Joshua Tree Film March 26 Riverside Library

I'm proud to say that I have a long, narrative poem, based on the Navajo Night Chant (with all due respect) called "Joshua Tree, Imprimature" that appears in this film!

It's on youtube....copy and paste the link below to your web browser.

http://www.youtube.com/digitalstudiogallery

Preface: No Place for a Puritan

Preface: No Place for a Puritan: An anthology of California desert literature
by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2009 by Ruth Nolan

I was ten years old in 1973 when my father first drove me in his old Volkswagen Bug from my hometown of San Bernardino, imbedded in the smog of southern California sixty miles east of Los Angeles, up the long, steep grade of Interstate 15 and over the four thousand-foot lip of Cajon Pass. I held my breath as we reached the top and saw, for the first time in my life, a land that was as wide and vast as the sea. There, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a long necklace of headlights stretched east for forty miles; toward the west, the sky was lit with rose and orange hues. We descended towards the small town of Victorville, racing past Joshua Trees whose thick-needled fists etched gracefully and fiercely against the sunset. I knew then and there that I’d found my place, my calling, my landscape. I stuck my head out the window and looked up: there was the evening star, 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 an entirely new adventure lie in wait for our family there, where we intended to re-locate to be near my father’s new job. My intuitions were confirmed 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 climbing a harsh rock peak near our house on an August afternoon. The desert was as silent as a church during a funeral and 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 drove was overlaid on an older route, an Indian trail used for thousands of years by different tribes to traverse California’s desert from the coast to the Colorado River and other inland areas, from waterhole to waterhole. The trail in part follows the one hundred fifty-mile-long Mojave River, which for centuries has flowed north—in some places above ground and through dense shoulders of cottonwoods, in other stretches underground beneath a vast and arid flood plain covered with deep sand—to its final resting place at Soda Dry Lake. By the seventeenth century, this same route was used by early Spanish priests and explorers; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western-bound settlers used the Mojave Road, or the Mormon Trail (same route, different name), to safely cross the desert to and from California’s densely populated, climate-friendly coast and the interior regions of the country.

As a child I perceived that this is a place of wildness and possibility, of rock hunting and tortoise sightings, of flash floods and years when rain never falls. But perhaps more significantly, this is also a peopled place. It is a land rife with stories of courage, despair, and resignation, where hopes are fulfilled and dreams dissolved. The desert is not, as it’s been stereotyped, a waterless void: thousands of springs and waterholes grace it. They are often hidden, detectable only to the longtime desert resident—by a lone cottonwood or sprig of weed in the Mojave, and by a cluster of native Washingtonian Fan Palm trees tucked into deep canyons of the Western Colorado. Just as the desert has been stereotyped, people who have made the desert home have been reduced to two-dimensional caricatures in the annals of American history and in a literary canon that favors cities, farms, and forests. With a little digging, one discovers that the literature of California deserts is every bit as exuberant, varied, and charming as the literature of its more populated and gentrified sisters.

The average reader is certainly familiar with stories of the rugged desert survivalist, the consummate “desert rat” or gold miner, grizzled and worn by sun, who wears a rattlesnake-skin headband and roams the desert with a bag of tools. However, the stories of the earliest people, California’s desert Indians, have gone largely untold. Their creation stories and songs are rich contributions to literature and depict an active relationship between the landscape and an ancient culture, which continues to thrive to this day. In stock desert literature, stories of rugged western settlers, gunslingers, and stagecoach riders, who brave the desert’s harsh expanses and pray to make it to water, have been greatly emphasized. The true story of California’s Mojave and Western Colorado deserts is as rich and textured as their vast geography, which covers twenty-five hundred miles and parts of seven of the state’s counties.

When I was ten years old, I knew nothing of the history of people in the place I found so entrancing. By the time I reached adulthood, became a college professor, and began to teach desert literature courses at College of the Desert, I realized that I had underestimated the breadth and depth of the literature of California’s desert. I’d never seen a collection that aptly reflected my own experiences and gave coherent meaning to the threads of “desert” woven into the works I’d read. In my own studies, any mention of the California desert was always overshadowed and left unexplained. It seemed to me that the desert was a literary underdog, employed as a fearful setting or as a metaphor for triumph over adversity but never depicted in a broader, fuller sense. Along with other inhabitants and enthusiasts who wanted a substantial, honest literary exploration of California’s deserts, I needed and deserved more.

It is my hope that, in this collection, I’ve given readers meaningful access to the history and culture of the desert, a land that often seems disparate and without consistent structure. For example, the Mojave River flows northward across an otherwise arid stretch of land, defying the stereotype of a waterless geography. In the southern portion of the Western Colorado, centuries-old sand dunes struggle to survive alongside golf courses. The Santa Rosa Mountains, one of the rockiest, most barren mountains ranges in the west, overlooks the Salton Sea, a vast, landlocked body of water situated at more than two hundred feet below sea level. Likewise, this collection contains pieces that seem to describe vastly different places but in fact describe facets of the same dynamic geography.

