My friend Jane sent this from the garden behind the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California. Ridgecrest is a town by the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in the Mojave desert.
Wikipedia tells me that China Lake is the Navy's largest landholding, and that its main site covers more than 1,100,000 acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. For me, this is just another reminder of how very large the Mojave desert is.
In addition, China Lake is the home to many of the petroglyphs in the Coso range. Since access is restricted on the Naval Station these ancient works of rock art are more easily preserved and protected. Vandalism is low, says yet another Wikipedia site.
You can only see the petroglyphs by prearranged tours. So I wasn't able to see them when we visited the area for the arts & crafts fair and Cherokee Inter-tribal Pow Wow back in 2015. Yes, there was a cowboy there too, with a very interesting chuck wagon full of all the cooking pots, pans, and utensils that were used on wagon trains. And lots of rusty items too, I'm sure.
Jane said she loves the garden and "the imaginative scattering of rusty things." Which gave me an idea, or rather reinforced an idea I've had for a while: Maybe I can gather my favorite rusty things and scatter them in my garden.
Well, I don't have a garden, but maybe then it would become one. And if it weren't for the ground-squirrels I could stick flowers here and there among the rust. I remember one of Graham's photos from Namibia, which had an entire vegetable garden growing inside the engine part of a rusty old truck. Now do you see why I miss his pictures?
And he did respond, by the way, and left a long comment on my old airplane post. He is OK.
And here's the stove again. I got carried away with other things and forgot this was a post about a rusty stove that my friend Jane sent to me. Thank you, Jane, it is fabulous!
