In the Mojave Desert, thunderclaps are rare, lightning strikes even less, and hard rain is an episodic event that creates gully-washing floods. On the ground, you find dry lakebeds coated with salt dust, grand vistas of hard packed sands covered with creosote plantations, black lava domes, and purple cinder cones that crunch under your feet. Sand dunes around the dry lakebeds launch dust devils into the blue atmosphere, and in higher altitudes, snow sometimes falls and the world’s largest Joshua tree forests grow. The Preserve’s vast geographic diversity required me to segregate my work into specific visual areas, such as the eight square miles of the Ivanpah Mountain Range, the first work in a long-term multi series project entitled Back to Loneliness. It is Gobi dry here, the landscape formed by razor-back ridgelines, shear rock walls, edgy Teutonia granite formations, pointy cactus flora, and the world’s largest Joshua tree forest. The hand of man is still visible in the abandoned and crumbling miner’s shacks and their corroding gear. I spent 112 days in the stillness of the Ivanpah Range. Head chatter disappeared; I was absorbing, working the light, and discovering what perception must have been before there was so much of it.

Frictionsmooth is the second of the Back to Loneliness series where light unites different geologic forms into an uneasy syncopation. In these images, I explore Soda Lake and the Cinder Cones National Natural Landmark, two geologic opposites that are within 15 miles of each other. Soda Lake is the quintessential dry lakebed. It has flooded in modern times and it does support surface moisture during winter rains. Looking south to north one sees a vanishing horizon line that disappears into sunburned twilights. An hour after sundown, the sky flushes orange with faded sunlight. The hard pack clay reflects the light and the fissured surface begins to glow, the color, a luminous magenta. Skies swell off the distant horizon line, sometimes calm, sometimes full of thunderous clouds that tease us with the idea that rain may come (and on occasion, actually does). In the Cinder Cones National Natural Landmark, rain is more frequent. This is a volcanic landscape with a violent past pock marked by dozens of vents, lava flows, and more than 30 cinder cones. I found myself drawn to the mass of heaving domes, some round, some thumb shaped, while others have pointy peaks that resemble chessboard pieces. Orographic lifting forces low cloud decks into threatening thunderheads that remind us of the steam and energy that once arose from these active volcanoes. I logged 40 visits to this area creating images to interpret the grit, the colorless, the colorful, and the miracle of a pastel sunset as it smoothes the deep shadows between cones and desert washes.

After the surgery, the chemotherapy started, and with it dreams too; imprecise, repetitious, vague dreams of a rootless quality. Not during the intravenous drip, for I was awake on the chemo couch then, reading sometimes, fatigue-sketching at others, but during the weariness of afternoon naps or night sleep. Darkness revealed the dreams; figments of soldiers falling, childhood moments, a second grade teacher, face and voice fresh and clear, then a Ferris wheel of time spinning high, then low again, all of it as if waging a slight battle with the ordained condition of the old earth itself. Each vivid chemo driven hallucination seemed to enter the room, more as a medium, vigorous and ruthless, and then it was gone; the finishing feet, out the concluding window of a foggy mind. When I awoke, I was not quite able to knit the far ends between sleep and wakefulness. Time and subject merged into imperceptible corners of stolen rides to reach reality. It was then that I quickly wrote shaky descriptions about each dream, and some I sketched, planning ways that I could reproduce them as photographs in time. The photographic project slipped for a while, then picked up in fits and starts. I worked from the notes and sketches, recalling each dream without embellishment. Often I sat at the computer, my face bent, still, vacant eyes searching into the electronic mirror of past images. Outside spring came and into the dim digital world, fainting gusts filled the room with clear air. In time, images sorted themselves into the dream pieces, sometimes timidly and a little hunched, perhaps beaten as I coaxed them into a visual message. Many came from the northern California drought photography, the last project before cancer surgery. Others came from pixels of the mind in an attempt to decipher ethereal dreams, and still others from knowing, not grieving, remembrances. Chemotherapy is a process that beats the dog to kill the fleas. It, as well as many cancer treatments, has saved or extended countless lives, and though a debilitating tool while in use, chemo is a powerful, and often effective, therapy. During the process, patients dream and pivot uneasily between hope and defeatism. Many have lost the battle, but increasingly many of us have returned— to be so close— to clamber back and restart. I am one of those, thanks to prayer, care, medical science, and medical art. The dreams have ceased, but now and then a few appear in your monitor light or reflect from a print substrate. Some are a fevered blur, others brittle and piercing, a few simple and straight, and all are dedicated to those who worked on my behalf, prayed for my health, and to those who have fallen to cancer.

Rock-A-Hoola: End of a Dream There may be some kind of cowboy wisdom that drives our penchant for abandonment; something that says if your horse is dead, well then − you might as well get off and ride another. But I think abandonment occurs when we fail to balance our imagination with realistic calculation. Turn too far in one direction and your head fills with woolly fantasies. Lean off on another course and you spend your life color-coding your day planner. In either case, the dream fails because expectations never arrived and it is then that the owner quits. Left behind is the industrial undercarriage of what was and perhaps what might have been. So it was with the Rock-A-Hoola Water Park. I arrived on scene in time to capture this dream in its final death dance. Stripped from their cradles were the famous water slides, leaving behind Pagoda-like shapes that march over a man-made hill. Windblown desert brush filled the wading pools, boarded up art-deco buildings invite the artist to decide on color or monochrome approaches, and in this detritus of a business quit, I found patterns of fabric, tiles, pipes, lattice-skirted billboards, cloud decks, towers, and tanks. My goal was not to document each of the remaining elements, or to provide a visual tour or time line. It was to explore a dream lost, a place abandoned. Rock-a-Hoola is 135 miles north of Los Angeles on I-15. In the late 1950s, John Robert Byers and his wife Dolores decided to add a synthetic lake to their campground property in Newberry Springs, a desert community near Barstow, CA. The campground became a popular destination when the Byers added slides, swings, zip lines and a trapeze; attractions that some considered water park thrill rides. Late night TV advertising in LA resulted in the park's most successful years— the late '60s to the mid '80s. Eventually, the popularity of the park waned and it closed for the first time in the late '80s. In 1990, Terry Christensen and two financial partners bought Lake Dolores. Christensen had a vision for an upscale 1950’s-themed water park and his LLC invested 3 million dollars into the concept. With help from local businesses and civic leader Spike Lynch, who was instrumental in the design, construction, and day-to-day management of the park—Terry Christensen's vision came to fruition. Boasting a catchy new theme, new water rides, and the world's longest "Lazy River" -- "Rock-A-Hoola" Waterpark (the park's name is from the 1961 Elvis Presley song in the Blue Hawaii film) officially opened on July 4, 1998 to the sound of 50's/ 60's-era Rock and Roll music. Christiansen was the neo-cortex of Rock-a-Hoola, but the financial commitments from Christensen’s partners were fantasy. The lack of funding and declining public interest in water parks forced the park into bankruptcy after three seasons and Christiansen died in 2009. After 50 years of on and off operation, Rock-a-Hoola quit— the dream, the business irrevocably abandoned.