Vasquez Rocks

May 21, 2009 — Vasquez Rocks should have just been an innocuous rock outcropping of mildly interesting-looking shape baking anonymously out in the middle of the Californian desert. Then, in the mid-1800s, when the notorious bandit Tiburcio Vasquez chose the formation to hide from the law, inadvertently bequeathing his name to it, the rocks should have just taken on a minor local-area historical significance.

But then Hollywood found it.

Since that time, the rocks have been used as filming locations in, well, everything. Mel Brooks burned saddles there. Bill and Ted died there. Ash made love the Bruce Campbell way there. Logan ran there (series, not movie). Planet of the Apes was remade there. Buck Rogers 25th-Centuried there. Hell and Rowdy Roddy Piper came to Frogtown there. Austin Powers was annoying there. Johnny 5 short circuited there. The Flintstones went all live action there. Stringfellow Hawke did Airwolf flybys there. Macgyver Macgyver’d there. It was the wild, wild west for Will Smith and Kevin Kline, as well as for just about every Western in the history of the genre, and Transylvania for Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Michael Jackson, Radiohead, Marilyn Manson, and Wolfmother (needed a fourth) have all danced there for music videos. The rocks have even shown up in ink- and computer-animated form in such movies and television shows as Over the Hedge, Cars, and Futurama. Basically, Vasquez Rocks is the Wilhelm Scream of scenery.

And, man, that’s the paragraph I’ve always wanted to write.

There are actually tons more examples, but most iconically, it was the spot where James T. Kirk fought the leopard-print-leotard-wearing reptilian Gorn in the original Star Trek episode The Arena. Honestly, if all the moments from the previous paragraph had happened and this latter hadn’t, these rocks wouldn't be as interesting to me. It was one of the many times Star Trek used the location, in fact, although never again as memorably. Also, apparently the words leopard and leotard have only a one-letter difference.

There are quite a few reasons that Hollywood wants these rocks thrown in their camera lenses. First, they’re ludicrously accessible. Located in Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park in the area of Agua Dulce, they’re only about 20 minutes outside of Los Angeles and the movie industry as a whole. In addition, even though these rocks look all rocky and formidable, the ground around them is cleared and flattened, with easier road access than most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in. That makes it a relatively painless place to schlep and set up trailers, animals, equipment, and fragile-handle-with-care actors.

Vasquez Rocks also has a unique and imminently cinematical shape that, besides making one wonder why a bandit would want to hide in such an eye-catching spot, is asymmetrical enough that moving the camera just a few degrees in the horizontal or vertical can turn the outcropping into a whole new alien planet/fantasy world/arid landscape/mountain pass.

The rocks stick out at an angle that would be called jaunty if they were a hat, acute if they were a geometry exercise, and jagged if they were a rock. So a jagged angle. The striking shape is due to the fact that they are products of the San Andreas Fault, which did enough violence to the underlying rock to make Vasquez Rocks jut out like Joe Theisman’s leg bone. That’s the only sports-related simile I allow in my vocabulary without punishment (usually Seinfeld re-runs).

To visit Vasquez Rocks, you just drive to them…and then right through them. They’re only seconds away from the park entrance off Escondido Canyon Road, and the lower, flat area on the farther side of the rocks does a great impersonation of a parking lot, complete with Dr. Who rooms (Can never bring myself to say the usual, silly names for portable restrooms, so I've invented my own silly name for them).

In person and in rock, Vasquez Rocks is just as impressive as all the movies want us to believe. In fact, they make me wish my religion had earth spirits to worship. At their highest point, the rocks soar to 150 feet tall, and the sloping angle pretty much lets you climb right up them pretty easily as long as you’re more okay than I am with being sweaty, dusty, and a badly placed foot away from a broken neck.

Of course, these rocks and their environs have other, more scientific uses than as movie frame filler, including geology and desert ecology. In addition, recreational activities such as hiking and camping are also popular uses of this nearly thousand-acre park...although camping in anyplace but a forest seems like an activity worse than Seinfeld re-runs to me. Still, movies are the filter I see life through, and that’s what more often then not gets me excited. And causes me to feel overwhelming amounts of self-loathing.

