Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
A year passed before I could get back to the desert. Most of a year, eleven months or thereabouts. Eleven full moons, half moons, new moons, etc., eleven swings of one satellite around another. In all that time I can’t say that I saw the moon that much or knew when it was waxing or waning. After Las Vegas I moved in with L. in a city far away, in another country on another continent, where people had their own dramas and no one cared about the Rhino or talked about him much except to snort with a sort of bewildered contempt whenever his name came up, as if he were some exotic and comically disfiguring skin disease, unlikely to afflict anyone they knew, too distant and too disgusting to dwell on for long.
I didn’t miss him, but I did miss the desert, and the stars. Sometimes at night L. and I would climb the stairs to the roof of our apartment building, hold each other like we used to outside the house in Joshua Tree, and stare up at the sky, but the lights of the city were far too bright, and even on the clearest nights we could make out only a few dim constellations. Once we rented a car and drove a few hours out of town to spend a weekend in what was supposed to be the darkest spot in the country and one of the best places in the whole continent to see the night sky. All the villages there were dying: the young people had moved to the cities in search of work, leaving most of the buildings empty and dark. Both nights we were there turned out to be cloudy. We saw a few occasional shreds of open sky, the blackness of space rich and dense and thick with stars gleaming for a minute or two before the clouds drifted closed, hiding them again.
I kept up with the news at home, the weather, all of it, perhaps even more attentively than when I was living there. The Rhino blundered on, destroying everything that came close to him, but he didn’t kill us all and hasn’t yet. Not all of us anyway. I don’t find that comforting.
The summer was hot, hot here and hotter than ever almost everywhere. I was glad not to be in Las Vegas. In the first week of July it hit the midnineties in northern Siberia. By the middle of that month wildfires were burning north of the Arctic Circle. There were fires in the moors of northern England too, and in Siberia, Greece, Ukraine, and much of the American West. In November fires erased the town of Paradise, California, killing eighty-eight people, more than tripling the grim record for fatalities set by the Oakland hills fire that I survived seventeen years earlier. If Blanqui is right I’m still running from it, my scrappy, nineteen-year-old self racing down that burning hillside in universe after universe. Somewhere else out there I don’t make it. Somewhere else California never burns.
In this universe the permafrost in parts of Siberia is no longer freezing. Which means it is not permafrost anymore, but mud. In this universe the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in vertigo-inducing techno-bureaucratic language that if we want to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade and prevent absolute fucking planetary catastrophe we have only a few years, until 2030, to cut global carbon emissions by 45 percent, and then twenty years to reduce them to zero. Even the dullest experts agree that this will require collective effort of a sort that our species has never yet attempted. Despite all this, carbon emissions are still going up. They’re breaking records, in fact.
Late in the summer, L. and I took a train to Portbou, the seaside town in northern Spain where Walter Benjamin ended his life. He had arrived there around the same time of year that we did, in September, carrying seventy dollars in American currency and five hundred francs, plus his watch, glasses, passport, pipe, and the vial of morphine tablets—enough for an overdose—that he had carried with him for more than seven years, since the burning of the Reichstag. He had a black valise too, stuffed with papers, among them a manuscript, now lost. His heart was bad, and though a guide had escorted him and a few others through the mountains to the border from France, the terrain was rough and Benjamin was ill. Too weak to continue, he had spent the night outdoors and slept, if at all, exposed in the rocky hills.
Travel within the European Union is these days supposedly borderless, but the police asked L. and me for our passports coming and going, on the platform and on the train. They barely gave ours a glance, but they lingered with great interest over the papers of another traveler, Afghan or Pakistani, who stood a few feet from us beneath the vaulted ceiling of the station. In September 1940, the police in Portbou had showed Benjamin neither hospitality nor mercy. He had a Spanish visa—and another one for the United States, if only he could get that far—but he had no French exit stamp, so the police told him he would be returned to France. The photographer Henny Gurland, who had crossed the mountains with him, recalled: “For an hour, four women and the three of us sat before the officials crying, begging, and despairing as we showed them our perfectly good papers.” The police would not be budged: the travelers could spend the night under guard in the Hotel de Francia. Gendarmes would come for them in the morning.
