The first time I awoke in the Mojave I was cramped uncomfortably into the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s Honda in a roadside rest area on Route 58 near Boron. It was not yet light. I had agreed to drive her car from Los Angeles to the Bay Area alone; she would fly back to spend time with her new boyfriend. The situation was untenable. Our breakup was not far off. I dropped her at the airport, then drove toward anywhere but home. A couple hours later I turned east on 58 from Mojave, vaguely remembering a rest stop from a visit five years before, not knowing which way I’d go when I awoke the next morning.
I awoke in darkness with a badly stiffened neck. Through the dry, cloudless air, a few spring morning constellations shone brilliantly. The nearby hills on the Edwards Air Force Base, speckled with lights from one installation or another, made it hard to tell where the sky ended and the earth began.
And then I saw a difference between land and air. The black sky to the east seemed to turn a deeper black, as if some unseen hand had poured a vat of purple ink into it. The cast was enough to outline a few objects on land: texture crept slowly into the featureless dark. A pale red smudge formed to outline the horizon to the east. As I watched, rapt, it spread to the whole eastern sky, a brilliant vermilion wash fading to violet overhead. I got out of the car to stretch.
Behind the spot where I’d parked, a twenty-five-foot Joshua tree stood outlined against the red morning sky. It was a flat silhouette, no relief discernable in the dim light, and I could not tell which of the curving, intersecting, crazily twisted branches was in front and which behind. It seemed an odd, alien thing, drooping wood and daggers, a painting done by Bosch and Dali with a Edvard Munch sky.
A few minutes later the sun came up, but the tree looked only a bit less odd for being three-dimensional.
Route 58 was once called Route 466, a feeder road for Route 66, the great Mother Road, the route mid-continent refugees took to get to the promised land. Between Dust Bowl and deliverance lay desolation. The migrants poured past my resting spot in a veritable stream, bound for low-paying, abusive jobs in the fields of California. 466 was part of the pipeline from Oklahoma City to Bakersfield. In the most important cinematographical treatment of that migration, “The Grapes of Wrath,” director John Ford portrayed the horror, the frightening otherness of the Mojave transit by showing the slow passage of Joshua trees at night.
It’s not surprising: the trees are strange. Joshua tree fanciers are fond of quoting the famous statement of John C. Frémont, western explorer and first Republican presidential candidate, on his first glimpse of Joshua trees somewhere in the vicinity of Walker Pass:
“Their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.”
Oddly enough, few quote the passage in full, which is from his Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44. (The title doesn’t seem quite so long when you consider the original byline, which read “by Brevet Captain John C. Frémont, of the Topographical Engineers, under the orders of Colonel J.J. Abert, Chief of the Topographical Bureau.”) The sentence that precedes his bon mot, dated April 14, 1844:
“Crossing a low sierra, and descending a hollow where a spring gushed out, we were struck by the sudden appearance of yucca trees, which gave a strange and southern character to the country, and suited well with the dry and desert region we were approaching.”
Modern desert-loving aesthetic sensibilities notwithstanding, Frémont didn’t intend that as a compliment. His bad mood can be forgiven. He had recently spent several long weeks floundering in the deep snow of the Sierra Nevada. His beloved horse Proveau had died of fatigue only a month earlier. Several of his favored compatriots had abandoned his expedition, seduced by the wiles of coastal California. Just that week he’d confirmed that the fabled Buenaventura River, which allegedly ran from the west slope of the Rockies to the San Francisco Bay, could not possibly exist: the Sierra Nevada was just too unbroken a range to permit such a river to flow through it. He was about to crush the fond dreams of thousands of speculators. Also, he had not had a decent cup of coffee in weeks, a problem with which every Mojave traveler can commiserate.
It will be no surprise that I have a bit of a bias in this matter. But after extended visits to Joshua tree country the apricot and almond trees and the live oaks in coastal California just look wrong to me. Their growth is too exuberant, their branches twee, a rococo profusion of twigs and dainty leaves getting in the way of the sky. It takes me a day or so to readjust when I leave the Mojave.
Stiff? Ungraceful? Quite the contrary.
Unlike oaks or pines or redwoods, the stems of Joshua trees are remarkably flexible. Other trees, hardwoods and softwoods alike, have vascular tissue in their trunks that is heavily reinforced with lignin, a polymer that makes up as much as a third of the weight of the wood of many trees. Lignin stiffens trunks and branches. That rigidity confers strength, but with such strength comes brittleness. A thick tree trunk bends only a little in a strong wind. Too strong a wind will shatter it.
Further, lignin is heavy, and so horizontal branches pose a special engineering problem for woody plants. Too much weight at the far end, and the branch will break off near its point of attachment. Lignified trees must reinforce all but the lightest horizontal branches by adding structural support, either by thickening the undersides of branches at the trunk (compression wood) or by buttressing the top of the branch to help hold it up (tension wood.)
If Joshua trees look different on the outside from most other trees, they are even more different on the inside. The trunks of hardwoods and softwoods are essentially a thin cylindrical shell of living tissue, the vascular cambium, which makes two kinds of vascular tissue: xylem on the inside of the cylinder, phloem on the outside. The tree’s leaves transpire water, creating a vacuum that siphons water up the xylem from the roots. Leaves turn water and sunlight into sugar, which flows down the phloem to the roots. Each year, the cambium produces another layer of xylem, creating those annual tree rings). Xylem is more or less dead tissue, a set of static pipelines to the leaves. In the center of a growing tree, the oldest xylem becomes a landfill, a waste repository for resins and other byproducts of plant metabolism. The tubes are clogged with plaque, close off, harden. This is heartwood, the densest, darkest wood in the tree. It is structural support and not much more.
