Are We Loving the Desert to Death?

Two years ago, my daughter and I headed out for a hike to one of our longtime favorite desert places, Cottonwood Oasis in Joshua Tree National Park.

To our surprise, not only was the parking lot at the trailhead full, but cars were spilling out along the roadway. In 30 years of hiking there, I’d never seen that before.

I learned later that spring that the Park, already listed as one of the most endangered of all National Parks, has experienced a huge uptick in visitors in the last few years, a number that continues to increase.

Unfortunately, I have realized that exponential increases in tourism to our region aren’t limited to Joshua Tree National Park: it’s desert-wide.

Maybe this wouldn’t hit so hard if I didn’t have to endure gridlock traffic on Interstate 10, and even Highway 111 for most of the month of April, the result of the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals, wildflower season, and all manner of other large-scale festivals, events and wildflower super blooms.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so annoyed if I hadn’t been rudely “asked” recently to move out of the way at Tahquitz falls by a group of tourists who wanted to take a group selfie to post on Instagram.

Maybe I’d be in a better mood if I hadn’t had to fight for parking at Thrush Park last spring to get past the hordes of visitors gawking at Desert X artwork – a months-long installation last spring (due to return in 2019) that included large art pieces across a 50-mile span of desert - just to go on an after-work hike.

There’s a disturbing implication afoot that this desert is up for grabs for any and all takers who want to profit financially or otherwise from our open spaces and quickly-vanishing sense of solitude and peace.

It’s the type of land grab mentality that evokes the worst of the California Gold Rush.

It’s the type of land grab that’s caused, in the past decade, large-scale, multinational renewable energy entities and investors – backed by the federal government – salivating to get their hands on open tracts of our surrounding desert lands. Eastern Riverside County is one of the most targeted-areas.

It’s the type of land grab that has allowed well-funded, large-scale culture and arts organizations to site their projects here where they please, seemingly without adequate environmental impact reviews and in highly sensitive areas.

It’s a mentality has allowed Coachella’s producer, Goldenvoice, to trademark the very name of this valley and use legal means to stop any person or entity use the name “Coachella” or even the word “chella” for to anything that might be associated with an event or product for sale.

Do I now live in a desert whose very name, and soul, has, by dint of its mostly-rural and therefore economically desirable vulnerabilities, been commodified, at the desert’s expense?

It’s starting to feel more and more like Disneyland; a sort of designer desert. I’ve lived and worked in the California deserts for most of my life. I didn’t sign up for this.

In the meantime, just down the road, the Salton Sea disappears and the ancient aquifer at Cadiz is on the verge of being siphoned dry, both victims of water-greedy urban municipalities 100 miles away.

I can’t blame people for wanting to spend time in this stunning desert. It’s a world-class place, and offers what I’ve cherished for the past twenty years of living here full time: open spaces, transformational view sheds, and unfolding scenic mysteries, as well as a close sense of a vital, ancient past.

I have this in common with every person who seeks refuge here as an antidote to less-inspired places: I love the desert.

But I can’t help but ask a question that keeps nagging at me:

Are we loving the desert to death?

FIRE ON THE MOJAVE: Field Notes, March 22

Fire On the Mountain: Stories of the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California

Notes from the Field, 3.22.16

Fire season is soon to begin in Southern California. The terrible drought of the past six years has eased somewhat for us here, with just enough rainfall this winter – though not the heavy drenching expected by El Nino forecasts-  to touch off the current wildlfower “superbloom,” which is permeating the entire California desert expanses this late winter/spring.

I had a great day of field research for my book project. Started with an interview with Serrano cultural leader Ernest Siva at the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning, where Ernest shared cultural stories of traditional/past Serrano and Cahuilla occasionally deliberately burning out the many palm oases in the Coachella Valley and little San Bernardino Mountains as a means of purification and health of the vital oases. 

Then I traveled on to the Morongo Reservation to interview the Morongo Fire Crew, where I did a great interview with a fire chief who had worked on the nearby fatal Esperanza Fire of 2006, where five forest service firefighters tragically lost their lives. 

I then made a visit to the Malki Indian Museum to learn how many native California Indian people historically used fire to gather caterpillars - driving them into the ground for later harvesting, and visited healthy and lovingly tended plants in the museum's Temalpakh Garden, which are representative of the botanic life in the Inland Southern California desert and chaparral wildfire zones.

