Just like in the cities, Christmas in
the desert is cold but warmed by brightly decorated houses.
Some people may be surprised to hear
that, and I have to admit that I wasn't expecting it, either. It's
not that I didn't decorate my place (I didn't), but I don't think I
quite expected to be so many people up here and so many of them to be
in such a festive mood.
First, a word about living a desert
community (if I can call Landers that). In the cities I grew up in
there were dense population in apartments and a little farther out,
residential areas of homes sitting on modest lots right next to each
other. There were many blocks of these, and even farther out, huge
tracts of land that had been leveled, paved, and turned into blocks
and streets of tract housing, a large collection of homes that all
looked pretty much alike since they were all built by the same
company.
Here, it's not quite like that.
Along the main highways there are
occasional communities of ten to twenty thousand people, roughly,
that have pretty much everything in the way of shops and services
we've come to rely on. And just like the cities, they have apartment
buildings and complexes and those single family houses sitting in
rows on the street. But (obviously), there are far fewer of each
because of the smaller number of people.
I live about ten miles away from the
closest of these, but there are a few more within twenty miles or
thirty-five kilometers or so. They're often just a few blocks deep
from the highway and beyond them is … land (in this case, desert
land).
Some time ago, all of this desert land
was marked off into a square grid by the government, who owned the
land, and then further divided into smaller parcels. Then, I heard,
the land was given to anyone who built a home on it and, I guess,
could prove they lived there.
As a result of this, over time, some of
those parcels were further divided by the people who owned them and
sold to others who were looking to live in the desert, surrounded by
sand and who liked this sort of thing.
What we have now can be pictured like
this:
Imagine a huge expanse of featureless
desert as seen from a small plane. Then, draw a checkerboard of paved
roads and, within the resulting squares, smaller checkerboards of
dirt roads.
The squares inside the paved roads
aren't all the same size, though. The average size, I'm guessing, is
five acres, or about twenty thousand square meters, but some are
twice that, some half that size, and a smaller number even smaller.
Actually, it's not always easy to tell because some lots are empty
and there was never any consistent placing of the houses on them,
anyway. I mean, somebody looked at their five acre parcel, found the
flattest spot, and put up a dwelling, which might be anywhere on the
land.
We now have the expected variety of
houses up here. About half (?) are “normal” homes, the kind just
like you'd see anywhere in southern California, in any of our cities
no matter how large or small they are. Regular houses with the only
distinguishing feature being a propane tank somewhere close to the
house. Some of these places are landscaped beautifully, some only
right around the house, and some fill the extra land with horses or
what have you.
And not all of the properties have
fences around them. In fact, I'd say most don't, but nearly all of
them have at least some fencing like mine does.
Anyway, here and there, sometimes in
clusters, there are abandoned properties. These are often, but not
always, tiny homes like the one I'm living in. Driving around it's
easy to spot most of the empty places because vandals have broken
windows, walls or roofs have collapsed, or it just looks like no one
has been there in years.
Many of the homes up here I figured to
be vacation or weekend places where people from “the city” would
visit to drive around on the dirt, remember what the night sky looks
like with stars in it, use to manufacture meth, or just hang out and
drink. But, driving around here at night, it became clear that there
were more people living or staying here for the holidays than I
thought.
At first it was just a few, but many of
the places have the same holiday lighting as I'd gotten used to in
the city. With the greater distances between the houses, it was never
like the block of lights I saw in Los Angeles, but one here, one
there, each one separated by one or more football fields from their
neighbors.
I especially liked seeing the
inflatable snowmen sitting out front.
So, up here it's cheery, festive, and
Christmas-y, just more spread out. Also, Santa made it up here last
night and stuck some little treats in the pockets on the back of the
Christmas gloves I got from my sister and opened last night.
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