Outhouse Poetry

I wanted to die in the desert,
I planned for it many a year;
Alone with my God and my conscience,
And not a sky-pilot near. 

Outhouse stands forth, southern Guano Valley, SE Oregon. Basin and range country.  Approaching the abandoned Barry Ranch with caution and respect. Rusted gates open, no signs. Swallows fly flinging from windows in the old ranch buildings.

Sheathed in galvanized tin, patched, shielded for generations from wind and dust, the occasional rain and snow. Detail below, a recycled section, collage-appearing.

The Barry Ranch, abandoned in the 1980s, was established in 1910 when M. P. J. Barry took title to this land. Barry was born in 1886 in Newmarket, County Cork, Ireland. He came to Lake County in 1906, was a prominent stockman of Lake County, a county with several Barry place names. 

 

I meant what I said when I said it,
For it threw a spell over me.
Its rimrocks, its sage, and its loneliness,
It was the place I wanted to be.

Wide-angle interior view of the two-seater outhouse. (Click to enlarge!) 
Three poems posted, covered in vinyl, on the walls... for an intimate reading, to self... or other.  
Far left, the poem I WANTED TO DIE IN THE DESERT (Revised). Author Unknown.

NOTES
Despite assiduous internet searchings, I have not a set been able to discover when or where this traditional poem I WANTED TO DIE IN THE DESERT may have been published. And what does "Revised" suggest?
Noting:  Don Edwards, a famous Cowboy singer, recorded a shorter, much-modified version as the song I WANTED TO DIE IN THE DESERT in the 1996 on his Last of the Troubadours: Saddle Songs II album.  That version can be heard on YouTube.

The two other poems tacked to the walls of the ranch outhouse are both by Charles Badger Clark (1883 - 1957), a famed cowboy poet and the first poet laureate of South Dakota (1937). That's a whole other story…

Photos Douglas Beauchamp, May 2026.  Wondering… how to picture and say abandonment?  The presence in absence?  Loneliness out on the range?  Perhaps cowboys entertained those questions. As did the Buddha.

ASTRAL AMERICA

I went in search of astral America (l'Amérique sidérale), not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. 
—Jean Baudrillard. 

All quotes from: AMERICA (1986/French,1988/English trans Chris Turner. Verso)

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. 

To understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Paul Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance.

Here is the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

The grandeur of deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth's surface and of our civilized humours. They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. 

The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

Desert: luminous, fossilized network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference — the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallize. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence.

 

Photos:  March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

On the road: E. California, W. Nevada, SE Oregon.

Pyramid Lake Paiute Museum

Outdoor art at the Pyramid Lake Paiute Museum, Nixon, Nevada, painted on various utility objects and integrated into the native plant gardens that surround the museum.

In this video, the Museum Director says the artwork was done by local artists at the time the native plant garden was opened in 2022. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO--MrixYjI

Website:  https://pyramidlake.us/museum

Below: An expanse of Pyramid Lake as viewed from north of the Nixon. Note, far right, mostly hidden behind the brown hills is the tip of stark white peak, the pyramidal tufa stone mound from which the lake gained its English name. (Click to enlarge, zoom in)

Photos:  Washoe County Nevada, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

DNA

One approaches, simply, the reality
Of the other eye. One enters, entering home,
The place of meta-men and para-things,

 

And yet still men though meta-men, still things
Though para-things; the meta-men for whom
The world has turned to the several speeds of glass…
—Wallace Stevens

We ask: the future of origin?  The question rings eternal, the heritage, what fate brought a me, a you, to this place, this now. This chart, this search, a tale of connectivity.

 

Walking the Underpassage a few days ago, a bridge pillar, noticing text — this portion of the Underpassage with the basketball courts, just south of the skate park.

Intrigued in particular by the blue writing on the lower portion, stopped, settled in and studied. Photoed as possible. Followed along, the closeups. An intuitive intensity. A search. Mapping articulation. Say, a nature study, or simply, Art! 

Possible to follow an order to retain a linear story? Doubt such an intent. I do think the visual impact is part of the journey. A scattering, a mattering. For the artist, for me, for you.

Walking to the other end of the basketball court, a couple hundred feet from the pillar with the writing, a middle-aged man waved me over. With sleeping bag, pack, some food. We talked. He said you seem interested in the writing. I said yes. He said that's my writing, that's my story. We talked.  I complimented him, asked are you OK? He said I am fine. Asked to take his photo. He consented. A direct intensity. I sensed him present to who and how he is as the story unwinds in this moment. And on… Now you are part of the story.

Mama Tried

 

Rock painting on an outcrop uphill from a reservoir lake along a bumpy road. Surprised and mystified. A friend recalled Mama Tried as the name of a song. Turns out, number one in the country charts by Merle Haggard in 1968. Semi-auto-biographical. Song with its own entry in Wikipedia. 

Why here a few miles miles east of Eugene and Pleasant Hill? Perhaps because it was sung over 300 times in concert by the Grateful Dead. And covered by uncountable others. Touches something deep in the psyche of family.  

Merle Haggard's parents were Oklahoma dust bowlers who came to the Bakersfield area in the south San Joaquin Valley. As did my parents — 1930s dust bowl refugees from Oklahoma and North Texas. Think Woody Guthrie.  Appreciation to all mamas who tried, most successfully, thank goodness. Look for lyrics or check youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Tried_(song)

Truth Be Told

Truth is always someone else's privilege.

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Confronting virtual worlds and the fleeting apparitions of AI, the Signs of the Streets beckon. Hard copy analogues position Truth Fact Belief Hope as ready-made visualities. Events, communities, attitudes frame and mirror the Zeitgeist.  Streetside photos late 2025/early 2026   

CODA

To achieve the long view, one steps further and further back from lives as they are lived to that more tranquil position from which one sees only the crowd. From that perspective human beings become a species, worth preserving. But take another step back and it is no longer necessary to preserve the species. There will be another following us, after all. Until the view lengthens to such an extent that the world disappears and one is left with only the cold reaches of space, in a private pas de deux with God. Was it possible to accommodate the contradiction between action and being, to incorporate both long view and short view in one’s attitude to life, to be both reflective and active, detached and involved?

—Robyn Davidson, from Desert Places (1996)