To the Desert’s Lonely, She’s an Angel of Mercy

“Just tell me!” growls Mack. “We just need to know who to write to--and we’ll tell ‘em. They’re leaving us high and dry out here in the desert, and without Beverly here, we’d be left to rot!”

Mack McKenzie paces back and forth in the dust, his eyes ablaze. The line of people he’s standing in looks like a scene out of some Dust Bowl documentary. Under the searing sun there are only two patches of shade: the veranda of The Last Chance general store, and the ironwood tree where boxes of cheeses and butter and rice and milk are stacked waiting on a camp table for distribution. People--some bearing kids, some leaning on sticks--have appeared from nowhere, with those Dust Bowl faces of resignation. The Living Desert. They have come out to meet Beverly Cornelison Lockett, the only person in the whole wide world, it sometimes seems, who cares whether they live or die.

Lockett is the Florence Nightingale of the Desert--that’s what one admirer calls her. She turns up where nobody else does, when nobody else does, to help folks who live out here between the devil and the deep blue sea, way beyond the sight of El Cajon. Refugees from the town. Retirees. People who have fallen through the bottom of the welfare net. Mothers who can’t afford to pay city rents, retiring young men who are cooling it after collisions with the law. And, of course, the inevitable population of Snowbirds, the drifters who winter in the desert and summer in the mountains. “We’re kind of the forgotten people,” grunts Mack. “We exist out here. Survive. That’s all.” Mack speaks through a voice machine. He was shot in the throat back in Guadalcanal where he fought as a Marine. Helping Lockett distribute the food is Henrietta. She’s lame. And Bob. He’s blind. Watching nearby is Donn Reynolds, chopper pilot. He was shot down not so long ago in Argentina, delivering medical supplies to one of the foreign colonies down there. His stomach looks like a plowed field. He’s come up here for the dryness and the heat. He’s constantly in pain. Jim Hansen is on a kidney dialysis machine. Vaughan Morbent can just afford to live quietly in a caravan on the end of the dirt Split Mountain Road. No electricity, gas, water. Many around here are living on someone’s property. Many are here because the nearest town, Borrego Springs, is too expensive.

Of course, not all the 50-odd people in the line live here for such extreme reasons. But they all turn up when Lockett comes by in her truck. The little relief in the form of commodities like cheese and butter and rice just helps bridge that yawning gap between hanging on and going under.

“We’d all write,” says Mack, “I’d write a dozen letters just to let them know our problems out here-- and to tell them about Beverly.”

Even for the less poverty-stricken, the quietness of desert life belies real problems. Rent’s cheap, but living’s expensive. It’s 40 miles to the nearest supermarket. Prices here at the Last Chance, well, they’ve got to be high, all that transport and so forth. Plus there’s no corner liquor store, no laundry, no gas station, no coffee shop, nothing for miles and miles, except for ironwood trees and cactus and, of course, that flax-like Ocotillo brush.

Doctors, social services, help for the elderly, all that is part of another world. The town world. And Mack McKenzie is sick of being left out of it. But he’s also so proud of Lockett and what she does for them all--she cares, that’s the main thing. He wants addresses. He wants names--senators, mayors, bureaucrats to write to, for God’s sake, just to tell them what a fantastic person Beverly Lockett, the Salvation Army lady, is.

Lockett, 48, is here once a month. With her Salvation Army truck and her boxes of cheeses and butter and other basic foodstuffs provided by the government Food Help Programs, food that never gets beyond city limits on its own accord. Until she came moseying through the desert, just looking, sniffing out signs of human habitation, no one in the social services seemed to have thought that there could be life beyond El Cajon.

Lockett is the instigator, organizer, developer and any other names you can think of to describe a tiger of a personality with a tank full of energy and a program she has invented and runs over 2,500 square miles of mountain and desert almost on her lonesome. That’s not to say she’s alone. She has come in like a storm to organize half the countryside into committees, action groups, outreach teams, desert coalitions, commodity distributors, home visitors for the elderly, disaster-preparedness groups . . . Because of Lockett, this desert is jumping like Death Valley frogs after a spring rain.

