Letter From the Desert: Gaslighting the Mojave
Hello old friends and new. Welcome to another free issue of Letters From the Desert. It’s been a minute: I’ve been fighting off some weird fatigue that remains unexplained, even after a PCR test for the most popular explanation for unexplained fatigue these days. The next few weeks involve a lot of travel to far-flung places like Portland and Moab and Denver. That should be a lot of fodder for newsletters, right there.
For those of you new to this newsletter, I try to send out one per week, with free subscribers getting one per month and our paid subscribers getting them more often. Join those paying subscribers with this button, if you like:
Also: 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast I put out with my co-host Alicia Pike, has a new episode up here on the recent floods in the desert, as well as the simultaneous drying up of the Great Salt Lake. On September 7, an even newer episode will go up on mylar balloons and he pollution problem they pose in the desert. Check at 90milesfromneedles.com to see that episode when it’s live, or subscribe to us in your podcast app of choice, or — if you really value the idea of a desert protection podcast — you can join our Patreon supporters here and listen to it now. Those of you who are paid subscribers to this newsletter will find a link to that episode at the end of this issue, after the paywall.
Enough asking for money! As some of you know, I’ve been taking a writing class to keep my tools sharp, and that class ended a couple weeks ago. Below is a piece of my still-in-progress final project for that class.
Also, speaking of writing, I’ll be part of the Joshua Tree Writers’ Festival the weekend of November 12, presenting a panel on environmental writing with my dear pal Rohini Walker; tickets are $25 for the weekend-long festival and available at the event’s Eventbrite page. There will be many excellent writers speaking and reading at this event, like Ruth Nolan, Claire Vaye Watkins, Susan Rukeyser, and many more. Personally, I can’t wait.
In that vein, plans are afoot to have me conduct a writers’ intensive workshop based in the Amargosa Basin, as a fundraiser for the Amargosa Conservancy. This will take place sometime in Spring 2023, and details are yet to be worked out, though we’re hoping to be able to do an in-person residency-retreat kinda thing. Stay tuned.
On with the essay:
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 cloudpack, 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. The desert wind would shake my truck sidelong. I would grin foolishly even if I didn’t want to. I fit into place with an almost audible click, the piece of the jigsaw desert lost too long under some urban couch.
The desert is a tonic for my emotional well-being. It is the natal water to which I would long to swim upstream. It surprised no one when I moved to the Mojave permanently, least of all my then-wife, who made the suggestion. She meant it as a kindness. It was.
It should likewise surprise no one that this landscape that sustains me is threatened, that it may suffer catastrophic collapse within my lifetime. That is, in my experience, the way love stories generally work.
It isn’t summer in the Mojave until the nighthawks show up. like any sensible desert dweller, the birds stay as motionless as possible during the heat of day, then go aloft essentially as soon as the sun drops behind the horizon. This is the soul of summer: thunderheads like those build on the eastern horizon, the day’s searing heat just starting to ebb. The slanting sun draws detail into the nearby hills: topography obscured by the glare of day is revealed in alpenglow and shadow. You think despite yourself that summer here is not so bad. And the nighthawks flash bright white wing bars, skimming past soundlessly, or gathering beaksful of swimming pool water in quiet zzzzzips.
If there is a bird that exemplifies the ease to be found in the desert, the nighthawk is it. The birds nest on the open ground. They don’t bother with building shelter. Females roll their eggs across the soil a few feet every few hours to make sure their progeny don’t get too hot or cold, selecting shade and warm sun as circumstances demand. It’s low-impact parenting, but it works. Adult birds will go into a sort of torpor when temperatures drop, a “hibernation” first recorded (though not discovered) in the related common poorwill by the desert biologist Edmund Jaeger, in a canyon an hour’s drive from here. If there are organisms that survive the Mojave with less apparent effort than nighthawks, I expect all of them are plants. I admire the grace with which the nighthawks live their niche.
On my first summer in the Mojave many years ago, mourning the end of my marriage and the prior and not coincidental death of our dog, I kept company with nighthawks. I lived in a 700 square foot house in a hamlet of about 15 people in a long Mojave Desert valley. The nearest stoplight was 20 miles away across the state line. The house had no cooling to speak of. At the end of the day I would venture into the yard and the nighthawks would be there, controlling the local population of flying insects, drawing lines against the curvature of the sky. On the hottest nights I would throw a pillow and a gallon of water into the Jeep and drive into Nevada, climbing about 1,500 feet into a forest of Joshua trees, and I would sleep there in the relative cool.
One night a wall of thunderheads built on the eastern horizon. Night fell and the sky was sable flecked with a million stars, except for its eastern edge. That view was full of those selfsame thunderheads, only now they were illuminated from within, a hundred bright flashes of lightning per minute. There was no thunder. I judged, it turned out correctly, that the storm was watering the Mogollon Rim country in Arizona. That storm flooded the Grand Canyon’s tributaries, rearranged waterfalls in Havasupai Canyon. I would find that all out in a few days. On that night, I merely knew that all the events in my life had brought me to that moment, that sublime panorama of cataclysm on the most peaceful night I had known in months.
I woke to the sound of cactus wrens in the Joshua trees. I drove home. Against my better judgment, I checked my email. I read my email. One message in particular made me stop reading further. “Dear Chris. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this project. FYI.”
More to come. Link to the most recent episode, pre-release, can be seen after the paywall below. Stay well: we need you.
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