eighty miles from anyone who might hear me if I scream. I wonder why I was less nervous interviewing a suspected murderer when I was a reporter just out of college. I guess it’s the isolation of this promontory, the undulating desert. The silence. “Thanks,” I say, plopping myself in a plastic lawn chair. “So what’s the appeal?” I ask, pointing at the all-terrain vehicles parked near the RV. I never saw any socially redeeming value to all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs—and if there is hedonistic value, it’s lost on me. They’re loud, they stink, and they’re kind of stupid-looking. But, hey, maybe I’m missing something. The guys tell me about the high-end stuff, how expensive the whole scene can get. A loaded ATV can cost sixty thousand dollars. It’s the desert white-trash equivalent of a Donzi, the Miami Vice–ish speedboat, and this is a sea made of fractured bits of land. The men tell me that other parts of California have become more restrictive, so they’ve come out here, the last frontier. The desert and the ocean are refuges for people who don’t like authority. I count myself in that group, and, in a peculiar way, I feel sympathetic to these guys. Whose side are you on? I ask myself, not for the first time. Temperamentally, I sometimes find myself more comfortable with...