Lockett works for, but is not a member of, the Salvation Army. Over the past couple of years she has single-handedly built up what has come to be called the Rural Mountain and Desert Outreach Social Services. Basically, she just came out one day, and saw that the desert was not empty, but alive with tough, independent people who were often too poor, too frail, or just too old to be so alone. She found herself involved in everything from helping load the wood box, to chasing chickens back into the coop, to holding an old person’s hand during frightening heart flutters.

Through Fire and Flood

“I’ve helped people through fires and floods out here, food problems, housing problems, family problems. First day I was out here it looked like there was nothing. Nobody, nothing to do. But I tell you, a little scratch here, a little scratch there, I’ve opened a Pandora’s Box! Especially with the old folk. Advocating for them. That’s my greatest love. I guess maybe because I don’t have parents of my own, the old folks around here, they’ve become family. I’ve got so many aunts and dads in these deserts and mountains I almost live on the cookies they feed me. It’s become one big extended family.”

“Lockett is magic,” says Charles Hansen at the Salvation Army’s headquarters in San Diego. “She gets things done--with lots of noise, but no fanfare. Give her a day, and she’ll find and motivate 15 people into a committee to solve a problem by self-help. I’ve never known such a motivator. Our desert outreach program is Lockett.”

Ask Lockett about how to deal with battered children, abused children, children of alcoholic mothers, children in foster care, kids whose stepfathers lose their heads and hold them hostage with guns for days on end, mothers whose children are taken away from them, mothers whose children are abducted by divorced fathers--and Lockett’s eyes will go dark, and she’ll tell you she knows--she was all of these things. All. You couldn’t imagine a worse childhood, a more terrible start to life.

At 16 she married to get away. From 17 to 21 she was a walking wounded, acting tough and finding trouble in New Mexico and San Diego. When she was 20 she married again, a sailor. She had three sons, Billy, Jeff and Bob. That marriage soured after eight years. The father got custody because he was the first to remarry. Lockett worked three jobs to get them back. She married again, had one more son, and after that ended in divorce and she was living on welfare, the father abducted No. 4 son. She didn’t see him again for 10 years.

The all-time low came when her house burned while she was away.

“I was at the bottom of the pile. I had nothing. It had started bad and come downhill all the way to this.”

Fought Through School

But something happened. She found Christianity and, later, she found roots. Cherokee roots. The two did something--combined perhaps to emphasize the unimportance of material things, of the need to be at one with one’s people, one’s land. She didn’t even have a high school diploma. She’d gone as far as 10th grade. But she decided to start educating herself. She scraped through the requirements for a high school diploma, then went on to the American Medical Business College.

“I worked hard. Hard. I was there at the library every daylight hour. I specialized in medical insurance. I came out second or third in the class. That showed me--maybe the first time in my life--that I could make it in the world.”

She did an internship at El Cajon Valley Hospital, became interested in old people--”looking for my parents again”--and took a job in a rest home for the elderly.

“I couldn’t stand it. They were locked up. I was locked up. It was suffocation, smells, claustrophobic. I realized I was for the outside world. Maybe it was my Cherokee blood coming out.”

That’s when she became involved with the social services, and through them, the Salvation Army. The Army was tentatively looking at outreach services beyond city limits. They thought of working through small-town officials--fire chiefs, police chiefs, bank managers. But there just weren’t enough of them. Many settlements were too small to have chiefs of any sort.

Lockett offered the Salvation Army the use of herself and her beat-up Datsun station wagon in return for a stipend to act as an information and referral person who could go around to the elderly especially, and help them get to doctors, or Social Security, or lawyers to write their wills, anything to connect them with the benefits of the world outside.

“The great thing for us about Lockett,” says Hansen, “was that she was willing to get out there. Drive. Go. Look. See. And then organize. That’s her magic. She doesn’t sit in an office in San Diego and try to do everything by phone. She’s there. She lives out there. People see her. They get to know her. They get to trust her. Share their problems with her. Pretty soon she becomes part of the community, part of the scene. She has made communities out of scattered settlements. She has become a magnet that has brought people together, and their communities to life.”

“I think part of it is that I’ve been through so much of what I see going on,” Lockett says. “I can tell them I’ve been there. I’m not some graduate who tells them the theory of how to get out of their mess. I just tell them I know what they’re going through. And my old folks--well, I love them because they’re my missing parents. The whole job is a miracle for me.”

