Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds (Part One)

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Hey friends! As promised, here’s Part One of the longish essay I’m offering for our paid subscribers. Another free issue will be landing in your mailboxes in the next few days.

Look! The pink thunderheads are lined up on the eastern horizon. They will bring another day of rain to the red rock canyons, another blessed disaster of too much precious water. A lesser nighthawk skims the foreground air, seining the atmosphere for the night’s haul of aerial plankton. 

Look! To the west, a sliver of sky beneath the cloud pack, its color one I have only seen on days like this, in places like this. When I used to leave the desert and had to coax myself up the long slope east of Tehachapi Pass, where California State Route 58 climbs toward that southernmost notch in the Sierra Nevada, on Sunday evenings after two days, or four, spent desperately chasing whatever satori awaited me in the Mojave, I would one time in ten or so see this same sky color, almost always following a rain. A clear celadon. A slate green replete with particulate matter.

And then I would arrive home. Or so I thought at the time. I would join my fellow human beings in their clustered crowds, and I would pay attention to such matters as traffic patterns and lunch rushes and the likelihood of being robbed on any given day. I would crowd into trains and not look anyone in the eye. I would not feel the next passenger whose whole length I touched involuntarily with my whole length. I would breathe something like freedom on the walk to the parked car. I would eat and fall asleep and awaken, repeat the process with trivial variations. 

On rare occasions there would be a coyote at the interchange. A redtail hawk on a power pole. A whale breaching off the freeway. I would watch, as rapt as traffic safety or the speed of my commuter train would allow. And then I would submerge into urban life again.

Six or seven times a year, sitting alone near a campfire in the desert, or under a sky filled with stars, I would feel as though I had just awoken from a marathon and incoherent dream of urban life. The waking would begin as I plunged eastward on that long stretch of 58 east of Tehachapi Pass.