Really really huge. I mean I've driven across the west many times, and I lived and worked for 2 years in the high desert of Nevada, but only now do I appreciate the vastness of it. Whole states from back east would fit in one county, and every bit of it bony and spiky and dusty and dry. Okay, there's plenty of wooded islands that rise up out of it into mountainous heights, and hidden springs, and desert streams with songbirds aflutter. But I didn't see any of that today. Just 90 long miles of stony ground and spindly shrubs.
But I realized something about halfway thru the day: the reason this area looks otherworldly is that it sort of literally is: it is the standard "dry-planet" landscape for every Star Trek series since the original. There are basically two Star Trek planetary landscapes, one is a jungly fake forest that seems to be filmed in a studio and the other is a desert of tan, fortress-like rounded granite. Those they film out here in the Mohave.
90 miles is probably the most I ever want to do in a day. The problem is that for 35 miles I was bucking a stiff desert headwind. Brutal stuff. Then as if in answer to a prayer, the direction of the route and the wind both changed and blew me into Twenty-Nine Palms at 20 miles an hour.
Twenty-Nine Palms is the gateway to Joshua Tree National Park and bills itself as "An Oasis of Murals." The murals are mainly of the historical realist style, miners and Indians and wildlife and so forth, but it is decent work. The palms are California Fan Palms that grow at the oasis at the edge of town where now is the National Park Visitor center. Currently there is no water on the surface but this may change with the next earthquake. That's typically how it is with the natural oases of the Mohave and Sonoran deserts. These oases are really the only natural basis of sustaining human life and culture in the desert. Everything since the 19th century has been based on large scale diversions of water from distant mountain snow packs, paid from the tax coffers of a growing industrial nation whose main centers of population and productivity were far away and much more humid. One thing that interests me a lot on this trip is seeing how all the communities fit in and maintain themselves in their physical locales. Most places in the west tend to rely on elaborate transfers of water and energy and materials from elsewhere. Obviously that sort of thing can't go on very long, simple physics and economics. It's fascinating to see the ways people are figuring to do things more wisely. Not to go off on a tangent but I think new-old building techniques like adobe and cob are a big part of the answer. Start right there at ground level, literally, and all kinds of would-be problems (like energy wastage and structure durability) are solved before they even arise. (With everybody riding their bikes to the big house building work-party and a potluck afterwards with garden produce hot-dishes and homebrewed beer.)
Two sides of how people perceive a lone cyclist crossing the desert: one, a friendly 60-something man named Ed who waved me down in the hamlet of Lucerne Valley to ask me about and congratulate me on my trek. Then a couple hours later at a sun-bleached mini-mart at Flamingo Heights, a little girl stares at me and says incredulously to her father "Daddy, that man's on a bicycle!" as they climb into their car.
Taking a bit of a break here in 29 Palms, resting my legs and butt before the next wide emptiness, the really big one, 90 miles of no services of any kind, 110 to the next actual town, Parker, Arizona down in the hot Sonoran Colorado River desert. So you may not hear from me for a couple days. I'm trying to strike a balance between getting across the desert quickly and not wiping myself out.
Posted by danreedmiller at May 13, 2003 07:48 PM