49 Palms Oasis Kind of Day

Today was a 49 Palms Oasis kind of day. Joshua Tree, front and center, and a visit to the land of the dinosaurs - that is, a merging of present-day desert, which is getting more and more arid and water-deprived, and a canyon crack in the mountains behind 29 Palms, another place of oasis known as Mara, behind the Chemehuevi Indian Cemetery and on the L.A. edge of the Marine Base. Ah, desert conservation and blatant desecration, face to face!

Warm, very warm late October weather. I've been absorbed in the abstract intellect world of compiling the introductions and biographies for the desert anthology I'm editing for Heyday. I'm forging ahead, scraping to get it all together by my deadline of Oct 31. It's frightening and liberating - to let this book go....to the publisher....my intimate sheaths and sheaths of copy paper, my eons of books and endless hours of reading, researching - a prolonged pregnancy of sorts and a very extended labor! And not yet born.

So, going up to 29 Palms Inn today was a relief. Nice to pull my head from the small laptop - have I ever been this focused and absorbed before? Courage - to pull all of these beautiful pieces of writing together; I take all of the writing very personally and feel that the years of culture, history, geology, people, places, desert crossings, desert beauties, desert in all of its manifestations - are a sort of mine - mine to float on, a little while longer, before the push over the lip of the hill, and across the desert floor.

I've been sidetracked, as life will do, by distractions. Namely, my teaching work. Rewarding as always but chipping away, as it does, at my private, poetic, editing, writing time. My inner vision landscape. We have completed Week 8, halfway through the semester. There isn't enough time, or should I say space, to fit around my writing. I've got an inspiration, the seeds, of several pieces - one is Shoshone Woman and Me - sitting at the edge of Soda Dry Lake at ZZYZX Springs last Sunday, waiting for the phone to ring and for it NOT to be the 866 or 503 area code numbers that have been harassing me - some credit card debt of my daughters, nothing to interrupt a meditation over and how the hell did they get my number anyway, for some measly $200 bill or something she's TRYING to pay - wanting it to be that special "someone else" I craved and crave. Ring - jump - that dastardly 503, where IS that, anyway?

And I noticed, precisely then, the lump in throat, a teasing ring is what made me almost throw my phone away across that semi-dry lakebed, but not - that I was sitting quite close to the iron peg markings of Shoshone Woman. My friend Susanne, a BLM archaeologist in Las Vegas, told me about her. She has been in the lakebed for 5,000 years - I'm probably wrong, but it seems that the emptiness and longing in my heart have been accentuated that long, too, and I'm still here. Shoshone Woman and me. Watching another mirage rise and shimmer, and I know there's no water in the direction of Baker, the heat-risen line of box houses dangling halfway up the white blank horizon - that damn giant thermometer. What does it mean? As if it's going to endure to measure the next flood, last big one was the Mojave River flood of 1916, people today loved Phantom Seed the magazine, I sold out of everything, issues #1 and #2, it floored me, the mag is a phenomenon, this desert is to so many people so amazing!

I'm just doing my thing, eternalizing the Mojave Desert with my long-striding words, my grasping metaphors and my sense of being so very alone - same as I was at 22, 25, 30.....pregnant with my daughter at 24 and wandering miles alone in remote hills - driving while under the influence of mushrooms (gasp) in my red volkswagen van, getting miraculously airborne near Cima Dome....camping in the New York Mountains in Thanksgiving snow, showing those who were slightly nutty enough to go out there with me places like the East Rodman Mountains (where we found a burned huge desert bighorn sheep rack) and climbed Stoddard Mountain for the umpteenth time to sign the little ledger there.....hearing and seeing dirtbikes whine irritatingly so far below. Just doing my thing, and collaging it onto my own memories, and people love it - what more satisfying, that and to hear the phone ring. Maybe things were easier back then, when there were no portable, cordless phones.

And it does, tonight. Tonight, my love calls me. I made him move out, 6 weeks ago and it feels an eternity. My heart has been in my throat since he has been gone. I think we fell victim to a sudden dust storm and lost our way. Panic and the necessary and thoughtless, primitive gut actions to survive. Mirages drown us all.

And so, after a successful day, being so poetically and surprisingly featured as a guest speaker at the DPC annual meeting - these folks were meeting and saving the California desert before I was born! - little did I know, the vanguards, my guardian angels - after following the Joshua Tree park superintendent Curt Sauer - what an honor! - and preceding Howard Wilshire and Jane Nielsen, geologists and desert savants and guardians galore, with their new book from Oxford University Press - there was little old me, reading my narrative incantation poem, Joshua Tree Imprimature, which is being superimposed on a film being created by the UCR-CA Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA- I am so excited to soon be helping promote an arrange showings of the film - the premiere is November 6th, at the museum - I don't know how I'm up for all of this, only to remember that I threw a boomerang out there last summer, early fall, putting out good intentions from my innermost heartfelt passion, for my beloved and austere desert - and here it is, coming back! Shoshone woman doesn't dial a phone, but she talks, how she talks to me.

And my heart feels a little less alone in the world, receiving so much love and abundance from these good, desert-loving and hard-working-protector folk. Who would think that so much so vital and needed comes from little meetings like the ones hosted today at the 29 Palms Inn? Guests wandered by, past the pool and Mr. Guitar Man, wondering who we were. I had a conversation with Preston Arrow Weed, an amazing Quezchan Indian from Yuma, Arizona. Or should I say, I shut my mouth and listened to what he had to say. I perused a notebook with pictures of and proposals for new California desert wilderness areas, created in large part by the hard work of people like the wilderness coalition. And my homie called.

He called, and all the stars sorted their way into my arms, and the world felt a little less crazy tonight, and I smoothed my heart across the deepening, darkling sky, no longer feeling alone. I watch a jet trail arc across, like a fast star, but with its blinking red. I don't care what he says, I only want to hear his voice, and imagine water, in Soda Dry Lake - I swear I've seen it and others will stand me by -it rises yet again. Resurrection - it's not a mirage. It's the real deal, and I'll drown in it, willingly. The thermometer, the wind-dancers, dazzle their displays across the water. Hold my hand, cradle a temperature of stars, answer the phone and talk to the woman from 5,000 years ago, or was that just yesterday, is it now -