JAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. We've been looking at the concept of time this hour—fighting against it, defying it and denying it. Our last story, however, is about making peace with our place in the history of time. It comes to us from producer Ben Adair, and it unfolds in a very, very old place: the Mojave Desert.

BEN ADAIR: These are old mining roads. Once upon a time, hopeful men and women looked for outcroppings of quartz, iron, copper. And when they found them—this was public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM—they filed a claim and dug. Follow EP 15, and you'll see the signs for the Burro Schmidt Tunnel. Between the years 1906 and 1938, a lone miner dug and blasted a 2,087-foot hole straight through a granite mountain. His name was Burro Schmidt, and he first filed this claim in 1904. Today, David Ayers digs here. He gives tours of Burro's tunnel. He says miners still roam these hills.

DAVID AYERS: And the way he got his name "Burro" Schmidt, he always had two burros with him, Jack and Jenny. And, of course, once they died, Burro didn't waste anything, so we ate them.

BEN: [laughs]

DAVID AYERS: And Burro died in 1954. They had his funeral right in front of the tunnel entrance. And in 1963, Toni and her husband came up. For the next 40 years, she was up here. And Toni died up here on her bed, inside her house like she wanted to at the age of 95.

BEN: Wow.

DAVID AYERS: That old woman is legendary. She was scared of nothing. When she died up here, she didn't die alone. I was by her side, and her granddaughter from Vermont was here too. But she never backed down from a fight. There was once when she was 75, she had a fistfight with a guy right in front of her house, and she won the fight. She cheated, but she won the fight.

BEN: What did she do?

DAVID AYERS: She had a role in nickels in her fist. But no, she never backed down from any fight.

BEN: How long do you think you're gonna stay up here?

DAVID AYERS: I gotta be out the 29th of this month.

BEN: Really?

DAVID AYERS: Yeah. The BLM's gonna take over the place and run it. They're gonna save Burro's cabin, they're gonna save Toni's house over there. Everything else is gonna be bulldozed and cleared out, which is unfortunate because they're gonna change the way history looks. This is basically the camp that an old woman built up. It's not supposed to be Disneyland. If you want Disneyland, that's in Anaheim. If you want a desert camp, this is just the way some of them look.

BEN: Hmm. So this has been going on for a long time, this BLM stuff?

DAVID AYERS: Yeah, quite a while. Toni, since she lived here for so long, they didn't bother her. They just basically waited for her to die. She expected me to save the place. And I was—I promised her that she would die on her bed up here like she wanted to. I kept that promise. The second promise, I wasn't able to keep up. You know, I tried. In fact, a lot of people tried.

BEN: You're all really close, huh?

DAVID AYERS: Geez, I'm never gonna stop missing her. Never. You know, she was—there was no one else like her.

BEN: David Ayers is gone now, but before he left, he looked over his ramshackle camp and told me, "Don't be sad. The days of the desert rat have already passed. What's here is just a corpse." People who spend time in the Mojave start thinking differently about space. Huge stretches of land without a house, a telephone pole or high tension wire. You can close your eyes while sliding between mountain ranges at 80 or 100 miles an hour.

BEN: "I'd love to drive Death Valley in a really fast car," a friend of mine said. "A really, really fast car." Death Valley is probably the best-known part of the Mojave Desert. Dropping down onto the valley floor from the west, you see huge salt flats below you, reddish-brown mountains peak in the distance, and between them, huge washes of boulder, rubble, and sand flow into Death Valley like a dam bursting in extreme slow motion.

BEN: It rains rarely in Death Valley. When I was there, a light drizzle caused a flash flood in Mosaic Canyon, where sculpted marble walls drop down hundreds of feet to a teeny, tiny stream bed. The stream fans out here, and Mosaic Canyon is a temple of reds and whites, arcing domes and voluptuous curves. There it sinks down deep into the rock, making hard stone look supple.

BEN: Death Valley exists in geologic time. The oldest rocks at Badwater are 1.8 billion years old. Standing here watching the stream flow, I started thinking about that Mars Rover. I thought about my girlfriend, my family and politics. Mosaic Canyon sinks a tiny bit deeper each year. A hundred human empires will rise and fall in the time it takes Death Valley to notice our passing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marta Becket: The masquerade is an event of illusion held once each year to serve as a vacation from ourselves, a relief from the reality of another year.]

BEN: Highway 190 bisects Death Valley. East of the park, it ends in Death Valley Junction, a former ghost town revived 36 years ago when Marta Becket reopened the Amargosa Opera House. This is the second season of her show, The Masquerade.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marta Becket: [singing] I always felt that I should be someone else other than me. I'm so bored with the role I play, I need to escape for a day.]

BEN: Marta Becket is a dancer. She spent the first half of her life on stage in New York. In her early 40s, she found this abandoned theater. She patched the roof, painted an audience on the walls, sewed the curtains, the costumes, wrote the script and choreographed the dance. Saturday nights sell out.

