In May 2008, as long-time readers of this blog know, I left the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived for a quarter century and moved to the Mojave Desert. I remember the next month through a bit of a veil. There was a lot of work hauling stuff. There was a tempestuous, unpleasant and ill-advised rebound relationship that corkscrewed into the ground that July. There were trips back to the Bay Area to sign legal documents pertaining to the house and relinquishing my ownership claim thereto. There was finding places in the desert to sleep until my rental in Nipton started July 1. There was a two-week trip to New England to see whether it worked between me and Ill-Advised Rebound Relationship Woman, and finding out that it didn’t. For a homeless guy with no life, I had a lot going on.
But aside from those major points I’ve been soft on detail. Over the last few years I’ve gotten into the habit, bad or not, of using the blog as a journal – not only for the writing end of things, but for the remembering what happened in my life end of things. In June 2008, though, I wasn’t blogging. Ill-Advised Rebound Relationship Woman was persuasive, and she spoke to me often – or fulminated in my direction, more accurately – about her dim view of blogging in general, of my blog in particular, and of the effect of my blog on my writing. (She was also adamant that none of my blog’s readers ever learn that we were involved, which warning sign I somehow missed, and thus I resort to the awkward circumlocutions here.) It was a couple months before I decided I had best not heed her feedback. In June, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be blogging again, and so up until this weekend I had forgotten a lot of the daily impressions, encounters and thoughts that I would have otherwise documented on this here web log site.
Of course a few weeks later I started blogging again AND keeping company with The Raven, and so now I not only have archives but old emails to The Raven to help me retain detail, not to mention The Raven herself, though she more often relies on me in that regard. But June was a blank spot for any details not involving endless phone calls in which my flaws were enumerated. Those, for some reason, stuck with me.
So flash forward to MLK Weekend, 2011. We’re moving, of course, and in the process I’m cleaning out the Jeep yesterday morning, and in a spot beneath the pile of maps I find a three-subject spiral notebook I don’t recognize, and I open it. It’s almost entirely blank, pages oxidized and mildew-foxed and brittle, blue lines baked off the paper. The first nine pages are in my handwriting.
I’d kept a journal of the first week of June 2008, then put it in the Jeep before I parked it at the San Francisco airport. I flew to New England for more in-depth criticism and in the next two weeks I forgot that the journal existed.
A few things about it jump out at me:
- I apparently write just as pompously when I don’t expect an audience
- Far too many of my plant and wildlife identifications are followed by question marks and then unverified
- Even in a week that might well have qualified as the worst in my life, the desert and my fellow denizens there are an immense and immediate source of solace.
- Even given the last, I spent a lot of time trying to talk to people, generally women people, outside of the desert.
I’ve only edited a little, mainly to protect the privacy of people I haven’t talked to in years, and adding links and in one case a note to make my shorthand clearer.
— C
Sunrise Rock Thursday June 5 2008
Sunset at Sunrise. A moon two days old hangs above a dwindling horizon band of crimson.
I have left my wife. I have left my home. I have left everything I knew in the Bay Area. This month includes the biggest changes I have made in my life perhaps ever. Leaving Buffalo was leaving nothing. Moving to DC was temporary at the outset. I have left a home I made, a career and a network of friends I made, and put everything I own in a storage locker in for fuck’s sake Barstow, and
and here I sit. The campsite on Cima Dome, where I have been coming for 12 years, longer than I lived in Pinole by twice, coming here even before we moved to Richmond, for a quarter of my life I have been coming here, sometimes feeling as though my life only truly moved along when I was here and all the rest of it mere maintenance.
Go to the source, they say, go to the source in times of crisis, and here I am though these days are as much resolution as crisis. The desert has called me for a quarter century, since the trip in June 1984. 24 years ago last week, as Matthew pointed out the other day.
Have I felt this calm before? This feeling of arrival, inevitable and a relief, feeling like a long-held breath finally let out?
[Ill-Advised Rebound Relationship Woman] said this evening that my voice sounded, on the phone, as if the desert was working on me. The sunset lit up the buttes in the NY Mountains, washed the rock fins at the south end of Kessler Peak in Navajo Red, and I am here. I am finally here, part of the desert.
The full tour of Nipton today. Fred: “and I need to get rid of these goddamned cattails.” Minivan full of obnoxious pubescent girls at the Trading Post, and their mother apologized, looking for sympathy. I offered some insincerely. Apples laying around on the ground beneath the tree from which they fell.
Friday June 6
Busy day so far. It’s about 12: 45.
- No coyotes heard last night
- many satellites
- 2 meteors
- woken by dawn light, long before sunup, looked around, colors fantastic, went back to sleep.
- woken by sun rising north of Kessler Peak two weeks before solstice!
- laid around, loafed, procrastinated, listened to cactus wrens, dozed, rewoke, sighed, got pants and boots more or less on, unpacked stove, filled pot, lit stove (shaking each propane can to gauge fill-th), boiled water, put coffee in French press, went to shit, saw cactus wren, talked to cactus wren, cleaned up, came back, plunged plunger on press pot, poured coffee, drank coffee, dozed more, got solar panel, plugged phone in, checked time — 7:30 am. Jesus. Ate orange.
- Talked to [Ill-Advised Rebound Relationship Woman]
- drank more coffee
- spilled coffee on pants and hat – a feat.
- watched flock of sage sparrows.
- saw non-cactus wren. Bewick’s? Kinda big for Bewick’s.
- Said goodbye to [I-ARRW] – 8:45.
- drank more coffee
- walked to road
- watched ants removing debris from hole, most of it plant-based, which blew away in the wind.