Benjamin understood this as a death sentence. At some point that evening, another of his traveling companions checked on him in his room and found him “in a desolate state of mind.” He was lying in bed, she recalled, half-dressed, and “observing the time constantly,” staring at the pocket watch that he had laid open beside him. Before he lost consciousness the next morning, Benjamin gave Gurland a card on which he had scribbled a few sentences. She destroyed it and committed his words to memory: “With no way out, I have no other choice but to end it.”
Portbou is small and sleepy and I imagine we saw most of it. It was gray that day and the sea was dark and still. We climbed up to the cemetery on a cliff overlooking the water just outside of town and found Benjamin’s grave there, or at least the stone that had been erected in his memory a half century after his death. At first they had given him a niche of his own, but after five years what was left of the money he had carried with him ran out—the hotelier had taken his piece, billing for an imaginary four-night stay plus five lemonades, and there were fees charged by the doctor who had declared him dead, the coffin maker, a priest, a judge. Even for the dead a private room costs money in this world, so Benjamin’s body, or what was left of it, was transferred to a common grave.
Standing on the rocky path behind the cemetery, looking out over the dull, flat sea, I was overcome suddenly by anger, furious that Benjamin had to stay forever in this shitty little town that had treated him so poorly. He had arrived ill, exhausted, and afraid, and they had found no place for him, no pity and no kindness. They would have done the same to me or to you or to any of us, and their offspring are everywhere these days, on this continent and on mine, cruel and craven, living smugly in their fears. The sun came out and gleamed off the water, blinding me, and then it went away again.
Back in town we looked for the Hotel de Francia. A waiter in a café pointed to the empty lot across the street. The hotel had been there, he told me. It must have been torn down years before, because there were trees growing in the rubble, a young fig and a sycamore among the high grasses. Cheery murals of undersea scenes had been painted on the fence surrounding it. But the waiter was lying. Or he had misunderstood me. Or I misunderstood him: the hotel is still standing. Later I found pictures of it online accompanying a blog post that was only a year old, too recent for a tree to grow. How could I have missed it? In the photos, I could read the stone plaque affixed to the wall, engraved with a sentence in Spanish: “In this house lived and died Walter Benjamin.” Beneath it was a quote from Benjamin in Catalan, apparently the most anodyne one they could find: “All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”
The funny thing is that they got the quote wrong, and that the idea behind it, generic as it is, was not even Benjamin’s. The line appears in a letter Benjamin wrote seventeen years before his death to a friend and mentor, the writer Florens Christian Rang. It is a typically dense and theoretical Benjaminian missive about “the task of interpreting works of art.” He concludes by apologizing if he is not being sufficiently clear: “Your basic concept truly got through to me. In the final analysis it is manifested for me in your insight that all human knowledge, if it can be justified, must take on no other form than interpretation . . .”
I doubt he would have laughed, but I am sure Benjamin would have been able to nod at least at the irony, however grim, that he, who had written so urgently of the need for the historian to be convinced that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious,” would be memorialized in the town that killed him with words that were not his.
In June a man entered the offices of a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot seven employees, killing five. In August a man walked into a video game competition in Jacksonville, Florida, and shot fourteen people, three of whom died. In September a man entered a skyscraper in Cincinnati and shot six people, killing four of them. Also that month a woman shot seven people in a Maryland drugstore warehouse, four of them fatally. In October a man entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot seventeen people. Eleven of them died. In November a man entered a yoga studio in Tallahassee and shot seven people, killing two of them and then himself. Five days later a man entered a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, California, just outside L.A., and shot twelve people, all but one of them fatally, before killing himself. Twelve days passed and a man entered a hospital in Chicago and shot three people, killing all of them before being killed himself. In January a man shot five women in a Sebring, Florida, bank, killing all of them. In February a man shot and killed five employees at a boiler manufacturing company in Aurora, Illinois, and then shot and injured five police officers before being killed in turn.