When I’m in Joshua tree country with a friend who’s new to the Mojave, I sometimes lift good-sized pieces of fallen Joshua tree under the pretext of looking for desert night lizards. In truth, I’m generally seeking to impress, if only momentarily. The trunks of Joshua trees are nearly as light as balsa. You will find no heartwood there, and precious little lignin. The trees depend for their strength on long strands of fiber, and they have plenty of it. Sawn in sections, they show no growth rings annual or otherwise, perplexing those who would guess at a tree’s age. In the Joshua tree trunk, xylem and phloem are combined into vascular bundles, little two-way conduits wrapped together with a thick insulating cellulose fiber between them. The trunks do not resemble hollow cylinders so much as bridge cables. They contain lignin — all vascular plants do — but not nearly enough to make the stems rigid.
In the early days of settlement of the Mojave, Joshua tree wood was often used to splint broken limbs. Peel off a cylinder of the wood to fit a broken arm, and it would immobilize the injured limb until the bone could be set – but was pliable enough to bend it into place, and to remove without a cast saw. And unlike a plaster cast, it breathed.
In that flexible strength is the secret to the Joshua tree’s appearance.
A young Joshua tree’s terminal bud grows toward the sky. Its stem is springy. It is capable of bearing great weight. If prevailing wind, or sudden loosening of soil, or brighter sun just around a rock outcrop spur the bud to grow less than absolutely vertically, the increasing weight of the stem causes it to sag ever so slightly. The bud responds to the change in direction by putting on more growth, heading for the vertical again. This increases the load on the stem, which weighs it down closer to the horizonatal. The bud continues to change direction, and the stem increasingly bows.
Eventually a branch may be horizontal for much of its length. Auxins, the plant hormones that suppress the growth of buds, move within the trees more or less by the dictates of gravity. There is less auxin at the top surface of a horizontal stem. New buds hidden beneath the surface push their way between plates of bark. They emerge and grow skyward, rosettes affixed to the branch like pinecones. They lengthen and add more weight to the mother branch, themselves bending and bowing when they reach a certain length.
After years of balance and adjustment an old branch of a Joshua tree will sometimes resemble a draftsman’s French curve, broadly sloping at the trunk, bowed gently but firmly back toward the ground, its tip upswept. More likely, it will become a fractal nest of such curves, each of its daughter branches – from tip or adventitious buds – succumbing to the sway and warp. Should a branch become so heavily laden that it settles, over years, to the ground, roots will often form where it touches the soil. When a tree becomes so lopsided that the roots on one side of its flared trunk can no longer keep their grasp on the subsoil, such branch roots may keep the upended tree alive for dozens more years.
I once had a toy, a little wooden dog, made of blond beads threaded together on strings. The strings fed through holes in the dog’s paws through a little platform, where they were glued to a spring-loaded button in the base. Press up on the button with your thumb, and the thread slackened. The little dog would flop amusingly. Release the button and the spring would tense the threads, bringing the dog to attention, alert and ready to play. I sometimes remember that toy in the Mojave as I sit beneath the Joshua trees, built from more or less the same blueprints. Taut-stringed branches wave gently in the slightest breeze, support and weight always finding balance somehow. Their slow dance both announces and calms the wind. They distill grace from tension.
In 1955 or thereabouts, I lived one variously blazingly hot, sand-stormy, thunder-storming, flash-flooding summer in Twenty-nine Palms. My dad was working there as a carpenter for a contractor at the nearby Marine base. I remember my dad once opined that Joshua trees would grow for many years, until they were simply too large to support themselves, and would then eventually collapse in a heap. He thought the oldest ones we likely the scraggly ones that didn’t get enough water to grow well.
On our many long, non-air-conditioned trips in the family Studebaker “woodie” station wagon along the roads of that area, I remember often falling into a desert heat delirium or trance, with little to do but compete with my siblings in looking for Joshua tress that look the most like people.
I recall Twenty-nine Palms and nearby Joshua Tree National Monument fondly as a harsh place of great beauty, a surprising abundance of fauna, most of it quite exotic to a boy raised in San Diego. It was the first place I ever saw huge thunderheads, desert rats, a street flowing like a river, bats, tortoises, or beetles as big as my fist.
I understand and respect your love for deserts, but I have never been comfortable in hot places, dry temperate, or tropical lowland.
Fascinating. Thank you so much for introducing a mid-westerner like me to the inner beauty of Joshua trees. I will never look at photos of them the same way again.
Is this another chapter from the book? It’s like reading a botany textbook. Except, a poetic one. I may have cried once or twice.
Cool, “heartbreaking textbook” is exactly what I was going for.
This post is in fact based on a reworked chapter from a previous draft of the book.
This article is an example of why I read Coyote Crossing. As I am a forest ecologist and wetland scientist I have a lot to learn about the desert. You bring me to a place that I can seldom visit, and for that I thank you. Very nice post.
Ecologically speaking the original purpose of lignin was related to water transportation. This organic polymer fills cell walls reducing air space. As a side effect the lignin lends compression strength to branches making it unlike most branches in deciduous forests that are dominated with tensile strength. One side note is that lignin cannot be digested by most animals which reduces predation on plants that employ it as a dominant feature.
I only wish it were referred to something other than a “Joshua Tree”, clearly a bibical, and therefore a european moniker. Are you aware of any Native American names for this tree?
Bill
thanks for capturing the grace of the desert, Chris! this post just made my day.
Now I know why we have redwood fences and patio decks landscaping our suburbs here in the middle of America and no Joshua tree based property accents. Growing straight and tall ain’t always the best survival strategy.