Call me chickenshit if you will. The wash turned me back. It was four or five truck lengths wide, and its sand was too deep to have formed washboard. I pulled to what little side the road had, got out, walked into the wash and plunged my hand down two feet into the sand before I felt bottom. Then my finger broke through the bottom. There was more sand beneath that. I briefly considered backing up, picking up speed and plowing through. But only briefly. I’d have sand up to the floorboards, and then? I had no friend there to help me dig, to lean into the rear bumper of the truck and heave while I shouted encouragement from the nearest shade tree. In fact, I had no shade trees.
Another, larger, deeper wash down the road sealed my chickenshit decision. A week later I’d look at the satellite photos and count the washes farther down the road, some of them making the one that stalled me look like a ditch. Eight and a half miles off the pavement and nowhere to camp the whole way, not without leaving my truck annoyingly and prominently in the road, advertising my presence to those whose job it is to inform me that camping on Arizona State Lands without a permit is against the law.
Instead I walked. Not in any direction, but in widening circles, finding things one after the other that intrigued me. It was odd enough to see saguaros growing with Joshua trees. That I had expected, a metaphoric blending of disparate places, the symbol of the Sonoran Desert hard up against the symbol of the Mojave Desert. But for some reason — despite having seen the two growing together on my way to Prescott two days before — I wasn’t expecting Joshua trees and ocotillos in the same camera viewfinder. And while creosote grows in the Mojave — the northern limit of creosote is the northern limit of the Mojave — creosote in the Mojave grows at lower altitudes that the Joshua tree can generally tolerate, so I rarely see them together there.
And there were things I did not recognize growing there, and things I did recognize growing in appealing combinations. A few denizens stood still long enough for me to take photos of them:
And some were beyond my eyes, a whir and brief darkening of a piece of sky, and I tried to puzzle out their song (a far-off kestrel!) or their geometry of flight (flicker!).
My throat dried, I remembered the truck and walked toward it. I had not stopped walking since I left it. It was a hundred yards away, no more. I got in. The clock read three hours since I had stopped. It seemed unlikely.