This anthology is organized thematically: these themes include “dangers,” “crossings,” “refuge and exile,” “lure,” “home,” “changes,” and “conservation and protection.” The order follows the arc of outsiders’ changing perceptions of the desert, from the idea that the desert is a terrifying wasteland to either be avoided or hurried across, at the risk of one’s life, to the belief that the desert is a place of spiritual renewal and mystery; from the desert as an exotic and foreboding place to visit to a landscape tamed of the landscape by irrigation and development and permanent home for thousands of residents. Each attitude toward the desert exists today, but the last two sections of the book explore more contemporary themes. Environmental awareness has dawned, and we’ve discovered that the desert is far from the disposable wasteland it was once thought to be: it is in fact is a fragile, overcrowded, over-used, and intensely threatened landscape.

At the heart of this collection is some of the best writing found in the American literary canon. There are stories, poems, journal entries, and news stories that incorporate many unique icons of the desert: the roadrunner, the remote homesteading cabin, the mirage. There are stories that thrill, frighten, sadden, and inspire: a man foolishly and arrogantly collecting live rattlesnakes; a lone woman striving to make a home in a remote desert canyon; Asian-American farmers in the Imperial Valley suffering unbearable personal loss; and a family coping with incarceration in a World War II concentration camp. There are meditations on how the desert landscape parallels the human spirit, and tales of ethnically diverse people carving communities of the farthest corners of the California desert. People from the region’s diverse Indian tribes—the Timbisha Shoshone, the Cahuilla, the Serrano, the Chemeheuvi, the Mojave, and others—have participated in this project, and an essay commemorating the passage of the historic California Desert Protection Act in 1994 is also included. In this collection, anything can happen, and often does: familiar voices are included alongside literature that has been obscurely published, is just arriving on the scene, or has been long out of print.

Decades have passed since the desert first took my breath away, and much has changed. The population of Victorville has exploded to more than 100,000 people, and smog now fills expanses once billed by real estate flyers as “the land of the champagne climate.” The entire California desert is threatened with overpopulation, pollution, and other social and climactic ills facing contemporary society. I now live in a different part of the desert, where golf courses and resorts crowd the horizon, and the endangered bighorn sheep is commemorated in decorated art statues in nearby shopping malls. The desert suddenly seems much smaller to me now, but the literary legacy appears much bigger. This is a land of people, of struggles and gains, of far more than mere exploitation or survival. In these stories, the landscape sings; it hums with the pulse of overlapping human lives, a river of sound that sometimes overflows its shores, and at other times travels quietly underground.

Joshua Tree Park Film: Escape to Reality 24 hrs @ 24 fps

For those of you who haven't seen it.....here is my section in a collaboration with the UCRiverside-California Museum of Photography on a film, "Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps" - based on photography by 60+ photographers and a long, narrative poem I wrote on Joshua Tree National Park. My poem, "Joshua Tree Imprimature," is based in form on the Navajo Night Chant, with all due respect.

Note: you will need to copy/paste the URL below to your web browser.

Enjoy! Comments are welcome!

http://www.youtube.com/digitalstudiogallery

Salvation Mountain via the Salton Sea

I took a trip to the Salton Sea and nearby Salvation Mountain yesterday with out-of-town family.....wonderful. The usual stop at North Shore, the Salton Sea State Recreation Area. I'm pleased to find out that the bird map I co-authored, "The Palms to Pines Birding Trail," is smartly being picked up by visitors, that the usual winter birds are on and above the water - pelicans, grebes, all matter of winter birds - a little amazed at the high number of visitors, and most of all, anticipating bringing my canoe down here for a flat water float before it gets too hot again, drifting along on the shoreline of the Salton Sea is one of life's ultimates! February. The height of winter, early spring, visitor season. The sea brims with life. Today it's 60 degrees, not 120, as it will inevitably be this summer.

And, most excited that my new California desert literature anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts,  to be published by Heyday Books in Berkeley, will be in this bookstore by next year, and hopefully making great sales. I'm in the final steps of wrapping up permissions-getting, revising the preface, and looking forward to doing something paradoxical in nature, I have barely got it done - a desert crossing in mid-summer, a dangerous endeavor, gutting it alone and moving from water hole to water hole - resisting civilization and the ludicrious empire-building with pilfered water (from the Colorado River) on our Colorado-Sonoran desert in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys where I live (hence, the inland sea that they call accidental, which seeks an outlet and has none and is now doomed to its own salty repetition and possibly near destiny as a dead sea very soon by agricultural runoff.)

And yet, I realize I'm creating water where once was mirage. Still sustainable, filled with storied names and creatures - fragile and endangered, my anthology is and was. Making a book out of sand - a purported collection of a storied landscape where there should be very few, or none - bullet holes on our cover, and a stark beauty in the poem from which we derive the book's name. I can only hope I've done something honest, real, captivating, and good, where when you look back over your shoulder, after embarking on your own literal and figurative desert crossings, there may be nothing left at all.

And now for yesterday's highlights: stippling down Hwy 99 to visit Bombay Beach, which fought back the water with dikes....past the bizarre, Chocolate-Mountain-haunch hot springs settlements of the Fountain of Youth Spa - Canadian flag flying, place packed with thousands of winter visitors - nestled against an active US Military gunnery range - and on down to decrepit Niland, on the southeast edge of the Salton Sea, once the tomato capital of the world, and off towards an old army barracks and mud hillside where is configured one of the desert's Seven Wonders: Salvation Mountain, a folk-art and God-Visionary monument to the powers of the human heart when it wants to make beauty out of nothing, and imprint something good: the progeny of Leonard Knight, whose done it all from paint and abandoned desert trash and goods, for the past 24 years. In the name of love!

