Letter From the Desert: Scars

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The tree at the entrance to my Cima Dome campsite, killed by the Dome Fire 13 months ago, has fallen. I saw it yesterday while showing my business partner around the Dome. She hadn’t seen the place before. The tree was just one of more than a million killed by the fire. It still bore a sleeve of incinerated bark, though that sleeve had peeled off in patches to reveal bone white dead stem beneath.

I traced a tiny crescent on the back of my right index finger. It is a shiny patch of skin that no one would notice but me, because I know where to look for it. It is almost at the base of the finger where finger joins the rest of the hand. It is exactly the place where the hand would hit, for instance, the rusted circular blade of an industrial can opener if the hand’s operator attempted to lift a garbage can loaded with 50 pounds of orange peels through a narrow gap between the prep table holding the can opener and the cooler where the cafe kept the dairy products. A workplace injury of vintage 1984. It has not so much faded as been covered over by minor scars accumulated since.

I have been rethinking the concept of scars.

Actually, “rethinking” may be the wrong word. I have been thinking about the concept of scars, possibly for the first time.

I have, without really pondering the issue, mainly considered scars to be discrete visual reminders of individual injuries. I have not asked myself where the dividing line is between wound and scar. There must be a threshold of sorts. Some scars, at least, no longer trouble their bearer. My shiny index finger arc escapes my notice for months on end, even when I pay close attention to that finger as, for instance, when I sliced off its tip while slicing breakfast potatoes on a mandoline a couple of years ago. The old injury accrued at Caffee Durant stopped offering up reason to notice it within a few months. (The newly flat spot at the tip of the same finger did likewise, 34 years later.) I have incorporated that old wound entirely into myself, my arcuate course through life seemingly unperturbed as a result.

With some scars, though, the wound seems to persist. A couple of weeks ago I walked with my friends Mike and Sarah on Conglomerate Mesa, a near-wild forest of Joshua Trees between Owens Lake and Death Valley. An old road still shown on some maps had been “restored” to not-road; ruts smoothed out and plants transplanted into the former right of way, and yet the road-wound persists, and may be used to justify further injury to the landscape.

The mere presence of the scar has prompted a gold-mining company to suggest sending behemoth mining trucks up this route, thwarting its centuries-long recovery and facilitating even worse damage at the road’s end.

We all of us know people like that, who take the existence of a scar for license to reopen the wound.

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A thing has a kind of equilibrium. Imagine it as an old growth forest, a healthy expanse of skin, a thriving population of wild animals, a human psyche in a state of contentment and calm. And then some other thing upsets that equilibrium, plows a furrow in that thing’s stable state of existence. The injury may be due to someone intending harm, or it may not, or it may be hard to tell. It almost doesn’t matter for our purposes. The injured begins to seek equilibrium anew. If the wound is minor enough, that new equilibrium may seem very much like the previous one. That is likely because we don’t bother to look closely enough. The trees that grow in the forest’s wound will be different species, fulfilling different functions, and they will certainly be younger. The skin that grows back will look different, its collagen fibers reaching across to fill the gap. The wild animal population will lose a bit of its genetic diversity, its evolutionary fate possibly nudged in a different direction. The human psyche fills the wound with life lessons and new coping skills.

Eventually, what results may be considered beautiful: a centuries-old patch of aspen turning yellow-orange like the long-forgotten flames that spawned it. Eventually, it may be difficult to recall that long-lost equilibrium.

For instance. How did I think about my role in this life before the first time an adult told me in so many words I was a waste of skin and oxygen? Fuck if I know. That was a question I asked on repeated occasions of one particular old friend, who never had much to say in reply but who was steadfast in her companionship, inordinately patient, and a very good listener. And there she is, burned and uprooted at the spot where my usual campsite merges into the dirt Jeep track.

There comes a point, I think, at which thinking of these as scars is pointless. Nor am I tempted to gaslight myself, and you, into calling them mere “lessons” from which we would best “learn.” So much of the damage to which our scars attest was cruel, or negligent, or even — as in the case of the evolving 43,000-acre scar the Dome Fire left on Cima Dome — just needless. It serves no one to concoct an uplifting moral to any of this. There are some lessons that have been learned enough. Sometimes wounds carry with them no lessons worth learning.

Except, possibly, that I am learning that each of us — human, plant, animal, landscape or nation — is a palimpsest of scars laid one atop the another. That suffering cannot be allowed to justify more suffering. That lashing out under remembered pain may cause the wound that prompts someone else to create a wound in yet another person.

And there’s this: there might just be someone else nearby who knows roughly how your scar feels. And vice versa.

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