Coyote Crossing

A few days ago in a thread on Facebook I idly mentioned the possibility that I might just make a short list of desert writers whose work I’ve admired over the years. People responded enthusiastically to the idea, so I actually had to put that list together rather than just yammering about it.

So here’s a start. I’ll be doing three writers at a time, and will try to get one of these posts up about every week or so. Links on book titles go to the appropriate Amazon page, while links on authors’ names will go to the author’s website if one exists. A reminder: if you do buy a book as a result of reading about it here, you need not get it from Amazon. If you do, I’ll get a tiny percentage of the purchase and I could use the cash, but I know Amazon isn’t everyone’s favorite corporation these days. Wherever you buy the book, though, if your budget allows, I encourage you to buy new rather than used so that the author gets a little of your money. Buying used is a great way to conserve resources, but that’s at least partly because that way writers don’t eat as much.

Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary is the first desert writer I ever read, as far as I can remember. When I was in exile in the DC area in the mid-1980s I read his books The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country, about the enduring relationships between the Tohono O’odham (fka “Papago”) people and their armory of plants, and Gathering the Desert, in which he engagingly profiles a dozen Sonoran Desert native plants. Reading them spurred my idle appreciation for arid lands into a full-blown love affair.

Gary’s an ethnobotanist, among other things — he studies and writes about human relationships with plants — and brings a profound cultural sensitivity to his writing, in part as a result of the fact that his studies have propelled him into some remarkably effective activism, working with native people to defend their living traditions. Aside from the books mentioned above, his book Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History — co-authored with Mexican tequila agronomist Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata — and Singing the Turtles to Sea, about the Seri Indians’ relationships with desert reptiles and sea turtles, are both absolutely wonderful.

Ellen Meloy

My heart broke a little when I read of Ellen Meloy’s death a week or so after the fact. I’d first found her work in 1997, a collection of river-rafter essays called Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River. She wrote three other books before her far-too-premature passing. Each of the four is worth your dropping everything else to free up some time to read them. Right now, I think The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest is my favorite, if only because I find it coming more and more to mind these days. It’s Meloy’s chronicle of an attempt to reconcile her adopted desert home’s sometimes terrifying beauty with the fact that that same landscape essentially gave birth to the nuclear weapon as both threat and concept. I read it most recently in 2005, while staying in the same room at the Mesa Refuge in which Meloy had stayed while writing it.

Her The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky is her most challenging work: the unifying theme isn’t the gemstone turquoise so much as the color, and she lassoes a whole lot of disparate topics together thereby. It’s more cohesive than a collection of essays, but somewhat less so than most books conceived of as a single work. That caveat issued, it’s charming if you can keep up with it. The author’s recounting of her night spent in the Topock Maze is worth the price of admission all by itself. Her final work, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, is pretty much to the desert bighorn what I hope my upcoming book will be to the Joshua tree: paean and elegy and description and rumination and personal odyssey.

Craig Childs

First off, let me just say that Craig is a mensch. I say that because back before I really got it through my head that people actually read my blog, I poked mild fun at him here, explicitly out of envy at his writing and his experiences in the desert. I found out sometime afterward that he’d read the thing the day after I posted it, and yet not only did he not push me into a cenote somewhere, he’s since said a few very kind things about my writing. (See if you can figure out which of the comments on that post is his.)

The guy is prolific, and I haven’t caught up with his output. Part of the reason is that I keep rereading books of his that I’ve already gone through. His writing is complex and loaded and definitely withstands rereading. The past week I’ve been revisiting Soul of Nowhere losing myself in descriptions of Mexican canyons, pre-Columbian occupation sites with various archaeological treasures, and one rather alarming trek through a dim and precipitous cave in the Grand Canyon. That parody of mine was a gross exaggeration of one aspect of Craig’s work. The man is brave. Hiking three times as far as my water supply allows is pretty much the extent of my desert intrepitude. Craig is a climber and a caver; that adventure permeates his writing, blended finely with lyricism.

