Photo Essay: Seeing the Forest from the Cars

I've experienced a few forests in my time—alpine forests, a bristlecone forest, a red forest, a cloud forest, and even a forest of bottle trees.



But a couple of weeks ago, I headed out to the Nevada ghost town of Goldfield to visit my first car forest.



There are only three in the U.S. that I know of, and this one is a lot closer than Carhenge in Nebraska (and bigger—in fact, it's the largest).



I wasn't sure what to expect—other than junked cars planted vertically in the ground—but what I found was a serene desert scape of outsider art.



And while some of the cars may have been already vandalized when they became part of the International Car Forest of the Last Church...



...their placement in this roadside sculpture garden has attracted a number of spray-painters and arsonists...



...transforming the site into a kind of art car graveyard rather than just an artfully arranged boneyard.



Are their placements arbitrary? It doesn't appear that way.



Rather, it seems more like a Stonehenge for desert rats, bandits, and other ne'er do wells...



...but you have to know how to read the formations.



Is it celestial, per se? Well, it's otherworldly.



It most certainly would confuse the aliens.



And I'm sure it changes depending on the angle of the sun, the fullness of the moon, and the amount of precipitation that falls at this high elevation, especially in the winter.



The wind—that inescapable wind of the Nevada high desert—does not, however, shatter their windshields or blow off their doors.



They do not topple.



And each car provides a window through which to see the rest of the cars—or, as it were, the entire forest, rather than just one "tree" at a time.



The 40 or so cars have populated this forest at least since 2011, with the idea having first begun to germinate as far back as 2002, though it feels far more ancient than that.



And it would be difficult to just stumble upon it, as it's set off the U.S. 95 enough to evade the most passing glance.



But it's open all day and night, which means I could rumble along its dirt tracks in my rented Nissan Rogue at 7 a.m. and still have enough time to fill the rest of the day with other adventures.



But this one, at the International Car Forest, quite literally stands out.



And while there is no onsite caretaker nor any services, there are also no rules.



If you're an artist, you can use the vertical vehicles as your canvas and your subject.



Not that the desert isn't inspiring enough on its own.



But sometimes those vast, dry expanses could use a little contextual framework.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: A Day-Glo Desert Detour
Photo Essay: Saving Sculptures from the Scrapyard
Is It Art, Or Is It the Desert?

A Tête-à-Tête With a Cockatoo Named Peanut

This is Peanut. I don't know for sure whether Peanut is a boy or a girl, but I think he's a boy.

The dark eyes and a smaller size gave him away.

Besides, female birds sometimes don't like female humans. And this bird most definitely took a liking to me.



When I first spotted Peanut at the Free Flight bird sanctuary in Del Mar, just around the corner from the San Diego County Fairgrounds, he was showing off.

Surrounded by a couple of young girls also visiting the sanctuary, he was taking snacks and bobbing his dead, doing that little dance that Western humans love to see exotic birds do.

He was a showman, for sure, but part of that isn't his particular personality but rather interwoven into his genetic code. As most parrots are pretty good mimics (hence, speech), the Moluccan cockatoo is particularly good.

So, if you bounce, he'll bounce.

And he's got quite the vocabulary, too, which of course also draws a crowd. While the macaws, conures, Amazons, and parakeets chirped and squawked in utterances that sounded more like "Leave me alone" than "come hither," Peanut was asking, "How are you?"

He was even asking visitors to stay when they tried to walk away.

Now, upon entry, the staff tells you that you're free to try to pet and even hold the birds, just keep the caressing to their heads and only let them perch on forearms and not shoulders or heads. And sure, it was allowed by the facility, but mostly it wasn't permitted by the individual birds. In fact, most of them gave the very distinct impression that they were not in the mood.

So I'd already struck out with nearly everybody by the time I'd gotten to Peanut. To my relief, there was at least one bird that seemed interested in hanging out.

After all, some birds (and other animals) will tolerate a little affection, but they won't necessarily like it. And I didn't feel like being tolerated. I wanted to give some love to a bird that wanted to be loved.



And Peanut turned out to be that bird.

Shortly after starting to pet the crest of feathers on the top of his head, careful to not irritate the quills still stuck in his skin after some serious plucking had occurred (and for God-knows-how long), he started to lean into me a bit, allowing me to stroke across his eyes as he blissfully closed them.

He reminded me of my cat.

And then he bent over, but not for the reason I initially thought. He wasn't trying to pluck a hard-to-reach spot in a fit of trichotillomania.

