Dumont Dunes, near Death Valley, California
My ten-year-old daughter is feeling brave.
We go rock hunting today, exploring far
beyond the last dirt road, just she and I.
We see the sand dunes from miles away,
some hallucinogenic scene from the
camel humps rising from the flat desert floor.
My daughter wants to climb them, but
there's no way to guess how far away
they are, no sure measure to tell how tall.
I tell her it's not safe to hike mountains
that unstable, hills that shift in the wind.
Our boots would fill with sand, and we'd
sink like thirsty prospectors, come to find
buried treasure, lured by promises of silver,
a gold vein, the rattlesnake's hypnotic charms.
c. Ruth Nolan 2008
And Now, She's 20 Years Old....
Life sometimes feels this way.....one step higher on the dune,
another step sliding back - it's a surprise we ever make
"progress" in one direction or another. I want to knock
out good stories, left and right, populate the earth,
better than an appleseed-spreader, maybe more like
the do-good, or do-poetic walk of a shaman, transporting
the body through the material density, across flat land
like a sand dune, building its multi-story strengths
across eons and geography, shifting and singing, even,
but always seeming so stable, until one approaches their
density, and begins the slow climb, deep steps in white sugar,
desert sand dunes are so clean it breaks your heart, and
the morning tea seems a little purer when the granules cling
to then melt from your boot, and from their temporary
peaked view - tomorrow morning, be assured they'll have
moved - an inch? half a foot? -you feel some small victory,
that you've made it again, to some slighty "higher than"
plateau, to survey what made you feel small prior to the
exalting climb, and feel a little more in command of your
language, of the sfhiting nature of things that make us
so mundane, crawling on the desert floor that underlies
all of this earth anyhow, it's just that the arid zones make
us realize just how bare things really are, how mountains
after all spend their pretty short lives rising and blowing
down, then rising again like a puffed up football, ready
for the perfect toss, across a sort of rainbow arc, into the
quarterback's arms, touchdown.
Part Two: Mother Dawns on Daughter: Ruth to Tarah
I wrote the poem 10 years ago, an oddball mom who spent
weekends, from the time my daughter was born, driving
long and far into vast regions of the Mojave, just the two
of us (among other past-times like whitwater rafting and
canoeing, biking, backpacking, camping, reading, studying
with a Hindu swami.) the hike's been long, my boots are
definitely swamped with sand, and my daughter's shoe
size is bigger than mine (though she returns today from
spending most of summer at boyfriend's house, he just
returned to UCBerkely, and the first thing spilling out of
her suitcase were three pairs of my "missing" shoes, nice
to know that I have what a young woman her age considers
"style.")
Yes, we really did climb a few sand dunes back in
the day - I carried her on my back on the first hike, I
believe it was Kelso Dunes when she was two. I bought my
house in Palm Desert in 2002, for the main reason that the
small property backed up to 4 square miles of ancient,
deep-mysteried sand dunes, some quite tall. Some of the best
I've seen, in shape and sculpt, following the eastern concourse
of the mighty Whitewater Wash from San Gorgonio Peak
down to Salton Sea - in fact, my house is built on another
remnant of the ancient dunes. I LIVE on a sand dune,
for godsake. No wonder my life feels submerged, and for
all of my desert protection, admiration, and aesthetically-grateful
ranting and raving, a little more than a roadrunner tail-tipped
ironic: I'm sleeping on very porous soil. And it's easy to drown.
I live in a classic graben-trough zone. A true "no-man's land."
Meaning, my house is situated on a narrow faux-valley floor.
It's more of a big sinkhole, 15-20 miles from one upthrust fault zone
to the other, meaning: mountain ranges on both sides, to the east
and west, paralleling and rising atop of the San Andreas fault.
We don't really get good "mirages" here in the "Conchilla-
Little Shell" valley - the whole damned place is a mirage.
Look down a street, look across the horizon, from June to
October it is all on melt-mode, and the eyes strive for shade
and comfort. And that is good news for the very few remaining
sand dunes in the California Deserts. Kelso is protected, thank
God. Dumont is a disaster - every time I've come and gone
from or two Tecopa Hot Springs, the low valley that they
fill - actually a sink of the unique Amargosa River - is filled
with haze and sand in the air for miles and miles.