If you want to read one book that tells you what the desert is really like, that just flat out conveys the place, Craig’s The Secret Knowledge of Water will get you there. Water defines the desert, and not just by its absence. It carves the landscape, determines the course of washes and ancient paths, arranges the vegetation according to its whim. Maps of my part of the desert bear a hundred place names with the syllable “pah” in them: Ivanpah, Tonopah, Pahrump, Moapa, Pahranagat. “Pah” is water in the Numic languages, spoken by the Shoshone and Paiute, the Chemehuevi and Kawaiisu. Places were named for springs, for seeps and rills and rivers, and sometimes — as in Moapa, “Mosquito water,” for the qualities of the water to be found there. The scarcity of the stuff makes it so much more important, more prominent where it does occur. In the heat of summer, you can still find jewel-like pockets of water in the desert rocks, dark patches on the sand where a flash flood passed hours ago, beads of guttated water evaporating from the tips of yucca leaves before the sun comes up over the horizon. In time you learn to see it, to smell it, and if you’re lucky to find it. I picked up The Secret Knowledge of Water in 2001, sitting in a desert cabin with Becky and Zeke as Becky slept through a nasty sudden fever, and I did not move from my chair until I had finished. Craig takes the reader from flash-floods to waterpockets to tinajas — rock tanks that can hold thousands of gallons of sometimes viscid, sometimes fly-strewn, always absolutely wonderful water. More than any other work I’ve read, this one nails water in the desert: its scarcity, its preciousness not just to hikers but to wildlife, and its surprising tendency to be there under your nose without you realizing it, just up the next bend of the canyon or on the other side of the hill.

Next up: Terry Tempest Williams, Larry Hogue, Amy Irvine.

Feel free to share your own thoughts on these writers or others in comments, or suggest other writers for me to discuss!

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I miss you, you know.

I think of you a lot these days, think of you trudging up the hill toward school beneath that canopy of horse chestnuts and ailanthus trees, cocksure and happy. You were very small then and you carted home as many books as the little library would allow, on space, on animals and history, on tech, on whatever subject captured your interest for long enough to check the book out.

I remember your optimism, your enthusiasm for the world you hoped to enter, and to be honest I also remember your self-absorption. You wore it well, back then. Back then it was a cute thing, an endearing thing, lost in a book more often than not. The world seemed huge and promising. Everyone expected you to live up to some unspecified greatness. I think you were lucky that way: a lot of kids could have gained from the little ego boosts you got from school, from your friends.

You were insatiably curious, and I loved that about you. Still do.

It got a lot more complicated after that, didn’t it? You got lost somehow. I certainly lost touch with you. I can only imagine what you might have thought back then as opportunities seemed to wink out one by one, as disappointment set in and ratcheted itself tighter around you. I imagine it turned you on yourself. I imagine you started to feel as though that best thing about you, that curiosity about the world, was old. Uncool. We all turn jaded, yes, we all succumb to adolescent loathing, but it seems in you that jaded loathing was mainly directed at yourself.

I look back now and feel oddly bad that I couldn’t help you more. I know you’ll tell me it wasn’t my responsibility. You’re right. I had my hands full back then, and you probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. But these days I wonder what I ought to have said to you back then. It’s a useless exercise, a second-guessing, but I wonder. All the aphorisms about studying hard, about listening to the grownups? You got enough of those. You actually listened to the grownups far too well, took on their fears and apprehensions far too readily. What you needed was that little devil on your shoulder: “Don’t listen to them.” “You know better than they do what’s good for you.” “Walk into the woods without telling anyone where you’re going, and keep walking until you get too tired to come back.” “Get these scissors down the hall as fast as you can.” Who in their right mind would give a kid advice like that? It’s a good thing I don’t have one of my own.

But that’s the advice I’d give to you back then, if I had that time machine finished. Think of the glorious risks you might have taken. Think of the stories you’d have.

Too late and irrelevant, all of it. What’s the use of going down that path? We are all who we are. My point is that I miss you. I miss your curiosity about the world, enough that I often try to emulate it. (I’m doing okay at it, too.) I miss your way of looking at the world, your naïve creativity.

I miss your happiness most of all, I think. That was awe-inspiring.

Get in touch, will you? I’d love to hear from you.

