Scott, Harvest and Jason heading out to the desert. The goal: do an art installation at Andrea Zittel's property near Joshua Tree.
First stop? Cabazon, home of the dinosaurs from "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure."
But things have changed with the King of the Monsters...
The dinosaur statues were recently sold to The Institute for Creation Research.
They are a conservative Christian outfit with a difficult mission...
...Convince the world that dinosaurs lived side-by-side with Adam and Eve.
They were great behemoths, but they didn't make it into Noah's Ark before the flood.
The world is only a few thousand years old, and dinosaurs were part of it until relatively recently.
So where do all the fossils come from then?
Must be fakes.
For two bucks, you can climb up inside the great T-Rex.
It's a long way up. He's three stories tall.
At the top is the T-Rex's mouth.
From here you can see what it's like to be eaten by a dinosaur.
Who's hungry?
Here's the brochure they're giving out now.
You can learn all about the shoddy science of evolution at their web site...
...Or from their new cartoon series, "Mr. Rex and the Fossil Finders."
Later on we reached Andrea Zittel's place.
Andrea Zittel is an artist who spends part of her time in the desert.
Her home is very minimalist and free of clutter.
Nearby she keeps a set of shipping containers that make up her office and workshop.
She only eats and drinks from bowls. Keeps things simple; Less to clutter up decision making with.
Much of her furniture is made from thick black foam.
It's comfy to sit on, and certainly much more child-friendly.
Harvest and Scott met her a while back, and she was letting them do the installation on her land.
She was also letting us stay the night.
Andrea Zittel's runs something called "High Desert Test Sites."
They are experimental art sites located out in the desert near Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.
Just wandering around, we found all kinds of different art installations.
This one was pretty random.
You're seeing it right. It's a pay phone out in the middle of the open desert.
Believe it or not, the phone actually WORKS.
The phone is hooked up with unlimited free long distance, but you can only call the 15 numbers listed above the handset.
Numbers include the lobby of the Empire State Building, the University in Duluth, a laundromat in Chicago, and the Sheriff's office in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The people who answer those phones think it's pretty funny that a random phone booth in the middle of nowhere is set to call them, so they write the number on the walls nearby. Sometimes they call back.
Sometimes they call drunk at three in the morning.
Just a lonely phone, ringing and ringing.
Recently, the rats chewed through the phone lines and Andrea had to get them fixed.
But the repairmen screwed up and reversed the cables. When she went to dial out from her kitchen, she could only call those 15 numbers listed on the pay phone.
And when the drunk people called from Duluth or El Paso, her home phone would ring in the middle of the night.
She had it disconnected.
This was one of my favorites.
It's a shiny mirrored lens, situated high on a rocky hill.
Something about it was really spooky, like the mysterious stone obelisk in 2001. It was so completely unnatural that everything just felt off.
This is the kind of majiks you see at Andrea Zittel's A-Z West.
For dinner we went out for Thai. (Good Thai food in Joshua Tree... Who knew?)
That night we slept out under the stars.
We saw meteor after meteor.
Eventually we all got cold and went inside.
DAY TWO! Finally, our mission was at hand.
Scott Wayne Indiana's Geo Chain began quietly.
On a rocky slope near a dirt road, he and his wife Harvest planted a metal post.
(He'd hauled the big metal post on the plane with him from all the way from Portland.)
They mixed several bags of concrete and poured them into a form, to hold the post in place.
This first step took a long time.
It was 115 degrees that day, and it was heavy work.
Harvest and Scott shared mixing duties...
Scott poured the concrete...
...And I took pictures.
It's good to be the cameraman.
After many hours of backbreaking labor that I did not participate in, the post was finally installed.
Next came the chain.
Scott attached a lenght of chain to the post and stretched it to the east.
Harvest and I both attached chains of our own to the end, continuing the it eastward.
The idea of the Geo Chain is that people will keep adding to it, stretching it for miles and miles. Sooner or later it will have to cross a road, or a river, or a border, or the ocean.
Someday, if enough people add chain to it, the Geo Chain will stretch all the way around the world.
If you're interested in the Geo Chain, visit Scott's web site, www.39forks.com