Coyote Crossing

The soil here is tawny, pale with a reddish cast, alluvium washed down out of the Black and Date Creek mountain ranges, and the Grayback and Weaver mountains behind them. Wind and flash flood have rendered the rock, pulverized it. Soft lava and old sandstone mix with flecks of harder, brighter granite.

A Harris’ hawk perches atop a saguaro, regards the landscape blankly.

The broad plain slopes southwest, toward Bullard Wash about four miles away. The soil is mainly bare, easily washed away,  and so the plain is striped with broad washes that storms have carved into the earth. They run into Bullard Wash as well. The sediment they carry will eventually reach the Colorado, 60 miles away as the Raven flies. It may take a thousand years to get there, or ten thousand, but it will get there.

There are plenty of lists of natural wonders available to tourists in Arizona. You’ll find some of the world’s most dramatic scenery detailed on those lists: canyons a mile deep, clustered column cacti and elephant trees, landscapes awash in improbable palettes, towers and pinnacles of Permian red rocks. This little plain between the Black Mountains and Bullard Wash rarely makes those lists. When it does, the mention is limited to the strip of pavement ten miles east: the Joshua Forest Parkway between Wickenburg and Burro Creek. The highway is noteworthy: it runs through a pretty stand of the trees. Most people passing through admire the trees through a layer of safety glass. A few hardy souls get out and picnic at a sun-drenched highway rest stop.

Far fewer souls venture out here along dusty Alamo Road, far enough from the pavement that even the noise from the 18-wheelers’ clattering jake brakes does not reach them. Those that do come here, excepting a few local ranchers, are generally heading for a reservoir park 25 miles west — and it’s much easier to get to that park from the west, where a paved road goes all the way to the shore. Still, a lake-bound traveler will speed past the head-high creosote here a couple times a day on a weekend.

Aside from those few, this plain is devoid of human visitors. But the lack of tourist traffic here doesn’t make the landscape any less important, any less significant. To realize this place’s significance you must have a bit more familiarity with deserts than is typical. If you know a bit about desert plants and where they tend to grow, this place quickly reveals itself as utterly unique. There is no other place like this in the whole world.

This is the one place in the world where Joshua trees and saguaros grow side by side.

That may not seem particularly significant. Put it this way: The Joshua tree is the emblematic tree of the Mojave Desert, and the saguaro cactus represents the Sonoran Desert in much the same way, yet here they grow intermingled. Joshua tree habitat in the Mojave tends to be higher, colder and drier than that saguaros enjoy in the Sonoran. This plain is unequivocally in the Sonoran Desert: aside from the Joshua trees, the vegetation here is Sonoran desert vegetation. Ocotillos spread their spiny fingers skyward with crimson blossoms at their tips. Soaptree, Yucca elata — a cousin of the Joshua tree — bears fat panicles of creamy flowers.

Joshua trees do range out of the Mojave a bit. I’ve seen them growing at the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and in a little swale where the Tehachapis meet the Coast Ranges. I’ve seen them growing out of the red rock of the Colorado Plateau. But those places have been within sight of the Mojave. Here, the trees seem incongruous, out of place.

That’s a bit of Modern-Day chauvinism, of course. Joshua trees grew in what is now the Sonoran Desert as recently as 12,000 years ago. It’s likely the species originated somewhere in northern Mexico and migrated northward as the southwestern deserts grew more arid. It may be that Joshua trees were growing here before any of the Sonoran Desert plants that now accompany them.

Or these trees could be descendants of a population from the north and west that migrated back in this direction over time. Either way, this population of Joshua trees is at about the southernmost edge of its species current range. There are some trees in Joshua Tree National Park, a hundred-fifty miles west, that grow a bit farther south — a handful of miles or so. Those trees are protected, at least in a legal sense — though air pollution, wildfire and climate change threaten their existence.

The Joshua tree forest above Bullard Wash ought to be protected. In a sane world, this spot would be a noted preserve: the “Joshua Trees And Saguaros National Park,” perhaps, visited by desert rats and landscape photographers and tourists making the circuit of Arizona’s natural wonders.

Instead, the Obama administration is considering the possibility of paving the whole place.