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Coyote Crossingian* Morongo Bill left his Backporch for a couple days and went out to what old desert hands still call the “East Mojave” — The Mojave National Preserve and my adopted home, Ivanpah Valley.  He took a hike on the site of the proposed Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, and has thoughtfully provided us with an illustrated, videographed retelling of his hike.

One of the videos is embedded herein for your perusal, as a teaser to get you to go see his post whole.

I need to go hiking with this guy, it’s clear.

*“Coyote Crosser”? Coyote Crossingite”? “Coyote Crossing Commenter”? “Canis Latransient”? What should we call all y’all what hang out here?

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Hey, remember that post I put up a few weeks back about how the story of how the Joshua tree was named is most likely folklore? The one where I said:

But in more than a decade of looking, I have seen not a single reference to the phrase “Joshua tree” having been used prior to the twentieth century.

Well, I can’t go around saying that any more. Here, in a passage from Botanical Observations in Southern Utah II, by botanist Charles Christopher Parry — yes, that Parry — I find the earliest reference to the name I have yet seen. The article was published in the March, 1875 issue of The American Naturalist.

Near the close of the day in ascending the last sloping ridge, leading down on the opposite side to the wide desert plain through which the Muddy courses to unite with the Virgin, we first recognized one of the principal objects of our journey in the singular forms of that remarkable desert production, Yucca brevifolia Engel. This is universally known among the Mormon settlers under the name of “The Joshua.” The mail rider over these desert tracts had furnished us weekly reports of its progress in flowering, so that we were constantly on the lookout for a first view of what had never yet been examined by a scientific botanist. At first a few scattering clumps of the peculiar stiff spiny leaves that characterize this genus of plants attracted attention, then some gaunt forms raised on withered trunks revealed the identical species.  On hastening forward to a more vigorous growth, where the masses of compact flowers were visible at a distance crowning the top of the upper branches or main axis, we soon had one of the lower flowering stems ruthlessly torn down for a closer inspection. The first feeling was one of disappointment; the flowers, crowded in a close pyramidal head, failed to exhibit the ordinary graceful forms pertaining to the Liliaceae. The perianth was of a dull greenish-white color, its divisions long-linear, thickened and confusedly massed together, while the odor given out was decidedly foetid, seeming to present special attractions only to various beetles and insect larvae. An examination of the inflorescence shows a regularity such as the botanist would expect: the upper leaves of the flowering branch gradually becoming bract-form subtend in their axils small jointed flower-stems, with the lower flowers generally arranged in threes. These in continuing their spiral arrangement on the main axis form the condensed mass of flowers which, opening from below upwards, prolong the flowering process for several weeks. Only a few of the flowering stems perfect fruit, and occasionally (as during the present season) all prove abortive, possibly owing to the absence of some insect agency for effecting fertilization. In the desert districts lower down, where this species especially flourishes, the flowering heads are said to weigh frequently over fifty pounds.

The material and notes now supplied will, it is hoped, enable Dr. Engelmann who has made a special study of this genus, to complete the technical description of this remarkable species.

Oh, my poor, sweet, lovely hypothesis, killed so brutally by this damnable fact.

Parry was describing the Beaver Dam Wash and Bulldog Canyon area, near St. George, and it may be that the name was locally popular for some time before it caught on elsewhere in the tree’s range.

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I’ve posted this photo a few times. I’m posting it again now. What jumps out at you when you look at it? The light? The alpenglow on Clark Mountain in the background? The rocks, the Joshua trees? The blurry cholla?

Right now, for me, it’s the least conspicuous aspect of this photo that’s blazing out at me, and I am staggered.

See the dark gray bushes in the foreground, among the Joshua trees? That’s blackbrush, Coleogyne ramosissima, and I don’t think, after tonight, that I’ll ever look at it — or the Mojave — the same way again.

