DESERT RAT JOURNAL -- Installment 5, May 25, 2008

I hiked back to the car today. Yesterday I left the car and hiked north to the easternmost point of a series of ridge-like rock outcroppings that ran west-east. To my knowledge, the ridge-like outcroppings have no name. The linear distance to them from my car was five miles, but of course the walking miles would total more than that. I made camp at the eastern end of the formation. Today I walked to the northern side, then headed west, intending to find a pass, break through the outcroppings and head south toward my car. I figured that would take until late afternoon or possibly the next morning. As it turned out, I hit upon a pass within a few hours of setting out, and made it back to my car by shortly after noon.

Last night, while camped at the eastern end of the formation, I made some notes on looseleaf paper. They form the basis for the journal entry below. I have edited them for coherence and style. I write now from my campsite in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. I will upload this entry when I get back into data range on my Blackberry, which may take a couple of days.

I had forgotten how a campfire changes a campsite. It pushes back the cold and stakes out a small half-sphere of light in the otherwise encompassing darkness, if only for as long as the flames burn. It makes food edible; it keeps insects and coyotes at bay. A campfire transforms the tiny area in which its light flickers from a patch of wilderness into something safe, an area where man can peacefully repose. I leaned against my pack and stared into the embers of the fire, listening to the crack and pop of burning wood. The night was cool but, near the coals, I shed my sweater and sat in my hat and tee shirt. I sat with my forearms across my knees and stared into the embers of the fire. This is probably as close as we can come to understanding our ancestors, to experiencing the sentiments that they knew. After a day of hunting, or foraging, or wandering, they too sat around isolated sources of light and heat and they, too, stared into the embers of the fire. Their minds likely wandered, as does mine. On this occasion as I stared into the embers of the fire I was thinking about women. This also I share with my ancestors. I know this because I exist.

Earlier in the day, about an hour before dark, I had climbed up to a cluster of rock on a hillside with a bottle half-filled with whiskey. I sat there as the sun sank behind me and the desert darkened before me. I had brought a book that I didn’t open. Instead I sat in a rearend-sized cranny in some metamorphic rock and took gentle pulls from my bottle. The day was still warm, and I was warm, and the whiskey was warm, and it was all this warmth and coziness that got me to thinking about women. There is something about a woman’s company that no the company of men cannot provide. This is not a conjugal observation. I am well familiar with conjugal desires, as were my ancestors, and this was something else.

The shadows of the cacti below stretched across the desert floor and merged with one another. The Sonoran Desert is remarkable of its diversity of cacti. The saguaro is the primary “indicator species” of the Sonoran, meaning that if you see a saguaro, you’re likely in the Sonoran Desert. Saguaros have a pleated, accordion-like exterior, which allows them to swell after rains and contract during prolonged dry periods. Under the spines, their skin is like hard rubber, but under that skin the flesh of the saguaro is moist and tender. Sometimes after a heavy rain the cacti swell too much and burst between the pleats, creating a long, narrow slit where the moist interior is accessible. The saguaro frequently grows alongside the ocotillo cactus, which seems dissimilar to its fellow inhabitant in every respect but the spines. The many unforked stalks of an ocotillo grow from a single root. Each stalk takes aim at the sky and, having chosen the angle at which it will proceed, grows straight, such that the plant consists of myriad stalks all pointed at different directions within 45° of the vertical. While the interior of the saguaro is moist and wet, the stalks of the ocotillo are woody and hard. As I sat in the rockpile sipping whiskey, the ocotillo were blooming. To make themselves more attractive to pollinating bees, the petals were colored red, fiery bursts of fertility erupting from the tips of the stalks. There are many, many ways for species to achieve that ultimate goal of every organism, the propagation of one’s own genotype.

I have been blessed to know a good number of high-quality women in my short but happy life – some I have dated, and others have had more sense. Too many men, however, fail to appreciate high-quality women when they encounter them. Too many men are blinded by their own prejudices, or Oedipus complexes, or insecurities, and cannot appreciate strength in the opposite sex. Too many men are intimidated. Too many men perceive women only in accordance with predetermined categories and overlook individuating characteristics, but for this last sin they might be forgiven, for women frequently insist on typecasting themselves. Here, as is often the case, inadvertent word choices reveal paradigmatic predispositions. Language betrays. Women commonly refer to themselves by type – e.g., “I am / am not that type of girl.” Men rarely use such language. Someone could say to me, “Jeb, let’s get drunk and shack up,” and the answer might be yes, or it might be no, but it damn sure wouldn’t refer to the “type” of guy that I hold myself out to be. One could argue that women perceive themselves according to type because men have imposed categories upon them, or one could argue the reverse, but in either case it is clear that American society categorizes women more often than men. I’m not sure why. How fascinating are the intricate social machinations involved in discovering a mate. Even within a species, individual organisms have unique predispositions.

