Desert Anthology Sneak Preface!

Enjoy! This is from the preface I've written for the California Desert Literature anthology I'm editing for Heyday Books, to be published in fall, 2009.

I was ten years old in 1973 when my father first drove me in his old Volkswagen Bug up the long, steep grade of Interstate 15 from my hometown of San Bernardino, 60 miles east of Los Angeles and imbedded in the smog of southern California’s Inland Empire region, and over the 4,000 foot lip of California’s Cajon Pass summit. I held my breath as we reached the top of the pass and beheld, for the first time in my life, a horizon of land that was as wide and vast as the sea. From there, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a long necklace of headlights stretched east for 40 miles, and the western sky was lit with rose and orange hues. We descended downhill, towards the small town of Victorville, racing past Joshua Trees, their thick needled fists etched gracefully and fiercely against the colored sunset. I knew then and there that I’d found my place, my calling, my landscape, my inner wilderness. I stuck my head out the window and looked up: the evening star, with a slice of moon alongside it. I was instantly and forever smitten.

This was an empty and imposing land, rife with promise of danger and thrill. I sensed that for our family, soon to re-locate there to be near my father’s new job, an entirely new adventure lay in wait. Three years later, when my mother opened a kitchen drawer to find a baby Mojave Green rattlesnake; when I went to bed serenaded by a symphony of coyotes every night; when my brother went to the hospital with dehydration after summiting a harsh rock peak near our house on an August afternoon, my intuitions were confirmed. The desert was as silent as a church during a funeral, and it was as wide open and empty as a schoolyard on a Sunday, but it was never, ever boring.

Little did I know, on that first drive to the high desert, that the road we traversed was overlaid upon an older, centuries-old route: the old Indian trail used for thousands of years as a cross-desert pathway for Native Americans of many tribes traversing their way across California’s desert from the coast to the Colorado River and other inland areas, working their way from waterhole to waterhole, and in part, winding across and near the Mojave River, which sometimes flowed, and still flows through dense shoulders of cottonwoods, and at other times, moves northwards silently underground in a vast and arid wash covered with deep sand. By the 17th century, this same route came to be used by early Spanish priests and explorers, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, by western-bound settlers – the Mojave Road, the Mormon Trail – same route, different name, and similar purposes – to cross the desert safely to and from California’s densely populated and climate-friendly coastal regions and the interior regions of the country.

copyright (c) 2009 Ruth Nolan