In March I flew to California. All winter it had rained and rained. It had only stopped a few days before I got there. Even from the window of the airplane, the greenness was so bright it made my heart leap. The delta where the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers conjoin was largely flooded. I drove with my nieces down along the Sacramento and the river was higher than I had ever seen it, almost overflowing the levees all along the way. From the freeway you could see the marshy lands between Sacramento and Davis submerged for miles in all directions, water covering the lower branches of the trees. It looked like a dream.
I caught myself thinking again about George MacDonald’s Lilith, which I had read while I was still in Las Vegas. It is among the strangest novels I have ever come across, and among the more wonderful, but I hadn’t planned to write about it. It was so different than all the other takes on the Lilith myth that I didn’t know what to do with it, or how to think about it yet. MacDonald, who was Scottish, wrote Lilith toward the end of his life, in 1895, four years after the death of his favorite daughter. In the end he would outlive four of his children, plus his wife and at least one of their grandchildren. The novel’s milieu, for all its whimsy, is one of overwhelming loss.
The plot begins in earnest when the narrator, allegorically named Vane, steps through a mirror in the attic library of his family’s ancient home. He finds himself in a “wild country” in which a raven that speaks to him in riddles will be the least of the marvels that he meets. Walking through a forest, he comes across a beautiful woman, naked, half-starved, and nearly dead. He does his best to nurse her back to health. He warms her by building her a bed of leaves and branches over a flowing hot spring, and feeds her a single grape each day. (He peels it first and removes the seeds.) For all his trouble, he wakes each morning with a “burning thirst” and a wound “like the bite of a leech”—first on his hand, later his arm, then his neck. His patient grows steadily stronger. When she revives enough to speak, she blames his bites on a “great, white leech.” She caught it in the act, she assures him, and hurled it into the river while he slept.
She’s Lilith, of course, fallen angel and onetime bride of Adam. This time she’s a glam-goth heroine: vampirish, magnetic, tormented, and pale, and generally accompanied by a leopardess that she dispatches to suck the blood of children. But MacDonald’s Lilith could not be more different from Hugo’s or Rossetti’s. She is not modernity’s despised other, but modernity itself: proud, self-mutilating, and murderous, a prisoner of her own self-regard, convinced in her bondage that she is the very height of freedom. The world over which she reigns is a recognizably capitalist one. The allegory, which would have been easy to decode for readers of MacDonald’s day, feels no less current now.
This Lilith is a princess, it turns out. Bulika, the city over which she rules, is rich but hardly enviable. There is no water in Bulika, no flowers, no children, no animals save the princess’s cruel feline familiar. Poverty is unknown there. It’s illegal, in fact. Deformity and illness are penalized with taxes. The people live off the treasures buried by their ancestors. Everything they need is manufactured for them elsewhere, but they are “good at bargaining and buying, good at selling and cheating.” They toss their trash over the battlements and let it pile up outside the city’s walls. They hate outsiders and each night expel all strangers from the city.
“But there must be some poor!” insists Vane.
“I suppose there must be,” his Bulikan interlocutor responds, “but we never think of such people. When one goes poor, we forget him. That is how we keep rich.”
It must have been the butterflies that made me think of Lilith again, the butterflies and the rain. In L.A. too it had rained and rained. The air was clean still, the hills everywhere that soft and blazing early green. Everywhere I went I saw the same little orange and black butterflies flying stubbornly northwest, a vast migration of millions upon millions of Vanessa cardui, a.k.a. painted ladies, their numbers swelled by the exceptional lushness of the spring. It was like the city and all of us in it were rocks in the bed of a river flowing with painted ladies flitting sometimes up and sometimes down but all heading in the same direction, paralleling the spine of the Sierras and the coast. Thousands flew between the semis clogging the Long Beach Freeway, orange poppies bursting along the exit ramps.