He was bowing to me to give me the back of his neck and, ultimately, the entire underside of his feathered head.

Imagine the long, salmon-colored feathers of a parrot flipped over and my fingers gingerly squeezing in between them, massaging his scalp in small circles as he cooed. Others tried to come over and pet the bird, but the bird was having none of that.

Peanut wanted me, and he showed me how he wanted me to love him, no matter how odd or unexpected it seemed.

He never left his perch to climb up on my arm. He never snapped his beak at me, though he gave me soft little love bites, leaving just enough space for his tongue to reach out and dab my arm. When a neighboring bird left a gash in my arm, Peanut inspected the wound thoroughly.

Peanut isn't the most beautiful of birds at Free Flight, mostly because so many of his feathers are missing and most people find the exposed, gray skin of a parrot somewhat unsettling. But he was charming and loving and willing to be loved, despite his anxieties and compulsions that ultimately push more people away than draw them in.

It was hard to say goodbye to him as he shivered in the cool, Pacific breeze, ruffling his wing feathers and holding his body close for warmth.

But someone else had taken a liking to him and was feeding him carrots. He was shaking (perhaps from nerves and not the cold), and he was showing off again.

And I left with only a whisper and a wave.

Related Posts:
Meet Simon, The Red Fox of the Radioactive Red Forest
A Chance Encounter, This Side of the Rainbow Bridge

Photo Essay: Clown Motel, Gateway to the Haunted Miners' Cemetery

For nearly three decades, the Clown Motel has been scaring the bejeezus out of weary travelers along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a.k.a. US-6.



At least, those with coulrophobia—a fear of clowns.



I feel rather indifferent to clowns, having grown up with my mother's obsession with Emmett Kelly, surrounded by the Pierrots and Mira Fujita harlequins that were so popular in the 1980s, and falling asleep to the dulcet tones of "Send in the Clowns" on WEZG-FM.
 


And I particularly like the iconography of circuses and carnivals, so how scary could a clown be?



And how creepy could a clown-themed motel be?



I found the whole experience quite friendly.



Though, in retrospect, maybe some of those clowns weren't just clowning around.



Maybe they were trying to scare me.



But if I could survive being trapped with hundreds if not thousands of Ronald McDonalds in the unofficial McDonald's museum in San Bernardino...



...I would be just fine for a few minutes, alone with shelves full of clown dolls and figurines.



To me, the Clown Motel is just another example of a collection taken to the extreme—like the Bunny Museum or the Banana Museum.



Only—you can spend the night surrounded by these hoarded collectibles.



I chose to limit my visit to the daytime, making sleeping arrangements elsewhere down the road.



Too often, my imagination runs wild.



I see too much life in inanimate objects.



Those clowns might seem safely perched on the shelf during the day...



...but who knows what they'll do while I dream?



Who knows what they'll do in jest?



But my suspicion doesn't stem from these figures being clowns, posing as clowns, or identifying as clowns.




I'd feel the same if there were that many collected chickens being held captive in the lobby of a Cheep Motel. Or miniaturized kings and queens at a Crown Motel.



The owners say that all the clowns at the Clown Motel are happy clowns...



...but that's not necessarily true.



It's not even open for interpretation.



And some of those clowns have seen better days.



Besides, aren't all clowns sad on the inside?



If that's what scares people about clowns, then I get it.



How can you trust a clown who's crying inside but tries so hard to outwardly cheer other people up?



Of course, the creepiest thing about the Clown Motel might not be the clowns at all—but rather, the neighboring cemetery.



Contrary to what you might've heard, it's not "abandoned."



Just nobody gets buried there anymore.



After all, it was Tonopah's first such cemetery...



...when the town was known more for its silver mines than as a truck stop midway between Vegas and Reno.



Back at the turn of the last century, people in mining towns like Tonopah died in all sorts of horrible ways...



...whether from illness (including the "Tonopah Plague" of 1902), old age, or murder...



...or from accidents like runaway ore carts, mine fire, and faulty hoisting devices.



Whether they came from Finland, British Columbia, or New York, for them, Tonopah was the end of the line. Most of them were miners or mining family members. Some were railroaders. There's no telling whether any of them ever masqueraded as a clown.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: How Billions of Burgers Got Their Start in Southern California
Photo Essay: The Museum That's Gone Bananas
Photo Essay: Hoppy Holidays from The Bunny Museum
Photo Essay: The Bunny Museum Strikes Back
Photo Essay: The Death Toll of Tombstone