Ken Layne - Desert Oracle, Volume 1

Within these pages are many mysteries of the desert. Some are cruel and terrible, others sublime, and a persistent few remain inexplicable by our current metrics of understanding.

Desert is wilderness stripped bare, and when left alone is creation in perfection. The landscape is vast and visible, the geology raw and exposed, the plants and animals in ideal proportion. Fresh water is generally in limited supply, but that has never stopped life from thriving in lands of little rain.

Our own species has always been fond of these harsh, arid places. The first civilizations rose up from desert sands: Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley. The wilderness of antiquity was wild desert. And thats where our philosophers and prophets went to meditate on mountaintops, to abandon society for a while and sleep under the stars or within limestone caves.

There were many river-valley civilizations in the North American desert, too, before our current mess of outlet malls and cell towers and interstates: the Hohokam in the Salt River Valley, beneath modern Phoenix; the ancient Pueblo culture of the Four Corners. The Taos Pueblo is a rare unbroken link to those varied pasts. Despite the plastic letters on the gas stations and the same banal television programming beamed or streamed into every home, Taos is more or less as it was when Hernando de Alvarado arrived some five centuries ago, and as it had been centuries earlier, when the Roman church was still struggling to Christianize the diverse peoples of Europe.

Through a combination of accident and intent, much of the American desert remains mostly intact, mostly wild. The accident was in the claiming of so much American territory by the U.S. federal government in the mid-1800s, actions taken to prevent competing claims and occupation by Spain, Mexico, France, England, Russia, all our old imperial rivals. Places with surface water attracted settlers, despite the heat and sandstorms and scorpions, while the vast walls of mountains and expanses of dry lakes and valleys were spared much permanent development. This was followed by dramatic efforts to preserve and protect these desert ecosystems as national parks and monuments and federally designated wilderness, actions inspired by the nature mystics of American transcendentalism. In the twenty-first century, conservationists aim to save what they can of entire ecosystems, and not just photogenic islands of flora and fauna surrounded by industrial mining and eroded cattle range. Even without the dense forests we associate with the crucial storage of carbon on this planet, wild desert forms an immense carbon sink over a third of our planets landmass, from the ancient aquifers beneath the parched surface to the vast networks of microbiotic crust that bind the desert together.

This is a simplified explanation to a complex questionWhy is so much of the American desert held in public trust?and is not intended to negate the intentional horrors visited upon indigenous cultures, the wide-scale extermination of desert species, or the determined efforts today by humanity-hating fanatics to reverse our limited protections of this earthly paradise.

When you are in the great desert wilderness, you must carry some understanding of why its still that way, why its so contrary to the numbing sprawl of our current civilization. Its the way it is because people spent lifetimes fighting to keep it that way, suffering more defeats than victories, because when you love a place that is what you do.

If this landscape affects your soul in this manner, you may have no choice but to join the noble and holy effort. We could use the help, whether you become a park ranger or join the Green New Deal conservation corps or volunteer a couple of times per year to clean up a nature preserve or lead schoolkids on backcountry hiking trips.

You might even need to become an outlaw, a hero. We are not so far away from the old times of adventure, of great deeds. Do not fall into the trap of anxiety and emptiness. There is purpose waiting out here, for anyone who comes in honest pursuit of it.

A revelation in the desert is available, in our time. It may fit a practice or theology you bring along with your water and walking stick and beer cans and yoga mat, or it may shatter your psyche entirely. Both are worth the effort, worth the trouble, worth going where few others travel, worth leaving behind the dull comforts of tourist resorts and constant connection. Some people see the face of God (whoever she is) blasting light beams into their brains on the desert highway. Some people fall off a boulder and spend days wondering if theyll live or die (its always one or the other). I have witnessed pure wild joy on a fellow humans face simply because there was no telephone signal available, no electronic-map display to show the nearest cluster of coffee and hamburger chains. Freedom, finally.

Out here, beyond the robotic grip of a civilization in disarray and despair, I promise you will feel human again, if only for a little while. Should this experience of old wonder appeal to you, then you will be back as often as possible, and you may have no choice but to call the desert home. And if its home, you have no choice but to defend it.

Theres nothing more fun than a purpose in life.

It wasnt supposed to go like this, wasnt the plan at all. The plan was to get out of town for a few days and explore the desert. Fill up the Instagram feed with abandoned gas stations and cracked asphalt two-lanes snaking through forests of Joshua trees. Beers at a roadhouse, impulse buys at a boutique on Highway 62, a night under the stars from the safety of an Airbnb hot tub or campfire ring.

And now its a late summer day, well over a hundred degrees, not a stylish swimming pool or outdoor cocktail bar in sight. Youve been sitting in the car, the doors flung open, the burning air wrapped around you, suffocating and dense and so very dry. An empty cardboard coffee cup in the drink holder. An empty plastic water bottle crumpled under the seat. It is midday. Which means, in seven or eight hours the ball of orange fire in the sky will finally sink behind the mountains and the temperature will sink down to ninety-five degrees or so, if youre lucky.

Something gave out, the gas in the tank or the city tires or the transmission or maybe the rear axle, snapped in two by a boulder partially buried in the sand on this godforsaken dirt road you never meant to be on, never consciously chose to take at all. The voice of the navigation robot was as sure as ever: Turn right at the gas station, even though there was little left of that particular gas station, and the road itself was forlorn and untroubled by recent tire tracks. There was something you were headed for, an art exhibit on the open desert, a historic mining site, a location from a television show you remembered, a sweeping view of the national monument. It doesnt matter now. Unless you write it down, nobody will ever know why you wound up dead on a rough sandy track that could charitably be called a jeep trail.