I was privileged and honored to get Leonard's tour (again) and this time he talked mostly about love, and why love is the most important thing we have, and how people in traffic jams in the cities should all call out to one another when stuck in their cars with messages of hope and love. I filmed Leonard for 7 minutes, interviewed him and promised to put on youtube (others already have, but he's always excited to pass along his message) - and walked away, with my parents and my mom's cousin's wife, a little better for the moment, and stunned, and reminded that love is really all we have. Left and right, below and above.


Leonard Knight surveying his life's work....Salvation Mountain. Honored by Congress in 2001 as a work of national folk art.


Talent show stage at Slab City....still resonating with fun from the music of the last night....


The Oasis Club at Slab City, including hot dog stand.

Mom and Dad (Joe and Beverly Nolan) on a partially-submerged toy at the old North Shore Yacht Club marina - what else but a play-submarine? Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains and Salton Sea in the background.

Skateboard Art in the empty pool at the North Shore Yacht Club.....

Hey, You

Hey, you,
enough of this self absorbed anonymity
I want to make a poem today
I want to tell you
your long arms wrapped around me
artery tie-off style, it
would be the sun, this winter-desert is too withdrawn
and I thought you were in my palm
tree, fig of passive weather

Hey, you,
I want to say that it would've been better
if you just held me in your arms
than doing everything else instead
and then feeling you pull the needle away
towards the wall, to an air mattress on the floor

Hey, you,
I want to say it would be nice to hike that peak
like we did a year ago, and find a secret cave
abandoned in the dope-faced nod,
when you admired me, what is different today?

I am flat for poetry, my dreams fall onto the floor
I canceled Tecopa Hot Springs, meeting with desert
conservation people I identify with and adore
because I'm strung out on a dry country
called you

the track marks run parallel
to your cousin's death by train
I didn't mean to cross without looking
but there I found myself,
looking the wrong way
while scissoring two opposing tracks
downtown where the rails get tangled
not knowing if left or right
was the right way to go
and so I'm flat

Hey, You,
this isn't much of a poem
and you're a composite of what I hoped was love
melt the spoon, mix the junk with blood
with someone who I thought I knew
returning to the desert
by boxcar is not the way to go
never mind the pulse of winter fruit

Hey, You - what about me
the germinating seed you put into the ground
these small plants, they want to get high
while they burst into flowers
Hey, You, it's just turning to spring
Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here

Chamomile-Lavendar Tea, Hummingbird Free

Today, a winter storm masses itself through southern California
earlier, I was in Riverside, in the I.E. (inland empire)
having stayed over, after teaching an Inlandia Writers Workshop at the Riverside Library. Did not sleep well, bit of a sore throat and sinus infection, awoke to rain. Realization that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time wtih the wrong people. And so, I went to eat breakfast at a dowtown faux-alpine-village restaurant, Mr. T's.

Two friends I talked to in Riverside in the past 24 hours seem to be going more and more.....ignorant and inbred, if that is the best way I can phrase it, and with a smug, self-assurance that they are creating some kind of alternative genius. And this really frightens me - because isolationism, separatism, rebellion, lack of hope, and runaway mentalities are the earmarks of the loss of the human soul, the loss of renewal, the destruction of collectively sustenance-building society - that is, I'm witnessing firsthand that some people are just giving up, saying fuck it, things are fucked, therefore I'm going to say fuck it, too, and make it my business to just look out for #1. Lame excuses to be lazy, pathetic, and saddest, to abstain all responbility to oneself let alone the larger world, beyond perhaps one's one immediate posse. Yeah, that's gangster. Join a posse and do drive-by shootings if the world do you wrong.

Dangerous! Images of gun-wielding militia, rage against the machine, people thinking they can outsmart the unseen (and intangible) enemy. These are "times that try men's (and women's) souls," as the great U.S. Revolutionary War poet Thomas Paine said once, and may have said again of today - the weirdest, loneliest and scariest thing I see happening, emblemized by these particular people who will remain anonymous here, is that it appears that while the strong are searching for their deepest, innermost strengths and answering the call to build hope and renewal, the weak are retreating inward into fear-based paranoias, sick or ludicrous escape mechanisms that out-win even the most star-spangled and consumptive entertainment fantasies Americans have been locked onto with a particular vengeance since the early 90's: the "dumbing down" of our country, which has accelerated in the past two decades, actually three, I'd say. Did it sorta start when John Lennon got shot? In my lifetime, in my young adulthood, that was a definite dark-turning-point. 1980.

The rise of anti-intellectualism. I know from my years on the fireline that the fusees, the back-torching tools we often used to "fight fire with fire," always ended up in the hands of the most whacko, pyromaniac guys on the crew. Thinking of their own self-aggrandized sense of power, and enjoying some twisted walk between ignition and control. Clever, maniuplative, but not the smartest of men. Where, oh where is respect? This fascism-on-the-rise, by many of those who would think themselves enlightened and "better than the rest" is disappointing and chilling -not a far stretch from Aryan fantasies and imaginings of superiority, the thought that somehow we can out-run the fire. NOT. Try going on that fireline and you'll hear the race of train-engines, realize how puny you are. Holding a fusee and thinking you control the fucking world is about as lame and worthless and weak as shooting a musician who stands for peace, or thinking a gun or piece of nasty poetry aimed to hurt women and the weak will set you free.

