Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the American desert?

Do you remember the lander's earthquake, June 28, 1992?

The biggest quake to shake California?

In 65 years, a magnitude 7.3 officially designated violent on the Mirkali scale.

Landers on the northern outskirts of the high desert town of Yucca Valley, if you're headed north on Highway 247,

is a sparsely populated land of Joshua trees and dry rolling hills.

It's beautiful up there and it still feels wild.

Sure, you might have a nice designer couple from Echo Park and one neighboring cabin,

but the other two still might house the old high desert.

The one where you could live so cheaply as to entertain the most philosophical approaches to life,

or the most criminal.

Landers is something else.

Well, in 1992, there were some artists and nudist and UFO cultist and Buddhists living up

around Landers, as is even more so the case today, but mostly there were people who were

attracted to the desert life for reasons

deep within them. People who perhaps did not care to talk about such things, people who perhaps

had run from something within or without some hassles, some intractable problem, or maybe just boredom with a pretty dull system day by day.

It was easier in some ways in 1992. You could still rent a shack or open a savings account without a credit report.

You could live on cash dollars.

And if all else fails, you can cash your social security or military retirement or public

services union pension check right there at the Stater Brothers.

...