Ripley Desert Woodland
Snow remains this afternoon, thin glazed patches underneath the junipers. Ravens fly in pairs through the Western Mojave sky. A pair approaches, not seeing us behind a stand of juniper and Joshua. First one and then the other double-takes, stumbles in mid-air.
Their wingbeats are loud enough to echo off the low Neenach hills. It’s not as quiet as I’ve gotten used to, but it will do. The ground is sodden. It must have been a few inches of snow fell here last week, drifting under the junipers, turning the alluvial silt and gravel to mud as it melted.
Juniper and Joshua on the valley floor: a taste of the Pleistocene Mojave. We passed the Gorman grove on our way here, burned to the ground a decade or so ago. Stump sprouts already studded that field when I stopped three years ago. That’s the westernmost stand of Joshua trees, and the story is they rode there on the San Andreas fault, escaped the confines of the Mojave Desert with sly, tectonic patience. Their closest fellows that I know of are fourteen miles east, about a 70,000-year trip along the fault. This seems wrong. I need to ramble in the hills between, see if I can find a closer grove. Perhaps there were such, fallen in the last century to the plow and the torch.
Or perhaps the fault had little to do with it. The locals did plant trees, here and there, pre-contact. They are forever confounding the wildlife biologists, those pre-Columbian desert natives, planting groves of desert palms and carrying disjunct populations of tortoises into the Black Mountains.
The ravens work the Aqueduct route back and forth, searching for roadkill and drowned jackrabbits. The Raven searches in me. I have been in a deep funk these last days, out of place in the city and sifting through the ashes of who I was once, hoping for a stray ember to blow on. We came up here to see if it would help. She watches me as I watch the landscape.
Had I but water and bread, I would stay here happily for weeks.
A hundred years ago this whole valley was clothed in forest, aromatic juniper and Joshua dagger-armed, and coyotes slept fat on beds of desert forest duff. They lope across dangerous highways now, brave the guns of angry ranchers. One passed here recently, its tracks sunk deep in the sodden ground.
More than nine-tenths of the Antelope Valley’s forest is gone; more than ninety-nine hundredths. Fallen to the plow and the torch. A bare spot near here was dry-farmed in the 1930s and then left alone. Nothing but rabbitbrush has grown back since then.
Juniper and Joshua on the valley floor. A packrat midden sits four feet off the ground in a stout crooked elbow of juniper. Sage sparrows flit noisily between the yucca stems.
Much of the remaining forest is for sale, ready to be subdivided into ranchettes.
The Raven searches in me. Old terrains shift along scarred faults, slide by increment to places unanticipated. The ground is sodden and records our passage.
Comments
Always beautiful writing here—even in mourning.
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