Wallace - Chuckwalla land the riddle of Californias desert

Chuckwalla Land

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the August and Susan Frug Endowment Fund in California Natural History of the University of California Press Foundation.

THE RIDDLE OF CALIFORNIA S DESERT

DAVID RAINS WALLACE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2011 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallace, David Rains, 1945.

Chuckwalla land : the riddle of Californias desert / David Rains Wallace.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-25616-3 (cloth, alk. paper)

1. Desert biologyCalifornia. 2. DesertsCalifornia. I. Title. QH 105. C2W 338 2011

578.75409794dc22 2010029593

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

To Mike Kowalewski

Arcadia (also Arcady). From Arcadia, pastoral region of ancient Greece regarded as a rural paradise... : a usually idealized region or scene.

Websters Third New International Dictionary

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

It took me years to notice the California desert. When I first crossed it, on freeways from the east, it seemed more of the same blazing scrub as in Nevada or Arizona. When I crossed it from the west, it seemed more of the same agroindustrial sprawl that borders California freeways. It wasnt all subdivisions, warehouses, tomato fields and power lines, not yet, but it looked more like an enormous vacant lot than a landscape. Tractmongers catchphrasesraw land, nothing therenonsensical applied to forests or wetlands, sounded more appropriate to the dead-looking brush sliding past the car windows.

I read Mary Austins Land of Little Rain and admired the stubborn sensibility of her explorations: Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you... out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. But her desert resembled her 1903 prose, sepia toned, like photographs of twenty-mule teams in county museums. I went to Nevada or Arizona if I wanted up-to-date desert, and even that felt secondhandif not Mary Austin sepia, then Edward Abbey Kodachrome: Death and life usually appear close together, sometimes side by side, in the desert. Perhaps that is the secret of the deserts fascination.... Nothing, not even the waiting vulture in the sky, looks more deathly than a dying giant cactus.

I didnt really look at California desert until I had to write something about it in 1983, and even then I planned it as a diversion. I was more interested in Central Valley riparian woodland. Since little of that remained in the Central Valley, I decided to visit a Nature Conservancy preserve on the Kern River just west of Walker Pass, one of the historic gateways to the Mojave Desert. I imagined spending an afternoon in a cathedral of giant oaks, walnuts, sycamores, and box elders such as John Muir had described, and then paying a brisk duty call on the Mary Austin country.

The Conservancy preserve failed romantic expectations. Instead of hardwood gallery forest in a stately valley, I found a large willow and cottonwood thicket hugging a rocky canyon bottom, good habitat for rare yellow-billed cuckoos, less so for a contemplative afternoon. After a chat with the preserve manager and a dispirited stroll past the thicket, I got back in the car and headed east without much anticipation. But the desert had surprises for me.

To start with, it refused to wait for me across Walker Pass. Soon after I pulled away from the willow thicket, troops of olive drab spiky plants began clustering around irrigated pasturesJoshua treesalthough grassland and oaks still covered the canyon sides. The tall yuccas seemed oddly zoomorphic, almost to be moving west, an impression abetted by my eastward momentum. They had an animation that I hadnt associated with desert, which made me wonder exactly what desert is aside from an assemblage of unsightly (or intriguing, depending on the viewpoint) organisms in places too dry for normal ones.

Driving on a two-lane road instead of a freeway contributed to my new curiosity. After crossing the pass and winding into the sepia jumble beyond, I kept passing spots that looked interesting. I eventually found one where I could pull over, a dirt parking lot at Red Rock Canyon State Park, which, according to a bullet-riddled sign, was a famous place where many Hollywood Westerns had been filmed. Id never heard of it.

The lot wasnt encouraging, a litter of glass, paper, Styrofoam, and worse. Someone with a bleeding ulcer had been sick under a dying yucca. I fled into a gulch, not expecting much. The parking lots squalor was hard to escape. Trash and ORV tracks dogged me, the tracks running impartially over bare rock, deep sand, and surprisingly steep and narrow passages. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, Mary Austin might have written in 1983, you cannot go so far that ORV tracks are not before you.

But it was April and I started seeing wildflowers, first a clump of yellow monkey flowers at a seep, then scatterings of tiny goldfields, showy deep violet gilias, big pale violet evening primroses, small white and brick red evening primroses, pale violet larkspurs, royal blue lupines, surprisingly lush green desert rhubarbs, scarlet paintbrushes. The flowers didnt carpet the ground as in magazine features, but their sparsity made them all the more impressive. Each inflorescence seemed to leap from the gray sand, mimicking the Walker Pass Joshua trees apparent animation. Even the dead-stick creosote bushes scattered over the flats and benches had little bell-like yellow flowers teeming with bees.

I followed the gulch past dark red walls of volcanic ash studded with black crystals. The only sound once Id turned a few corners was the wind that had pursued me from the pass. The only motions were the flowers shaking in the wind and a prairie falcon that dropped from a ledge and glided past my head. After a while, the walls narrowed between two huge boulders shaped like deformed human skulls, one red and one yellow. The red one, flattened and elongated, leaned forward as though to peer into the canyon floor; the yellow one, beetling and bulbous, tilted up at the sky. Past them, the badland formations, or hoodoos, grew even more bizarre. Gray green tuff sprouted fungoid and phallic shapes; red ash erupted spires and gothic facades. In places, the facades had collapsed into alcoves so palatial looking that I half expected to see ruined tiles and fountains among the sand and weeds.