A few signs posted in the area point out a small fraction of the movie history and also warn against mountain lions...although it if there's one spot in the world that mountain lions should not tangle with me, it's the inspiring spot where Kirk beat at all odds in a ferocious mano-y-beasto fight the terrifying and expressionless Gorn creature. I mean, I’d still go down like the spineless and badly built Jenga tower I am regardless of the circumstances, but in this case the mountain lion would be subjected to the inevitable screams of pain and entreaties for my life in Shatner cadence. But even if you avoid the mountain lions, there are still rattlesnakes, bears, black widows, scorpions, and J. J. Abrams-inflamed Star Trek fans to get you. I’m not sure how many reasons the desert needs to suck, but whatever works for it.

Still, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more easily accessible example of the accidental splendor of insensible nature than Vasquez Rocks...great for movie backgrounds, geologists, and writers who need to exercise the rusty “Z” key.

Madame Sherri Castle Ruins

May 6, 2009 — The great part about the ruins of Madame Sherri’s castle in Chesterfield, NH, isn’t the fact that it was once the mansion retreat of a rich eccentric who liked to drive around in a fur coat and nothing else, but that it ruined so aesthetically, with a long stone staircase that ends mid-air and the forlorn shapes of stone chimneys, columns, and arches, all back-dropped by the beautiful 500-acre forest that bears her name.                



Paris-born Madame Antoinette Sherri earned her fortune in show business as a theater costume designer in New York, but she earned her enduring fame in the Granite State. She built her stone mansion as a summer house sometime in the early 1930s, and she was known for the extravagant parties she threw there, as well as tooling around nearby towns in expensive cars and outfits, and generally acting like a character from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Over time, the mansion was neglected until a fire brought about its official demise just before Madame Sherri’s own in 1965 at the age of 84.



In this case, the pyromaniacs were right. The fire left behind a pleasing medieval-looking ruin, the most prominent feature of which is a set of curving stone steps that end abruptly some 20 feet in the air. In fact, the place looks more like a castle now in decay than it did at its peak, when it originally received the moniker. I was able to walk all the way up the stairway with little difficulty, but had to butt-slide down like a three-year-old to keep vertigo from being my murderer (that role is reserved). There was no handrail. Those are always the first to go in the ruination process.

The top floor of the ruin bears a few surviving stone columns and chimneys that poke up from the house frame through a layer of soil and grass. The floor beneath that layer is filled with rocks and other cave-in detritus, and Madame Sherri would be happy to know that, judging by the beer bottles and graffiti we found inside, people still party there.

Even though the castle is surrounded by forest, there’s actually a parking lot close by for the convenience of hikers making natural use of the area. But you don’t have to hike to the castle itself, although that might make it a much cooler experience. I’m always fighting the battle between cool and convenient. They’re both things I want out of life, and they’re rarely compatible.

To get there from the parking lot, take the path to the right past the sign that represents the full extent of my research for this article and which includes a picture of Madame Sherri and her husband, Andre, who died before the castle phase of Sherri’s life. I know I should probably be using compass terms for directions since this is wilderness, but I still have trouble discerning my left from my right without focused, conscious thought, so trying to communicate in four directions will tie me up like an Octopus with Parkinson’s. Drive behind my turn signals sometime.

From here the area goes either uphill or downhill, depending upon where I want to take this joke. It goes downhill, because there are no more intriguing ruins to clamber on. It goes uphill because the network of trails that lead away from the ruins go up the casually named Daniels Mountain. On one of these trails, the Daniels Mountain trail itself, you can even see over into the state of Vermont from your New Hampshire vantage point. The dotted line that is the official state boundary painted by Rand McNally is clearly visible.

The area around the ruins is veined with these picturesque hiking trails, but the majesty of nature still takes a rare back seat here to this carcass of a castle.