We are in times of realizing our smallness in the bigger order of things, and we might with a little help from our friends understand that we are tiny fish in a giant phantasmogastic sea. But this is
not a hopeless or helpless thing. Rather, there is liberation here - jivamukti! Surrender to the nature gods, this massive storm poised to dump several more feet of snow in our mountains! Give in! But don't give up! Firefighting was the hardest thing I've ever done, besides being a parent and, arguably, editing a desert literature book - but - it was the ultimate experience in coming to know my strengths and vulnerabilities, of feeling good that I'd done some small measure of good to save homes, animals, forests - but meantime, understanding the futility of the job - fires will continue to erupt, and in the past few decades, in fact, forest fires have gotten bigger and more destructive than ever. But do I feel I wasted my work? Not for a moment. Rather, I saw and see it as a metaphor for the burning free of the human soul through our time spent on earth - as the writer Fitzgerald said, to loosely paraphrase, "the sign of a first-rate intelligence is to know that things are cracked and hopeless, and yet to keep up hope."

And so with this in mind, from a book I read in my early 20's and devoured then, and really comprehend through and through now, I lightly walk through apocalyptic fields. Into Clark's health food store downtown, and behold, a free chair massage! I buy healthy foods and share smiles and kind interactions with several people. I buy chamomile-lavendar tea, agave nectar, and three bottles of super green juice. Yeah, puny stuff. I could be planning survival tactics in a bunker, I could be making excuses for why working in the world is no longer important and make that my reason to sit on my ass all day and let someone else pay the rent, imagining that I'm some kind of exempted genius - but I don't.

And I manage to get home a few steps ahead of the darkness, through the San Gorgonio Pass, rain nipping at my taillights, and into full sunshine in the desert. I come home to the happy lapping dogs, not quite lap dogs, and read the story of Fig Tree John, an Indian who lived in the early part of the 20th century by the Salton Sea, how the Yuman Indians believed that the Salton Sea was the Colorado River's angry punishment at the white man for messing with the flow of the river for irrigation - Fig Tree John had so much respect for the power of the river that he stopped to pray - the lake created to be salty and useless, to irritate men for disrespecting the river gods. When I used to do whitewater rafting trips, it was common to lose a hat, or other item when going through rapids, or from a draft of wind, and we'd always say, "the river gods claimed it. Let it go." And so we did. And you know when going through rapids, you control nothing; you only can try to hold on and let the river hurl you along.

As for the hummingbird- somehow a green-breasted Costa's Hummingbird got into my house shortly after I got home. It bounced off the ceiling, landed on the floor, and my big dog briefly had it in its mouth. I believe the bird played dead for a moment. I spanked Brindle away, got a small broom and dustpan, and managed to get the bird outside.I began to cry, pained by my sense of distance from my two Riverside friends who seem to think that the thin pane of window glass is reality, pained by how this beautiful, brave bird has staved off a huge dog, and collapsed in a corner of the windowsill. I scoop the bird up so gently, and take it outside, thinking it is probably dead or almost dead, and cry, thinking of the sense of futile, trapped inside of a strange house I'm feeling these days - and set it on a table, wanting it to expire with dignity....

And then, the bird stirs, lifts up, and soars away, high, into the sky above the neighbor's house with incredible lightning speed and is gone, arcing quickly towards the sun..... to a "t."

stuck in deep snow.....and set free

So today began so strangely- I lost my cell phone (again) last night, and spent the morning lookin for it at work and restaurant, nada, shelled out $200 bucks for a new one. GRRRR. And, on top of that, feeling ill and sick. I had planned to do so many things today, but last night, he told me again he was lusting....obsessing.....consumed with thoughts....for another girl. Same girl of 3 years? The one his marriage crumbled over? The one who "went running for the hills" when the shit hit the fan? The one he told me about, then conveniently stopped talking about for the past two years, until recently? Detached I have been for more than a year, and much more so in recent months, as I go through therapy to help me deal with this twisted b-shit, trying to understand why I'd sell myself so short, why I would try to secure love from someone who cannot, does not love me - someone who, to be so cliche, "wants the milk for free."

I've done so much to be strong. I have a great life, many friends, successful career, stellar literary path just now crescendoing. And, I've been moving forward towards taking care of myself, and also rebuilding my life from a whacked out detour I somehow ended up on when I wasn't thinking straight. Even so, this kind of thing cuts through the heart and soft organs and esophagus and my gentle and loving reproductive organs. For more than a year, I was strung along in a fake relationship. I saw all the warning signs - winter storm warning - and I plowed ahead, typical me, Ruth is a go-getter and a strong woman and "I can take care of myself," eh?

The "remaining friends and working together" seems to have hit some too-sharp hairpin curves in the road lately - much like seven-level-hill that I just drove up, a quick jut from golf courses at sea level to the mountains. At every sharp turn the past year, there has been something devastating just almost pushing me off the edge of that severely dangerous road; when I lived in South Palm Desert, we'd often see rescue crews hauling cars from hundreds of feet down one of the steep cliffs. A narrow rail, sections taken out, many fatalities on that road. And this is the road I chose to drive today - to play in the snow and rejuvenate my soul. This past two years with this certain friend has been one close call after another, and I've already brushed a few of those bright orange cones.

