THE LATEST FROM THE RANCHO

Monday, June 20, 2011

Alta Lochridge, Joshua Tree's curiosity shopkeeper, was a jewelry maker, artist networker and sponsor to many recovering addicts. A visit to Alta's shop was like stepping into a magical world where you could find anything you needed and many things you didn't need but couldn't live without.

Alta's Curiosities was the treasure chest that provided the furnishings and accessories for Fred's Rancho de la Luna, from drive-in movie speakers (for monitoring the studio from the redwood hot tub) and an early Edison wax cylinder player (from the earliest days of recording, pre-gramophone) to cowboy lamps and coffee cups. The Rancho was an extension of Alta's museum of the outlived; filled with items from random estate sales and unpaid, emptied storage containers.

With the mystique of a fortuneteller and the intuition of a coal-miner's daughter, Alta loved nothing more than introducing her many friends to fellow artists and musicians. Her passing, 10 years ago, left a gap in the heart of Joshua Tree, but her legacy, including referring the original Crossroads owners to the site of the old Winners' Circle bar, is indelible. Alta took us to Pappy & Harriet's for the first time, when it was still a place of line-dancing cowboys, marines and aging long-haired bikers. Her whispered jewels of advice, delivered like a secret, ancient formula, included the desert wisdom of turning on the swamp cooler well before it got too hot outside, to beat the heatwave of summer afternoons.

One of her creations, a beautiful, glittery mermaid she transformed from an adult bookstore mannequin symbolized her own transformation from an abused child, to a biker with beloved husband and partner Bob, to a healer of broken spirits. On the day of her memorial the mermaid was paraded through town on the back of the flatbed where she always wanted to stage concerts. Her wish came true when Victoria Williams, the late Buzz Gamble, Fred Drake, and many others, sang in her honor on the back of that flatbed, then parked in Alta and Bob's magical junkyard at home where the overflow from their shop found a place among Airstream trailers, railroad ties and garden gnomes.

Alta left the desert on the first day of a long, hot summer, at the age of 60. 365 days later, on the last day of spring, 2002, Fred sat up on his second-hand couch, where so many visitors had slept, took a deep breath and joined Alta in the Mysterious Otherworld of Curiosities. A year apart, each of these sages of the high desert chose to beat the heat of summer, just before the swamp coolers were to be called upon.

Signed prints of Marcia Geiger's portrait of Alta, above, will be available at Red Arrow Gallery on Saturday, July 2nd.

Ted Quinn

Hi-Desert Benefit for
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