April 19th, 2011

A cattle coral hardly seems to be a fitting place to set up camp when trying to experience Wilderness. Yet decades of stomping hooves level the ground and thick wooden gates provide excellent shelter from the wind. Tonight a cool breeze gently carries away the heat of the sun beaten sand so perhaps a wind break is unnecessary. The level ground and soft sand is a welcome luxury.

Small black songbirds with crests like cardinals and bright white patches under their wings perch atop the Joshua trees around camp letting a short ‘beep’ carry out into the hills to join the songs of a multitude of other birds. I am surrounded by tiny musicians performing their favorite tunes continuously and without a cover charge.  They bring this landscape to life as the sun sinks low and the air cools, celebrating another day’s successful hunt of bugs and lizards, seeds and berries.

Mockingbirds also frequent this area, bringing with them the patterns of chirps and whistles they learned in their travels to South America and back. Many of the songs they sing were composed by birds that I will never see in my lifetime, and may yet be undiscovered by humans. More musically inclined than any human, mockingbirds can sing every song they know one right after the other without stopping. Every individual creates his own compilation, a collage of other birds’ songs that suits its own personal sense of style. So vast is the memory of these remarkable birds that they can capture, recreate, and remix tens of thousands of songs to create their own (How many DJ’s do you know that can do that?!).

Rolling hills covered with black brush comprises most of the landscape of my day. An occasional Joshua tree will rise up out of the thick cover, however not much else grows on this section of the South McCulloughs. That may be due in part to the way that the ground here slowly hardens and compacts. The surface is composed of stones of various sizes forming a mosaic-like crust, gradually getting tighter and tighter choking out new growth.

A small horned lizard perched upon a rock basking in the afternoon sun provided some welcome entertainment on our hike. With a disc shaped body and a stubby tail these charismatic little reptiles adorn themselves with a set of protrusions on their head that resemble a regal crown. Capable of changing the color of their skin they can quickly disappear into the sand as they lay still and try to blend in. I sat down next to his basking rock and he quickly darted into my lap and crawled underneath my folded legs. When I lifted my knees he hid under my boot. When I lifted my boot he scurried to the other. Every time I tried to move to reveal him he sought shelter under another part of me, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

This place has brief moments of breathtaking beauty: pink clouds streak across a yellow sky with deep purple mountains and throngs of birds. Yet these are intermittently scattered between long expanses of desolating heat and silence. I think humans might be the only animals stupid enough to go trompsing about in the desert during midday.

I thought today about changing myself, and how all the changes I expected to occur throughout my life are supposed to be correlated to a specific scenery or landscape. As if the landscape can somehow create the situation or the change within the human psyche. However, I’ve come to learn that most of the change in my life has been the result of the people I have interacted with and the relationships that have been created and dismantled. I feel as though (a kangaroo rat just darted out of its burrow right next to me! I’ve been waiting for almost an hour) the human experience is painted by our friend and family. Our life is a canvas and we paint it with the colors of our friends and family. Some people give us bright yellows and oranges, and some dark blues and even browns. Although we may paint over some areas of our canvas, those layers don’t get erased, they built onto. Some people’s paintings are hung in galleries as models or inspirations, while others are stored in closets (and some are burned). I think it is finding connections and inspirations from others that make real changes in the human experience. Dealing with the obstacles that various landscapes provide (limited water, heat, cold, humidity, etc.) is handled by a basic and instinctual part of the brain, but the intricacies of interhuman actions challenge our most sophisticated responses.

A black throated sparrow has come to inspect the cholla next to me. A cholla is a seemingly impenetrable fortress in cactus form. Growing its narrow arms in a dense bushy fashion it fills the gaps between them with intensely sharp and rigid spines. Paying little mind to the innumerable puncturing point the sparrow merrily hops about the inside of the cholla’s stronghold, tweeting as it goes no less.

Cholla grow their spines all over their thick skin in clumps that protrude like little mosquito bites. When the cactus dies these little balls of terror litter the ground and poke anything soft. Even long after the rest of the cactus has decayed the spiny balls can stab right through the soles of your sandals.

The stars are beginning to appear and I think I will retire to the warmth of my sleeping bag. I seemed to have inadvertently placed my tent on an exit to a kangaroo rat’s burrow. I can hear him sniffing his way out from under the nylon and see the little bulge he creates navigating around my pack and boots. I would move my tent but he seems to have found a way out and darted off to his foraging grounds. I’ll move my pack to ease his return in the early hours of the morning.

*P*S* Over the course of the night I awoke to the sound of the kangaroo rat returning. However, rather than retry tunneling under the tent he spent half an hour digging a new entrance to his tunnel system. I watched by the light of my headlamp as he flung dirt up and into my tent, just retribution for creating this excess work for him I believe. I thoroughly enjoyed watching him run headfirst into his hole and hop backwards as he scooped little pawfulls of sand and energetically flung them between his hind legs and onto my sleeping bag. All the while half a dozen other individuals zooming into and out of view to see what all the commotion was about.