The Desert Sang A Sagebrush Serenade

      Desert
 Peaceful Mother.
 Holds you in her Warm Embrace.
 One you will succumb to
 And never leave.
Shirley Sandler 2017

For two weeks our landscape has been the desert.  It was nothing like what I thought it would be. I expected nearly barren sands, mostly flat land, and little signs of life. I only saw one road runner and no coyotes. Instead I saw land stretching for miles covered with greenish brown sagebrush and cactus. I didn’t see any cattle skulls along the side of the road. But when turned my head I saw mountains of rocks and some that seemed to be a single rock, and they were but a few hundred or some a few thousand feet away. When I looked closer I saw beauty and life and even muted color. But mostly I saw the planet Earth, nearly naked. A thin translucent layer of life that until then had only been visible to me in small cutouts. Where the Earth’s land meets her seas, we see naked sand, soil and rocks; the Earth’s skin, but only a glimpse. In the desert, it is always and everywhere exposed. I only saw one road runner, but there was other small animals visible, mostly geckos and rabbits.

It is the land itself that mostly fascinated me as we drove from campsite to campsite, tourist site to tourist site, canyon to canyon, for two weeks; perhaps three. The land is dirt with lots of rocks, soil is non-existent. And gorgeous life grows in that dirt and rocks; plants, lizards and rodents persevere to live and survive day after day for thousands of generations as proof that beauty exists all over, even in the desert.

Finally,  we faced our last stretch of desert. It was time to leave. We visited and admired, we did not belong. The desert is not a place where many humans live.  Much of the desert land still belongs to the natives, many banished into a phantom zone they did not deserve. The desert is not a place where many humans choose to live. The last stretch was the desert known as Death Valley. There, most assuredly, I would see stretches of land with barely any life at all, the Earth a totally naked planet as far as the eye can see. Our GPS actually told us to go South and avoid the desert, but that meant a 4 hour drive, minimum. Through the desert was half that. We took the shorter drive.

The Death Valley ride was the toughest and hardest drive we have made to date. It wasn’t the heat, or the barrenness of the land. Although there is a portion where there are signs telling you not to step onto the road, another sign in that same portion of road tells you to shut off your AC, to prevent your vehicle from overheating. Casey Jones runs with a Ford F450 10 cylinder engine, and with a few exceptions it climbed through the Rockies, only a little slower than most other vehicles, and sometimes that was me slowing it down due to mountain road curves. Death Valley had it all, mountain road curves with steep, inclines. At times Casey Jones barely made it past 20 mph, chugging up out of the desert. The engine heat gauge looked good and steady, but I could feel that heat coming off the engine. It was the longest 20 miles I have driven any vehicle.

The landscape always changed, but here the dirt and rocks we saw everywhere else was more so. You look out on the land as you are driving, and the ground gets more barren, the dunes are less covered than the ones you left behind the last turn. Finally, we reach a spot. A marked lookout spot, where there are other silly people driving through a landscape with such a foreboding name.  In that one area, the land is nearly as barren as one might imagine. The rocks and dirt have been weathered down to sand. We stopped and took pictures. This was the desert, everyone  thinks they will see. We got back on the road and after a few miles encountered the signs to not step on the road, and turn off our AC. By then the rocks had almost entirely replaced dirt. If one was to walk, it would be nearly impossible to pass through. Rocks, cactus and dirt. The entire landscape for at least 20 miles, impassable. Certain death if on foot. Fortunately, as best as we could tell we had phone service the entire trip, a great de-stresser.

Then with each corner we turned, the land got just a little more filled with plants. Still desert, but not deadly. Another mountain range loomed in front of us. The Sierra Nevada’s. The road passed an actual lake, surrounded by trees. More trees than we had seen in weeks. But around it all was still desert. Our route took us past and around the lake, our next campground less than a mile from the lake’s other side.

We made it through Death Valley. We were in California. In just a few days our adventure would bring us from the historic trade port of Salem, MA on the Atlantic Ocean to a former home of fish canneries in Monterey, CA on the Pacific.