i. thirty-eight who saw murder didn't call police
It's 2:00 a.m. in the halfdark, twenty-five miles east of Holtville California, and I'm wrapped in a sleeping bag on a tarp with five other prone psychotics. These are the sanest people I have ever met. I blink unsteadily, peer about in the predawn desert. The creosote and sagebrush but black shapes looming. The desert soundless, void-like, the flattened earth holding a bare echo of the midnight hours past of howling coyotes, scuttling kangaroo mice, darker reptiles lurking. Above a brilliant canvas of galaxies, white and brilliant and offering the only hint of light to the manless wild. I am awake, I sit bolt upright. Instincts watered by city life are distilled in the desert; my life here has been a rediscovery of ancient blood, ancestral lusts. I look out from our camp and I know that something is horribly wrong.
Our tarp-commune in miniature sits on the edges of main camp: a semicircle made by a beaten, dented, brand new Ford pickup truck, a haggard white trailer, and our massive white dinner tent. From appearances all would seem to be right. I look about and see no light, I look down the tarp and count all five of my crew mates. I listen and I hear the nosound, the desert, the hum of nothing that beats in tune to our arid spirits. As I focus I can make out the chugging spit-drone of the geothermal plant: a nonexistent background, like cicadas in the summer in Tennessee. But on further listen the wrongness, the force drawing me from sleep, is made plain.
A far roar draws nearer. The black desert a province of the unknowable, the terrible. I think of what terrors the night may hold solely because it is night, thinking three weeks ago outside Shoshone California I woke up in the desert with this same feeling and looked around and saw black shapes moving and they were wild dogs growling and they very much wanted to kill Jake and I
A far roar drawing nearer, stars sitting silent witness. Creosote in the night only a black shape, waving in a wind gust, sitting silent witness. In the distance looming scraggled hulks of mountains, Chocolate Mountains and San Jacinto Mountains and all that rims the Imperial Valley, all that sitting silent witness. Like Kitty Genovese: thirty-eight who saw murder didn't call the police. But in the desert, for half a dozen desert rats, for a team of environmental restoration experts, the cops, if they even existed, are not the good guys.
A far roar draws nearer. The black desert a province of the unknowable, the terrible. I think of what terrors the night may hold solely because it is night, thinking three weeks ago outside Shoshone California I woke up in the desert with this same feeling and looked around and saw black shapes moving and they were wild dogs growling and they very much wanted to kill Jake and I
A far roar drawing nearer, stars sitting silent witness. Creosote in the night only a black shape, waving in a wind gust, sitting silent witness. In the distance looming scraggled hulks of mountains, Chocolate Mountains and San Jacinto Mountains and all that rims the Imperial Valley, all that sitting silent witness. Like Kitty Genovese: thirty-eight who saw murder didn't call the police. But in the desert, for half a dozen desert rats, for a team of environmental restoration experts, the cops, if they even existed, are not the good guys.
Lights are flashing now at intervals, the roar is growing guttural, the bowel of the darkest desert sand dune clearing its throat in intermittently increasing decibels. I stand, my sleeping bag slips away and I step into my overturned shoes. My crewmates stir. In the wild it has never paid to be a heavy sleeper. In my hand I clutch my flashlight, my opened pocketknife, and step forward into the doughy sand thinking whatever growls there must come through me first and trembling and thinking you are not as brave as you imagine you are
From the distance now emerges the onus, the senators of civilization come to civilize. Beams of hallogen shoot rays across the desert landscape, shouts and profanities ejaculate from windows to blaspheme the silence of the night. The gunning engines sputtering like something diseased, foreign pathogens to the spotlessly endemic land. The vehicles follow no path, follow a straight trajectory through creosote and underbrush, tearing across the open country and past the campsite, the swirls of dust illuminated crimson by rearlights.
Get the hell outta our desert, they scream.
We see them pass, we see them circle to come by again. Their tracks through the virgin landscape plain in the starlight. No different than a god being murdered before your eyes. In my palm the knife is sweaty.
Our desert is not flashy. Little subsists to attract the tourist, the developer of parks, the salesman and bottler of natural beauty. The East Mesa contains scarce evidence of human existence. The ruins of a military base, a hohoba farm, and an old airport bear rusted testimony to past failures at domestication. As Mary Austin wrote, desert is a loose term to describe land that supports no man. The East Mesa subdivision of the Sonoran is just that sort of desert, the word in the truest sense. Our plight to protect our new home is not one of volition alone - no one will replace us if we go.
The others are up now, peering sleepily to the carnage. Imagine: Steve Jobs' prototype of the first Apple being vaporized in front of his eyes, in his bedroom, by a pack of redneck cesspool-dwelling meth-dealing high school dropouts. The world is delicate beyond our wildest imaginings.
Jake places a call to the dispatch number the BLM gave us. There is nothing more to do. There are far more pressing concerns to law enforcement than the preservation of the earth.
Song of the Day: Calexico's cover of Neil Young's Heart of Gold. The band Calexico is named for a border city of the same name which lies fifteen miles from the East Mesa.
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