Living in the desert is "not for everybody," says writer Claire Vaye Watkins. Her home, in the Mojave Desert near Death Valley, is staggeringly beautiful and brutal.
"You feel like, oh, I could die out here …" she says. "Your air conditioning in your car overheats, you're on the side of the road and it's 120 degrees, there will be buzzards circling. And I think there's something primal and immediate about that."
Watkins' new novel, Yellow Pine, is set in this desert landscape, which is being developed by an energy company for solar energy. Solar may sound like clean energy, but solar on this grand scale is wreaking havoc on the desert ecosystem. Like many frontier territories, the desert attracts misfits, loners and drifters. In the novel, each of those types is represented in a small community of people protesting the "green energy gold rush."
This land, Watkins explains, isn't far from the Nevada site where the government conducted nuclear testing. "It's a place that's been treated like a wasteland for a really long time — and that story has been very cooperative and convenient for extraction and exploitation of the natural resources …" she says. "While I feel really convinced that we need to decarbonize the economy … I was really concerned that there would be some really serious sacrifices being made that didn't seem right to me or fair."
Watkins' previous novel, I Love You, But I've Chosen Darkness, is her most autobiographical book and draws on her father, Paul Watkins', memoir, My Life with Charles Manson. As a teenager he was a part of the Manson Family and recruited teen girls to join them. He was not involved in the murders. Claire says he escaped the cult in part by hiding in the desert. Watkins spoke with Fresh Air about life in the desert, environmental justice, and how her father's death informed her life.
Interview highlights
On atomic tourism in the desert
Atomic tourism is the most amazing coping mechanism that the people of southern Nevada came up with to deal with the fact that their own government was bombing them. It was a phenomenon where people would come to Vegas to watch the detonations and people would dress up. … There were show girls who had mushroom cloud headdresses and there would be parties, like bomb detonation watch parties up high in the casinos. It's almost like the culture sort of metabolized this ghastly, deeply wrong phenomenon into a tourism gimmick, it's incredible.
On her awareness of nuclear waste near where she grew up
My parents were involved in activism against nuclear testing and against Yucca Mountain [Nuclear Waste Repository] and against water projects. I remember feeling really hurt by it as a kid, feeling like: So they think that's OK to do to me? I'm just a kid. It made me feel like we were expendable people or that we didn't matter. I mean, that's the story usually, of this type of exploitation is like: There's no one there anyway. It's an empty place, and that it's already dead. And that's a really confusing thing to be told when you're a lively kid. I understood that that was wrong, and I didn't deserve it, and no one does. I had a sense of clarity about it that I don't really think has gone away.
On environmental injustice
[It] is kind of a wonky academic phrase, but the way I understand it is: It means you get less life. That there are some people who get more time on this Earth than others. Some people are expendable in this model.
On feeling close to death in the desert
My mom ran this little museum and rock shop on the edge of Death Valley, and a lot of tourists would come through, especially European tourists. Maybe they had seen some of those Westerns that you had seen and wanted to have a Death Valley adventure, and my mom used to say that it was her job to save the European body from the European imagination. And I would listen to her, and occasionally people would go missing, and I would listen to the dramas of someone not making it, which happens pretty regularly out there. It's an extreme place.
On how her father's death has informed her life
My first memory is my dad dying when I was 6. That's really where I begin in my story. He was sick with cancer for a few years before he died, and I don't really remember having a time where death wasn't really a presence in my family. His absence changed everything. And I've come to feel pretty grateful for that, actually. I've made mistakes and lived foolishly as much as anyone has, but I have been gifted with not being quite, perhaps, as in as much denial of the fact of death as I might have otherwise been. … Our culture is so weird about death. … As far as I can tell, there's a part of us that is, you know, infinite and divine … and then there's part that's very finite and only here for a little while, as far as we know. And we're in this body and I felt really grateful for that and it makes me want to live a good life.
On her father's involvement with the Manson Family
My dad was a teenager. For him, in the beginning, the Family was all about music and sex and drugs. And he'd come from a pretty gnarly household. … Manson was a lot older than most of them … It was a really exploitative scene. …
When he wanted to leave the Family, at first Manson said, OK, that's fine. And then he changed his mind and they were in a power struggle for a while. They were out in Death Valley at the ranches and eventually there was a night that he describes in his book where he opened the door of the cabin where he was staying with a couple other people who had also defected from the group, and Manson was, like, squatting there with a knife between his teeth. And so he thought he would be killed.
He walked that night across Death Valley … like 50 miles or so. But he fled for his life and then went to the police, went to Inyo County sheriffs. … I think he was just like getting a very, very hard reality check and realizing that this was not the loving, paternal guru that he thought he had.
On comparison
Especially for an artist, I think it's pretty much useless. I try not to do it at all. I've had times in my life where I have kind of been on a like, comparison is like a drug I'm trying to kick. You know? Because I'm me. I'm me. I really, for some reason, for me, it's Zadie Smith. I want to be like, why am I not doing what Zadie Smith is doing? And it's like, well, you're Claire, babe? Zadie is going to Zadie and George Saunders is going to George Saunders. And you just do Claire, that's enough. I feel best when I can inhabit that and let everybody else just do their own thing, too.
Anna Bauman and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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