The Algodones Dunes, south of here....cringe and heartbreak,
being in the direct line of fire of the thousands of ORV's
and RV's heading down Hwy 111, and 86S, past the Salton
Sea, to wreak their weekly havoc and damage on miles of
sacred scape - not to mention in the weird "legal ORV"
pockets of people of all ages creeping around on hills
on their weekend warrior wagons....having known a
seven-year-old boy who lost his life on three-wheeler
some years ago, while dad cracked another can of bud
and waved at his son, who promptly ran into a barbed
wire fence and died when the thing flipped and landed
on his heart.....not to mention the band of bandit
"f-you" dirtbikers of a few years back (probably still
out there trashing the land) who deliberately, in spite
of others' protective efforts to safeguard old Serrano
Indian village and shelter sites in the chapparal
foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, in the
beautiful wedge of big, rolling, once-juniper-filled
mountains around Juniper Flats, situated between
Deep Creek and the start of the Mojave Desert near
Hesperia and Apple Valley, have gone repeatedly
out of their way to ride bikes brazenly through cut
barbed wire and through many of the sites, ripping
up ground, artifact soil, and burial locations. I am
so sorry......but for all of this.... I despise the fuckers
even more.
Deliberate cruelty, in the name of rebellion against the
system, any system, directed at any living entity - meaning,
all of us, all of our land, all of the desert - that there are
many among us who should spend more time at home
playing "X" box. Maybe there is some good to the computer
gaming revolution after all. That, or the angry, ORV hellions
can maybe conspire to invent "virtual off roading," the video
game - level 4. We have guitar hero, why not "ORV Hero" - at home!
I think....
my area has had, for centuries, until the last one, some of
the best dunes - 95% of them plowed. We ARE lucky to have
nearby Coachella Valley Preserve, where there are some
nominal dunes left, though not really outstanding - although
it's a constant struggle for them to survive, given the assault
on their very existence by angry homeowners in adjacent
Sun City (shudder,) a massive, megalomaniac "retirement
community that actually, believe it or not, sits atop a major
archaological village site of the Cahuilla Indians, at the
opening flood plain/valley floor of Pushwalla Canyon,
which eases out of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
Many residents there had the nerve, recently, to try to take
out a city license to make killing of a certain species of migratory
bird legal - because those birds, attracted to the fake lakes of
the country club, had the nerve to visit and leave droppings.
Residents also have petitioned to plow the dunes near them -
well, blame the developer, Del Webb, who's undoubtedly made
their millions and millions and split for New Zealand or somewhere
"dirt" isn't a blow-problem. Luckily, McCallum Grove, a small
stand of whiteness, survives, protected near a natural oasis,
which actually profers ancient pupfish and native Washingtonian
Fan Palms on its modest shores - although I recently saw a class
of school-kids visiting, whose teacher did not stop the kids from
running amok past the near-buried "keep out" sign to play on
the dunes - until I spoke some strong words. But, sadly - what
kind of world is this when kids can't even be allowed to "play
on a dune" - when I, myself, have climbed so many of them?
Fringe-tailed lizards of the world - unite! Sand beneath your
toenails, tails whipping pretty lines in the whiteness, your
heads and tiny bodies buried beneath creosote and mesquite.
World is in order. You are protected. For now.
And my daughter, realizing....as we talk.....over Indian food at
a new place in Cathedral City....that maybe she had it pretty
good as a kid, with a mom who took her way out into the wild
places and showed her a good time, had enough sense to know
when to call it a day, what legends to take for real, and which
ones to throw away. I feel, after a few years of the "my mom is
kind of weird" shrug and eye-roll she's shared with her friends,
redeemed. And now she's ready to go camping again, and
actually wants to hear about my recent work for desert conservation
and protection! Thank God. Raising her in Palm Desert - private pools,
trips to Disneyland in friends' limos, extravagant bat mitzvah parties
of friends, high school parking lot full of brand new SUV's, Hummers,
Mercs, emphasis on brand new (kids, not the teachers) - didn't
ruin her after all. I gave her......the desert. I'm a real Sand Mom,
shifting and moving around and re-shaping a bit....but....I endure.
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