MARTA BECKET: Well, there are like many musicals, if you want to call them. The one we did before this was called The Dollmaker, about a doll shop you can go and buy the perfect companion for life and not have to bother with a real one. It was quite controversial. I made a few enemies out of it.

BEN: Like The Dollmaker, The Masquerade asks questions about identity: who we want to be versus who we actually are. And it sort of summarizes why a lot of people move out to the desert. There's a freedom here.

MARTA BECKET: In New York, it's like trying to paint on a canvas that's already painted on. Out here, it's an empty canvas for my mind to envision whatever I want to create. In the beginning, people thought I was kind of eccentric. Then they saw that I was a success, and that really snapped it, and now—now they like me. I'm not a weirdo.

BEN: Do you ever hear from your friends back home?

MARTA BECKET: Oh, yes. Yeah.

BEN: What do they say?

MARTA BECKET: They think it's great. They thought I was crazy when I moved out here. Now they think it's great.

BEN: Do they come visit you?

MARTA BECKET: Yeah. Once a year.

BEN: Nobody really knows who was first, though anybody can tell you why. As city real estate spiraled out of control, artists, musicians and old hippies have migrated here, the extreme south end of the Mojave Desert. Tucked away around Pioneer Town, Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, are free spirits living off their art.

BEN: Of course, the land grab is the cynic's point of view, and it's easy to feel jaded around young kids singing and old men drumming. Urban sophistication is when you refuse a stranger's hug or laugh, no questions asked. But those who've dropped their cynicism will tell you this is a place of optimism and hope. And it's genuine. The woman cooking brought extra burgers to share, the climbers are back with their instruments, looking for accompaniment. No experience necessary. The Indians sing because it feels good. You can feel good too, if you want. It's your choice.

SONNY TWO FEATHERS: My name is Sonny Two Feathers. I'm 27 years old, and I'm from Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada.

BEN: Describe for me what we're looking at right here, and tell me how you see that versus maybe how other people see it.

SONNY TWO FEATHERS: Well, right now what I'm looking at is a beautiful desert paradise with boulders that have symbols of hands and symbols of people, of animals and spirits. I see beautiful trees in front of me. Tall, reaching for the sky, reaching to pray up to the Creator. And it looks all glimmering in the moonlight. When people are out here, they—all their stress and worries and their problems go away, their anxieties, fear just totally leaves them when they come out here. But it's just so hard with the society now. We don't know how to escape this control that they have over us. But when we're here, the moment it's just happy, and everything blows away with the wind.

SINGER-SONGWRITER: [singing] Some was bad and some was good, some just did the best they could. Some have even tried to ease my troubled mind. And I can't help but wonder where I'm bound, where I'm bound. Where I'm bound, where I'm bound.

BEN: In 1989, a sculptor named Noah Purifoy bought a ranch on the flats north of Yucca Valley. Purifoy's probably best known for founding the Watts Towers Arts Center in 1964, but he also made huge assemblage sculptures from lost and found desert objects. Some are serious, but most are whimsical. All are in pretty bad shape. His first few years out here, Purifoy fought the elements, but later he incorporated their effects. A sculpture is never done, he surmised. After he built it, the weather continued the process. I went out to talk to Purifoy, but I was a day late. When I got there, I phoned his assistant and she told me that he'd passed away the morning before. She was devastated. After hanging up, I walked around his garden. I wandered down a sculpture built like a hallway filled with old calculators, cash registers and boards with rusty nails sticking out.

BEN: I stood there thinking about this man who had just died, and I started thinking about those old miners, their desert way of life. I thought about Marta Becket singing her operas for 36 years, and I thought about Death Valley, the sense of time there that threatens to make everything we do here absolutely irrelevant. Everything.

BEN: I thought about these sculptures decaying, the miners disappearing, all the artists dying and every last one of us, the entire human race, turning the dust blowing around the Mojave Desert in the wind. Noah Purifoy once said that after he finished his sculptures, they take on a life of their own. I'm gonna hope he's right about that. I really need to believe it's true.

JAD: Ben Adair is a producer for KPCC radio, and he has his own show out in California called Pacific Drift.

ROBERT: And we would be very curious to hear what you think of our show. We have an email address: Radiolab@wnyc.org. Radiolab is one word.

JAD: And anything you heard you can hear again at Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And we are signing off.

CINDY FANELLI: This is an English ...

CINDY FANELLI: The carriage clocks are ...

CINDY FANELLI: This is late 1800s.

CINDY FANELLI: This is a cuckoo clock, and it will cuckoo and then play a little song for you.

CINDY FANELLI: This program was produced by Jad Abumrad and Ellen Horne. Production support by Robert Krulwich, Sally Herships, Rob Krieger, David Martin, Amy O'Leary, Sarah Pellegrini, Michael Shelley and Anne Hepperman. Special thanks to Keith Scott, Ramsey Alan, Valerie Shakespeare and I'm Cindy Fanelli of Fanelli Antique Timepieces. Time can be expensive. The most valuable time is the time we spend on each other.

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