It came to me on the scent of creosote, cloying and resinous, and wet dust driven before a summer desert storm. A sudden gust out of the glowering east sent the little car skittering across the lane, and as I tightened my hands on the wheel the scent hit me at once, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which had preceded which. Did a burst of wind off the front of the storm bring the tang of monsoon to me? Did the scent hit me with such force I would have staggered without the wind?
Either way I was jubilant, greedy. In the desert, walking too long out into the mountains and dry washes, thirst can build almost imperceptibly. Though you may ration your water well enough that you never actually feel parched, the film still builds on your tongue, and then on your eyes, and then on your mind. Only when you find enough to drink your fill do you at last realize just how heavy a weight that drought had been.
It was like that Saturday. I felt, all of a sudden, lighter. I felt, all of a sudden, as though a hundred thin increments of dull had fallen off me, each laid down with each successive day outside the desert.
I felt eyes on me. It was The Raven, riding shotgun. “You just came out of something,” she said. “You’re giddy.”
“You felt that too?” I asked.
“Felt it? You just started laughing out of nowhere.”
We took a break in Barstow, picked up a few copies of a newspaper that had just printed some of my writing. Outside a little museum we stood on a gravel rise, looked out across the eastern half of town. It was an odd feeling washed across me then, strong affection for a town I have scorned all these years. It felt… like home. It felt like home.
At Harper Lake we walked out onto a boardwalk that could have been a dock, had there been any water beneath it. An alkali crust upon the soil stretched out some dozens of yards. The sun scutted behind one storm cloud after another to the west. One storm cloud after another traced light wet fingers across the West Mojave. We laid on our backs on the boardwalk for a time.
I went away for a time. It was not sleep. I merely ceased to exist for a time, only a thin consciousness left behind, of breeze and rustling dried grass, the labored wingbeats of doves across the lake, stormcloud edges dappling the deepening blue above.
“Your eyes aren’t usually this deep a blue,” said The Raven.
“I don’t belong in Los Angeles,” I replied, a truth I’d thought I had hidden from her. She is worth Los Angeles, if anything is, and yet each day there calcifies my heart, compelling a choice that I had thought fraught with potential heartache.
But storms traced the creosote flats and the slanted light cast stark the ridges across the lake, and the words came before my caution did.
“I don’t belong in Los Angeles,” I said.
“Derr,” said The Raven.
Drive slower than fifty across the West Mojave on a rain-washed night, with the top down, and the black and pin-pricked sky will nestle down around your shoulders. The breeze becomes a roar even at modest speeds, but the silence out there is loud enough that you can hear it over the rush. The hulks of rusted train cars and old water tanks are voids against the gauze of stars. They block the light where your heart cannot.
amazing photo.
I remember a long time ago flying into LA and hitchhiking out of there to the Owens River Valley - up to Lone Pine as I recall. The change was staggering. From an ocean of cars to an ocean of wind, mountains and desert. At that time I was ignorant of the fact that LA was the vampire that had sucked the Owens River dry. In time I came to hate the desert cities: LA, Phoenix and, most especially, Las Vegas. Vampires every one.
:-)
Derr, indeed.