March is here, and already for us in the low desert, the dread of HEAT on the way. Warm days, odd, near-thunderstorm weather this afternoon as I went rollerblading through my neighborhood, the Palm Desert Country Club. Today, I awoke to the neighbors' two puppies barking, barking, barking.....and saw, when I looked out the front door, the ubiqutious UHAUL moving van in front of the house. The lady with the bad back and golf cart and three kids, moving out. She's been there only a matter of months, and I've been through this with that house five times already in less than five years. It's sad, and unsettling. Where do they all go? It is haunting.
A disheveled sort of day - a Monday following a weekend of poetry gathering with friends in Riverside at my friend April's Small Wonder Foundation (with I.E.-based poet-writers Julie Paegle, Cyrus Emerson, April Durham, and me) - thanks, April, for hosting the event and bringing together a small circle, and for me, yesterday scurrying to catch up with long-put-off house chores: cleaning the yard, picking the last grapefruit and oranges from the trees to ward off citrus rats, and earning terrible arm scratches while raking beneath the bouganvellia - weeding the garden, blocking the busted-up front gate so the dogs can't knock it open again, and throwing my canoe onto the pool, enjoying the soothe of float, if only in my imagination, because when I'm home, I rarely have time to relax. It's always catch-up time, and this time, for having gone to Riverside and back four times in the past week for various events, often arriving home at very late hours! Last Sunday for a women's poetry group I'm honored to belong to at my friend Cati's house; Wednesday, to facilitate a terrific NEA Big Read literary circle ("Crash, Boom, Love" by Juan Felipe Herrera and "Bless Me, Ultima" by Rudolfa Anaya;) my Thursday night Inlandia Writers Workshop (very fun!) and Saturday, for the poetry reading at April's salon. No wonder I'm tired!
Unsettled: the pristine, slight days of perfect tangerine light of January yielded to the always-too-quick maze of February, the short month, too much jam packed into its contraction, and in the yang principle, this month is for expansion. Friday, an afternoon hike into Pushwalla Palms, parking my car in the usual spot off of Washington, heading north, sneaking in through the barbed wire, following an old road till canyon drop off, then up a slope, down another trail into the oasis proper - a fair amount of water running. Finishing the loop, heading west, as dark settles in - coyotes howling, across the road, but Brindle and Shasta both spooked and running back towards me at the sound. Grateful when I see the twilight-shaded hulk of my Toyota RAV4 ("Little Rippy,") I've been on this hike before when it was so dark I had to use the key alarm to find it!
Again, I saw the horse trailer of a deaf woman who donates her days during the winter by riding her horse into the preserve to do all kinds of maintenance. She'll be gone again soon as the weather turns hot, to go somewhere else until late October or November. I saw her in a side draw, but pulled the dogs around the long way; Brindle was quite nervous last time he saw that horse. So many memories, super-layered into the deep canyon mud walls; it could be only yesterday that I hiked here with Brindle as a puppy in wildflowers so thick and tall he was almost buried, or with a friend who was in my life and is gone, with my daughter and her boyfriend, taking the ridge trail back into sherbet sunset when they were still in high school, or with my parents that hot Easter Sunday when my dad almost put his hand directly onto a baby rattler on a palm log. I am imbedded, my life of 10 years here, and yet, saying good bye to it all, too. I can't believe how many times, using different loops, I've done this hike - at least 12-15, I'd guess, or more. One of my usual, "can only do it in that window from late October - if we're lucky, till mid-April. I emerge from the last group of sparse palm trees; lots of big mud chunks in the wash, fallen from the hillsides in our heavy rains this year - and there is is, as I stand, a cluster of rocks begins to fall from the canyon lip, and rushes down, piquing the brief interest of the dogs. Rockslide, on demand. The earth moves. I too plan to move. Soon
Longer days, nearing spring equinox, and for me, suddenly, almost, the final wrap of desert anthology. My journeying circles, here, in this desert, coming to their rounded ends. The sand dunes are gone, and for many reasons, my life has an urgency about it for moving on. I had no idea, when I embarked on this book project, in spring of 2007, after the success of the book "Inlandia", which sparked a literary renaissance not only for writers in the Inland Empire, but in my own heart and mind, awakening and connecting me with other writers and a writing community, mostly in Riverside, for the first time in my life - a huge, huge awakening and validation that someone like me, born in San Bernardino and somehow relegated to years of lonely if amazing and deeply imprinting years of desert wandering - actually had something worthile to write, to connect to, to compile, to say. I can't express the extreme effect this had on my life! (See my blogspot picture - that is me at the Inlandia release party in Nov, 2006, signing a copy of "Inlandia!"
As a part of this, and based on my number of years teaching desert literature courses at my college and various symposiums and beyond, I began seeing the sincere need for a "desert" book, that my time in the desert, after being here for most of my life, would also be nearing the end of its legacy. This book project has consumed me, and increasingly so since last summer. I spent days and days indoors, escaping the 115 degree blinding heat, poring through piles of manuscripts, always adding one more thing, taking out one more thing, and then beginning on the permissions-getting. Learning as I have gone along, with the tutelage of Gayle Wattawa at Heyday - and looking back, realizing this has been a crash course in the graduate school of copyright laws, the world of editors and publishers and agents, as well as writers, and the wildness of the very idea and act of putting together....an anthology!