- walked among junipers
- thought of camping among junipers with [I-ARRW]
- started hearing sound like bandsaw cutting sheetmetal
- returned to camp, made oatmeal
- ate oatmeal
- heard Icterus parisorum in distance
- visited three times by hummingbird, green and dun
- wrote email to Darya as side-blotched lizard sought shelter under my thigh
- worst asleep-leg ever due to fear of crushing lizard
- walked to tall rock to send email
- found source of metal saw noise – a cicada-sized, cicada-shaped, cicada-colored insect. Not sure what it was.
- sent email
- watched family of antelope ground squirrels, at least three individuals, cavorting and a bit nervous about me
- called Sharon to say “hello from Cima Dome,” talked for 4-5 minutes
- noticed white-flowering shrub that had been covered in bees at 9:00 had one bee at 12:00
[resume writing at 3:24 pm]
what else was there?
Desert swallowtails in relative abundance
a couple ravens
those ants – one of them carried out an old yellow chartreuse object, looked like a dicot seedling. probably an iodine bush fruit, possibly one that blew into the anthill opening.
Yellow Encelia, or Enceliopsis? Purple asters by the campsite. Buckeye about to bloom. Looks like last week was grand here – Yucca baccata and Mojave mound cactus w/ week-old spent bloom. Lots of green fruit on the JTs.
Mid-sized, light brown raptor being chased away by smaller birds. Didn’t get a good glimpse. Small fat lizard hauling ass away from me – desert iguana? Baby Sauromalus?
Chollas and prickly pears blooming this week, canary-yellow flowers opening mid-day.
The buzzsaw bugs have quieted. Don’t recall having heard any in a couple hours. Cactus wrens noisy as usual
Finished the Stegner letters. Read the inscription from Becky there, felt sad. I love her so, but what can I do? I have not felt married to her for a year, perhaps longer. Grieving Zeke together – that’s about it.
The wind is relentless. Blowing constantly. My arms are sunburned and I am a little queasy.
[I-ARRW] says it’s raining there.
Wish she was here. I’m lonely.
Nap time.
About 4:15 -
big skinky-looking guy, maybe 8″ in nose to tail, bluish head and dark body, walked haltingly across a meter of open sand a few feet from my nose.
Earlier, maybe 10:00, found an old burrow. Tort? Squirrel? Dunno. Unused at least this year, though – a webbing of grass awns across it.
5:30 more orioles heard, not seen. Possible shrike? very strong black bill, kinda cresty. Song chip note, staccato, do DIT, do DIT, do do DIT do.
Crickets starting up. Coyotes tonight?
God, this wind. Relentless. Like Mojave.
Near Sunset:
There’s a Sphaeralcea near my pillow. I think I noticed it on a previous visit. It’s in bloom, two brilliant orange flowers set against gray-green velvet leaves.
I remember the fist time I noticed Sphaeralcea, or globemallow. It was in 1990, I think – the time I took the VW to Arizona. My god, that was 18 years ago. I woke in the roadside rest area near Boron, and it was blooming there – and everywhere else along the road from Barstow to Tucson, along the crazy 45-mph summer Mojave road, my shoulders knotting.
It’s so easy to sit here and miss the life I used to have in the Bay Area. Used to have. It’s not the life I had last month, or this time last year. Zeke is gone. Faultline is gone. Earth Island Journal? I was a stone that passed that surface and made no ripple.
I go to Thistle’s house, to Becky’s house now, and all I see is my depression grown head-high with monstrous thorns. So many dreams unrealized. So many hours spent not looking at that patch of ground where we planted him.
I burst into tears tonight with missing Thistle. Thistle. Who barely deigns to show interest. But I won him over, I did, and he spent our last hour together sitting at my knee. And now that hurts.
And what happens next week? Patience. Do I fall in love with [I-ARRW’s dog] and then miss him the way I miss Thistle?
Cactus wren’s rattling call.
Globemallow always calls to mind that morning, excitement and worry mixed, and embarking alone into a new world. That time I missed Becky, who was frightened of everything.
I still miss her, and she’s not scared any longer. I guess I can take some small part of the credit for that.
Sat June 7: Baker, CA Starbucks
Last night [lying on the ground] I read by odd bluish light of the battery lantern. My forearms illuminated, sunburned red showing pale violet, and I watched as I read. Small crickets ventured past tiny pale spiders, aggressive but gentle, and they ran back and forth beneath the light hunting. One ran up my arm from the elbow to my thumb, jumped off. A darkling beetle headed my way methodically; I flicked a few grains of coarse sand at it and it stopped. It was perturbed. It did a defensive headstand for a second, then turned and went the way it came.
One light gray, slender thing landed on my left arm. A grasshopper, I thought at first, and then got a closer look. A mantid, and it regarded me and the lamp warily, both of us. I turned my forearm one way and another and it moved, upset, staying just in shadow. A tickling at my elbow – a red ant meandering, heading roughly toward the mantis, and I hoped for some excitement – my forearm a Serengeti and the mantis a mighty hunter. But it was not to be – the ant would not wander within range, and eventually the mantis flew off.
I’m thinking the hesitant eight-inch lizard was probably one of these.
Chris, your writing never fails to astound me…..so deep and personal…........if only I was brave enough to put my life in writing.
Wishing you and the Raven, joy and love.
I’m glad you decided ultimately not to follow [I-ARRW]‘s advice about blogging. Also, “pompous” is not generally an adjective I’d use to describe your blogging style.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m with Dave regarding the inaccuracy of “pompous”.
Just dove into some email from this past June, and yup, that’s a sufficient enough record of my breakup for my purposes. Quite sufficient.
thanks for the ‘lost archives’. reading your blog inspires me to keep a journal, but then i could hardly aspire to the beauty and elegance of your observations. yours is one of the blogs i read daily to ease my soul against the ignorance and greed that tears at the concerns for my childrens world. thanks so much.