©2007 - Authors retain all copyrights.
"This is the most beautiful place on earth." - Edward Abbey, Arches National Monument, Utah.
I've never been to Arches, yet I understand where Ed Abbey is coming from when he says this.
The desert is a pretty inhospitable place to those who wander in unaware, just ask anyone who has wandered unprepared into Death Valley during the summer. Even in this day of helicopters and cell phones, the desert still makes the traveler acutely aware that they might just be one water bottle or misstep away from being an old photograph on the front of the local newspaper. No matter, I prefer it this way. The forests and swamps have become dirty, dirty with people and secrets, but the desert... the desert is clean. In the desert, you can see where the path is going to lead you. There’s no room for secrets here; there are not enough trees.
I'm not naive enough to think that the desert remains as pure and clean as it once was, but it still doesn't leave a lot of places to hide things. The high desert is populated by plants adapted to minimize exposure to the sun, and this inevitably leaves them with less leafy material than would be found in the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Take a walk in the steppe, among the Joshua trees and the sagebrush; there is very little that grows to even a meter high. The Joshua trees or a few scrappy conifers may grow higher, but they are so few and far between that they hardly offer any concealment. A man could hide easily behind some sagebrush if he put his mind to it. A band of men might be able to conceal themselves if they spread out, but a vehicle or house, a tent even, would be spotted and called out immediately. Yes, yes, there are of course the rocks and the canyons, but it is bare rock; what you see is what you get. It’s honest— yeah, that’s a good word for it.
The desert is very frank with you; it is an easy place to die. Some of the people who come out to the desert only see the dangers of heatstroke, sunburn, or dehydration; these people are quickly dispatched to the vultures. It’s too bad, but what other rights do we have as Americans if not the ones that allow us to wander into a scorching wasteland, of our own free will, and find out the hard way just what we're made of? Heat and sun are definitely the biggest danger of the desert, and are usually a significant factor whenever someone drops out of the race during the summer, but before it gets to that point, there is something that leaves a person trapped in the sun far from water. Big rocks: they're easy to fall off of, and kicking at that rattlesnake probably won't help out a whole lot, though it might distract from the fact that the ground is rapidly liquefying, and creeping up the shins, now the knees. Hmmm, we've got some problems now. Oh, by the way, it’s also getting to be night, so good luck with those clothes wet with mud; good luck getting a fire started.
As much as I love the fire, I've got to admit that it’s becoming a "problem" in the desert of late. In most cases it is much better to simply let the fire go on, as that’s what it would've done in nature, but in the deserts outside of major cities, the amount of pollution in the air has become so large that it is actually fertilizing the ground and allowing grasses to spread and colonize more land. This allows isolated lighting strikes to blossom into widespread brushfires, which burn down trees that are not as adapted to flames as their wetter counterparts. Even the Ponderosa pine, which inhabits much of the dry forested land that abuts deserts is adapted to the fires that whip through every once in a while, and when trees do burn, they might be partially replaced within a century. But the Joshua trees and the junipers that call the desert home are not so lucky. These hardy desert dwelling plants take a very long time to grow, and can't just be replaced after every fire that waltzes through the place.
Fire cleans things up, but in the desert, there’s really not so much of a need to clear things out as often as in the forest. There’s no mucking about like with the meter and a half of salal, Oregon grape, blackberry, sword fern and whatever else is out in wetter forests. In the desert, you see him and he sees you, whatever else happens beyond that, at least both are starting on the same page. Sure, there are some sketchy characters out in the desert; they came out there for the same reason as you did, so they might live as they want, even if it’s a bit creepier than most folks. Of course these aren't the characters the desert is about, rather they are products of our modern world, made this way in the concrete jungle; at least you can see them through binoculars, instead of stumbling onto their front porch while crashing through the salal. Of course they can see you just as easily through the dry air, as can the cougars, coyotes, and vultures; there’s no fox-walking across damp earth here.
Though it’s not cluttered up with a whole lot of plants, it is a bit hard to see through the masses of people that have got it in their heads to come out to the desert for some crazy reason. These aren't the sort of people that come out for the spiritual side or the quest to escape society; they want to bring it with them! In any case, they don't seem too determined, so they might be driven off with minimum effort. I can't imagine a whole country of people with the will to leave their cars and mobile homes. The truth is that if the entire country really was willing and able to come out to the deserts, mountains, and parks, we'd be in a whole lot of trouble. Those out in the wild like to think that they're insolated from the rest of the world's problems, and confident that nature will conceal and protect when it comes down to that. But when the bombs start falling and the mysterious landing craft start appearing from China, these people are fleeing to deserts and mountains, and even if only a fraction make it, it will still be trouble for those who have been there all along.
In the long run, the desert is not one that is able to hold secrets either. What makes the desert the desert, a minimal amount of precipitation, is exactly what allows it to hold onto everything that it touches. In wetter climates, there is a swarm of fungus and successional species that are chomping at the bit to tear down any structure that might enter their home, be it concrete bunkers, logging trucks, or even people. These organisms, in addition to rust, tree fall, and washout ensure that whatever is brought into the forest has a very limited amount of time that it can survive without human maintenance. In the desert however, with the minimal rainfall that it receives, there are no fast growing plants, moss, or fungus that can overwhelm and break down the tailings that men leave behind when they step across, or settle the desert.
In the high desert outside of Joshua Tree Park in California, there is settlement by various people (which includes me) who thought it would be a nice place to live— which it is, even if I wish they'd move away. Anyway, there are a whole lot of homesteader cabins built on land that the government gave to GI’s after World War Two. Some of these buildings haven't been lived in for over 50 years and yet they're still there, a little bit sandblasted by the wind but much more intact than if they had been abandoned in the middle of the Olympic rainforest for half a century. Out in the town of Joshua Tree, there’s a (mostly dry) stream that runs across the end of what could be called a neighborhood out there. Down in this wash, there are the remains of a few cars that have been dumped there over the years. The doors and windows have long ago been ripped off by flash floods or shot out by drunken hicks (they're really actually lovely people). The thing is that all the structural elements of the car are still there, and they show no signs of leaving anytime soon; even though they're pushed around by floods every year, there’s no rust on them. The flash floods and winds push things around and might pile sand somewhere, but for everything that gets buried, there’s always something that becomes uncovered, continuing the cycle. Even footsteps and tire tracks can last for years. If a foot falls or a vehicle drives anywhere but some sort of drainage, there is nothing that will sweep those footprints away, even when the rain comes. The soil crust will break even when a person stands on it, and it will be a long while before the sand builds up enough and cements itself like it has done before. Because of this phenomenon, dirt bikes and quads will leave their legacy long after peak oil has sent them to the scrap heap. Perhaps this concept would be better referred to as permanence, rather than honesty of the land, but the truth is that you really can't hide what you are doing to it The land is honest and will tell exactly what you did to it, good or bad.
People want to come out to the desert because they believe that nothing is there. These folks are wrong, and their attitudes towards those who are already out there, plants and animals included, mean that things are going to get hurt by people charging out into something they understand little of. The purity of the desert itself is not something you want to take lightly.
Nevertheless, the desert attracts a part of everyone— the desire to escape it all, to run and hide in a land of sand and rock. You can hide, though the desert is going to find you someday when your canteen has leaked all your water and you seem to have lost your own tracks way back in that maze of canyons. Well, then I suppose you'll have a number of hours to get yourselves acquainted before you do finally get to run and hide.