Confessions of a Former Desert Rat

I know people who are passionate about the desert. People who wax romantic about its withered plants and the scabrous creatures that scrabble across its surface. People who prefer juniper and sand to pine and rivers. I can’t tell you why they feel as they do. But I can tell you this: They didn’t grow up with the desert lurking outside their front doors.

If they had, their feelings would be more conflicted. Having been raised there, I feel about the desert the way you feel about a crusty relative. He’s family. You’ve swum in the same gene pool. You may not like him, but you’ll never admit not loving him.

To me, the desert was rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and trails that wandered in circles like stroke victims. These impressions formed early. One afternoon I was digging in a field of sagebrush near our house in Colton in the Inland Empire when a monstrous bug attached itself to my fingers. “Did it get three legs on you?” one of my companions asked after I’d shaken it off. “If it gets three legs on you, you’ll die.” Ridiculous as it sounds, I believed him. So did my mother, whose knowledge of entomology was not much greater than mine. My father, when he was called from work, was less impressed when his son told him he expected to die from the embrace of a potato bug.

It seemed perfectly possible to me that creatures with poisonous grasps lived in the desert. Horned toads, it was said, spit tobacco juice in your eyes, which sounded far less believable. For one thing, where did they get cigarettes? You didn’t find friendly, furry creatures in the desert, or sentient beasts such as elephants or dolphins. To live in the desert, you must have armor and you must have fangs. And it helps to be stupid.

My family wasn’t stupid, just stolid. They were born to the desert; my father grew up among the date palms in Indio before Palm Springs gave anyone a reason to go there. The desert got into him, the way sand gets into everything. That’s one thing the desert does better than anything else. It colonizes. It eats. It grows. With great care, you can coax a garden out of the desert. But the desert needs no encouragement to devour your garden. I suspect all those barren worlds out in the cosmos were once covered in green through which water coursed. Until somewhere a desert got started. And then it ate every world but ours.

Our town was reclaimed from the desert. It was one of those blue-collar hamlets that grew up along the railroad rights of way. Not that we considered ourselves desert folk. We thought we were better than that. If tumbleweeds blew down our streets when the Santa Anas came in, at least we had grass around our houses. Banning, those were desert rats. We looked down on them as arrogantly as Homo sapiens might have regarded shambling Homo erectus.

Of course, distinguishing desert from non-desert in Southern California is partly an art and mostly a lie. The desert is our most authentic self. We’ve watered it and tended it, but the truth, and the desert, emerge when our vigilance lapses. The lawn browns, flowers wither, the desert creatures creep back.

Even so, it was important to prove how far you had separated yourself from the sand. Just as your success in Zaire was measured by the number of pigs you owned, here it was the size of your lawn. My father’s first comment upon seeing my then-new house in Ventura County a few years ago was not about the size of the kitchen or the design of the upstairs rooms. “Your lawn is sure green,” he said.

I have to remind myself that these impressions reflect a different time. These days, the desert has been colonized so aggressively, and our cars are so reliable, that much of the anxiety has been removed from a journey into the wasteland. Today it hardly qualifies as a wasteland. Now it’s just another housing tract waiting to be born.

I can remember when you didn’t go out there without careful preparation. The dangers were both environmental and man-made. The environmental ones were bad, but the man-made ones could be worse. There was a time when the Baker Grade near Barstow was as feared as the Donner Pass 150 years ago. The Baker Grade was a long, slow climb of several miles. At the top of the slope stood some gasoline stations. Crouched inside those stations was the greatest collection of thieves, tire-puncturers and fan belt-cutters in the civilized world. I once worked in a gas station with some men who could slit your fan belt without opening the hood. They couldn’t hold a flashlight to the Baker Grade larcenists. Maybe your ’47 Studebaker overheated, or your ’58 Montclair went into vapor lock, both good bets on the Baker Grade. You stopped for some water, a bit of shade and a couple gallons of gas to be polite. If you got out without losing a month’s salary on a new set of tires, all new belts and a special “anti-vapor lock” system, you counted yourself fortunate.

At that time a desert community was not just an extension of the city suburbs. Driving through Earp, population 47, you couldn’t help thinking its sunstruck citizens might have just come from a stoning. I don’t think my father ever stopped in Earp. Looking at those dead houses lying limp in the sun, the window shades drawn and the porch swings peeling, gave all of us the creeps.

Truth is, limpness in the desert is a virtue. You learned to shepherd your resources. You became a reader, a fantasizer, lazy. When I was young, I made up games with my two sisters that we could play without moving. Our little frame house had a swamp cooler that wheezed like an oxygen tent. It didn’t cool the house so much as increase the humidity to rain forest levels. But if you lay very still, you could imagine you were being cooled. Which made the competition quite spirited for the spot in the hall directly under the cooler. Once settled, though, we drifted for hours in that nether world.

Two types of people were in the desert then. One type was running from something--the police or the crowds in the cities. Several years ago, I met a man living in a trailer at the foot of the Panamint Mountains near Death Valley. He’d been a bus driver in L.A. He missed people sometimes, he admitted. But he had a dog. The dog didn’t cuss at him or try to cheat him. He was afflicted, which is a desert theme as ancient as the Old Testament. The heavily laden have always headed into the desert for answers. God didn’t speak to people in gardens. He didn’t dangle his feet in a pool while sipping a Bloody Mary as he waited for the soul-injured to come along. He wandered with blistered feet over sharp rocks.

The second type, by far the majority, were the working class who couldn’t make it on the coast. They weren’t as competitive, or didn’t finish enough grades in school, or were born into the wrong families. These people would have loved it in Seal Beach. The bar was simply too high for them to scale. Desert people both envied and feared the city. For days before driving me in to see a Dodger game, my grandfather worked himself into a state over the drivers in Los Angeles. “They’ll force you right off the road,” he grumbled. This was in 1960.

Because the desert is a harsh place, anything goes. Not only bizarre crimes, but harebrained schemes take root. When I was young, a deluded entrepreneur opened a mechanized water-skiing exhibit. An overhead cable jerked you around a cement-lined pond at high speed until you fell, let go or until your arms were pulled out of their sockets. Like many plants and animals that get blown on the wind or wander out there, the exhibit lasted a season or two before expiring in the sun.

That enterprising spirit apparently survives today. The city of San Bernardino is talking about building a massive canal system similar to San Antonio’s River Walk to relieve its economic problems. Some bigger city folks are scoffing. There goes Berdoo with another crazy scheme, they say. Why don’t they just give up?

I disagree. Good for Mayor Judith Valle, for having the courage to dream big in a shrunken time. And for standing her ground against the desert. Yes, you desert lovers, I appreciate your devotion to this last wilderness. Your dedication to protect and serve the desert tortoises and the Joshua trees and the rainbow-colored rocks of Death Valley. Keep fighting.

But I reserve my affections for the people who contend with that hard place. The imaginative, the naive, the crackbrained and the lost.

Let them persevere.