This is the bright side of climate collapse: from now on, the scientists say, long spells of extreme drought will be punctuated by years of unusually heavy rainfall. More rain means more flowers and more grasses and hence abundant food for the caterpillars that become painted ladies. It takes them six generations to make the trip from northern Mexico up to British Columbia and Alaska. Individual butterflies live only a few weeks and breed as they travel, crossing borders without a thought, flitting over walls and checkpoints, flying with an almost inconceivable determination toward a destination that neither they nor their immediate offspring will likely live to see.
In MacDonald’s version of the myth, Lilith cannot be repressed or expunged. MacDonald, who was a Congregationalist minister before he started writing novels, was too much of a Christian for that. Even Lilith, he hoped, might be redeemed. And if she might, we might. Lilith is his theodicy, his attempt to reconcile God’s goodness with the manifest shittiness of creation. For MacDonald evil is not a quality or a substance; it can hold no lasting sway. The “queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds,” as Lilith calls herself, is not irrevocably damned so much as disfigured by her pride. She clings to the fantasy of her own autonomy, perfect and self-wrought. “What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am,” Lilith insists. “My own thought makes me me.”
But thought has no such powers. It is the movement of divine love, MacDonald suggests, that makes Lilith what she is: the same rushing, generous force that calls forth all creation. (In the novel it is symbolized by water, the nourishing rain that refuses to fall while Lilith rules Bulika.) You don’t have to share his very Christian outlook to agree that what makes us us is not what we imagine and declare ourselves to be, but how we fit into the weave of things: past interwoven with present and with future, great-great-grandparents with children not yet born, with ancient lakes and distant stars. To cut yourself out is to cut yourself off. “Something was gone from her,” MacDonald writes of Lilith. “The source of life had withdrawn itself,” and yet she survived. “She had killed her life, and was dead—and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever!”
Or maybe not quite that long. Vane leads an army of innocents—children who won’t grow up, “the Little Ones,” he calls them, or sometimes “the Lovers”—to overthrow Bulika. They ride mounted on baby elephants, on “diminutive horses” and “little bears.” Birds and “great companies of butterflies” form an advance guard above them in the air. When at last they reach the city and enter through the gate, they are terrified. The horses panic, the Little Ones quake. “All,” MacDonald writes, “except the bears and butterflies manifested fear.”
And look at us down here in Bulika, deathing it all day long, scrambling and afraid, fuming in traffic while the butterflies fly calmly on, knowing they won’t make it and flitting onward all the same. Do they know? Does it matter if they do? Will it give too much away if I reveal that in the end Lilith yields and lies down weeping, and as she cries it rains? At first the Little Ones are frightened:
“The sky is falling!” says one.
“The white juice is running out of the princess!” another cries.
Soon the rivers fill and roar to life, running fast not with blood or with tears—the “red juice” or the “white juice,” in the argot of the Little Ones—but with pure, clean water, “the juice inside the juice.”
L. flew out to join me and we drove together to the desert. We couldn’t find a place in Joshua Tree—prices had gone up—so we had rented a house in Landers, twenty-five or so miles to the north and west. When we got there the desert was so green that if you didn’t already know where you were you wouldn’t think to call it desert. There were more flowers than anyone I spoke to had ever seen. Another bright side to climate catastrophe: all this psychedelic lushness, the green hills smeared with yellow and violet and white, desert dandelion and phacelia and pincushion, as if the buzzards and ravens had gotten bored of the same-old drab Mojave pallet and taken paintbrushes to the whole place.
The terrain in Landers is mainly flat or gently climbing bajada, creosote prairie gridded off in two-and-a-half- or five-acre chain-link lots strewn with decaying cars and other junk, half of the houses losing their battles with the elements. When I’d been there before I’d found it sadder somehow than Joshua Tree, more wind-blasted and exposed. I don’t know if four weeks there changed that perception much, but when we arrived the land around the house we rented was thick with yellow poppies and Mojave asters, fiddlenecks, and other flowers that I never figured out the names of. As MacDonald put it, “Nothing in this kingdom was dead; nothing was mere; nothing only a thing.”
