Turns out this piece, written in April 2005, won’t be making it into the book. So I’m putting it here.
On a map of the Western Mojave, a host of place names divide the land into basins, counties, military reserves, and irrigation districts. Aside from the mountain ranges, these territories’ edges are straight lines. It is expansive country, and – in the main – flat. What desert mountains there are have been covered to their necks by alluvium washed down from the greater ranges walling off the desert to the west: Sierra, the Tehachapis, the San Gabriels. The desert slopes up gently to its terminus at the ranges’ alluvial fans. You can engineer a road across the Western Mojave and make only shallow roadcuts, each one just enough to fill the slight hollow ahead.
I think of the whole Western Mojave as The Vale of Spousal Longing.
I took a class some years ago in which the instructor, a geologist, said that traveling eastward from the Central Valley, the Mojave was without interest until you reached the Calico Mountains north of Barstow. I knew what he meant. If you drive east looking for evidence of tectonic grandeur, grabens and fault block mountains and antisynclines, until you reach Barstow they are all in the rearview mirror. You could visit them, but then you’d be in the Sierra, not the Mojave.
But in the Western Mojave, with few mountains to hold it aloft, the sky reaches all the way to the ground. After a rain, the atmosphere shows in patches of pale celadon through the lingering clouds, or the pink of a 1950s motel shower stall, or both. When day ends, no ranges shield you from the deepening of sky. The dark brilliance swells by increments, in the firmament and in you as well. By the time Mars pokes its head up over the Owlshead Mountains, the twilight will have suffused you clear to the bone.
I’ve spent many days alone in Joshua tree country, and while I’ve sometimes felt the lack of human companionship, I’ve never really felt alone. The company the trees provide is far too piquant to allow one who travels among them to feel pure solitude. Still, after a few days away, either on my own or in the company of friends, I start to miss my wife something fierce.
Though we may have parted only a few days before, and though we phone most nights while I’m gone, the Western Mojave is where I most keenly feel the lack of her company. I am six or seven hours from home. If I’m headed homeward, I face a long, straight, stultifying stretch of interstate through the Central Valley. A million dulled commuters, dozing at 65 miles per hour in the passing lane, will never once check their rear view mirrors to see if they are blocking my progress. They are obstacles between my wife and me.
Lack becomes ache, ache becomes sorrow, sorrow congeals in the bloodstream. I find a telephone, call home, leave a message shot through with forced cheer on the answering machine. It doesn’t help. From Mojave I point my truck up the hill toward Tehachapi, and drive through a thick band of Joshua trees, the last I will see until my next visit to the Mojave.
There are idiosyncratic Joshua trees in the Western Mojave. They grow in loose drifts along the road from Mojave to Barstow, widely-spaced forests of wildly gesticulating trees on shallow west-facing slopes of hills so subtle that it can take a transit to find them. The trees there bear all the loopy eccentricity for which their species is known. But go to Gorman or Red Rock Canyon, or head up the long Freeman Canyon road from Ridgecrest toward Walker Pass, and the Joshua trees you will find there are subtly different. They grow in groves with trunks packed so tightly together that you would have trouble driving a goat between them. They tend not to branch. Where they do branch, the new stems grow rigidly upright. Some trees look almost globular, a mass of stems growing from a single point on the ground: the original tree has developed crown sprouts from its base, each of which has become a new trunk. Others grow separately but close-ranked. In places they seem a battalion, a regiment of yuccas advancing westward.
Though Joshua trees can’t set seed without the cooperation of yucca moths, they have a reproductive ace up their sleeves. A tree will sometimes send out thick lateral stems - rhizomes - that grow just below the surface of the ground. The rhizomes sometimes extend dozens of feet from the mother tree. They turn upward, and a new rosette of Joshua tree leaves pierces the soil. The young rhizomatous tree grows a web of roots, red-cored pencil-thin tendrils delving the deep alluvial soil. Once these take hold, you can cut the rhizome and the new tree will grow just fine on its own.
The new tree is a clone, genetically identical to the old. It has come to life with none of the chromosomal reshuffling that takes place with reproduction via pollen, ovary, and yucca moth. A forest of genetically identical trees is, theoretically, more vulnerable to pathogens and climatic extremes than a genetically diverse population. That hasn’t seemed to hamper the Joshua trees of the Western Mojave.
All Joshua trees seem to possess the ability to send out such shoots, especially in response to fire. In Kern and Los Angeles counties in the extreme western part of the tree’s range, the trees develop immense rhizomatous networks in areas where there has been no fire for a century. Are the shoots a response to the deeper soils of the western Mojave, or to the area’s greater moisture? Might they happen if the local yucca moths fail to pollinate flowers for some years running? No one seems to know.
