JOSHUA TREE, 2026
Mr Watson’s Sidewalk Diaries N°10 — Desert heat, Pioneertown movie dreams, and the food chain
My office is tiny. There's my desk, two chairs, two sideboards. A 19th-century painting of a bull that belonged to my father. It stares, mildly bewildered, at an old ether inhaler that a young artist fitted with rose thorns and called "Sleeping Beauty."
And a worn-out leather loveseat that once must have looked modern in the fumoir of a stately apartment. Scattered around it are some fifteen pairs of shoes. Most of them have shoe trees. They are polished to perfection. R keeps telling me to clean up my mess. I don't.
Mr Watson is curled up on the cardinal-red velvet cushions. Fast asleep. His legs start twitching. His lips puff out at every muffled half-bark.
Is he chasing? Or is he being chased? _H.
Remember Olav? H's winged friend I told you about some time ago. The snooty Scandinavian robin I had to share my garden with. My butcher block too.
He left. Disappeared into thin air. What else are birds for?
Not without leaving his legacy, though.
H calls her Olivia. He thinks she's Olav's daughter. Beats me how he can tell the difference between a male and a female robin. The birds are no help; male or female, they come with the standard brake light down the front. Or so I'm told.
But she's quite inventive. More inventive than her pathetic flapping suggests.
H now has two bags of bird feed attached to the branches in our garden. I still only have one bowl of food that I have to rattle for him to notice I'm hungry. I rattle it so vigorously that even his left ear, the one whose best years have long gone, would notice. Anyway, a ball of fat and nuts suspended in yellow mesh was making unfamiliar movements when I came down into the kitchen one morning. Going up and down like a hyperkinetic yo-yo.
Olivia dropped from the tree in what looked like a kamikaze dive. Just when I thought I'd be rid of her forever—I'd be as flat as a doormat if I dived like that—she flapped up clumsily, grabbed the string in her beak, and shook it like a madwoman.
Like me rattling my bowl for food.
Pieces of fat and seed dropped to the ground. Followed by the red blur of Olivia's next dive. I lead by example. The crimson dilettante picked up in weeks what had taken me years to perfect.
I'm the canine version of David Attenborough. Equally telegenic, but with a shorter lifespan and still practicing the husky half-whisper. I love nature. Especially when it's contained by two-and-a-half-metre-high brick walls.
In June R and H took me to California. Los Angeles suited me perfectly. Being chauffeured past palm trees along the ocean. Cooed at by young American women, of whom I can only see the leggings. And their fluffy dogs, whose breeds inevitably end in -oodle.
Then came Joshua Tree.
What the hell were they thinking? That I'd be spending time in an oversized air fryer among hairy spiders and scorpions whose tails are as elegant as mine but deadly? That I'd stroll between cacti with barbed spines? Serve as an entree for a scruffy coyote whose main purpose in life should be chasing roadrunners or getting flattened under a rock?
The operating temperature of a Jack Russell is seventeen to twenty-four degrees centigrade. Anything lower is for huskies. Save the desert heat for chihuahuas. A Mexican hairless would do, too, but I'm not paying for the sunblock on its back. I have often wondered if it is up or down the canine evolutionary ladder. But I don't need sunscreen.
The park rangers got it right; this is not a place for dogs. H kept me nice and cool in the car in the parking lot, engine running, air conditioning full blast, while R wandered off to shoot some photos of trees I wouldn't even dare to lift my leg against.
Glad we made it back to Pioneertown and civilization. If that's what you call a bunch of wooden sheds in the middle of nowhere.
I could have a movie career here. When I was in Mérida, everyone pointed at me, all excited, yelling, "La Máscara, La Máscara." Pretty annoying, really, once I found out that Milo, the Jack Russell in the movie, wasn't half as good-looking as I am. I already have a head start. I stayed on a film set. Even slept there soundly. I could picture a gunfight down Main Street from the deck of the saloon. Blood seeping slowly into the sand. Horses tied to the hitching rail staring blankly as they always do. Lots of head. Little inside.
A pigeon landed in the dust in front of me, ending my reverie. "Crashed" is more like it. Kept on wriggling helplessly, unable to take off. H in savior mode. Picked it up, threw it in the air, and off it went again. I noticed its partner perched on the eave of the barn in front of me. Looking worried, if that's possible.
Back to my scene. John Wayne's spurs rattling at every step.
I saw the worried pigeon again as we were walking back to the hotel. It was staring at two crows picking feverishly at what looked like its partner. Or what was left of it. One of the crows flew off with an intestine dangling from its beak.
The pigeon took off in the opposite direction.
I made it back home. To cooler climes and friendlier woods. To autumn days that make me wish I wasn't color-blind. There's a hunting party in the fields. Men in fluorescent jackets driving game towards the hunters in camouflage, their shiny SUVs away from the line of fire. The Châteauneuf-du-Pape is breathing in the hunting chalet.
In a barren tree that overhangs the brook, a pigeon's severed wing flutters in the breeze, spotlit by the afternoon sun.
There's not a bird in sight.
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