Desert Revisited: "Sermons in Stones"
by Jeanne Carney

Recently I stood on a sandy-red boulder in Coyote Canyon, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, impressed by the fact that sediments of this southern California landscape date back over five hundred million years.  Closing my eyes, I tried to picture it with lush meadows and cool oases, as it existed ten to twenty thousand years ago, when it was the habitat of mastodons, sabertooth cats, giant sloths, and camels as tall as eighteen feet.  Soaring above these marvels was Aiolornis, a relative of the stork, darkening the ground with its seventeen-foot wing span.  Ancient hunters tracked mammoths that came to drink from fresh-water lakes.
These images crowded my mind as I hiked toward a distant palm canyon.  Suddenly I was spellbound, as a large creosote bush came alive and burst into golden blossom and animated song.  Several verdins, their yellow heads gleaming in the midday sun, alighted to drink from the small stream nearby.  Just as suddenly--or so it seemed--they were gone in a scramble of wings. 

As I watched one chirping straggler, lingering to drink, I realized how much these juxtaposed images symbolize desert itself: the brilliant light and forbidding dark of it, the stark and compelling beauty it masks and protects, but specifically the hard lessons it forces upon us concerning the very survival of human life on this planet.  As Malcolm Jones, Jr., observed  (Newsweek, August 5, l996), “We’ve mined it, dammed it, irrigated it, developed it and subjected it to nuclear assault, yet the desert, somehow both fragile and tough, manages to endure, a rugged old touchstone for us to measure ourselves against.”

My personal discovery of Anza-Borrego began in 1971, after I moved  to Del Mar in San Diego County.  Some two hundred years earlier, in 1774, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, searching for an overland route from Mexico to Alta California, traversed the area that bears his name.  Today, containing over 600,000 acres, it represents the largest desert state park in the contiguous United States.
In later explorations of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, my handbooks were The Voice of the Desert  and The Desert Year, to be packed along with sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, binoculars and a plentiful supply of fresh water.  To this day, the luminous writings of Joseph Wood Krutch (the remarkable scholar-turned-naturalist) continue to initiate me into the elemental mysteries of Shakespeare’s “sermons in stones.”

Krutch (pronounced with a long u ) provides insights that still seem prodigious.  Yet his style is plain, and carries more than a hint of dry sage.  As a former professor who  moved across country to Arizona after retiring, he was keenly aware that the desert never gives an easy exam, and he enjoyed reflecting upon the curious fact that both the thrasher and the cactus wren consistently build their nests in the cholla, “that fierce touch-me-not.”

Krutch loved the stark ground of his home near Tucson, where stars seemed to tumble over each other in their haste to spill down upon his wafer of sand and mesquite. While he, and Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico, lived for years in these hard clear lands they had chosen, for most urbanites even a brief sojourn can serve to distance us from civilization.

Mary Kelly wrote in her poem “El Regalo” (Blue Unicorn , February ‘87), in Anza-Borrego we  “Grow a little lighter, without the pain it / Takes to live back there, on the land we’ve wasted.”  Speeding away toward the desert, from Los Angeles, or San Diego or Phoenix, we begin to feel freed from our normal time-tyranny, liberated from overdeveloped suburbs and packed freeways to visit a spare yet glorious land.
And the terrain not only separates us from conventional places and noises, it also divides us from our habitual excesses, inciting us to examine our wasteful addictions.  Witness the consternation of my fellow Californians who years ago awakened to the reality of sustained drought--drought  in El Dorado.  Yet all desert sermons, all its examples, are drawn from spareness--of food, of sheltered habitat, most stringently of water.

Among intriguing survival methods, the most ingenious cope with the inescapable reality of dryness.  From the thrashers that go long periods without drinking, to the paloverde that has sacrificed the safety of leaves, wasting moisture is abstemiously avoided. The seeds of many plants have such canny prescience that they are not misled by a first seasonal shower into endangering their future, but wait for a second rainfall, or even pause for several seasons.

One variety of night-bloooming cereus regularly reenacts its own drama of resurrection.  Throughout most of the year, its dry stick-like appearance attracts no interest.  Yet underneath the ground, its turnip-shaped reservoir guards as much as fifteen pounds of life-sustaining moisture.  And when the time is right, la reina de la noche, queen of the night, bursts into bloom with petals of an almost supernatural whiteness.

The Sonoran saguaro, called by the Papago “lords of the desert,” grow as tall as fifty feet, and live to be two hundred.  Instead of deep roots, however, they produce an extensive network of shallow ones fanning out in all directions for a hundred feet, each straining for every available drop of surface runoff.  Fourteen miles from Tucson in the Saguaro National Monument, I saw a number of these Titans, aged and windblown, lying beside living specimens.  In their fallen state, they reveal the artfully shaped nest (called Arizona boot) crafted by gilded flicker woodpeckers.
Rare natural creations abound in desert lands, but here the sublime must be earned--unlike ocean or mountain vistas, where easy ecstasy for wonders is a given, even a cliché.  Georgia O’Keeffe salvaged beauty and originality from unorthodox sources: bleached bones, striated canyons, a rattlesnake’s cast skin.