Revered California botanist Philip A. Munz long ago described these rhizomatous forests of Joshua trees as a distinct variety of Yucca brevifolia — var. herbertii — but botanists since have deprecated his description. Aside from the greater frequency with which the Joshua trees here develop side shoots, there really isn’t much different about them. Other Joshua trees grow both crown and rhizomatous shoots, from the far eastern jaegerianas in Utah and Arizona to the statuesque brevifolias in Joshua Tree National Park. Pakoon Spring, a remote part of the Arizona Strip across the Virgin Range from Mesquite, Nevada, is a desolation of black desert-varnished rock and drought-blasted creosote, the fetid sump of Lake Mead glistening slickly in the distance. I saw rhizomatous shoots growing on Yucca brevifolia var. jaegeriana there, the furthest coming up a good two or three feet from the parent tree. True, the parent tree was a spindly thing, seven feet tall, and true, none of the side trunks reached more than half that height. But they were rhizomatous clones nonetheless.
Without more to distinguish them from the rest of the species, botanists have demoted Yucca brevifolia var. herbertii to a mere form, the lowest taxonomical unit recognized by botanists, one step above saying “any difference you see is imaginary.” In the new field guides, the description – where it is mentioned at all – is written “Yucca brevifolia forma herbertii.” The trees in the western Mojave go on sending out rhizomes, named or not.
Becky and I seem to spend more days apart than many couples. Time together is often hard-won. One morning a number of years ago I sped from Barstow toward Cantil to a rendezvous with her. I had been in the Eastern Mojave for some time. She drove down from the Bay Area, our dog Zeke in tow. We planned to meet at a campground in the Joshua trees, to spend a long October weekend together walking, talking, reuniting.
When I got there the park was gone. A major storm had rolled through the desert the previous week, and a flash flood had scraped the whole valley clean of human-built encumbrances. There was no campground, no sign, no trace of the “clearly marked turnoff” I had described to Becky on the phone the night before. She was already en route with no cell phone. I drove up and down the road in a panic, hoping to spot her in traffic. There was no traffic. I found a turnoff onto a dirt road not far from the former campground. I decided Becky might have thought this turnoff was the place I had intended us to meet. I parked by the side of the highway, walked in to a cul-de-sac parking lot surrounded by red cliffs. I heard the jingle of Zeke’s tags. Becky had pulled up behind my truck at roadside. We spent four days camping atop a ridge covered in single-leaf pines. To the east, a thick rhizomatous forest of Joshua trees washed up the slopes of Freeman Canyon like a tsunami.
On the floors of Mojave Desert valleys grows the creosote bush – Larrea tridentata. The resinous denizen of the hot lands sends out new aerial stems from the base of the plant. Little by little the plant expands, gaining a bit less than a millimeter in width each year. In time the old branches in the plant’s center die out, crowded and pressed for nutrients. The plant becomes a ring. In the southern Mojave there are oblong rings of creosote. One near Johnson Valley is twenty feet across on the short axis, sixty-five on the long. Dividing the rate of growth into the size of the ring, ecologists figure that “King Clone” is on the order of eleven thousand years old. The seed from which it grew predated all of recorded human history. King Clone was already older than the oldest bristlecone pine when the first pyramids were built.
Walk through a thick stand of Yucca brevifolia forma herbertii – if you can - and you will likely begin to wonder at its age. Is it the result of one tree’s initial network of runners, or of multiple trees in what was once a much sparser forest? Though much is unknown about Joshua trees’ growth rate, their runners certainly grow much more quickly than the creosote can expand outward. Kern County naturalist Ernest C. Twisselmann recounted a Joshua tree runner extending forty feet in one year after a wildfire near Tejon Summit, which seems almost certainly an overestimate. A rate measurable in feet per year is certainly likely. A tree sends out rhizomes, which grow to new trees, which send out new rhizomes. How many years until the bajada is covered in spikes?
The forest in Freeman Canyon is likely far younger than King Clone. It is certainly old enough that from its perspective the road, our campsite, the plastic bags blowing uphill from the streets of Ridgecrest would seem mere brief blurs. The forest was old when Twisselman first visited in the mid-twentieth century, and likely when the bandit Tiburcio Vasquez hid out here in the nineteenth. The Kawaiisu walked this forest for centuries before that. I imagine the forest spreading out from one or two lone trees, a growing patch of green against the foothills. I picture the hidden web of rhizomes, an unseen network of links beneath the desert slope. The trees stand separated by varying distances, but pick out two at random and it’s likely they are connected in ways you cannot see.
On days when I am alone and do not wish to be, I find this reassuring.
The creosote flats below are swathed in dust, and stretch almost to Harper Lake sixty miles away. Down there somewhere one year, Becky stood by a paper-bag bush as an old, female desert tortoise labored toward her. With slow, measured steps, the reptile pulled herself between Becky’s hiking boots. Becky was rapt, reluctant to move, a little worried about even breathing too deeply. A minute passed, then five, then fifteen. The tortoise looked content beneath her new desert shade tree.
Finally, Becky could stand it no longer. She moved one foot away from the tortoise, carefully planted it on the ground, slowly swung the other away, and backed up a few feet. The tortoise blinked, surprised at the sun. She craned her wrinkled neck toward us, spied Becky. She lifted her right front foot, a paddle against an ocean of desert, and made for the shelter of my wife once more.