One cloudy afternoon we climbed an old, steep mining road to the top of Goat Mountain, which is more a lump than a mountain but is high enough that the view from the top was spectacular: ridge after ridge of receding sawtooth peaks to the north and the east, the open desert stretching on for miles. The slopes, usually bare, were carpeted with wildflowers. Climbing up, almost drunk on their brightness, I didn’t care if the torrent of color was just another sign that everything is coming apart. I spotted an old metal gate that someone must have labored hard to erect there, to keep other people away from their claims. Miners used to dig for gold on Goat Mountain. For most of the first half of the twentieth century men gave decades of their lives to it, hollowing the earth with tunnels and holes, never taking enough ore out of it to do much more than keep the dream alive. The gate no longer blocked anything. It lay a few yards down the slope, rusted and bent, surrounded now by flowers, little white and gold daisy-like things that I looked for in all the books and websites but couldn’t figure out the name of. Broken gate flowers. Dig-all-you-want flowers. Little clever blossoms called the-desert-always-wins.
On the road outside our house we saw the painted ladies flying almost every time we went out—not the heaving river of them that I had seen in L.A., but a trickle still, a shallow, ever-northwest-flowing stream. We hiked a canyon close to Landers where there was still water burbling through the wash—the juice inside the juice!—and flowers everywhere, globe mallows and desert bluebells, Mojave paintbrush a shade of red that otherwise appears only in hallucinations, desert parsley weird as a sea creature or something recently landed from space. A wildfire had burned through that area thirteen years earlier, scorching tens of thousands of acres. The Joshua trees and junipers were dead but standing, their blackened bark peeled off, branches pointing to the sky. Some of the oaks were coming back, though, saplings shooting up beside the charred cadavers of their elders, growing, it seemed, from the same roots.
Did I mention that K. and A. had a baby? They named him T. That’s another good way to tell the time. He was four months old when we met him, a handsome fellow with serious eyes, studying everything with an almost eerie equanimity. We went for a walk with the three of them, not far from our old house. The cacti had just begun to bloom. Thousands of fat green caterpillars were climbing the stems of the desert dandelions, munching the petals, leaving low forests of headless stalks behind them. What kind of butterflies would they become? They all seemed to be headed in the same direction, up the wash, toward the spot where we had seen the owls.
There were no signs to mark the location of the oldest creosote on earth, no billboards, and no gift shop, but in the end it wasn’t hard to find. We drove north from Landers into the wide expanse of the Lucerne Valley. It’s mainly creosote out there, creosote and sand, plus distant mountains, enormous sky. Farther west there’s a historical marker just off the highway marking the site of “The Last Indian Fight in Southern California”—it was more accurately a massacre—but before we reached it we turned onto an unpaved track strewn with sharp stones. I drove, slowly, until a fence began—two lengths of barbless wire strung between steel posts along one side of the road. Enough, hopefully, to prevent the ATVs from speeding through. We got out of the car and ducked between the wires. Despite the sandiness of the soil, flowers were scattered everywhere up there too, desert marigolds and tiny sand verbena, a delicate, faded pink.
The creosotes grew clumped in loose, uneven circles, most just a few feet in diameter. Sand caught in their roots so that with enough time and wind each ring had been raised, like a platform or proscenium above the desert floor. The most ancient ancestor of each ring would have grown in what was now its empty center. As its own roots and branches died, it would have cloned itself with new sprouts expanding outward so that the circumference of the ring was an index of its age. Or a clock, if you prefer. But the rings weren’t really empty: they were a stage for the desert’s greatest show, time performing its soliloquy, yowling along with the wind.
It didn’t take long to find the big one. It was oblong, more rectangular than round, by my measurement thirty paces long. Someone had piled a few rocks in the middle of the ring to mark it, but if you weren’t actively looking it would have been easy to walk past it, just another clump of scraggly desert shrubs. In the mid-1970s, Frank Vasek, a botanist at U.C. Riverside, noticed its unusual size and shape in an aerial photograph. He named it King Clone—why he decided it was male I don’t know—and later estimated, extrapolating from radiocarbon data, that it was 11,700 years old. Which makes it more than twice as old as the oldest bristlecone pine and more ancient than all but a very few living things on earth.