From there, I drove uphill throuigh the wind-tossed Little Morongo Canyon/Highway 62, and farther up into the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree National Park for more fire research, where wildflowers and Josh Trees were in full bloom. The kiosk below discusses one of the Park's more recent large wildfires, the Memorial Fire in 1999, which ripped through Joshua forests and mountains of the park. Exactly what I had come looking for - besides spring wildflowers in this year's incredible, desert-wide #superbloom , and I stopped to pull off the road and park. Grabbed my Canon digital camera and iPhone6.

As I walked through the eastern edge of the eery old burn zone, I found downed Joshua Trees that were still charred on the inside, and my fingers picked up the black smudges; this area was barely decomposed, even after 17 years! A reminder that deserts are so very slow to recover from any trauma such as wildfire, if they do at all. A few hopeful wildflowers poked up through the scarred, open landscape, and several healthy young cholla cactus also gave it their best to stand proud and tall in the empty space they inhabited.

I remembered what it was like to work on the fireline, in my days as a seasonal wildland firefighter....I worked on several big fires in the park in the 1980's, in heat and blistering sun. The smell of the charred Joshua Tree brought so many memories back, of days long gone but also right there with me as I wandered alone, taking photographs, feeling the wind make occasional magic little dance steps, playfully but with serious intent of a stiff, cold, and strengthening northwestern Santa Ana wind event. 

Across the high desert plains, healthy Joshua Trees, bursting at their tops with their cream-colored white flower bulges, filled the horizon, and the Wonderland of Rocks glowed in iridescent brilliant light that made me feel like I was in a powerful warp of beauty and timelessness.Just me out there, strolling and exploring through the burn, and in the hour I spent, remembering and forgetting, not one other car stopped along that busy road into the park to marvel at memory and persistence, at the graphic power of loss and renewal demonstrated so insistently in the old burn area of the Memorial Fire of 1999. 

It was me, alone out there, but not alone. So many friends I've spent so much time with in Joshua Tree over the years, and it was down to this, down to me, down to memory, down to the grooved bone appearance of ancient rock, sky, wind and sun. But they were with me, too. Friends, and ex boyfriends, and my baby daughter, and campouts, and rock scrambles, and day hikes, and more. People who have come and gone and left their indelible impressions on my mind and my heart, some good memories and some rather bad. How could it have come to this....where had they all gone? Had they really burned through my life, through the years that once felt so long but now seem to have passed as quickly as a wildfire, leaving behind nothing but mostly-empty space, silence, and the longing for fuller landscapes?

But somehow, I felt them all right there with me, in a bittersweet kind of way, and though I tried to avoid it, I couldn't help savor each wonderful memory, even though this made me smile and feel sad at the same time, and I pushed through the memories I wish I could forget or undo. And they were all part of the puzzle of the desert landscape, coming together right then and there to offer proof that my loved ones, and loved ones with who I'd fallen out, hand't gone far at all. Everyone and every story in my past in that desert park had risen and shimmered right there with me, taking in all of the glorious, late-day views.

And as if to offer proof of this ghostly feeling, shortly after I left the burn zone, drove a bit down the road, and then off to view what I've heard through my extended desert network of friends is a particularly intensely blooming Joshua Tree forest a side dirt road that leads to Lost Horse Canyon - off limits to the public after the first few hundred yards, but where I've led poetry writing workshops and also once spent the night in a paper USForest Service issue sleeping bag while working on a big wildfire years before.....I saw a white car coming my way....and I could've sworn it was my friend Caryn, who is a longtime park ranger, and who in fact had attended one of my writing workshops up there! We nodded and smiled and through the wildflower haze and my own sense of superflousness and disjointedness that always overcomes me when I'm in desert wildlands, I couldn't be sure it was her, as we each kept going our own directions on that same desert road, different destinations in mind yesterday. 

And I called Caryn today, to check on this. And it turns out, that was her. We made plans to meet for coffee in Palm Desert, where I live. Next time she comes down this way.

Alive in Joshua Tree, everyone and everything, in a perfect sort of desert symphony, even the old leftover Joshua tree skeletons that crumple and scatter the fire-cleared landscape where I stopped yesterday to explore. Soon, as spring unfolds and temperatures begin to rise, there will be dried grasses in Joshua Tree NP and our inland deserts and mountains, tempting the start of new wildfires with calf-high brittle brown grasses. 

