The day before yesterday Annette and I took the Jeep up into the hills, found ourselves a shady spot in a jumble of boulders in Joshua Tree National Park. It was deliciously cool, perhaps as low as 95 degrees, and ash-throated flycatchers raised a tumult in the overhanging pinyon pine. One of the birds was following the other around relentlessly, its calls just a little frantic, and then it would sidle up to its companion and gape. A fledgling and its mother, I deduced. At times the mother flew off, landed in one of the scrub oaks nearby, and the young one would head up to the top of the pinyon and shriek.

The wind through the rocks was gentle, a desert lullaby.

I’d been stuck at the computer too often, and the 110-degree ambient temps don’t inspire much activity other than napping. Whole weeks can go by without me remembering I’m in the desert as opposed to, I don’t know, a superheated city with cacti planted in the gas station verges. I needed Sunday more than I knew. Ravens soared a mile off over the Hidden Valley. I had rolled out my backpacking mattress: Annette stretched out languorously atop it. I hauled a camping chair from the Jeep, sat there with eyes shut for a while, watched the flycatchers for a while, shut my eyes again.

The scrub oaks around here used to be lumped into the species Quercus dumosa, which is how I learned them. Now they are probably Q. cornelius-mulleri, unless they’re not. I was disinclined to key them out. Scrub oaks are hard and time is fleeting. Still, I found it a little unsettling to find a place where identifying a Tyrant flycatcher is easier than identifying an oak tree.

Not a word written on the Joshua tree book since we moved, despite the drive to their National Park being shorter than some commutes I’ve had. I’d started to talk over breakfast at my frustration at paid work — for which I am grateful, don’t get me wrong — elbowing out the work on the book, and decided to go off the grid every single Monday to work on the book and nothing else. Manuscript Monday means unplugging the phone, failing to check email or TwitbookPlus, keeping the web to the minimum required to tease out a pesky fact or two from the fog of my bewildered memory, and writing as much as possible.

Fourteen years ago I hiked up the shoulder of Tabeau Peak in extreme southwestern Utah, about a mile north of the Arizona Strip. When I hiked there the scars of an old fire were plain against the landscape, as seen in this blurry photo of a photo:

The blonde patch at mid-right is where the burn happened. elsewhere, the blackbrush was thriving. Where it burned, only cheatgrass and one or two stray surviving Joshua trees held on. That was in October 1997; there have been at least two big fires there since. As I have been biding my time on finishing the book, it has progressively changed from paean to epitaph.

1. 
   Fred Levitan 2011 08 05 at 2:19:43 pm

   I tweeted a link to a bibliography of fire science in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.  Here it is again:
   http://www.cafiresci.org/storage/bibliographies/CFSC desert pub list_July 2011.pdf