Desert Dessert

My first morning out when I reached Coachella, I took a side trip down to the Salton Sea on 86 and was already seeing something amazing happening. All the dust in the air from the three years of dirty winter had settled upon the land. There was hardly any place except the jutting rocky landscape that remained much the same like the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains overlooking Palm Springs where the dust hadn't settled to 3 to 5 inches. Barren, rocky soil, now covered with loam, green and growing was everywhere.  The only exceptions were where floods had washed the dust away and hard surfaces like the highway where frequent rains did the same and the rushing truck stripped the pavement clean with its man-made wind and suction.

An amazing thing that I didn't see the year before was happening right before my eyes--flowers were blooming! The once barren desert was a riot of color from billions of seeds that had blown in over hundreds of years and had not germinated--until now. Reds, blues, yellows and pinks in large patches and mixed changed the desert into a magical land unlike I'd ever seen. The winter storms that I had experienced in Palm Springs brought rain to places that hadn't seen rain except in occasional monsoons or dissipated hurricanes from off the coast of Mexico. But those waters ran off very fast and disappeared into the porous rocky soil.

The dust retained the rain water just long enough and it was just warm enough in the early spring to germinate all these flowers just waiting to be revived. The result was a kind of terraforming for the desert. No longer barren. A riot of color and a bumper crop of new seeds for the coming years. A boon for insects and wildlife, alike.

I pulled the truck over at a particularly gorgeous place where the flowers were going wild. I took a couple of pictures on my smart pad and went wading through the flowers, some only two or three inches tall with very tiny blossoms and some already almost to my knees with large, colorful blossoms. As I savored how they looked and smelled, I heard buzzing--bees. I knew there were bees in the desert, but I didn't think they could survive in barren places like this. I was wrong. I was wrong about nature's resilience and ability to bounce back. What I did see, in much more abundance, were ants, beetles and spiders. Along with them, I saw predators. Lizards and scorpions I flushed from the shade of the flowers quite often. I even saw a rattlesnake. I'm sure that the seeds will provide much food for birds and mice that will begin to inhabit these deserts in great numbers, followed by rabbits, desert fox, and raptors of all kinds. Perhaps even grazing animals if grass had time to grow. If only I had someone to share this beauty with. That's why I took the pictures… Still have them.

I drove on down to the Salton Sea and encountered what I had the year before at Great Salt Lake. Route 88 ended like a boat launching ramp into a body of water much larger than the Salton had been. I got out my fishing gear, and with artificial lure took a cast to see what I might catch. I thought I might catch one of the very large Covina that I had seen in pictures like the ones I caught at Camp Pendleton. Instead, I got numerous hits but no catches on that first cast and thought that it was something smaller, so I changed baits from the large spoon with big hooks  to a much smaller spinner and gave that a try. Almost as soon as the spinner started spinning, I caught a tilapia. Looking it up later, I realized that the Covina were long gone and the Mozambique tilapia was the last surviving fish except for the pugnacious native desert pupfish.

At about 14 inches long and actually quite delicious, three of the tilapia made a wonderful fresh fish dinner that evening. In the morning, I caught 20 more and spent the rest of the morning putting some in the refrigerator, some in the freezers, and most of them attached to the trailer in the sun to dry. Would make good soup later on. I also scooped up a generous amount of salt, always useful for cooking.

I returned to I-10 and continued eastward. Occasionally, I encountered washouts and mudslides from the winters' ravages, making headway quite difficult. Where bridges were out, I could still navigate around using the power of the diesel and the winches to get me through the rocky arroyos that the bridges spanned. Large boulders were always a problem and I had to chart my course carefully around those I couldn't just push aside. Made me wish I hadn't taken the interstate. The local highways had fewer bridges and were built to be flooded when flash floods came down the arroyos whenever it rained. A couple of times, I had to take a detour, one of those local roads, just to get around a particularly bad washout.

I had not experienced road damage like this before except for avalanches and mudslides that had covered the road in California. It looked to me that travel in this part of the country may get more difficult with time as erosion took its toll from heavy storms. Large bridges were no problem because they were well-built for the terrain. When I got to the Colorado River, I crossed it with ease, only stopping briefly to admire the raging blue-green water below that seemed to be far more water than normally would be left in the river after so much had been pulled off for other purposes. How long before those dams upstream would fail? Then probably all the bridges would be washed out or jammed with debris.

I pulled off at an overlook nearby and watched the sunset as I prepared another meal of fresh fish. Sunsets here, in the West, were always more spectacular. I felt badly that I had no one to share it with.

Morning found me driving into the morning sun. As it rose higher, the flatland that I was driving through was spectacularly transformed into a sea of color that spread out on either side and even in the roadway itself to infinity on all sides My heart beat with the power of nature to transform and create. Once again, I wished for someone to share this magnificence with. It wouldn't be long, I figured, before the heat of the sun would quickly extinguish these wildflowers and bring their seeds to harvest. The desert heat and drought would once again make the land dry. But I thought that, each spring from now on, for a very long time, this spectacular process would prevail again. And with the added soil, grasses and trees might take hold again. It all depended upon water.

The road had been relatively clear through what had once been either barren or irrigated farmland. By noon, I reached Phoenix. Phoenix was no longer rising. Like all the other major cities, it had subsided into ruin. As I drove through several suburbs, the roadway was clear and festooned with spring flowers wherever the dust had settled, but there was no one moving on the heavily developed exits. At least the ones I turned off on to take a look. After lunch, I moved on.

As I neared Tucson, I began to see more and more Saguaro cactus raising their huge pole-like shafts, sometimes with arms, high above other cactus in great variety on the surrounding hills. I pulled into Saguaro National Park to take a look. Not only were the wildflowers at their peak of blooming, so too, were the cactus… Every one with a different color and size of flower. I'm sure they were a marvel in any year, but with the added wildflowers underneath, they took on a new dimension--a kind of fairyland where none had been before.

Amid the giant cactus I saw owls and hawks. More bees. Many more than I had seen at the Salton Sea and other places I stopped. I saw ground squirrels and snakes. Lizards and even a Gila Monster. All within a short period of time. I spent the evening wandering amid the beauty of the cactus watching another spectacular sunset. Returning to the truck, I built another fire and roasted some mutton on it for my evening meal. Life was good alone with nature. The coyotes began to call to one another. The owls began to hoot. Bats fluttered overhead and doves cooed in the background. It cooled off dramatically and I slept well that night.

Two days later of this endless historic spring and I was alongside the Rio Grande coming into El Paso. Looking across the river, I saw the sprawl of Juarez. No smoke came from any chimney or open fire. Like everything else, Juarez was a ruin. An ancient artifact or archaeological site for some future investigation. Thrown up along the border to provide temporary sanctuary from the sun until such time that its occupants could cross the river into the United States to stay. It was hard to tell from my viewpoint, which way the traffic was flowing in those terrible days of the collapse. Maybe both ways in the confusion. Some headed north. Some headed south. None of them going anywhere but death.

I put those thoughts out of my mind and pushed derelict cars and trucks out of my way until I was free of city obstructions and continued east. I was so glad when the wildflowers, once again, filled my view, refreshed by showers that passed through while I was struggling to get out of the city.