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.