I’m working on a piece for the Desert Protective Council intended to convey the notion that the desert is not a renewable resource. People call paving desert wildlands for solar “renewable energy.” I’ve become increasingly persuaded that’s deceptive terminology, because while the sun may come up every morning the desert landscape that gets bladed to install industrial facilities that make solar power is actually rather fragile and very slow to grow back. And so I’ve been doing a little background research before drafting. There are certain things I intended to mention. The 12,000-year-old creosote clone in Johnson Valley? Check. Cryptobiotic crusts that grow an inch a century, and without which the desert would blow away? Check. I was working on finding some stats about Yucca schidigera, which grows in clumps that take centuries to form — there are 1,000+-year-old Yucca schidigera clumps all through the Mojave Preserve — and leafing through another few old scientific papers I thought I might want to look at, and then I saw a paper entitled Dynamics of Mojave Desert Shrub Assemblages in the Panamint Mountains, California by Robert H. Webb, John W. Steiger, and Raymond M. Turner which was published in Ecology, June 1987.

It mentioned blackbrush.

Webb, Steiger and Turner did a study of disturbed areas west of Death Valley. Some had been disturbed by human activity in the late 19th century, some by debris flows in the last couple thousand years, and some by debris flows of Pleistocene age. They determined the rate at which desert plants recolonize disturbed areas. They found that Coleogyne is very slow to revegetate areas from which it had been stripped.

Now as it happens, I’ve written about blackbrush recently in this very context, in a new Joshua tree book chapter I took to my writers’ group last week. Here’s what I said:

A stand of native blackbrush will take at least fifty years, and probably far longer, to recover from wildfire. That’s assuming there are no fires afterward, and there will be.

It’s a scary image, one literally seared into my brain. In 1997 I went to Bulldog Canyon, Utah, where a fire had knocked down a thick stand of blackbrush and Joshua trees a decade earlier. The difference between burned and unburned was stark after a decade. Where the land had not burned, blackbrush covered the land in an almost solid carpet. Where the fire had been, there was no blackbrush even after a decade.

This is important for a few reasons,  the nearest to my heart being that blackbrush is the most common nurse plant for Joshua trees, at least in the upper elevations of the tree’s range in the Mojave. Blackbrush is pesky to hike through, stiff and ornery and scratchy, and Joshua tree seedlings that germinate under a blackbrush canopy stand a good chance of escaping hungry rabbits and ground squirrels until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. Joshua trees also grow in places dominated by other shrubs, creosote probably blackbrush’s main rival in this regard. More often than not, though, a Joshua tree forest is actually a Joshua tree-blackbrush forest.

So what’s the big deal about reading a paper published a quarter century ago? Just this: it turns out I was off in my estimate of how long it takes blackbrush to regenerate. Way off.

Blackbrush can make nearly solid stands across many square miles of desert. The photo above shows one such, mixed in with a dozen or so other shrubs like Menodora and chollas and a few others. Hiking on Cima Dome is an exercise in getting to know blackbrush. There’s a lot of it there, in some places more than half the plant cover.

Webb, Steiger and Turner found that blackbrush took as much as “tens of thousands of years” — their words — to revegetate up to 20 percent cover in the areas they studied.

That’s one study. Something may have happened to the places Webb, Steiger and Turner examined to slow the growth of blackbrush. So I looked elsewhere. I am still collecting citations for the piece I’m writing. It would seem the consensus is that a thick, Cima Dome-style stand of blackbrush probably takes from 5,000-10,000 years to develop.

That unprepossessing, inconspicuous, actually kind of ugly plant in the photo is the base of a very specific ecosystem that may have taken longer to develop than the whole span of human history.

This may be hard to grasp, for for those of us raised on 19th-century ecological notions such as succession and climax forests and such. So let me put it this way:

Find the oldest coast redwood forest on earth, with trees three hundred feet tall and thirty feet thick at the base, some of them 2,000 years old. Then plat out a few square miles of the White Mountains’s bristlecone pine groves, home of the Methuselah tree and its ancient cohort, ranging up to twice as old as the redwoods. Then pick a random piece of Cima Dome, a couple miles in each direction, full of unprepossessing blackbrush.

Chainsaw all three. Bulldoze it all flat. Leave only stumps flush with the ground. Then let them all grow back at their own pace. When the new redwoods and bristlecones are considerably older than the ancient ones we have now, the blackbrush may still not be more than about halfway recovered.

