October 27, 2013

If you speak to someone from the East, they don’t understand the appeal of the desert.  They describe it as nothing but ugly brown dirt.  For them, the landscape should be green trees for as far as the eyes can see.

The problem with the East is that there are green trees for as far as the eyes can see, which turns out isn’t very far.  For someone like me from the wide open West, the Northeast and Southeast can be quite claustrophobic.  Sure, the trees are beautiful but after a while you can’t tell where you are.  It literally all looks the same.

I suppose Easterners think that of the Desert Southwest. But not me.

I grew up in the Mojave Desert.  As a child, I didn’t admire the beauty of the landscape.  I didn’t appreciate the cacti and Creosote bushes and the hills and the sunsets.  All I knew was that the wide-open desert provided me an infinite playground.  There were creatures to catch, bushes to hide in, and enormous space to play tag.

You could also make unexpected finds like old cars, burned out and rusted, half-buried in the sand. What was the story behind that car?  How did it get there?  It didn’t matter because my imagination was as expansive as the desert horizon.  My imagined stories were surely more exciting and sordid than the truth.

This morning I got to appreciate the desert from a whole new perspective.  I am sure I experienced it as a child but just didn’t appreciate what was happening.  A desert sunrise.

I left early to drive from Redlands to Las Vegas.  At 6:00am, I was surprised at how dark it was outside but it was time for Daylight Savings Time to end.  For the next 90 minutes, I had the joy of watching the desert wake-up, bathed in pinks, reds and purples.

The Mojave Desert has a surprising amount of mountains, or hills as they would call these mounds in Colorado.  As the sun plays peek-a-boo behind the mountain ranges, the texture of the foreground illustrates rows and rows of hills.  Each hill bears the carvings etched from water flowing over them thousands or millions of years ago.

You descend into valleys that must have been lakebeds in ancient times, with hills standing like soldiers guarding the borders.

Progressing through the desert, you finally encounter the Joshua trees, really just black silhouettes against the rising sun.  There are thousands of them, each bearing a shape more interesting than the previous.  They have created their own identity.

Soon enough, the sun has risen enough to blind out all definition of the desert.  Only long, orange rays are visible through the car windshield.  The waking of the desert has come to a close.  Until tomorrow.