Much was good. Productivity and poetry. Much more was devastating, demolishing to me as a woman, actually, and I'm now in the aftermath of the storm. The snow is deep, the sun shines, the air is cold, Brindle, my 100 lb mastiff-shepard "baby boy doofus dog" is suddenly out on Hwy 74 while I contemplate getting my Toyota RAV4 unstuck from the snow. I call him and he comes running to me, both dogs now safe in the car after a happy hour frolicking in 1-2 foot deep snow in the Santa Rosa-San Jacinto Mountains, 20 miles and 5,000 feet in elevation gain from my desert home.

I don't have a four wheel drive anymore, and my snow driving skills reveal poor judgement, although I'm wise enough to have attempted to trace a big truck's tracks - the truck now gone, but I thought I could get to that trailhead. It's a trailhead of the Pacific Crest Trail, where is crosses Highway 74, and heads north towards Mt. San Jacinto, one small toe of its several-thousand mile journey from Mexico to Canada.

This is a trail I found, and hiked, when I first moved to Palm Desert nearly ten years ago. It was August, and I was about to begin my new teaching job at College of the Desert. I didn't know anyone, had briefly met some of my colleagues-to-be. Restless and seeking reprieve from the heat, I happened upon this trailhead, and found a wonderful hike - through pines and oak groves, vast rocks, amazing views, cool mountain temperatures. It's a hike I haven't done for 5 or 6 years, maybe more. My life has taken so many new directions, so much has happened with people and my job and countless experiences in the past ten years.

Somehow, today's whim was a part of saying goodbye. Revisiting an old, familiar, but long-abandoned walk, a former self, I'd never done it in the snow. Southern California just weathered a four-day winter storm, and while our deserts received the nominal rain and everyone's out in their t-shirts again, the mountains are still in full-winter. Every few years, the area between Pinyon/Anza/Idyllwild/Garner Valley gets hit with big snowstorms. And this winter is the first one in three years with this much snow.

The last time I'd been in the area to play in the snow was three years ago, 2006, when I was having a ferociously painful time while my daughter finished her senior year of high school - without detailing, she went through some heavy shit, and I was beside myself - the first time I realized that my beloved child, then 17, was experiencing something I could not really cure or solve for her. A parent's hardest moment. And so, I'd gone up to Garner Valley proper.....and gotten stuck in the snow! Luckily, a van of two women and kids helped me get out, and then invited me to their nearby house for hot chocolate and food! I have always remembered that day, a talisman of light and wonderful people, crossing my path, helping me get unstuck, and then extending generosity to me at a crucial moment when I was having a very sad day. And interestingly, it wasn't long after that time in my life, when, disoriented when my daughter left for college, suddenly alone, alone alone, that I desperately, anxiously got involved with someone who was not meant to be.

Flash forward three years, it's 2009. And I was sucker punched again, the truth will set you free but god-damn it hurts, my stomach in knots, a poor night's sleep, because again, I was reminded of the levels of how I was deceived, and how I deceived myself. Mentally I get it. I can handle it. Emotionally is another matter. The spirit often deflects the blows, as do our bodies, as a way to enable us to handle disappointments and pains stemming from those we love. "He's just not that into you" - the new movie, and my slap in the face truth, washing over me again and again - how about, he just was never that into you," accounting for this tough accounting job I find myself in. I thought my life was taking a new direction - and here I am, tracing an old path, and today, with this deep snow, the trail isn't even visible - no one has walked through the snow, yet.

I decided today, after not sleeping all night and feeling sick, disgusted, and angry, to go up for the purity of snow. I haven't been in the snow all season, and we've had lots of it this year, and snow for me has always been intensively healing. I love snowshoeing and skiing, and miss my days in Flagstaff, where the cleanse of the white stuff was routine.

So, I was stuck. What the hell, might as well get a nice walk in. A tough walk! The dogs sort of found the trail, but they also sunk deep to their chests. Meantime, I was wondering how I could've forgotten my snowshoes. Beautiful, with my palm tree frond, hand-carved walking stick. Going into nature, alone, has always been my balm, no matter what I've been going through. Trace an old memory, a healing opportunity. And the snow - lock the car and figure it out after we hike! The dogs, so joyful it makes me laugh - little kids, frolicking and going apeshit!

And then, time to dig myself out. The walking stick was all I had, and a piece of blue sleeping pad backpacking foam from my backpack - It took awhile, but I scraped enough snow from behind my wheels, put that foam beneath the left front tire, carved out a long trail of tire-paths towards the highway - uphill, at that, gunned the gas, smoked the clutch, and guess what! I was free! Almost.....the last bit up to the highway was steep and the snow extra deep from the snowplow.
I stopped the car as it slid sideways, before it slid into a drainage ditch. I really didn't want to wait hours for Triple A to show up, if at all.

Out of the car again. Dig, dig, dig. The snow, deeper. Images of myself extricating my vehicle from this momentary stuck-ness, succeeding. Wondering why no one stopped to help, although it seems important that I figure this out myself. The dogs watch me from inside the car. I take off my jacket and gloves and knit hat - I've gotten really warm! I think of how strong and brave I am, how I fought forest fires and jumped out of helicopters. I think of how I raised my daughter, as a single parent, and raised a young woman who is competent, beautiful, compassionate and strong.