It’s a blackbrush forest out there, and it grows inconsequential, short-lived Joshua trees out of it here and there, ephemeral companions, barnacles on a whale. Though individual blackbrush plants in a stand may not be particularly old, a solid stand of blackbrush is an astonishingly ancient community.

This is how Webb, Steiger and Turner said it:

“Time span for [vegetative] recovery may be longer than past periods of climatic and geomorphic stability.”

They’re talking geological epochs here. They’re talking the blackbrush community beginning when there were standing lakes in the Mojave with sabertooth cats and ground sloths drinking out of them.

And we see it as less valuable than a few megawatts of power to run our swimming pool filters.

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Here following, 13 notable leading lines from works of fiction written in English, then fed into the Translation Party engine, chewed up and spit out. See if you can guess the origins of each. If you’re stuck, each result links to the original Translation Party page with the intact untranslated line at the top. If you’re not stuck enough, hover over each link and read my “helpful” “hints” in the ALT text.

Feel free to make astute guesses in comments. If you’re trying to puzzle stuff out, you may want to avoid the comments until you either finish or give up. 

1) If you are a lucky owner and his wife, I know you must be a universal truth for you.

2) All complaints, each member of an unhappy family is in the family, in their own way are satisfied.

3) You are my adventures, I have read that this does not know the name of Tomusoya.

4) Before, the original, in fact, all I Debiddokappafirudo course, children, parents and me, perhaps I might have to consider all of this, I for the first time, I know I’m sick feel that these type of apology. Truth.

5) If you are someone in my life in front of the station, in these pages is to be held to prove to prove my hero. 

6) Between the thickness of the village Bakkumarigan Barerumiraboru Reiautouon stairs.

7) Temporarily, something really bad in the morning, ¶ Joseph, must be bound to honor him.

8) Products - many countries and people, including a diverse group of people. Backup to please.

9) This watch is 13 days, his 4-year-old is a bright cold day.

10) It is desirable that God knows everything.

11) Since then, my father and his young, I was dizzy and vulnerability advice.

12) One person one or two, my assessment at this point in time six years, I have the true story of three patients who have two children one by one in one day a magnificent view of the one in the morning, the jungle I was on there.

13) 1 Shinverona, 2 Ming Ming 1,1,2, in this case, 1111111112, 111111111 number of blood, two or three, or a new 21-1, the dignity of the ancient enemy of domestic violence.

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1. Spend most of your time reading. Start as early in life as you can. Read everything — billboards, cereal boxes, books, letters, instruction manuals, correspondence course texts, magazines and affidavits. Drown yourself in a sea of sentences.

2. Keep track of the reading material that most moves you. Don’t worry if you can’t find commonalities among the various pieces at first. Don’t pick a favorite, or even a top ten. Keep it all in one big category: “stuff I loved reading.” Reread items from this category on a frequent basis.

3. Keep track of the work you least like reading. When you’re about to add a work to this category, spend some time thinking about why you’ve decided not to like it. If it’s simply a matter of the author being boneheaded and wrong, waste no more of your time on the work. But if it’s something else, figure out what that something else is. Pay attention to that. How does the writer fail you as a reader? Are there patterns within the writer’s work — consistently mangled metaphors, illogic, clunky language?

4. Edit other people’s writing. Take a class in editing at your local community college if you have to learn the basics, then volunteer your services at a non-profit or other community organization helping out with their newsletter or paper or magazine or website. Nothing teaches you what you want to avoid in your own writing as quickly as finding and correcting it in others’ writing. Nothing teaches economy of language more quickly than editing a 2,200-word article to fit it into a 600-word hole in a newsletter. As an alternative, take some of the books from step 3 and mark them up. Find the problems that caused you to dislike the work. Underline them. Describe them.

5. Go back to your pile of stuff you loved reading and do the same editing. Make positive comments where you feel moved. Note problems if you find them on rereading.

