Reach - 2/14/17

My drawing this week is of the San Ysidro mountains, above Borrego Springs in Anza-Borrego. I accentuated the peak of the mountain to relate it to the word for this week, which is "reach." In connection with this drawing, a friend recommended that I read Mary Austen's 1903 "Land of Little Rain," a series of essays about her travels through the Mojave desert. 

I have hiked through the Mojave desert. Last summer my partner Johnathan and I hiked through a 42 mile stretch of the Mojave desert that had no natural water source, carrying 20+ pounds of water each. In December we also spent some time in the desert -- in Anza-Borrego, south of the Mojave. (This time it was winter and it rained and we were also not as adventurous -- we stayed in a hotel). 

Here are some passages that seemed most important from "Land of Little Rain:"

What the Mojave desert looks like:

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze. The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness that get the local name of dry lakes.

What living in the desert is like:

To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water--there is no help for any of these things.

What it takes for a plant to live in the desert:

The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is underground; above there is room for a rounded perfect growth. In Death Valley, reputed the very core of desolation, are nearly two hundred identified species.

And finally, the experience of what it feels like to leave the desert:

At any rate, it was not people who went into the desert merely to write it up who invented the fabled Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance. I, who must have drunk of it in my twice seven years' wanderings, am assured that it is worth while.

This spring, because of the rain, there could be spectacular wildflowers in Anza-Borrego. It would be on a scale not seen since 1997 and 1998. 

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Source: Los Angeles Times

Hiking through the desert one can't help but feel that it is not a place fit for human habitation...that the desert will destroy you...and wants to. And yet, there is something impersonal about this, because the desert of course is not a person and does not care if you survive or not. And it is your choice to travel through it...to be strategic...to experience the "radiant color and romance," as Austen describes it.