Ruins don’t have to be as far removed from us in time as these fortresses and castles. For instance, the Small Tract Act of 1938 essentially allowed any U.S. citizen to lease five acres of public land, deemed otherwise useless, with the proviso that if the leaser improved the lot with a dwelling, he or she would be elegible purchase the land three years later at something like ten to twenty dollars an acre.

In the Morongo Valley of California, east of the San Bernardino Mountains and east of Palm Springs, near Joshua Tree and Twenty-Nine Palms, the desert is dotted with these dwellings, most of which have been abandoned.

Some of the same fascination applies to these dwellings too. They are not magisterial. They were not once visited by Mary Queen of Scots (Dunnottar) or Bram Stoker (Slains). But one wonders about the lives lived there. What would it be like to live in so small a space, built in the style we called “shack architecture” when we stayed in Joshua Tree a few years ago? in so unforgiving a climate? What enemies, even natural ones, would the dwellers within these small houses have to face?

One morning, we came upon an abandoned shack, the back slope of its roof partially caved in on an old single bed. In the kitchen lay what seemed to be the carcass of a dead duck and an open bottle of Jack Daniels. Had the house been abandoned in the wake of some domestic catastrophe? Maybe. But the area around Joshua Tree is home to a small, rugged arts community. The scene could just as easily have been an artist’s tableau. I didn’t want to touch a possibly dead duck to know for sure.