Among other things, this last trip was a journey of fire. On day two I drove past a staggeringly large field of burned Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park, which looked very recently destroyed. I found out later that the fire had taken place just a few days before. It rekindled, or a new one was kindled, not far away, and that one is still burning.
Also still burning, across the 29 Palms-Yucca Valley Corridor, is an even larger fire that has destroyed the rustic-twee settlement Pioneertown. One of the losses, apparently, is Pappy and Harriet’s, a legendary biker bar where once I had a beer with Sharon. The farther uphill settlement of Rimrock, where Becky and Zeke and I spent Valentine’s Weekend 2001, and where I first watched a ladderback woodpecker drilling into a joshua tree fruit for the yucca moth larva within, was evacuated last I heard, and I fear for the adjacent Pipes Canyon Preserve.
I crawled on my hands and knees through burned tamarisk thickets with the Border Patrol in 114-degree heat along the Colorado. Tamarisk burns readily. Sometimes the coyotes light fires to distract the authorities. Sometimes the migrants’ cigarettes fall in the wrong place, or monsoon lightning strikes.
On my drive back home I stopped to mourn the westernmost grove of Joshua trees in the world, almost astride Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Range near Gorman. Some miles distant from their nearest kin, some have speculated that the grove was once part of a population in the Antelope Valley, on the other side of the mountains, and that it slid into its current location along the San Andreas Fault over thousands of years. It was another chapter of my book, this grove, and it was 99 percent burned. I took some photos.
A few miles north, a huge chunk of the mountainside smouldered near Frazier Park. Wisps of smoke filtered back down to the freeway.
I stopped for lunch near Buttonwillow, and drove a few more hours. A plume of smoke above Mount Hamilton beckoned for an hour, and my suspicions were correct: It was at the head of Del Puerto Canyon. That fire is still burning.
Let me pause here to allow Mr. Cash to render in song the thoughts that filled my head:
It was not over. Outside Tracy, the Interstate starts to curl westward and over the windmill-festooned Altamont Pass, marking the beginning of home to Bay Area drivers, but my way seemed blocked. A staggering drift of smoke lay across the roadway, obviously driven by the stiff wind from a fire uphill. That wind had battered my truck for the past hour, sending me onto the shoulder more than once, and it now obscured the visibility on the road ahead.
Or so I thought. as I neared the smoke, I saw that while some of it was indeed being blown from a burn uphill, much of it was in fact rising from both sides of the road. The fire had jumped the interstate. Both sides and the median were burning, and as I slowed at the front it looked as though the pavement was on fire as well. I had entertained thoughts of driving through. If the fire was twenty feet across, or twenty yards, the truck would likely make it through unsinged. But I could not see the other side.
There were no police there, no firefighters to tell us what to do, the only authority in evidence a lone, distant helicopter slowly swinging a bucket toward the Aqueduct. We sat transfixed for a while, five semi drivers and three other pickups, seemingly hypnotized by the flames, and a few of the pickups turned and crossed the median to head south. It occurred to me that the roadcut we sat in, steep-sided and lined with tall dead grass, could with a slight windshift become a blowtorch. And there was a tanker truck pulling slowly up behind me. What chance was there that it held milk? I crossed the median as well, adding an hour to my trip, but still a good choice as the cops soon closed the freeway for several more hours after that.
And all the while I smiled, content. The westernmost grove of Joshua trees — whose loss I mourned remotely these last three years — that grove lives still. Beneath each clump of dead and blackened trees, beneath each wizened white-fibered corpse, new trees arise.
This may not hold to the east, where Joshua trees have not evolved in the presence of regular wildfire, but the western trees still sprout after a burn. With luck, they will slide along the fault to prosper on an altithermal future coast.