But the memory of wildflowers in this year's #superbloom won't fade. I, for one, will have pictures to prove it. Just as those bones of desert trees, still blackened with charcoal on the inside, remind us of another one of nature's necessary uses of force, the spirit of wildfire, slowing us down, making us watch, making us learn. Fire Season 2016 is about to begin.

 But the memory of wildflowers in this year's #superbloom won't fade. I, for one, will have pictures to prove it. Just as those bones of desert trees, still blackened with charcoal on the inside, remind us of another one of nature's necessary uses of force, the spirit of wildfire, slowing us down, making us watch, making us learn. Fire Season 2016 is about to begin.

AREA 51, Nevada, 1987 by Ruth Nolan, from a memoir about working in the Mojave Desert as a helicopter hotshot crew member in the BLM’s California Desert District…

Area 51, Nevada 1987 is published in LUMEN Issue 1 

http://www.lumenmag.net/flip-the-switch

I’m on top of a mountain, somewhere in Nevada, but other than that, I have no idea where I am.  Just that I’m the vicinity of Area 51, home to top secret U.S. military activities and, some say, inexplicable alien sightings and extra-terrestrial activities.

I’m the only woman on a crew of 12, based out of the Bureau of Land Management Apple Valley Fire Station in the Mojave Desert, a two hour drive east of Los Angeles, but there are only six of us up here tonight.  We were flown in from tiny Caliente, Nevada, 180 miles northeast of Las Vegas, hours ago, as dusk was settling in across the sky, on the 212 Helicopter used for our initial attack flight crew. We are designated as a first responder crew throughout the desert Southwest, on-call 24-7 as a small, first responder crew when desert wildfires break out.

I have no idea what time it is, just that I’m shivering so hard, lying here on the rocky ground next to the rough fireline I cut earlier this evening with the guys on the crew, that I’ve woken up. I can hear a few of the others snoring, and it seems I’m the only one who’s awake.

This is one of my very first assignments. Lightning is the cause of this fire, and we’ve managed to keep it down to burning less than an acre by cutting down blazing Pinyon pine trees and clearing Juniper bushes away with chainsaws and Pulaskis. The Pulaski is a specialized two-headed steel tool with an axe on one side, and a grubbing instrument on the other, designed specifically for fighting wildland fires in terrain such as what we are seeing up here.

On the 30 minute flight here from Caliente, I looked down at the ground rushing beneath us, so that I could avoid getting airsick, and so I could convince myself that we weren’t heading too far from town, but there were no roads, no houses, no sign whatsoever of human life across the parched and moon-like desert landscape below us. Several times, our strapping crew boss, Mark “Buster” Hennessey, shouted over the through his flight helmet and the deafening noise of the helicopter, that the fire we were going to was in Area 51. By all appearances, it certainly appeared that we’ve dropped off the edge of civilization and entered a surreal sort of twilight zone, a sensation made all the more unsettling by how very dark it is out here now, how very quiet and still and lonely.

I look up, half-asleep, feeling stoned and dazed. Glass-cut stars beam down at me. There’s no light at all, except for a very faint smudge of light on the far away horizon, which I can detect when I lift my head off the ground. I realize that must be Las Vegas, and wish I were there, instead, tucked into a hotel room or playing roulette, sipping beer, with my boyfriend Zach.

And I remember Zack’s voice, thick with sarcasm, taunting me as I left the house a few days ago to go to work at the fire station, which isn’t far from our adobe desert cabin, where he lives with me. “You think you’re such hot shit, on a hotshot crew, don’t you?” I see his face, twisted in a smirk, hovering over me.  “You’re only doing it because you want to fuck all the guys on the crew, aren’t you?” I blink hard, willing the image and sound of his angry voice away, but it’s hard to erase.

So I sit up, teeth chattering, pull the Velcro tabs at the wrists of my yellow fire-resistant Nomex shirt as tight as I can, then fold my arms close to my chest and lean forward, trying to pull myself into a little ball to gather warmth into myself. I have no idea what time it is, because I don’t have a watch. This is many years before cell phones are invented, and it’s doubtful I’d be able to get reception anyway in this extremely remote place.