This week, twenty-four tracts of land in five western states were designated Solar Energy Study Areas by the Interior Department. Said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar:

“President Obama’s comprehensive energy strategy calls for rapid development of renewable energy, especially on America’s public lands. This environmentally sensitive plan will identify appropriate Interior-managed lands that have excellent solar energy potential and limited conflicts with wildlife, other natural resources or land users. The two dozen areas we are evaluating could generate nearly 100,000 megawatts of solar electricity. With coordinated environmental studies, good land-use planning and zoning and priority processing, we can accelerate responsible solar energy production that will help build a clean energy economy for the 21st century.” [emphasis added.]

This plain between Alamo Road and Bullard Wash — the red-hatched area in the map below — is one of the 24 tracts.

Climate-change-propelled extinction of Joshua trees has been much in the news these last few months. Temperatures are rising, droughts lengthening, and the climatologists talking in terms of 500-year records, 1000-year records. It may well be that no Joshua trees exist in their namesake National Park in a couple decades, that none exist in the wild in a century. Sober-sided ecologists and land managers are beginning to talk seriously about “assisted migration,” or planting and tending wild gardens of Joshua trees farther north, at higher altitudes, where the species might survive.

The Joshua tree forest above Bullard Wash has thrived for some centuries in hotter conditions than most of their kin could well tolerate. In a sane world, plant breeders and arboriculturists would be combing the tract taking seed samples, capturing and studying the yucca moths without which the Joshua trees cannot reproduce, to see whether both species might prove integral to the long-term viability of Joshua tree forests as a whole.

Instead, the Obama administration wants to bulldoze the place, run construction equipment and pipelines and transmission lines through its margins, blade and scrape and poison the ground so that nothing can grow there, and pave it with mirrors. This, they say, is a small part of a climate change mitigation strategy that’s necessary if we are to survive into the 22nd century.

The argument trotted out by the engineers, the anthropocentric so-called “environmentalists,” the terraformers, the advocates of Big Desert Solar is that the desert will be lost anyway if they do not carry out their plans. This is an argument with deep historical roots, perfected in its current form by General William Westmoreland as he spoke of villages in Vietnam.

But one cannot save what one does not understand, and the Interior Department clearly, in it official capacity, fails to understand the plain above Bullard Wash. They say:

Sensitive lands, wilderness and other high-conservation-value lands as well as lands with conflicting uses were excluded [from consideration as SESAs].

The only place in the world where Joshua trees and saguaros grow together, and Interior declares it not a “high-value conservation land.” They fail to understand its value, or they understand its value and lie about it. It doesn’t really matter which, though I suppose if it is merely the former they might be amenable to persuasion via the usual commenting process.

It is not the Joshua trees, of course, to which the terraformers refer when they talk about “us” surviving into the 22nd century. It isn’t even people they’re talking about, really, but a particular subset of people: people unwilling to spend more than 79 cents on a light bulb, unwilling to do without private cars, unwilling to push for the radical changes we desperately need. Human history is a fast car speeding toward a washed-out bridge, and the “people” the terraformers would protect are the ones with their foot on the gas.

If I am given the choice between a world without such people and a world without Joshua trees, I could make the decision without the slightest hesitation.

I suspect that choice will not be exactly necessary, but I am mightily tired of that feeling I got so often during the last decade, the knowledge that faced with a wide range of options, the Executive Branch was certain to pick absolutely the worst option, and then implement it badly. I had hoped for a time this year that those days were over. These days I fear they have just begun.

[More photos of the area here.]

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Adobe Mesa at sunset, Richard Schwartz photo

[Edited post-publication to include a piece I’d misplaced.]

Howdy, and welcome to the belated fifth edition of Carnival of the Arid! It’s a shorter CotA this time around, and flanked (as has become traditional) by beautiful photos captured by Richard Schwartz.

The purpose of blog carnivals is to consolidate a bunch of posts on a particular topic, then amplify the traffic each post gets with a bunch of incoming links. So if you’re taking part in CotA — or if you just find it worthwhile — don’t forget to give us a little link love on your blog or community site or LiveJournal or what have you.

