The Magic of the High Desert

We are a couple hours out of Palm Springs. We left the interstate and are traveling along a paved, secondary highway. It is amazing.

Of course I am not driving, but Dennis is not complaining. I sleep while he drives. He groans and gasps at each gust of wind when I drive.

I recall when I assisted teaching in a summer program at Nebraska Wesleyan for gifted high school science students from across the country. The emphasis of the program was environmental study. One day I was taking a car load of students about 60 miles west of Lincoln to look at some remaining original prairie. We came over a hill, and one young man from the back seat started yelling for me to pull over. There was no traffic, so I pulled over. He bounded out of the car, went up to the fence line and spun all around a number of times. He was a young man from the inner city of New York.

I asked what he was doing. He responded, “I have never in my life been able to see the horizon in every direction.” I stopped for a moment and realized that I had grown up in a very special part of America. I don’t think until that moment I had ever really made special note of the endless horizon that surrounded my youth. I wonder now what effect that might have on a person’s life-vision. I recall hoping at that moment that I never lose the wonderment of my young friend from New York. But, I had lost much of it.

Somehow today it all came into focus once again. Wherever I look I see the rugged high desert of southern California. In every direction I see the outline of mountains—not the imperial mountain peaks of the Rockies, but beautiful subtle purple peaks in the shadows of the afternoon sky.

The road is just fine, but not the flat, forever forward road of the Interstate. The dips and hills in today’s road remind me of simpler summer days when my Uncle Merlyn would rev up his old Buick with my cousins and I in the back seat. Off we would go, taking the gravel hills and dips in the back road near our Minnesota campsite at Potato Lake. There was never a roller coaster that could put my young stomach in my throat like those long ago summer rides.

Today there is a single rail track running parallel to us. The black and white gravel rail bed is raised five feet or so from the desert floor. For at least the last 40 miles on our side of the raised bed we have seen a continuous amazing array of “I was here” art and phrases created with this gravel. People (I assume young people) have taken the black and white rocks and have left their mark on the raised sand of the desert. “Abbey loves Mark”, “Class of ’83”; “Benjamin”; “Peace on Earth”; “Billy Sucks”; etc. There is not a house visible in any direction. Who are these people? Where did they come from? How did this tradition ever start? It all has a complex, mystical impression on this passer-by.

We pass a “For Sale” sign for 3,250 acres of this flat desert. Dennis wonders out loud what anyone could ever do with the land. Of course that is the logical question, but perhaps this is just land upon which the “doing” of something has never been the point. Such observation no doubt limits the market for such land, but I cannot help but wonder why anyone should ever own this land? A property law professor once observed in class that no one ever owns land. His point was that we simply hold real estate for our lifetime. As long as land is perpetual and we are finite, we can never really possess it. At times like this, I ponder his insight. I wish to hear again the order to “pull over” so I can walk to the fence line and with outstretched arms take in the magnitude and majesty of it all.

I think in the future we may avoid wherever possible the sterile Interstate. Of course this all assumes I can talk my driver into sharing my momentary existential real estate experience, and that I can stay awake long enough to enjoy it all.