Letter From the Desert: What we owe the land

The next episode of the podcast drops on February 1, and as it’s about the aftermath of the 2020 Dome Fire in Mojave National Preserve I found myself driving to the Preserve to do a little bit of solo recording last weekend. This is never without its cost. The previous few trips were in the company of friends, who constituted a bit of a psychic guardrail. This trip had no guardrails. That turned out to be a very good thing.

For those of you who haven’t known me long, I should bring you up to speed: Cima Dome, where the Dome Fire burned 44,000 acres and killed about 1.3 million Joshua trees in August 2020, was the center of my world. I started visiting in 1995, started spending weeks there in 1997, and moved to the desert from the Bay Area in 2008 so that I could be closer to Cima Dome. Before the Dome Fire Cima Dome had been more of a home to me than most of the places I’ve ever lived. I owe the place my life.

Turns out I owe it something even more important as well. I may have come as close to being at peace with the fact of the Dome Fire as I ever will be.