Also, desert enhances small pleasures, so that by contrast they offer surprise and disproportionate delight.  In noontime heat, water music from a small melodious stream in Anza-Borrego soothed and refreshed me.  And the paint-box amethyst of wild heliotrope gleamed more vividly against a backdrop of desolate ground. 
Native animals, unfortunately, have fewer survival secrets than plants.  Seasonal droughts and raids by mountain lions are cited as dangers to the borrego, the eponymous bighorn sheep.  Although the species is protected, loss of habitat and other challenges are attributable to humans.  Some years ago, during an annual count of these reclusive animals in Anza-Borrego, an individual volunteering as member of a protective association was actually serving as spotter for trophy hunters--before discovery.  Nevertheless, in spite of a number of hazards there, the annual count from July, 2008, identified 261 sheep, including fifty lambs--figures modestly larger than in earlier years.  And these regal residents can still be seen, especially at dawn or sunset, surveying their former domain from towering crags.
An official brochure states that the park holds “the largest repository in North America of Pliocene and Pleistocene-aged fossils, animals that lived four million to 300,000 years ago.”  Among survivors, the single most impressive example of adaptation is the kangaroo rat.  He is obviously not a kangaroo, nor a marsupial, nor even a true rat; but his admirable kidneys require no source of liquid apart from his grainy food. The largest of these remarkable animals inhabit the torrid dunes of Death Valley, although smaller relatives have thrived both in Anza-Borrego and the Sonoran desert.

Success stories are a reminder that nature’s gifts to mammals, including humans, have not always been abused.  Once, at the Anza-Borrego Visitor Center, I studied a display containing a large clay jug, or olla, used for carrying water by the Cahuilla, who inhabited these regions as long ago as the thirteenth century.  On this particular piece of pottery, the unknown artisan pressed a thumb into ochre pigment, and ornamented the plain vessel with a row of prints.

Was this simple act a means of identification, or was some creative impulse at work?  Across the centuries, I felt a kinship with this anonymous potter, a chilling sensation of connectedness slicing through the separating time-span like a sharp Santa Ana wind.

This olla was shaped, adorned, filled and hefted by a creature of my own species, one who had been required to learn how to use every single resource the desert had to offer.  In such times and places, necessity was almost exclusively the single parent of invention. The Cahuilla parched honey mesquite pods to make grist-cake, and used the red-flowered chuparosa to extract a tasty and nourishing drink.  Beavertail cactus seeds were pounded into mush; white sage yielded a tangy flour.  Yet these and other uses of natural products were accomplished without decimating flora or fauna.
In spite of sophisticated technology, our society can make no comparable claim, even on a diminished scale.  Desert as concept, desert as actual place, forces us to break with our commonly held notions of success, and with the worship of temporality that drives our material aspirations.  Sun and moon are the only horologes tolerated here, the only dials that compute accurately.

Our triviality, too, looms larger and more repugnant.  Here nature highlights our nauseous dalliance with the lurid red-and-yellow of tabloid covers, with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” And probably in no other place can we see more clearly that human survival is interwoven with that of other living things.  Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Mary Oliver--uniquely gifted students of nature--have sensed that the aboriginal garden must have been a spot where wholeness was lived, where life forms flourished by using and respecting the richness of our planet.
The earthly paradise to which we crave access is not to be regained solely through teleological discourse or dire scenarios, but primarily from natural paradigms, especially from their restrained and symbiotic use of environment: earth, air, water, fire. The vibrant yet hooded life of plants and animals in our Southwestern deserts teaches us to savor those sweeter uses of adversity cultivated there.  And nowhere else except in desert are they so tempered or so pungent: patience, endurance, the unsung heroism of surviving for the sake of egg, blossom, seed. 

In her poem “Waking at Anza Borrego,” Mary Kelly discovers “how long dawn lasts.”  Desert gives us time, and light to see by.  It demands that we see small--and, paradoxically, see large, looking deep into a perspective we could never command elsewhere.  Krutch believed, “It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.”  And it is in desert that lessons can still be learned--from ancient stones, from abandoned but still usable morteros, from fossils that have not forgotten.

“Desert Revisited” did not appear in the Sandpiper print edition.   However, it previously  appeared in Tidepools,  MiraCosta College’s literary journal.  Thanks are due to  Michael Rodriques, Manager of the Anza-Borrego Visitor Center, for his generous assistance in reviewing this article and providing current information.