Weekend Trip to Desert Proves Priorities Are in Order

In keeping with our new policy of taking mini-vacations of one or two days, instead of arduous global treks, my wife and I drove up to the high desert on a recent weekend.

I had been invited to talk to the Friends of Copper Mountain College at Yucca Valley, in the Little San Bernardino Mountains above the Coachella Valley.

On a Saturday morning the San Bernardino Freeway was easy going. We stopped for lunch at the Farm House in Beaumont. It turned out to be an excellent restaurant full of farm house implements and charm. I had a forbidden chili dog. When one is on holiday one is entitled to break a few rules.

Turning north on the Twentynine Palms Highway (California 62) we began to climb a desert valley between hills that were covered with thousands of power-generating windmills, their silver tri-blades turning in the wind. There is something eerie about the sight of these machines working silently to reward investors, though I’m told they haven’t reduced power bills in the area yet. It would take a thousand Don Quixotes to vanquish them.

Morongo Valley was the first settlement. A wide place in the road. As I remember, it didn’t even have a stop sign. It soon vanished in the desert. Eight miles farther on we came to Yucca Valley. Forty years ago Yucca Valley was a gas station and a bar. It is still hardly more than a wide place in the road--a five-mile stretch of highway with houses and other structures making an urban corridor of about a quarter mile on either side.

Within those five miles Yucca Valley offers most of the institutions that sustain life. Doctors’, lawyers’ and real estate offices, hardware stores, liquor stores, shoe stores, a K mart, a McDonald’s, a Taco Bell, Vons, Home Savings, Pomona First Federal, Carl’s Jr., Bank of America, World Savings, a Sizzler, Bob’s Big Boy, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Denny’s, Pic ‘n Save, American Savings and a motel (one of several) called Oasis of Eden.

The residential structures spread out on either side of this lifeline and are sustained by it as the settlements of the Egyptian desert are sustained by the Nile. The housing frenzy that has seized the coastal towns has not reached these high desert communities. Residences are modest, and I saw no signs of massive new construction.

Nine miles beyond Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree also clings to the highway. It is only a mile long, and its biggest enterprise is a K mart. All of a sudden Joshua Tree ends, and the land beyond the last street reverts to desert brush and Joshua trees.

We took the last street and drove to the home of our hostess, Leota Bell, in whose guest house we were to spend the night. Her friend, photographer Harry Laugharn, drove us three miles farther on to the Copper Mountain College.

The college is a campus of College of the Desert, a community college at Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley. It stands on a rise below Copper Mountain, utterly isolated in the desert.

It is a handsome group of low, dark brown block buildings surrounding grass courtyards planted with sycamore trees. It is an educational and geographic oasis.

We were given a tour by Owen Gillick, executive director of development, and Jim Pulliam, provost of the college. (While technically it is a campus of the mother college, everybody in the valley calls it Copper Mountain College.)

Their pride is understandable. Against every kind of odds, including the devasting effect of Proposition 13, the people of the high desert towns, including Twentynine Palms, 12 miles farther east, got the college built. At the outset, they raised $1 million in gifts and pledges for the initial construction in 1983. A second classroom unit was built in 1988; a library and student center are on the drawing board.

The supporting communities number only about 45,000 people, but the college has 3,600 students. Many are older people who have returned to complete their educations. Many are Marines from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms. Marines graded the 120-acre site free. (The transfer of 4,000 Marines to Saudi Arabia has hurt business in the desert towns.)

The college offers not only a liberal arts program but also Registered Nursing and automobile technology programs that are among the best in the state. (Graduate nurses are recruited like star athletes.)

The building of this college, especially in times like these when funds are scarce and 60 million Americans are illiterate, seems to me to be an inspirational accomplishment. It sustains my faith that the American spirit still lives, and that some of us still have our priorities right. Education should be a primary goal of a democracy.

On Sunday morning we had breakfast with some locals at Joshua Tree’s finest--the Bull ‘n Spear--and drove back to the metropolis past thousands of new houses that looked as multitudinous as windmills.