6. Pay attention to the world. Find something, or many things, that affect your emotions. It doesn’t matter what they are. Birds, stones, music, pastries, books, software, toys, bottle caps, medical procedures, politics, sex, other people’s writing. Whatever. It doesn’t matter except that it should matter to you. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of anyone writing about those things before. Just pay attention to them. Pay attention to how you feel about them. Note the nuances. Learn everything you want to know about them until you run out of time, information or interest. Keep doing this, with one thing or many things, until you die.

7. Eavesdrop. Sit in restaurants by yourself, or with another person who’s quiet. Be non-chalant and non-intrusive. Pretend to read a newspaper. Note the rhythms of conversation, the pauses, the phrasing and repetition.

8. Spend a couple years learning a new language. Nothing makes the inner workings of your native tongue more apparent than learning to think, and write, in a new one. If you already speak more than one language, add another to your repertoire. Pick different language families. If you speak English and Spanish, study Mandarin. If you speak those three, study Euskadi.

9. Start a blog. Commit to yourself to write and post 100 words a day on your blog. Feel free to write more than that if you get momentum going, but give yourself that daily deadline. Don’t edit before publishing, aside from a cursory once-over for embarrassing typoes, spelling and grammatical errors. Don’t worry if you have nothing to say. Don’t worry if you blather. Just: 100 words a day, at least, put up where people can see and respond to them. And replying to comments on your blog doesn’t count toward the 100-word total. Though you should reply to comments. You make friends that way, and writers need friends.

10. You pay attention to getting your spelling right, and to word choice. You pay attention to sentence structure. You need to take that up to the next level. Pay attention to paragraph structure as well. A paragraph is an idea. You’ve heard that said, if you’ve taken composition classes, and it’s basically true. But it’s more than that. A paragraph is not just a string of sentences in a logical order. A paragraph is a stanza in a poem, a verse of a song. It has an internal structure that has nothing to do with the information conveyed by the sentences. If all the sentences in a paragraph are the same length, you have a monotonous paragraph. Sometimes that’s what you want to do. Mostly it won’t be. Vary and balance sentence length within a paragraph. Put a long sentence in the middle of a series of short ones. Put two short sentences after a very long one. Language is music. Pay attention to its rhythm.

11. Read your writing aloud. Even better, have someone else read it aloud. Note where the reader stumbles. If it’s not over a word that’s hard to pronounce, then phrasing or sentence structure is probably the stumbling block. A sentence that’s stumbly when read aloud is a sentence that will distract the silent reader. Note the tripups and fix them. Smooth them flat. Sand them down. At the very least put up some caution tape. This is also a good way to learn about words you use far too often, phrases you’ve done to death, and concepts you haven’t illuminated sufficiently.

12. Write things. Put them away for a week. Don’t even look at them once in that time. Take them out again after a week and edit them. Look for stumbling block sentences, paragraphs that don’t quite follow, ideas that there’s an obvious better way to convey.

13. Remove the first and last paragraphs of each drafted piece altogether and see how the piece works without them. Most writers take a paragraph to crack their knuckles and warm up at the beginning of a draft, and you’ll find a perfectly good and more economical beginning at the start of the second paragraph. Taking a paragraph to wind down at the end is common as well. If, while reading your last para, you can hear the theme music swell in your head and imagine credits rolling, cut it out. There’s almost always a great ending line at the end of the previous para.

14. Explore indecision and doubt where they exist. Don’t try to explain the things you can’t explain. Doubt is way more interesting anyway. Find the weak points in your argument and acknowledge them. Hell, celebrate them.

15. There’s another level of structure above the paragraph. John McPhee once described some of his essays as having a structure like a lowercase “e.” They started out in a direction, made a wide expository loop, then ended up near but not precisely at the starting point, heading in more or less the original direction. Write a 2,000-word essay structured like a lowercase “e.” Then write essays structured like an “O,” an “S,” and a “Z.”

16. Take two wholly unrelated concepts. Write an essay about both of them. Make the transitions seamless. Write so the reader says “I never knew those two things had anything to do with each other, but it’s so obvious now!” Hint: Most of the effort lies in selecting the two things. The writing comes naturally.

17. Above all, enjoy your writing. Go back and reread things you wrote years ago and find joy in them.

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