            It’s hard to believe how cold I am, remembering how hot I was just a few hours ago while cutting fireline, drenching the t-shirt beneath my Nomex shirt with sweat. That must be why I’m so chilled. My t-shirt never got a chance to dry off completely after the sun went down and the temperature, although it’s June and the day was hot, over 100 degrees, plummeted. I have no idea how cold it is up here on this desert peak, but it’s  enough to make my teeth chatter so hard it feels like they’ll break apart. Being exhausted and feeling the soreness creeping into my shoulders and arms from the hours of brutal work I did earlier this evening doesn’t help.

I’m scared. I wish I had a blanket, but out here, that’s a ridiculous thought. Each of us only has what we can carry on our backs, including as much water as we can clip onto our belts in one-quart plastic bottles issued by the BLM, a headlamp that fastens onto our plastic yellow hard hats, and, of course, our tools, which weigh a considerable amount. I’m using my mandatory fire shelter, folded and bundled into a pack the size of two boxes of brown sugar – our only defense against a fire blow up and to be used only in emergencies, at the direction of our crew boss – as a sort of pillow. 

I’m thinking of unpacking my fire shelter, also known as a “shake n’ bake” for obvious reasons, to wrap myself in to get warm, but I’m too well-trained to do that – we’ve been repeatedly told that opening a fire shelter without permission is actually grounds for a felony charge.  I’m cold, but I am too scared to defy authority.

I look to my right, and see one of my crew-mates, Josh McKinney, curled in an uncomfortable position, his hand under his head. He’s shivering, too, but it looks like he’s still asleep. He’s only about five feet away from me. I slowly crawl towards him, getting as close as I dare without touching him, hoping to generate a mutual body heat, but not wanting him to think I’m being suggestive. Soon, although I’m embarrassed, and hope he doesn’t wake up and get angry at me, or think I want to have sex with him, I’m curled up behind him, in a spoon position, and I begin to feel a little bit warmer, and not so alone.

Down the fireline, Buster snores loudly, not a care in the world, and getting deep rest. He’s a big, blonde, rough guy, 6’4,” with a pregnant, petite blonde wife at home, and he yells at all of us a lot. He seems to yell even more at me, and sometimes his tone is snide or downright cruel.

“You were scared to get out of the helicopter tonight, weren’t you, Ruth?” Buster had sneered in front of the rest of the crew as we’d devoured our awful, dehydrated chicken casserole dinners out of our military-issue, plastic green MRE (meal-ready-to-eat) pouches.  “I saw you hesitate to jump out. I know this is a lot for a girl like you. Maybe you shouldn’t be out here, you think?”  I’d ignored him, and smiled politely, smoldering inside, and thinking of all the things I wanted to say to him, but was too insecure, and frightened, to voice.

I tell myself firmly to forget about it, and try instead to concentrate on staying warm, on trying not to guzzle the little bit of water I have left in my canteen, even though I’m thirsty, and on trying to feel less like breaking down and sobbing. I feel like hugging Josh, maybe waking him up and telling him how cold and scared I am, and seeing if he can help me, but I don’t. Josh is one of the nicest guys on the crew, and he’s 24 years old, like me, and he’s cute, and I want him to respect me.

I’m glad he’s next to me, especially when I start remembering, like I always do, on my many sleepless nights during the past seven years, the baby I gave away when I was 17. Her face seems especially clear tonight, layered across the Milky Way, and, through my exhausted and spacey daze, I look into her eyes,  which blink back at me,  and I search for some indication of who she is in her newborn awakening. I wonder hazily where she is tonight, and hope she is sound asleep, and safe in her little bed.

I remember what it felt like to hold her in my arms before the social worker took her away, three days old, and hear my father’s voice, telling me I’d soon forget about her and get on with my life, and that I was saving our family from being ruined by the shame of my disgraceful behaviors. I haven’t talked to my parents in over a year, and they don’t even know where I am tonight. They don’t know I’m working on the fire crew.

I know I should try to sleep. We’re supposed to start working again as soon as it starts to get light, and mop up any remaining embers or flare-ups in the charred area that’s already burned, and make sure the fire is entirely out, and that will probably be soon.  I hear a gentle crackling noise, and open my eyes. The fire is still smoldering and just a few feet away from my face, I see a small flame leap up, stoked by the light wind, then settle down, and disappear. It sounds like a soothing lullaby.

I have no idea when we are getting out here, no idea when Helicopter 554 will return.