I dig and dig, assess the situation, kick snow aside, scrape to pavement. It's hard work, but luckily the sun has begun to soften this snow; otherwise, it would remain iced beneath and I would not be able to rescue myself. Scrape, dig, kick, curse, look up at the beauty of the nearby mountains, how they are laced with snow. The dogs smile at me. I bend down again. I don't care if no one stops, don't care if I'm bending over and my pants are sagging too low as I do so, as I don't ahve a belt. I....am taking care of myself.

I put of my mind my agitation and internalization of people who have asked for, and received my strengths, who would then devastate me - it helps to think they don't mean to do so, but I've had a lot of anger lately about always feeling I have to be "the strong person" in every situation, and also suddenly understanding that mixed with my strength, accomplishments, and capacity, is a new vulnerability and gentleness and need-for-the-love-of-the-universe to shine on me, to accept that - a very awkward transformation, rather like going through my teens again.
We go from child to woman in very strange ways, or at least I did - a gawky tomboy with glasses, a downright nerd from puberty till my mid-teens, when suddenly - high school and I was popular, beautiful, and noticed by so many boys!

Could it be.....I'm going through another ugly duckling phase, where I suddenly don't know where I stand with anyone, anywhere....back then, at 13 and 14, I was a great over-achiever. Editor of the jr. high newspaper, star student, star in the drama productions, star tennis player.....how I ached inside, feeling like a shy geek no one really wanted to befriend, but still following my star, the desert sunsets and my beloved Irish Setter, Toby, and the rock-mountains I climbed behind my parents' house in the desert, all soothing me, rejuvenating me, and giving me hope that life would move on, unfold in all its beauty - and how it did!

And look at me now. I am part-regression back to that shy nerd. Out here with my dogs, my current best friends and loyal "little-kids." They love me so much and I've ignored them lately, wrapped up in my head and hurting and not wanting them to embrace me, but they've hung in there. They have known me for years, and know their "mommy" loves them still, that we've had so many great hikes together in the past, and that I'm just now starting to get that back for all of us again. Feeling like a car-wreck, but still driving - yes, there is enough oil in the engine, and the gas tank is full, auto-pilot serves me so well now - and again, I'm excelling in ways and arenas that make me feel so connected, whole, and loved, in the literary and poetry world. That light sustains me, even when I'm feeling so inwardly dim. On a mountain again - I did this at 14, how could I forget, how easy it is to do now. I take a deep, deep breath. Damnit, woman, you DO have your shit together, don't let ANY motha-fucka take that away from you!

I am in the car and ready to rock n' roll. This is it! I've determined that accelerating backwards is my best bet - forward is too deep and that ditch.....I wait for a string of cars to pass. My emergency blinkers remain on. And then - the last truck to pass suddenly pulls over ahead of me.....out jump two hot young guys in their 20's, running over to help. I wave and give my intense thanks - "no problem, we got stuck in the last storm," the taller guy says. They remind me of the guys I worked the firelines with - tall, lean, muscled, and down to earth.

Step on the pedal......two guys push me backwards....and I'm easy and free!

I like to think I would have been able to extricate myself from that deep drift on my own, by myself, maybe just another half hour of digging had those guys not stopped by at that crucial moment. Then again, that they stopped, and gave me that last extra push, a good push, out of being stuck in the snow on a beautiful day, not a bad push into the ditch and deeper drifts - this has made all the difference and made this a forever-to-remember day.

c. 2009 Ruth Nolan

Figures of Thought

You were so young I couldn’t embrace you, small as
you were, there was a man and his belt,
Your hair blonde, shoulder length, the scary man
We could not aptly name

We could not aptly name
The scary man tightening his belt,
We could not presume
To know his name
The fire tip of his cigarette, small flame

Young, oh, you were so old
As not to know the figures in a dream

The moon, in her small stepping
Over ancient beach stones, the fish traps
Are lonely without the sea, without their catch
The people are so few they seem large
And men take young boys aside

Your sun, waiting to show its face
Too bright in its asking for love

And far too wide to hold
Your shoulder length hair, the unnamed man
Hovering behind you
Rising with the tide, a sleeper wave
And the villagers run to greet you
So few, they seem large, not mean,
Spears ready with burning arrow tips

c. Feb 9, 2009 Ruth Nolan

Poetry Workshop Sat Feb 21 Living Desert

February 21, 2009, 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Desert Poetry Writing Workshop Class A303
The Living Desert University/Living Desert Reserve
47-900 Portola Avenue Palm Desert, CA 92260
Phone: 760-346-5694
Ruth Nolan, workshop leader

Please join us for an inspirational desert poetry writing workshop at The Living Desert! Open to all levels of poets, or aspiring poets, or those who want to use language and words to help embody the unique beauty and inspiration of the desert magic found at this unique site.

This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of poetry, by reading published desert poets' works. We will then embark on our own "hands-on" desert poetry writing activities that will be generated by observation and walk through selected areas of the Living Desert.

Poets will be encouraged to share their on-site works with other participants, and to contribute their finished works for the new desert literary journal, Phantom Seed.

