By Count Friedrich von Olsen
It is my understanding that elsewhere in the Sentinel this week there is an article about a local political dissident being tossed in the hoosegow out in Needles. I don’t have a mastery of all the facts, as I have not read this article but merely had an early unedited draft read to me over the phone. When I heard it was about Needles and the sheriff’s department out there my ears pricked up and the rim of my monocle bit into the flesh around my eye. I have heard a thing or two about that town…
I am, as all who know me can attest, passionately in favor of law enforcement. Whenever I see the gendarmes putting some scoundrel into handcuffs, my heart raises a cheer I scarce can restrain. Despite my obvious attitude in this regard, I have heard, from elements I am inclined to trust and heed, a few less than complimentary things about the attitudes of the deputies who work at the sheriff’s station in Needles. In Needles, the county’s smallest city at its extreme east end next to the Colorado River, the sheriff’s department serves as the police department…
I occasionally have visitors up here at my palatial estate. Indeed, some see Lake Arrowhead and its environs as some sort of mythical Alpine paradise and I am continuously beseeched with entreaties from a lifetime’s worth of acquaintances, friends and others with whom fate intertwined me to put them up for a few days or weeks so they can experience firsthand the place where Milton Berle and Joyce Mathews honeymooned in 1941. It might go without saying that most of these are people from the Eastern Seaboard or the Old Country, across the Atlantic, be they Mediterraneans, or Northern Europeans or from the east or west side of the Continent. Many of these choose to travel not by car, but by rail, a particularly European mode of conveyance when you must go a grand distance…
Amtrak has a station in Needles. As Needles is right up next to the Colorado River, many of my visitors elect to make Needles a stopover, a place where they will spend the night or even a day or two before again hopping on the train to San Bernardino or Los Angeles. So many of my visitors tell me the same story that even if I was disinclined to credit what I was told the first or second time, I am now inexorably moved to believe what I am repeatedly told…
It turns out that Amtrak often misses its schedule, that is, runs late. As the train originates in Chicago and there are multiple stops along the line before it reaches California, a four or five or ten minute delay at each can mean the train chortling into Needles as much as two or three hours late. What I have been told, again and again, is that those waiting at the Needles Amtrak station are often approached by sheriff’s deputies and subjected to a rather unseemly rigmarole of having to fend off charges that they are loitering, identifying themselves, opening their bags for inspection and so forth. This is what happens at the train station. If, because the train is several hours behind, they venture out on foot to one of the nearby restaurants, they run the risk of an even more heavy-handed going over, including in one case I was told about, the man being handcuffed while the search of their baggage was ongoing. The officers routinely use the threat of arrest, I am told, to obtain “voluntary” compliance in carrying out these searches…
Those I have spoken to about being subjected to this welcome to California do not exactly look like criminals. It is no longer fashionable, I understand, for people to wear fur, but let me tell you, many of those accorded this treatment are in the mink and fox set. Some have refrigerated closets. On one occasion, some guests I was expecting were so rudely treated by sheriff’s deputies while they were near the Needles Amtrak station that they called me to tell me about it. The sword side of this couple was an old and dear friend, one to whom I indeed literally owe my life as a consequence of an act of breathtaking courage he took upon himself some six decades ago. I felt as if I somehow had lost face with this couple because of how abominably they were being treated by the authorities in the county within which I have chosen to reside. I was so embarrassed I had Anthony fire up the Bentley and we immediately drove down the north side of the Mountain and out into the Mojave, where through a series of back roads we found I-40 and made it to Needles to retrieve them I am told that last year the publisher of the Sentinel was in Needles, awaiting the Amtrak in the early morning. He, too, was subjected to insinuations that he was a criminal or at least suspected of being one because he was toting a gunny sack into which he had placed his computer and some odd items of clothing…
I cannot, of course, be certain of what the totality of circumstances are relating to the arrest of this fellow who has assumed the mantel of community watchdog out in Needles. Perhaps he indeed engaged in activity that merited his being taken into custody. But if you were to ask me, a fellow who normally will give the police the benefit of the doubt, do I believe it possible or even likely that the deputies in Needles might go out of their way to make trouble for some guy who has been critical of local officials and demonstrably skeptical of the quality of governance in that remote and small outpost in our gargantuan county, I must say, regretfully, I do…