It Is No Desert

My step-brother died in a car accident a day or two ago.  I don’t know the details and I don’t know what to make of it.  We haven’t talked in years.  He’s an ex-step-brother, I guess you’d say.  We hated each other for the better part of our time together.  He had it rough, rougher than I.  That’s my judgment.  What little I’ve heard says he might’ve been drunk.  Well.  I can sympathize with that need.

I went to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday.  It was supposed to be the first stop in our road trip, and it was important that I take it back for myself.  I don’t know that I succeeded on that front.  I packed up some saltines and jerky and water and drove out in the middle of the day.  The park is vast, beautiful, varied.  There are two deserts in the one park, and the vegetation changes so quickly that you can blink and not notice.  Ocotillo stretching high like many-fingered hands.  Cholla gardens.  And the Joshua Trees.  The northern part of the park is the attraction, and it is an alien place.  The trees are strange and the rocks stranger, smooth from afar but jagged to the touch.  There are veins in them that look just like thick scars and they run symmetrically across gaps so you can see where things used to be attached, or where rocks have dropped off and rolled.  I needed to be a little reckless and so I went off the paths and clambered around on the rocks, leaping from boulder to boulder.  Something about them demands that I walk on them.  I’ve scuffed my boots to hell and I’ve got long scratches on my forearm but it was worth it and I wish I’d taken a few jumps more.  I ended up crossing a split in a large formation by pushing along with my legs and back, seated on air.  The split then got so tight I had to pull myself along sideways only to find almost no way to haul myself to the top when the split ended.  But I managed.

That night despite the possibility of rattlesnakes and spiders or whatever I slept out under the stars with just my sleeping bag, the way I seem to do when I’m in a desert.  I saw satellites and the long arm of the Milky Way.  So many stars.  I saw seven shooting stars through the night and I wished on four of them.  The rest I let go.  I won’t tell you my wishes but I will tell you why I quit wishing on them.  The last several years I’ve been of one mind about everything, and those years were among the happiest in my life.  I lived exactly how I wanted and if my paths crossed with others either we went right along or our paths ran parallel, for a time.  And when they diverged they diverged.  I don’t regret any of those times but there are a few that I feel bad for.  I was an ass during those years but I was likable and I knew where I stood.  Before that and now again, there’s this other.  He’s a bit of a fool and he’ll work like a dog to please you.  The former came about because of the latter, actually.  So there’s this dichotomy that I’m not describing very clearly but what it comes down to is that there’s the fool and the ass and despite their names they don’t get along.  I’m primarily the ass and I can’t reconcile the fool unless I embrace him and right now I’m caught in the middle, driving through the desert and feeling for a hand that isn’t there.  Being out among the stars and hearing the crows and coyotes and seeing the sun rise among the rocks and come out over the plains and even now seeing the soot on my hands and smelling the smoke, feeling the cuts, these things are bringing me together.  The problem is that I put a lot of work into trying to do it another way, trying to see things differently.  So going back into that desert, standing out under the stars alone again…if it’s not throwing that work away it’s sealing it up and hiding it.  But this is where I am.  I’m in Riverside, a desert that is not a desert.  It’s warm and the sky is always blue and the water is always cool and I’ve got time to kill, for now.  Letting those stars go was a part of accepting all that.  If you do the math you know I’m still on the other side, still waiting, still looking up.  And part of me probably always will be.

There’s this mountain in Joshua Tree, more accurately there’s this part of a range, and you can drive up to it and it overlooks the Coachella Valley.  You can see for miles.  There’s a mountain on the Mexico border that’s visible, there’s San Jacinto, and all of the cities I passed through to get to the park were laid out before me.  The San Andreas fault is right there.  But right there too is Los Angeles, is man, in thick haze and pollution that says that so long as I am here I will never be in the desert.  Not like I want.  It reaches all the way out there.  I know I’m drawing conclusions on places I’ve rarely been to and spent a scant amount of time in but I think my conclusions were correct even before I got here.  This is the place where people go to sleep.  You come here to fool yourself.  It’s the Land of the Lotus Eaters.  And I won’t have that.  I’m not letting the fact that life kicked me in the teeth give me reason to eat that fruit.