And please spread the word about CotA. Participation has fallen off just a bit — largely due to my own tardiness in putting the thing together this time, I fear — but there’s a lot of wonderful deserty blogging out there we could be including.

If we get a good showing next time around, we could consider rotating the hosting so as to maximize the audience for CotA over time. Let me know if you’d be interested in hosting an installment!

On to the posts! Though they’re fewer in number this time around, the overall wonderfulness of submissions hasn’t flagged. CotA stalwart Silver Fox, for instance, sends along a set of stunning photos of spring wildflowers in eastern Nevada’s Egan Range, taken May 29. The shot of the two-rut leading off into the distance actually hurts, it’s so gorgeous: made me feel the visceral lack of a working Jeep.  Silver Fox offers a bit of more recent local photography as well in her post Hiking in the Rain.

Longtime Coyote Crossing habitué Cowtown Pattie submits a first entry to CotA with her post Bend Critters, a set of wonderful photos of Big Bend National Park on the US-Mexico border, which, in Pattie’s words,

is now part of one of the largest transboundary protected areas in North America. More than two million acres of Chihuahuan Desert resources, along with more than 200 miles of river, are now under the protection of the United States and Mexico.

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Another CotA first-timer, Elizabeth Enslin, sends a submission from eastern Oregon on the native bunchgrass bluebunch wheatgrass, which like most native bunchgrasses these days is on the decline in the wild. A pity, as the species’ importance to wildlife cannot be overstated. Elizabeth crossposted her piece over at the group environmental site The Clade, and you should crosspost stuff there too.

Yet another CotA first-timer, Ole Nielsen, reminds us that while deserts might be sublime playgrounds for those of us who have enough food and water, they pose special survival challenges for people who live in politically unstable places such as Somalia. If you’ve wondered whether there was a connection between aridity and Somali piracy, Ole spells it out for you:

So what can you do in Somalia for a living. Crops gone, livestock gone, fish gone, and no social security. One solution is taking aid helpers as hostages to get ransom money. There is however bigger money in piracy. And the pirates are local heroes. They are the revengers of those foreigners that destroyed the fishing industry and they provide money. Eyl (in Puntland, another more or less independent region, see map below) is the location of most of Somalia’s casualties from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It has about 3 million inhabitants and has become something like the capital of the Somalian pirates. As the so-called pirate capital it is where the high seas hijackers often steer their captured vessels. Special restaurants in the town cater for the captive crews. With their expensive tastes in fancy houses, cars and women, the pirates have brought boom times to the local economy.

At DesertBlog, which has recently undergone a change in staffing, Larry Hogue brings news of environmental groups preparing to sue the Fish and Wildlife Service for slashing critical habitat for the endangered peninsular bighorn sheep. I follow that with a note on the Interior Department’s rather duplicitous wholesale giveaway of public lands to Big “Green” Energy. That last was also crossposted at The Clade.

And though I’ve digressed into less-arid themes lately here at Coyote Crossing, I do have a couple droughty posts to include. I ruminate on a Mojave photo I took in the wake of a devastating wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve, and follow that up with At Home, a Joshua tree-related sonnet it only took me 12 years to write.

That’s it for CotA#5! Please spread the word, link us to hell and back, and don’t forget to send in your arid-land posts for CotA#6, deadline July 31. IF you missed submitting to this edition, feel free to offer a link in comments! Here’s Richard Schwartz, in lieu of Keyboard Cat, to play us off with a fantastic shot of a Southwestern icon:

Delicate Arch, Richard Schwartz photo

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In my memory the bank was twice my height, sloping, a buff soil as washed-out in color as the condensing vapor on my breath. Tufts of grass fringed the blank soil at top and bottom. The little ridge wore stark skeletons of dormant staghorn sumac as a crown, a crest running the length of its spine. I remember the feeling of frostbite deep in my lungs, shoving my ungloved hands deep into my meager denim pockets.

Warmth was only fifty yards away in my uncle’s house, but I was headed in the opposite direction along the two-rut road his farm machinery had made at the bluff’s base. Inside were cousins, and pie, and convivial chatter among the aunts and uncles who had married into the family, but I was sullen. The outside beckoned and I went.

