Initiation at Joshua Tree

July 19, 2024

I am sitting on the daybed couch in Joshua Tree at the High Desert Test Sites guest cabin. It is 107 degrees outside at last read. Today started for me around 2 a.m.. Too excited at the prospect of going to the park for the first time, I was unable to rest fully and so woke at 2:30 and rose from bed at 3 a.m.. I made my first coffee of the day in a French press. In my sleepiness, I forgot to add the sieve component to the mesh and plastic part of the inner workings of the press and thus I had to scoop bean fragments out of my warm coffee cup. I ate some granola and yogurt and packed water and snacks. I felt more than prepared as I drove to the western entrance of the park sun-screened and with an extra three liters of water in a plastic pitcher perched on the passenger side floor, tucked among bags. 

Once inside the bounds of the park, I slid around the rock pile hills in the darkness in my white rental sedan. The sky was dark and bright with stars. The road, crossed every so often by speeding mice or chipmunks, tails trailing or folded back against their haunches. Their fur, the same color as the desert sand in the headlights. I stopped off two times at dusty shoulders, twice daring to turn my car lights off and to step out of the car to take in the sky in all its glory. But I had trepidations. I imagined the snakes, scorpions, and tarantula having a kind of rave in the dust by the roadside next to my car. I beamed my phone light at the ground. No critters were noted, but the shadows around me were suddenly undeniably dark, tall, and probably handsome if you wandered in the desert long enough. With a strong sense of animal fear risen in me, I swiftly took my place back behind the wheel of the car and proceeded towards Arch Rock. 

I never quite got there. I parked close by at the White Tank parking lot and set out down the path, initially with my I-phone light for guidance. Remember, my mind has some propensity to look at this desert as a place possibly teeming with snakes and other things I have naturally feared. I didn’t see any of these fearsome creatures, but I did see many ant colonies. Ants will, no doubt, outlive us all. I’m not mad, I wish them luck for the end of the world. I said so quietly as I passed by the fifth or so mound.

The atmosphere there in the darkness was unearthly. It was windless. It smelled like paper and dust as the sun began to tint the sky behind the mountains of the Mojave desert. A melding appeared to be happening, of light and darkness. The mixed light poured over the mountain into the visible sky, and I could suddenly make out arresting rock formations and unreal plants all around me. Days full of many new delights would await me on this trip. But, I'll never forget the moment when some of the plant greens were revealed by the sun to be a surprisingly tender aqua blue, and the gold halo of the pencil cacti at dawn. 

As I walked there were times where the path was extremely clear, marked with brown metal posts and arrows. Other times the gravel I tread on would taper off and I’d have to seek out another rivulet of pebbles to assure myself that I was indeed headed in the right direction. I followed sign markers and then the path became an undulating plane of white granite.

Before me, a set of monumental rocks was cobbled together and arranged vertically by the hands of time, and the work of water and erosion. The sky was changing with richly pigmented bands of blueish pink and gold. The colors of the rocks shifted all around me, as if blushing as I laid eyes on them with the dawn. As I scrambled up and down the face of the rocks, I felt doubtful that I was still on the ordained path.

I wondered if I would have the stamina to proceed without signage and general clear “pathiness” to bolster me. Already at the very outer limits of my bravery, my mind began to reel. I watched it wheeling. I questioned if people ever got lost in this section of the park, so close to the road. What would their un-panicking minds have chosen that might have saved them? Another anxiety competed to fill my mind: the temperature was climbing as the unabated sun blasted over the sand. Would I end up with the same fate of people who miscalculated their desert hikes? Die slowly from a scorching sunburn and thirst? Could I be one of the unfortunate ones?

I’m fairly sure that the sign at the outset had said it was a .2 mile hike, but nonetheless the worries escalated. I heard distant voices bouncing off the rock faces and assured myself that I wasn’t alone. Or, was this a trick of the desert? 

After a particularly steep expanse came into view as the next section of possible trail, I decided it wasn’t all that important to me to see the Arch Rock. After all, the unnamed rocks I’d seen already had me in awe. I wasn’t about to prioritize pride over uncertainty. There was precious time before the heat of the day. And turning around would mean doors left open for other wonders. 

Walking back towards my car where the clay granite trail forked, I spontaneously turned towards the path for heart rock instead. I’d heard someone in an emotional intelligence workshop in 29 Palms the day before mention that they couldn’t find the rock, but that they’d discovered their own “heart rock” in the process. The wonderment of the people living near Joshua Tree is a palpable thing. I imagined what it would be like to be one of them. To recognize features of this alien terrain as though they are home.