Dusk was falling. A bee buzzed by my ear, circled my toe, then hovered over a hole in a metamorphic rock. The rock was colored purplish-red, and the once-straight lines of sedimentation that had originally lithified had twisted and buckled into crazed patterns reminiscent of some modern art. But this was ancient art. The oldest rocks on earth are metamorphic, some billions of years old. They have plunged deep within the earth so frequently, and been subjected to such inconceivable levels of heat and pressure, that their original makeup can become indecipherable. Sometimes gas bubbles have floated through the rock while it was molten, and sometimes those pockets of gas have remained in the rock when it cooled and hardened. Later, when the rock appears on the Earth’s surface and erodes or fractures, those gaseous pockets become exposed as holes, like bubbles in sliced Swiss cheese. Such was the case with this rock. As I watched, the bee dove into a hole on the upper side of the rock to avail itself of the water pooled therein. I had noticed lots of bees while hiking, especially when passing through washes and gulches. Desert travelers have long associated bees with water, and the bees may have been more active because of the recent rain. They buzzed across the desert, often alone. I wonder if they were gathering water from scattered pools and somehow transporting it to their hives, possibly to support larvae or a queen bee. I took another sip and capped my whiskey bottle. The shadow from the hill on which I sat had advanced and merged with the shadows of the surrounding hills so that they covered the flatlands below. I had better climb down before I tumbled down.

Back at camp I crumpled two pieces of notebook paper and lay them against a rock the size of a car battery. I lit the paper and knelt beside it to add twigs, then sticks, and finally logs. Despite the rain of the day before, the wood was dry and burned easily. The twigs began to pop and tumble against the ashes of the notebook paper, so I added larger sticks. Orange light flickered against the creosote bushes and brittlebushes and cacti around my campsite. Behind me, as the last light faded, I heard a call that I had learned to associate with Gambel’s quail.

I had been sitting in earlier in the day, resting my aching feet and admiring the beauty of my just-pitched tent, when a Gambel’s quail ran across the sand nearby, his gaudy crest bobbing with each step, and fluttered up into the lower limbs of a mesquite tree. He hopped onto a higher branch, ran along it toward the trunk, then fluttered to a crotch between two limbs a few feet from the treetop. Thus situated, he surveyed his surroundings. He began to call for his companions.

The northern bobwhite quail that I grew up hunting behave in this way this after a covey has become divided. Males call until the covey reconvenes, although the bobwhites use a different call and do not always call from high perches. I wondered why this desert quail had climbed so high. Maybe it was so that his voice would carry farther, or maybe it was so he could see his companions as they convened. Possibly it was to avoid predators – surely foxes and coyotes know what a quail’s call sounds like, and if the bird were on the ground, where rasorial birds like quail stay most of the time, they might learn to interpret the come-hither call the way schoolchildren interpret the lunch bell. But if this is the case, then the calling quail is putting any birds who respond to his call at grave risk, since they are most likely to approach by foot rather than flight. As I sat resting, I had watched this quail for about ten minutes. No other birds came.

The bird calling behind me in the near-darkness fell silent, as he would remain throughout the night. I broke some dead mesquite branches across my knee and fed them to the fire, then added a gnarled, knotted piece of wood that I had found in a wash nearby. I leaned against my pack to watch the fire and feel the night. The stars emerged in brilliance and number, as they always to on clear nights in rural areas. In the distance to the south, I could see the diffuse orb of light emanating from Yuma like a blister on the night horizon. But Yuma was over fifty miles away and the stars came out undaunted. I smelled something like burning rubber. I reached down and tapped the soles of my boots, a common casualty of close campfires. They were not burning. I looked at the fire. There was no plastic or rubber near it, but the smoke coming from the gnarled log was black and inky. I thought for a minute. Probably creosote. I wondered briefly if creosote smoke had adverse health consequences or affected the brain. Then I leaned back against my pack.

The strategy of the Gambel’s quail, of calling for mates but in so doing subjecting them to mortal danger, would not work for humans. Human pairs need relationships that would by stymied by such a cavalier attitude toward the safety of one’s mate. Unlike children, most avian young, whether precocial or altricial, require parental care for only a few weeks, and the care can be effectively provided by only one parent. Then the fledglings become self-supporting. Not so with humans. Raising human offspring requires longer care traditionally given by both parents. I am an extreme example of the need for elongated parental care – at twenty-six years old, I have just completed law school and will soon take my first “real” job. Only recently have I become self-supporting. This lengthy period devoted to nurturing children is why relationships between human parents must be more than conjugal. It is the biological explanation for the strength of the human pair-bond. But from an emotional and intellectual perspective, love is more than a means to an end. It is fulfilling in its own right. To be able to give and receive that kind of happiness, for as long as the flame flickers, seems reason enough to exist.