In later years it would get to be a habit. My father’s family would gather for some holiday, and after I had enjoyed as much togetherness as I could stand I would head out, walk down strange side roads where farm dogs would run out at me, barking furious joy. Roan and scarlet naked branches in winter, or the unnecessary profusion of verdant oak and tulip tree jungles in summer, and I would walk through it until the guilt set in. Sometimes I would follow railroad tracks abandoned so long ago that rust an eighth-inch thick flaked off the rails, silver maples thick as my arm growing between the ties, the right-of-way a tunnel through forest grown back for the sixth or seventh time, an old station suddenly looming out of vaporous green forest. Its brick was eroded, cupped faces lined with mortar. The platform had long since melted into the earth.

But this was before then. A cold west wind came up the hill from Canandaigua Lake. I felt my earlobes going numb.

My uncle’s farm was what is now, perversely, called a working farm. Every dime of profit not needed for the feeding and education of my four cousins went back into the livestock, the equipment, the infrastructure. Lawns and paved walks and the like would have been extravagances. In mud season you parked on the gravel and walked planks to the back porch. They were 2 by 8s, I think, and they bowed dangerously in their middles when more than one person was walking on them, and the soles of your shoes got wet anyway. That day it was safer to walk alongside the ice-slicked planks: the mud had frozen and refrozen, scalloped with contorted footprints of kids and stray cows and my uncle’s workboots. I’d looked in the barn, but the cows were off braving the cold somewhere. I imagined them wincing against the wind.

Instead, I headed down the two-rut at the base of the little bluff. The bluff blocked the wind a bit, which for a few minutes — until the comparison with the wind had seeped from my memory — seemed a relief.

There was a little field between me and the paved road, tilled some time ago and then frozen solid. A car crunched along, breaking sheets of ice in the hollows on the pavement. The woman in the passenger seat stared. I must have been intriguing, reed-thin 16-year-old in shoulder-length hair and jeans patched at the knees until there was no denim left between ankle and ass, flea-market fatigue jacket with buttons missing. And Frye boots, if I recall correctly.

The car’s engine noise died off a quarter-mile down the road. The wind picked up a bit. Something odd flicked back and forth in a clump of teasel: a shed snake skin, tan and translucent, belly scale covers lenses magnifying the teasel stems.

That, as near as I can figure it, was the first time I noticed it happening. Whatever it was I’d been upset about was gone. A shed skin stuck in the weeds and I was rapt. An unexpected joy makes predictable annoyance fade in importance.

I had learned to see one ridge over, learned to negotiate the world outside almost within shouting distance of that little bluff,  The ridge and its surround are the deep meaning of wild to me, as tame as they were. I have been days’ walk from the closest person and thought of that cold afternoon two miles from a comfortable farm town.

The staghorn sumac lurks as deep in me as a Jungian’s Shadow, though not so unhappily.  It speaks to me in dreams. Last year, when all was disintegrating around me, I dreamed of an abandoned house not far away from that bluff, down the hill from the house where I learned to see. The house was a deathtrap, turning into dust, and an elderly neighbor talked to me of some vague shameful and violent event inside the house that had prompted the neglect.

Carloads of people drove by, heading toward a forested lake at the end of the road. They slowed to see the house. “Are they curious,” I asked the neighbor, “about the scandal?” “No,” came the answer. “They’re slowing because the house is for sale for five hundred dollars. The paper ran a story on it.”

There were things that had once been possessions in the house, a hundred pieces of garbage for every treasure, brass fixtures attached to rotting wood and old, delaminating mirrors atop Stickley dressers, Arts and Crafts settles with the original upholstery irretrievably mouse-soiled. A pervasive smell inside that a pack of territorial Rottweilers would only have improved. Bronze switchplates with the two-pole push-buttons long since broken. A Wedgewood stove dismantled in the kitchen. Half the kitchen floor a skylight for the dirt-floored basement.

I wondered whether the local fire department might burn it down for practice, whether I could live long enough in a tent or trailer — two winters? Three? — to build a small cabin back in the trees, to let twenty acres of woods come back a bit and plant the apple orchard. I wondered whether, if I took out the treacherous and rotting floorboards one by one, pulled out the crumbling and moldy plaster beneath the 70-year-old wallpaper stained with things at whose origins I cared not guess, there might be intact frame, joists not entirely riddled by termites. I thought of calling my cousin Tim, who lives a few miles away and who — what with his busy career and teenaged son — would certainly have nothing better to do than help me rehab a two-story farmhouse for free.