As I walked, a pair of coyote pups jogged silently across the rocks in front of me. Add this to the list of tiny animals I’d already encountered: desert rabbits with ears impossibly long and soft looking despite living in the crust. Outback mice. Desert quail broods. It was comforting to see these young, peeping creatures making their way within the environment. Surely I could hack this short hike if they could live there day in and day out. 

Heart rock. Makes me think of "Heart Love" by Albert Ayler. Don’t get pencil cactus in your eye, they say. Like an arrow from cupid’s bow, it will sting. Gram Parsons wandered here long ago with his heart stung in the night and the early morning. I feel myself in some kind of distant conversation with him. Like he’s at the Tiny Pony, talking softly to me over his shoulder at the bar. I can smell licorice and tobacco on his breath, inhale the worn sweat and sun streaked smell of his felted hat. We both know enough now to sense through our heartache, and laugh together easily at our shared secret: that having a muse is and isn't love itself. It’s the green and the greening, life flowing from a real stream-- and artists who come and find they live in the oasis that grows out of that springing? Well, blessed are those artists. Wandering blind on faith across scorched terrain, we choose to see it, to be there for love as it appears to us with all its life-giving qualities. We bask in the flowers of our own tender feelings and how in talking about love itself we can’t help but to be quenched. We sing to express this satisfaction, and to keep the flowers of love and hope alive.

“You and you alone are love, I am just your loving.”

-Anna Albeck, my paternal great-grandmother in a journal from her time in Yokohoma, Japan. 1940.  

Later that morning, I found a bone fragment, perhaps the long leg of coyote by the door of my cabin. I spent the day after sunrise feeling a bit queasy and needing to be still and contained, tangling with a restlessness of gut and mind. In the evening, trying to rest only found me asleep for a few short minutes. I’d wake again in my white tee shirt hot but not unsatisfied or sweaty, or even tired.

“If you get hit by a meteorite, can I keep the stone?”

Am I walking the line of some mania? I wondered. There’s not a negative or destructive emotion that I can see in the swirl. I turn over the facts. Though I’m somewhat demure at this moment in my intake of every substance including caffeine, it's impossible to ignore how something about Joshua Tree draws out a wakefulness in me. 

I am leaving Milwaukee after a long time and as much as I’m staying on a mountain overlooking the Morongo Basin, I’m also living on the edge of that transition. That place hasn’t felt like a home to me for quite some time. I’m a fan of Milwaukee, despite my own estrangement to aspects of it and its culture. But mostly, I dream of a multitude of places. At the same time, I appreciate and soak up Milwaukee's wonders when I think to-- both in-person and in memory. I champion it in and with my soul. It’s so easy even now to call to mind the generous mystic beauty of the place, the beaches and expanses. The forests and trails. It is a gateway to the great lakes. Once you've arrived on that promise, all the ways that water and trees have shaped the space will astound you still.

I think of Milwaukee, and of how the aquamarine January lake hit me the first time I laid eyes on it. I was on I-43, from the back of a taxi on my way to Shorewood from General Mitchell Airport. It was 2010. Beyond the towering billboards to the east of the highway, the lake shimmered like a Caribbean sea against a purple and sunny storm-threatened sky.

At a distance, I can treasure the contrasts of Milwaukee. Its coolness and its joviality; the surreally lush and watery micro-environments of the city that change form completely through the seasons; the brick factories and old corner shops turned over into slick coffee roasteries and homey restaurants. The songs and the smiling eyes of my friends. But there’s been a lot changing under my feet there, like sod eroded. The landscape itself is moved, is moving, from flows of water through it and upon in. But, beyond this place and its changes, there is a wide world that calls to me.

I'm writing now from that wide world.

An intuition being shaped shapes itself. A puddle formation, drying and reformed at its edges with the air's suggestion. A notion that comes on like a warm wind, exciting curiosity and a smile: more art teacher vibes for me and for the planet, yes please please please. Thoughts of places known about but not yet seen and places only experienced in name. Questions of names, and of histories, which are also the questions surrounding who we feel we are, who we are becoming.

A premonition and a reflection

negate each other.

The moon disappears and sky becomes dawn.

We move to hold on to what feels true,

and we hold it up,

we find it can hold itself up,

keeps holding us up,

but what can be held by us

across all environments?

Whatever it is is waiting in shadow

while the light is at work already changing everything.

-

Thank you for reading.

Feel free to reach out to have conversation about anything brought up in or brought to mind from these entries. Especially if you enjoy postcards or you're excited to share about great parks you know about in Europe.

P.S. Please enjoy an accidental selfie, captured while scanning for bug ravers.