There is a nominal fee for this workshop; please contact the Living Desert to register.
http://www.livingdesert.org/education/ld_university.asp
Phone: 760-346-5694

Note: I am going to invite attendees to get there early for a morning hike.....those who wish to join us for a hike through the Reserve prior to writing activities in the afternoon. -Ruth

Poetry Reading Feb 28th Small Wonder

Poetry and Prose Reading

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Small Wonder Foundation,

7101 Jurupa Avenue #20

Riverside, CA phone: 951-687-4879

(in an industrial complex, in the back)

2-5 pm free and open to the public

Full Moon Cahuilla Village Site

February 8 2009

One night before the full moon, Cahuilla village site near the fishtraps just below sea level, the ring of water from Ancient Lake Cahuilla we come up from under water, 40 feet beneath, and walk up canyon to the old beach - the ancestors camped here.....

A full moon, February, it rained in the desert earlier in the day. By evening, the bright night light sparkles the water on fresh wildflowers I can see in the dark - puffy clouds playing in shadow across the Santa Rosa Mountain arms.....

Beach sand, white and brilliant, with crushed shells, too, perfect for sitting and building a fire, we got it just right, selecting dead desert wood and drying it out by slowly encouraging flame - warm and wine, black bean burritos, stars and laughter.......

Poetry lives here, so clear it is beyond words, cleared out hut sites nearby, this was a cove along a beach, the memory of water, and Martinez Mountain shining its lovely 6,800 foot peak above our heads, a puff of white-ish cloud, the coyotes howl and the hound dogs on Torres Martinez reservation howl back.......

Why am I not afraid out here? I walk along rocky shoreline, alone. My mind these days is in a gnarl of stress and depression, coping to see my way out, to see clarity, and here, in this half-light, it's incredibly real. This makes sense. I dread going back.

Back to my friend, who's shared this sacred site with me, to warm by the fire. I began the weekend by canceling on plans to be at the desert committee meeting in Shoshone, near Death Valley, four hours' drive to the north. I canceled my plans because the person I was planning to go with canceled on me while I was driving to his house to pick him up. Let's not dwell on this.

My friend E. called and invited me to his place down towards the Salton Sea. I've ended up playing campfire till well past midnight at the bottom of a canyon where Cahuilla once camped and lived. Such a private experience, and I send my love and light out to the world in small prayers as I finger tiny shells; this was really named Conchilla Valley, the place of little shells, but a map-maker lacking Spanish skills mis-labeled it and we are stuck with Coachella.

"It's complicated" is an undersatement....facebook doesn't give us enough options to depict the true state of things in our lives. For me, it's so complicated it's not funny anymore, but one long jag of ongoing pain, confusion. After the boys of summer are gone. But this moon. This all-encompassing moon. So bright.

My past few years' efforts at relationships have run their course like a mad, wild fever, and the wash is dry. I'm not afraid, but I am sad. I dated no one for four years prior to that, focused on career and motherhood that I was, a smaller world that was safety netted. And before that, one, longtime half-baked thing that kept me afloat for a good six years.

But my daughter grew up. I fell out of the box, lost like a fish waking up to find that a century has passed and the slumber has turned into a dried out sea. A Rip Van Winkle out of water, outside of water and "out" of drink. Abandoned in the dried out fishtrap! Is there a way out?

I am parched with exhaustion, wondering what went wrong. How and when did things change so drastically? How quickly was this village site abandoned - the forces that suddenly commandered its demise - Spaniards, and then ranchers, and finally, the pressures of "civlization" to adapt or die. And adapt quickly, the Cahuilla did.

Even this area is privately owned and slated for golf course development! I weep for every bit of broken pottery I walk by; say a small prayer for the large stone metate my friend says is just up the canyon, too big to safely move into a hiding place deeper in the canyon so the obnoxious off-roaders who've been driving up here can't steal it with their winch, or perhaps crush it beneath their 4-wheel drive monster truck tires.

I'd love to pack a bag and go "yesterday," but I have a house to sell, a job to sort through, if only I could just goddmaned get out of here and go. Anywhere but here. Traveling might be, as Emerson said, a fool's paradise, but from this shipwreck in a dry lakebed, it looks pretty damn good to me. Is there hope for me?

Marriages, children still at home, a smaller circles of identity to keep me balanced and safe - I've paid an enormous price, and I shiver at the understanding - to walk the desert is to lose your sense of self. Stay too long and you become one of those rambling desert rats who stumble out of deep canyons, grizzled and mumbling to themselves, iconic and always, the sense of "wow, what was that?" I'm saying that to stay too long is to get too lost in rarity, too far removed, and inevitably, so far out you can't come back.

I can only hope that's not where I am. Yet. In our so-called despairing economic times, there's no longer such a thing as footloose and fancy free. You can't really mingle and mix various facets of society so easily. You have to choose, hunker down, and understand that our ideas of what it means to be free are outdated. Move along, now, and mingle with the crowd. Don't stand out. And don't disappear.

The irony is that I'm embracing all this beauty, in such a quiet way that is so indigenous for me, and my friend, we both grew up in open deserts and share a bond of antiquity that way, but crisscross through society making our way towards people, community, which we both agree is missing entirely here. Others live more sheltered and less dangerous lives - or do I just imagine this? E. and I are bound in friendhsip by the irony that we are out of bounds. Times suddenly and urgently dictate that you find, create, and sustain community. It is the new challenge of my life, and I'll trade a bit of wildness for sanguity.