That means it first took root sometime around the end of the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers still covered most of Canada. There were lakes all over the Mojave then, two of them just a few miles to the west. The climate had only recently turned dry enough for creosote to thrive, but already there had been people around for at least a thousand years.
The Akimel O’odham people, who live in what is now Arizona, give the creosote an even longer genealogy. In the beginning, they believe, when Earth Doctor, the creator, floated alone in the darkness and nothing existed save the flowing and folding of the dark, he scraped the sweat and dust from his chest and flattened it in the palm of his hand. With it he sculpted the earth. The very next thing he did—even before he made the sky—was plant a creosote. Little insects wandering in its branches turned the resin in its leaves into a gum called lac. Earth Doctor sang and gathered the lac and pounded it into shapes, forming the mountains and the hard crust of the earth. Only later did he think to make humans.
I cupped a branch in my hand and blew on it. The leaves let off the same sticky, spicy smell as any other creosote. The smell of rain. A pickup truck sped by on the road beyond the fence, its bed heavy with ATVs, raising a giant cloud of dust as it passed. L. had wandered off. I stepped into the center of the ring. I don’t like churches but I felt okay kneeling there in the middle of it, in that empty altar. Like I said, it wasn’t empty. I dug my hands into the warm sand, and sat for a while listening to the wind pass through the branches and to the buzz, somewhere, of a single bee.
That evening I read online that a gunman had entered a synagogue in Poway, California, the town in which George and Carobeth Laird spent most of their life together. He killed a sixty-year-old woman and shot and injured a rabbi, one other man, and an eight-year-old girl. The shooter, who was nineteen and had been studying nursing, confessed to having lit a fire a few weeks earlier at a mosque in Escondido, where he and his parents had for years attended church. His family lived near Poway, so he must have driven often between the two towns, just as the Lairds had more than eighty years earlier, and whether he knew it or not he must have often passed the place called Green Valley, where George would park the car on the side of the road, leave Carobeth in the passenger seat, and walk by himself into the rocks, painted in red with rectilinear labyrinths that showed no way in or out.
Time loops around. Frank Vasek, the botanist, explained: “The exact point at which a segmenting old individual plant becomes an incipient clone is problematical.”
In the late 1950s, the United States Atomic Energy Commission hired Dr. Janice C. Beatley to study the effects of radiation on the desert ecosystems that the government had at that point been systematically nuking for nearly a decade. Shortly before the 1962 Sedan blast at Yucca Flat, Beatley affixed glass dosimeters to creosote bushes to measure their exposure to radiation. About two miles from ground zero, she found creosotes that, having escaped total devastation, were merely “covered in ‘a blanket of radioactive dust.’” When Beatley checked their dosimeters that September, two months after the blast, they recorded radiation levels of between 3,320 and 5,500 roentgens or, if my math is correct, several thousand times the amount of background radiation the plants would have absorbed over the course of a normal year. By winter, their leaves had turned a “brownish-grey.” By summer, they were “completely defoliated.” But the creosotes had not died. The following September, one year and two months after the Sedan blast, heavy rains fell on Yucca Flat. “Abundant sprouts” appeared on the leafless, apparently lifeless plants. The sprouts grew quickly into branches.
It’s hard to find much of anything written about that “Last Indian Fight” in Lucerne Valley, except that it occurred near a place called Chimney Rock, just above the shore of an ancient lake that dried up early in the Holocene epoch. Most accounts do not name the tribes who fought there. None that I found bothered to name or count the dead. It was 1867, barely twenty minutes ago on creosote time. Someone—maybe Serrano, maybe Southern Paiute, which may have meant Chemehuevi, or maybe a group of all three—raided a lumber mill in the mountains and burned it. (Fair enough: the settlers were cutting down the trees.) A posse chased them to the desert floor, where, in the words of one local historian, “most of the savages were pinned down in small bands and destroyed one by one.”
