Did you know that Joshua Tree National Park was founded on Halloween Day, 1994? It’s almost as if federal government had some inkling of the vast hate once heaped upon the lowly, humble, “demoniacal” Joshua Tree.

The strange saga of Joshua Tree antipathy was largely forgotten until, well, I dug it up and turned it into a new book—YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia.

For Halloween, I thought I’d toss out a couple of the more merciless and inspired attacks I came across in my research. These choice bits all come from the astonishing and largely overlooked California Desert Trails, written by Joseph Smeaton Chase in 1919.

“It is a weird menacing object more like some conception of Poe’s or Doré’s than any work of wholesome Mother Nature. One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant… A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal.”

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“Wild-looking shrubs leaned out overhead and stared down at us with startled air. Strangest of these were the so-called Joshua trees… Nothing in the vegetable world is more unprepossessing than this scarecrow, all knees and elbows, with handfuls and mouthfuls of daggers for leaves.”

“My friendly trees ceased at once at the foot of the canyon, leaving only the Joshuas, which always seem to have been arrested in the midst of some uncouth antics, brandishing daggers like a juggler.”

Like the Sphinx, there is no answer to its riddle. It is in the fascination of the unknowable, in the challenge of some old unbroken secret, that the charm of the desert consists. And the charm is undying, for the secret is: Secrecy.” —Joseph Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails, 1919

For more on the mysterious forgotten master of American nature writing, JS Chase, see my previous post, “Cosmic Bard of the California Badlands.”

In other news, you can catch myself and writer, photographer, and adventurer —founder of the Forgotten Lands Project and author of the important and powerful new book, The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands—live in conversation in Los Angeles at the Last Bookstore on ✦ Wednesday, December 17th ✦

We’ll be speaking with journalist Dana Covit about forgotten lands, forgotten histories, and the importance of preserving both.

And if you haven’t checked out YUCK yet, published last spring by Wandering Aengus Press, you can get a feel for it in the above Halloween-themed video. You can also purchase it in paperback or audio here.

For now, be very afraid…

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