Page 9 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Eleven

drive off the supposedly pacific inhabitants. The latter slaughtered
the Frenchmen and knocked down the structure, but traces are
visible. Du Vay is primarily remembered today for his great-
grandson, Bouffi du Vay, whose chef invented salad dressing.

Tomb of the Unknown Species Long a refuge of the visionary, the
eccentric and the misanthropic, California’s immense and often
trackless deserts present the adventurous off-roader a trove of active
and abandoned sites testifying to the human urge to break away from
conventional life and create something completely idiosyncratic. One
such endeavor, now giving little evidence of its brief existence, is the
hippie commune Planetarium (go 15.7 miles on the washboard road
beginning at the Flushwater truck stop on I-37). The geodesic dome
is gone, but its residents, a mix of avant-garde tragedians and
metalworking sculptors, left behind a curious steel-and-stone
construction representing, according to a barely-legible plaque, the
flora and fauna destroyed by H. sapiens, both known to be extinct
and probably never to be identified.

Pitview Terrace If you are motoring through the flat scrublands
outside Granu Loma on Route 77 on your mad dash to the Chew
Mash casino, pause at the intersection with Mile 13 Road. Before you
sits a vast and doorless edifice in the sand. It is the Whang-po Data
Center, home to 50,000 computer servers connected to the power
and internet grids by thick underground cables. Radio reception and
cellphone service may be interrupted during this brief hiatus in your
travels. It is no longer marked on any maps, but a planned
community was once under construction here. Financed by foreign
venture capital, it was intended ultimately to replace Granu Loma as
county seat. It was not until substructure excavation had begun in
1963 that the tract was exposed as formerly a gigantic burn pit for the
nearby World War Two-era military base and weapons testing facility.
It had been bulldozed over and forgotten when the land was reverted
to civilian use. Although the situation was saved by a sweetheart deal
with Whang-po, many of the officials involved (and their
descendants) still refer to the area by its pejorative nickname.

Nanda’s Crypt Among the many Eastern mystics finding fertile
ground for their teachings in California in the interwar period,
Promakasar Nanda developed a cult following in Waverly Hills, a
suburb of Las Agneless. There his wealthy followers built a temple to
prana vata, the vagus nerve; and there Swami Nanda held forth