Today is pure autumn: a looming grey and clouded sky, thin bright sunlight that breaks through in places and illuminates the glowing, colored trees. It is two years since my winter of freezing rain and despair, and I find myself growing nervous for the winter here to come. I have just taken my headlong nature and let it free – it sent me ricocheting around the Western Hemisphere for a while before allowing me to settle on a school, a city, even a state. So I am in the desert now, learning the names of cactuses (because everyone calls them cactuses, never cacti, I’ve never heard it once), learning the beauty in flat salt-faced rocks, alluvial magic, and the fierce gorgeous explosion of blooming ephemerals after a rain.
I am reaching, widening, hoping to allow the desert in. It becomes what the ocean has always been: a representation of the infinite. I said it before, and I think it was that train ride that began my long, winding journey here: sunrise over the desert is not a thing to be taken lightly. It was one morning, watching the light stretch out over the mesas, stretching to seize my halfway sleeping eyes, stretching to encompass each grain of dust and grit, each spine on each prickly pear, stretching, that morning, that I began to love the desert. So I stretch myself to let the love in and fill me.
It is a bigger and more varied thing that we imagine, the desert is. Hiking from the wide rolling base to the grasping peak of one of the tall desert mountains is akin to walking from Mexico to Canada, from branched saguaro to spruce forest in the space of nine thousand feet. In the lower reaches, there are rodents that live on nothing but dry grains and occasional insects, never drinking water, only producing their own. At the top, there are only lichen and wildflowers, and the wild howling of the wind. Above treeline, even the usual wilderness noises are gone: no crickets, hardly birdsong, just the wind against bare rock. Just the wind heaving through the occasional twisted bristlecone pine. Just the wind. There, it is too quiet for poetry, too quiet for human life. We hike through and hurry back down to the conifer forest, where rustling in the underbrush assures us we are distracted from the stark eyes of god. Above treeline, there is hardly air enough to hide in, much less breathe.
In between you find the pines and oaks, the chapparal, wide prairie grassland, and yes, finally, the subtle rolling desert of so many of our dreams. Below the oak woodland, the desert seems to truly take hold; there, nothing is friendly, or comforting, or inviting. Everything stabs or stings or stinks, full of revealing names like cat-claw acacia – and ironic ones like teddy-bear cholla, which looks soft and furry from ten feet away because it is covered in a multitude of hateful, curving spines. There are cactuses with “jumping” spines, which are perfectly clear on their final few inches, so even when you think you’ve given them a wide enough berth, you find yourself jabbed repeatedly, their barbed ends stuck into your skin. The ants all bite, the scorpions can kill, the rattlesnakes lie camouflaged and hidden in the shade until your unsuspecting boot inspires their rage.
The sound of a rattlesnake’s rattle, I think, must be tagged, filed somewhere in our genetic material, along with cougar screams and the words we need to talk. It makes the blood run cold, a cliché that I’d never appreciated until I looked down on a hike and found my foot hovering two inches above a napping Western Diamondback rattlesnake. I couldn’t stop shivering for hours afterwards, my blood gone cold in literal truth.
There is something about meeting a predator, in the wild. The rattler isn’t such a good example of this, because though it could certainly have done me significant damage, I knew even in my terror that it didn’t want to eat me. The bear tracks that I could fit both my fullpalmed hands in, however, still wet and deep in the mud, those made an itching at the base of my neck, a flaring of the nostrils, widening of the eyes. The sudden, thudding realization that I am made of food. So easy to forget the food chain when grocery shopping, buying meat in Styrofoam cutlets, safe. In all my lists of fears, I did not include eaten alive, or even hunted. But to look at bear tracks in the gathering darkness, think of the flimsy walls of your tent and the beef jerky in your pack, then the mind jumps, jarring, to your own flesh jerked and salted, the sledgehammer knowledge that you are meat, you are blood, you are bone, and you would not stand a moment’s chance against a bear. It is refreshing, in a nihilistic, masochistic kind of way; it makes me feel like I have a right to be there, tromping around in my polypro and my Gor-tex and my pride.
Down in the canyons, the humbling comes from god himself. First, you are struck down by the beauty: the striated, climbing, soaring walls, the variegated stones, the cold cold pools tucked deep into narrow shadows that haven’t seen the glance of daylight since the Pleistocene. Then: you look up and see a tree wedged between the canyon walls some fifteen, fifty feet over your head, a massive log with a diameter much wider than you are, a piece of wood you estimate would take eight people to lift and move. You look down to the trickle of a stream that winds past your feet, then back up, up, past the tree into the sky. A single cloud puffs its lonely way across an otherwise clear expanse of blue, but all you can think is thunderhead, downpour, flashflood, and you quicken your steps.
Out of the canyons, and into the flats: the space itself is a slap. Like the universe, the desert proper appears to be isotropic and homogenous – no matter which way you look, no matter how far you walk, the slow undulations of sand and scrub do not change. Whiptail lizards and drooping songbirds watch you with slow eyes, prickly pears cumber your path, the sun assaults you in a long silent scream.
It is a sin that to some people this open palm is an invitation – to develop, to irrigate and bulldoze and build swimming pools and fountains and houses with lawns. We insist on green where no green can grow, plant our concrete cancerous pulsing cities where thousands of years of seasons saw fit for creosote, saltbush, pocket mice, and death. I can think of no better proof of our increasing madness than that the desert cities are the fastest growing in the country. But I moved here too, so who am I to complain?
I am not nor will I ever be fully free from hypocrisy. At least I didn’t move into a subdivision; at least I don’t own a Sports Utility Vehicle. At least I’ve got some pride.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home