Across the road a driveway led fifty yards downhill to an old clapboard farmhouse. There were musicians on the porch. The fiddle player turned to look at me, took her instrument out from beneath her chin, stared at me frank and curious through lepidopteran eyelashes.

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Maybe the second song is a little crass. Posting this anyway.

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Okay, I messed up. The job search and various other real-life exigencies ate up my time last month and we skipped a CotA. The few of you who submitted a piece without my reminders: sorry for the delay.

But let’s get back on that feral burro! Call last month a sabbatical.

The canonical description of Carnival of the Arid:

Submissions should have something to do with a desert somewhere in the world. (If you’re not sure whether your work is desert-related, check out this definition at Wikipedia, and if you’re still not sure, send it in anyway.) Submissions can be scientific in nature, or history, or travelog. Images are welcome, photographic or otherwise. Discussions of culture and politics are welcome if they’re desert-related. The one restriction, other than geographical, is that — at least when I’m compiling it — paeans to destroying the desert probably won’t make it. (Developers and ORVers take note.) Paeans to preserving or protecting the desert are fine, as are alerts of current pressing issues.

Deadline — since I’m announcing this belatedly — Is July 1, and CotA will run on July 2.

If you’d like to check out previous editions, here are #4, #3, #2, and the inaugural edition.

So spread the word. Submissions can be linked here in comments or emailed to me at coyotecrossing@faultline.org. If you know of someone whose work might qualify, let them know, or let me know, or both. Retweet and email and link from Facebook and send telegrams. Thanks!

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It just figures.

Not two days after I post the following on my Twitter feed:

I am incomplete without a dog. And I don’t think I want to ever have a dog again.

… I find my next dog.

Or at least her breed.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure, looking at some of the photos here, that my last dog wasn’t of this breed, at least in part.

There are detractors who say that American Indian Dogs are extinct, and that these lovely critters are “recreations” of the line, mixes of various wolfy-spitzy-looking breeds. Then again, there are plenty of people who act as if the original breeders of American Indian Dogs are also extinct. The man behind SongDog kennels, Kim La Flamme, says he began his work to save the breed by finding relict populations of the dogs living with First Nations people from Canada to southern Mexico, and breeding them. He says there are 800 of the dogs now in existence. He insists on interviews with prospective adopters, on spaying/neutering, and that the dogs he adopts out be returned to him if the placement doesn’t work out. Perhaps I’m naive, but I find all that reassuring.

Besides, just look at the ears.

In thinking about this, I do come up against the ethical ramifications of buying a pup from a breeder. Not that I don’t think it’s possible to be an ethical breeder: I do. It’s just that there are so many dogs in shelters needing help. But if LaFlamme is doing what he says he’s doing — saving a line from extinction that bears immense importance to the dog genome, a more-or-less ancestral line of dog without the inbred-to-hell-and-back nature of most current breeds, then that’s something I could feel good about taking part in. Plus, if I’m living with a cat, getting a young puppy would be a plus.

I don’t need to decide anytime soon: I won’t be getting any dog before I nail down more income and a more dog-friendly place to live. But I’ll be looking into these guys. Their temperament and size and general overall doggestalt just feel right to me.

And it feels good to be looking forward in this regard, rather than longingly backward.

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The estimable Larry Hogue has taken leave of his communications consultant job at the Desert Protective Council, and the DPC has asked me to take his place. Not that I could replace him. But I’ll do my best.

The gig, a part-time consulting deal, will involve posting items at DesertBlog, editing and publishing the DPC’s newsletter El Paisano and various Educational Bulletins, maintaining the DPC’s twitter feed at @DesertBlog, and a few other tasks. I’m looking forward to digging in over some long-term strategic items, too.

I hope you’ll wander by and check it all out.

In the meantime, this is a great excuse to point out that most of you probably don’t have a copy of Larry’s book All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys In A Desert Landscape. My review is readable here. It should be required reading for Western Enviros.

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