I've added friends and strangers along my literary journey. Some have come and gone; few remain. Even today, my mom was here, helping me go through the last batch of permissions-organizing. I've begged and borrowed help from anyone I can, and even hired other friends to pitch in where they can. I've put off several weekend trips to what would've been way-cool desert conservation meetings, East Mojave, Tecopa, not to mention vacationing and time off; canceled the Mendocino Writers Conference last year to get this book done; have irritated numbers of people whose works can't fit, irritated friends and family for who I've had to say, "I've GOT to get this...intro and bio version #29 finished by tonight....have to talk to an agent in NYC to talk the price down for the Joan Didion piece....faxing contract materials to Pauline Esteves, esteemed Timbisha Shoshone tribal elder, for the right to reprint her statement of Homeland to congress in 2000 - heavy stuff!
I understand that few of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, wide network of literary comrades share my passion for this project - and at this point, more determination and discipline and a touch of craziness in my drive to pull every ounce of professional experience and acumen to stay focused and get it done - whilst enduring heavyduty teaching semesters at College of the Desert....in recent months I've survived on the tiny joys popping up from one author correspondence or another, or, say, scoring a hard-to-get permission, or better, tracking down an obscure family member-copyright holder, or getting a way-cool permission from a way-cool famous writer for a great price, and how I savor those kind words and supportive sentences scribbled on sticky notes and small papers along with permissions sent and granted - and how exciting to meet, albeit in email or letter, so many of the country's most amazing writers - the excitement is beginning to stir, however, as I share and read, where I can, the preface that I wrote to the book.
My love affair with desert literature, legacy, and lore, as well as the heartbreak over seeing the purity of line in my desert being cracked and broken day by day by wanton development - parallels the heartbreak for me of love relationships, too, that have run directly alongside this whole book project affair of the last two years. Relationships flamed and fanned with passion, with pure intention, and suddenly, as threatened and doomed as desert corridors slated for windmill development under the guise of "everything green is good." Green is only the temporary color of things in the desert, and only following a brief winter of heavy rain, to be followed by scorching heat and withered grass, wildfires, white-sere day upon day. Hope and despair, love and loneliness, passion and pain, side by side by side. Turning with seasons, upside-down-on-a-mortgage, lucky for that fixed interest rate, but at what price, to be left alone?
A mirage - here and gone - tempting and destructive- true and false - water really as/is in that (dry) lakebed, and water is (not) there for the drinking - insanity mirroring stability - lies and desperation - and flood - stuck in mud - crackling the caked dry ruts with tires or boots - you could see a city of people here, and you can also see the sharpest loneliness you'll ever have met -
Yes. I've made some kind of literary journey across miles and miles of page sands, turning chronicle through my front room, navigating salts and scoping the water holes, the population centers, the dry lakebeds, the emptiness, the urgency of impending environmental doom - desert lands leased for windmills & solar farms & power lines galore - going green is not good for our desert, except for now, the quick burst of widlflowers. Again, this spring, the first good season for flowers since 2005, following our last winter of real rain. Economic rock-bottom we've hit and continue bouncing off of, like the rocks on that hillside cascading down, but we did get some serious rain and every desert rat knows the intense importance of that!
Today, but perhaps not next week or tomorrow, pink desert sand verbena sprout their short songs on the few remaining emtpy lots in my neighborhood - when I bought my house in 2002, the four square miles of sand dunes, ancient, steepled, sidewinder-tracked, glimmering, shimmering, phantasmorgastic white dunes swifting and sculpting behind me, proferring thick stands of centuries-old mesquite dozens of feet high. Now, a golf course or two. Lovers come and gone during this book. The collapse of our economy - last year at this exact, exact time one day off to the day, I refinanced my home, and it was worth more than $100 k than it is now - the absolute truth. I was buying $400 Dolce and Gabbana leopard print glasses, thinking nothing of it. Supporting a live-in friend on the endless ATM card, buying posh groceries at designer markets, going entirely organic, my sense of security intact - hadn't even thought of selling the house, of making a move. And through all of this, always, me, tracing the same hikes over again; revisiting and circling and re-circling the fat and slowly-diminshing and refining desert book manuscript, carving it until only the perfect story of bones remained.
And so it is with my life. What seemed comfortable a year ago, suddenly is extreme excess. Get rid of it all, I say. I've had one yard sale and realize I only sold about10% of what needs to go. A finished anthology is complete, and says much more with much less. The story of my house, my desert living, is suddenly pared down and nearly complete, too. A paean, this book, to my own life and time. The book is the goal, has been the goal, and when I look around me, at my 3 BR 2 BA w/pool and 2 car garage house, it is time for so much to go. Stories now are my home, and like the neighbors next door, the fifth set of renters in so many years, I am about to one day soon just up and pack and move out. It is time for a new trail, one in a cooler and more peopled clime. With one helluva book at my side to read and share, sort of a one-woman desert show, Ruthie Palm Tree Seed. Or maybe, in certain moments, proferring pockets of the small black seed of Joshua. And perhaps, not having to imagine, fistfuls of rain bombarding me like desperate prayers.
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