She Finds People to Help

All sorts of names have materialized since Lockett came to the desert-mountain empire: the Back Country Council on Aging, school nursing programs, five centers for the elderly, 13 food distribution centers. The Rural Desert Outreach Teams to help coordinate the Commodity Foods Social Services--distribution of the food. That means people from each community who will help unload and hand out Lockett’s heavy boxes of food.

The food program itself started with her realization that in El Cajon all this government-provided food was coming in regularly but only getting out to city folks. “No one out here could afford the gas to make a hundred-mile trip into town for food aid. Not the ones who needed it, anyway. So we brought the mountain to Mohammed.”

In what Lockett took as the ultimate compliment, Juan Valle, a professor in San Diego State University’s sociology department, sent her two undergraduates and one graduate student to complete their field work under her. She didn’t just have them stand there taking notes, either. One of their first projects was to start agitating for a medically equipped van, a mobile clinic complete with doctor and nurse. She and her students saw one of these beautiful wagons in Julian and realized what a boon it would be to desert folks to actually have a service come to them. Especially old folks. She’d already inspired the people of Jacumba into one of the most active senior clubs in the region. They didn’t need much persuasion to start agitating for the Medivan. Now it is a reality, working out of El Cajon’s AMI Valley Medical Center.

“Now don’t forget, everybody!” yells Lockett, as the food distribution winds down beside the Ocotillo Wells store. “We’ll be meeting next Monday to start forming area Disaster Response Teams--for earthquake, flood, fire. It’s in the interest of everybody, because city help will take at least three days to get to us. That’s Friday, 5 o’clock. OK?”

“Bev, you’re going to kill us all with your energy,” says Mack McKenzie.

More names reel out as she drives up into the mountains for the next food stop. “We’ve got a Rural Providers’ Council now, too. It’s something, a statute body that can speak for the rural people with one voice. That’s what we need most--advocacy at county level, at state level. We’re moving, brother. We’re shaking! We want everybody to know we’re here!”

She’s climbing up towards the next stop on today’s food run, Mount Laguna. Suddenly, Lockett pulls over where the road falls away down cliffs to finally flatten out into desert, hazing off towards Mexico.

“This is all my territory. God has given me all this. You know, it’s a real feeling of power. No ego-trip stuff, but a humbling feeling. Awesome. I have somehow built this great weight of responsibility. People’s lives and welfare depend on me. Me! The feisty, loveless fighting kid I was. No past I wanted to remember. No future. In no position to do anything for society. God! I can’t tell you what a wonderful feeling it is to get out of bed these days. Every morning!”

Everybody’s Friend Arrives

She’s up through pine trees now. Coming into the small settlement that you’d miss if you blinked. Mount Laguna. More hails and welcomes, more food boxes out on tables, shared almost as between friends rather than doled out by some beneficent state authority.

And then it’s home to Descanso, to a little log cabin hidden among the trees. “I get here, and I switch off from the human race,” she says. “I feed my white doves, Molly-Lu my Aussie shepherd--ah, don’t touch him, he kind of feels very protective about Mama--then there’s Flopsy the white bunny--say hi, Flopsy!--and, of course, Princess Midnight, my black cat. Then I go and check the garden and switch off, forget the world.”

Well, maybe not. Phone calls start coming in. “Is this the Shaklee distributor?”

“Sure, how can I help?” asks Lockett. Selling multivitamins is just another sideline-- necessary when you’re living on $200 a week.

She says goodby to her visitor at her office--part of the Descanso Real Estate office.

“I feel my own experience has happened for a purpose, like when they called me down to that hostage situation at Guatay a few months back. The first thing I asked was, ‘Has he let her out to go to the toilet?’ Because I’ll never forget, when my stepfather held my mother and me up with a German Luger for days, that was the worst torture and humiliation--he wouldn’t let us out to the toilet.”

“That gal,” says Dave Holt, the real estate agent who rents her out the office space, “she goes. I have my problems with welfare, but what she’s doing is good. She knows what a lot of these people are going through. And with a little luck . . . they won’t promote her.”