Day 5, Sierra Madre and the edge of the High Desert

We left Manhattan Beach in the morning. In an hour, we were at the base of the San Gabriels; Los Angeles' eastern perimeter. It was a small town called Sierra Madre, where so little happens that the entire community came together just a week before, in a candlelight vigil to protest a lady, who built a fence that was sharp enough to slay a fence-jumping deer.

The town itself is a mish-mash of architectural styles; clapboard villas and orchestrated gardens, all hanging on to the waterfall-clad mountains that originally brought people to Los Angeles in the first place.

The story of the deer, which would die slowly as they tried to writhe free from the fence-posts, enraged the community to such an extent, that it created the emergence of a leader, the deer lady. The deer lady was no ordinary slave to local small town politics. She brought this incident to the papers. Soon, it was national news, Mrs. Wilkinson was famous and then it all hit the AP Wire. All of Los Angeles was talking about it. I interviewed Mrs. Wilkinson on June 22. "Exactly what happened?" I asked. "We all found out about it the same time, just before Memorial Day weekend, that four deer had died tragically, gruesomely, horribly in or on the spiked fence which surrounded Ms. Lender's property." "Why did Ms Lender continue to maintain her fence despite the protests?" I asked.

"She allowed four deer to perish, and I'm convinced that had we not put so much pressure on her to do something, we'd have scraped the flesh of yet another beautiful animal from the razor-sharp spikes. What kind of person would insist that she was right all along, using these defenseless creatures to emphasize her point? After all, life is life; animal or human should be held equally sacred. Lender's senseless, unnecessarily prolonged slaughter of deer has made her a pariah where she lives. She will never be forgiven and her actions will never be forgotten."

Mrs. Wilkinson, perhaps, is a symbol of the suburban town trying to cling to its own identity. People get bored in Suburbia, and eventually create their own imagined drama. Mrs. Wilkinson and the other ladies of Sierra Madre have given names to all of the characters in the town. There is "Killer" (Ms. Lender), and "bat-faced lady" and, for example, "Wild Bill", who, according to Mrs. Wilkinson, is feral and lives in the mountains with the cougars, occasionally dropping into someone's yard to eat lettuce-heads or broccoli stems.

Desert Southwest Coyote Buttes Science fiction, flight of the raven, and the Mud Road to Coyote Buttes Carrizo Plain Walking Southern California's protected grasslands: Reefs of Pollen on the Carrizo Plain Colorado Plateau Mesa to Canyon along the Colorado Plateau. Death Valley, California The Saltwater Fish of Dealth Valley Los Angeles River Gray River in the Sun: Paddling and Driving the LA River Slab City Death and Salvation on the New River Panamint Valley Everybody has stayed at a really bad motel: the Panamint Valley Roach Motel White Sands, New Mexico Atomic Agriculture on the Rio Grande Bombay Beach, California Kayaking the Salton Sea: Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea Trona, California Trona and the Unusual Lake Searles Anza-Borrego Desert Walking the Barren Borrego Joshua Tree National Park, California Four Seasons of the Mojave Las Vegas, Nevada Observations from traveling Las Vegas by skateboard. High Desert, California Stories from California's High Desert Areas