The desert anthology for Heyday, my paean and final departure song to this place. I've wrapped it up, crossed it many times on all its many faces and lives and roads, and connecting all its dots, like stars, moving across the sky, but familiar still - Orion's Belt, Big Dipper, Pleides, and many others still.

As my publisher says, the desert takes it out of people, takes their vitality. He said this to me at a Christmas party and I suddenly know what he means. I'm in the final stages of dehydration - the vision images across the sky, cloud shadows so subtle and gentle and then shifting away - this is not a place where people can stay - sane.

To live in the desert is to hide away. The desert really keeps its own company, and the loneliness is acute. People come and go. Very few stay. It's time for me to do a geographic - I'm 46 and it's time to leave home. No Place For A Puritan, indeed. This time. I'll be the one to leave. As the poet Rilke said, "you must change your life." The hardest ever thing. Is there lushness and the golden land on the other side of these arid mastiffs?

The drive home, through the last remnants of date ranches with their lofty palm trees, old farm roads, is laced with drifting tule fog, what a rarity in the desert, this middle of night moistness. My windshield was laced with dew. I am cruising in a dream, underwater.

The memory of fish traps, ancient shorelines, geographies traced so deep you'd never really know this was once a sea unless you are able to truly see your way through the human heart. And that, my dear, is laissez faire. We rush face first, closer and closer towards the Milky Way. For me, for now, I'm about as alone, and close to eternity, as a person can get.

Cutthroat for Assassin

It's February, volunteer nasturtiums slice through the soil of my core
ten ships set out to cross a turbulent sea, ten sails tipping above land
rollerblading on new skates into a headwind on level ground
migraine headache richoceting up and down my spine for three days

ten ships set out to cross a turbulent sea, ten sails tipping above land
I canceled a weekend trip because my friend canceled on me, last minute
migraine headache richoceting up and down my spine for three days
He's gotten increasingly agitated and mean on the phone with me

I canceled a weekend trip because my friend canceled on me, last minute
no reason other than that he didn't want to drive in the rain
he's gotten increasingly agitated and mean on the phone with me
I told him how I felt, clicked the phone shut, pulled over, and cried

no reason other than that he didn't want to drive in the rain
my puny "what did you expect" tears, competing with windshield splatters
I told him how I felt, clicked the phone shut, pulled over, and cried
Palm Springs offers little for a single middle aged straight woman

my puny, "what did you expect" tears, competing with windshield splatters
the storm hadn't even arrived yet but maybe he was telling me it would
Palm Springs offers little for a single middle aged straight woman
maybe he knew he'd explode like a winter storm all over me, ice and cold

The storm hadn't even arrived yet but maybe he was telling me it would
a sucker punch to the gut, a violent synecdoche, I may end up tied to a tree
Maybe he knew he'd explode like a winter storm all over me, ice and cold
veins streaking the window in front of me like a cracked open rack of ribs

a sucker punch to the gut, a violent syncecdoche, I may end up tied to a tree
the other one I'd call to love has an ongoing, impossible Christian virgin fantasy
veins streaking the window in front of me like a cracked open rack of ribs
he can't scrape the last bit of meat from the Bible stories from his breastbone

the other one I'd all to love has an ongoing, impossible Christian virgin fantasy
our earliest years impress neurotic neurologic paths we trace in our fantasies
he can't scrape the last bit of meat from the Bible stories from his breastbone
Mark Twain, he's read, we've listened to Jazz together from a bar called Raxx

our earliest years impress neurotic neurologic paths we trace in our fantasies
all that music, swinging across my thighs with his hips, his dreams were not of me
Mark Twain, he's read, we've listened to Jazz together from a bar called Raxx
single mom for years, professional woman, it cracks apart in two bad dreams

all that music, swinging across my thighs with his hips, his dreams were not of me
divorce: from my house, from my job, these bad-windshield transparencies
single mom for years, professional woman, it cracks apart in two bad dreams
no one to clean up after my departure, it soils from my shoulders to the floor

divorce: from my house, from my job, these bad-windshield transparencies
the desert blinks back at me, eastward a dried up ocean, now a tinted fantasy
no one to clean up after my departure, it soils from my shoulders to the floor
It's February, volunteer nasturtiums slice through the soil of my core.

c. Feb 9, 2009 Ruth Nolan

Phantom Seed in Pasadena was wonderful!

The Phantom Seed magazine reading in Pasadena, CA on January 31 was a wonderful success. although I took my camera, I forgot my take pictures! It was held in the Catalina Branch of the Pasadena Library, and a number of poetry contributors were in attendance: myself, Jeff Green, Laurie Barton, Don Kingfisher-Campbell, Cal Okie, Debbie Kolodji, Bruce Williams, Bryan Bywater, Lori Wall-Holloway, Julie Paegel, and others. Thanks to everyone for making this a wonderful afternoon celebrating desert poetry! Please feel free to continue to contribute to issue #3, which will be published sometime this spring. Submissions are accepted at: runolan@aol.com - please use email attachment and include author's biography.

We also will be scheduling a few more readings for issue #2, including a reading at the Gypsy Den in Costa Mesa, CA in April, a reading at the California Desert Symposium, also in April, at the ZZYZX Springs-Desert Studies Center, and possibly another reading at the Living Desert Reserve in Palm Desert.

That's it for now. I'm in week 2 of a new semester at College of the Desert and my mind is woven thread at the moment with it all.