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.