That’s more or less how it went in California in the years that followed annexation: massacre after massacre of a few dozen or a couple hundred, isolated killings of one or three or eight, almost all of them unmarked by any monument. I found the transcript of an interview with a man named Emmanuel Osague, a descendant of the survivors. He told the stories his uncle had told him, of the cowboys who worked a ranch in the Cajon Pass who would shoot at Indians they saw traveling through; of another ranch near what is now the town of Hesperia, where they displayed the heads of three Paiute boys on poles; and of the battle at Chimney Rock. Many people died there, Osague said, and many of those who did were his relatives.
“It was like the end,” he said, “yet our stories still survive.”
I read an article in the San Diego papers about a local rock art enthusiast who had photographed boulders in Green Valley that appeared to be unpainted and then subjected the images to digital enhancement. Vivid mazes and sharply crosshatched grids appeared on rock faces that had seemed blank to the naked eye. In some cases the images overlapped, suggesting that someone had painted the rocks and then, after enough time had passed that the original pictographs had faded, someone else had painted over them with new ones, which faded too.
All that month in Landers I wanted to walk again in the wash where more than a year ago I had hiked with K. and A., the one that got this started. For symmetry, if nothing else, and because I wanted to see the owls. (From MacDonald again: “I had only a glimpse of him, but several times felt the cool wafture of his silent wings.”) But the weeks flew past, work and deadlines kept me indoors more than I would have liked, and before I knew it the month was nearly gone. A day before I had to leave the desert, I walked with K. and A. again. They had T. with them, so we hiked a different wash, a flatter and more open one that would require less climbing through the rocks.
It was late in the day. The light was soft, the shadows getting longer. We talked about A.’s latest book, which he had just finished, and about mine, which I am finishing right now. I’m sure we talked about the Rhino too, and the Democrats’ willful impotence, but mainly we talked about the baby, the caterpillars, and the flowers. It had been hot for a few days earlier in the week, and all the phacelia and desert dandelions had dried out. Overnight, half the color in the desert was gone. We talked about the willows too, and the mystery of their scent. The ones we passed there hadn’t even bloomed yet, but if you stood a few yards away from them, in apparently random pockets, the scent was overwhelming, as if it traveled via invisible filaments and spilled out through tears in some otherwise indiscernible web. Lupine was blooming in the wash too, and there were a few primroses left that the caterpillars had missed. T. slept through most of this, but he roused himself to watch the willow branches swaying in the wind.
By the time we got back to the car the sun had set. The sky was violet and nearly dark. We said our goodbyes again. I would come back as soon as I could, I promised, but I knew it would be half a year, if I was lucky. By then T. would be a different person, cackling and grabbing like ten-month-olds do, struggling to stuff the whole world in his mouth to find out what it tastes like. (If children are another way of telling time, a kind of living clock, then what about the rest of us, a little bit older and further along?)
The earth would be a little warmer by then. The glaciers would be thinner, the oceans that much higher. By then another summer would have passed. The flowers and all the spring’s lush growth would have dried as crisp as kindling. By then surely some new swatch of the planet’s surface would be burning. Elsewhere it would rain and rain. If all clocks strive to represent—in various forms, with hands and digits and shadows and bells—the spinning of the earth on its axis, and calendars in their myriad forms represent the interactions of the earth with the sun and the moon and sometimes the rising and setting of the planets, could it make sense to suggest that the earth is also a clock? Just a bigger one, with a wider grip on time? And if the earth is a clock, why not the other planets? Why not Pluto? And what about the sun and the stars and the galaxies, the black holes at their centers, the clusters of galaxies and the larger bodies that they form, all the swirling stuff of the cosmos—what time does it tell?
I drove north back to Landers, the highway dipping through a deep wash and climbing out steeply again. I tried to keep my eyes on both the road and the stars and I did a bad job of it as usual. Castor and Pollux were to my left, Capella just ahead of me. The highway sloped into another wash and just before it rose again something glided past my windshield. For a moment I thought a wire had been strung low from one side of the road to another and an animal—something too big to be a squirrel or a rat—had raced across it like a tourist on a zip line in Las Vegas. I turned my head just in time to catch a glimpse: white wings spread wide against the night. An owl, flying off into the darkness.