It is striking if not surprising how quickly the desert empties of humans as the summer nears. When I visited what was then Joshua Tree National Monument in mid-April 1984, the parking lots in the western, high-desert section looked like suburban malls’ and the crannies among the nearby granite boulders were full of tents and sleeping bags. When I visited the recently upgraded national park in late May of 1998, the only other person at one large lot in an already blazing dawn was a crazy young Australian in a black raincoat. It got hot enough a few days later that a coyote with fur so short it might have been trimmed at a local pet salon snoozed in a roadside picnic shelter undisturbed by the tourists cruising by in their air-conditioned cars.
On that same afternoon, however, I encountered a scene of strenuous excitement in the Joshua tree forest of Lost Horse Valley. An angry prairie falcon was harassing a pair of loggerhead shrikes, stooping at them as they lurked in the spiky trees, climbing, hovering and shrieking, then stooping again. The shrikes stayed in the foliage but otherwise seemed unconcerned by the falcon’s tantrum, hopping around with their usual sluggish inquisitiveness, occasionally emitting hoarse squawks. I hadn’t seen a falcon squabbling with shrikes before, although it’s probably not that unusual, especially in desert. The shrikes must compete with raptors for sparse prey, and may threaten their nestlings.
From an anthropomorphic viewpoint, a falcon is a straightforward, go-ahead sort of bird. It belongs to a venerable lineage of raptors that, if they live by killing, at least do so in a visibly prompt and efficient way. By contrast shrikes seem creepy and aberrant. Although they are “songbirds” that look more like the inoffensive vireos than hawks, they make a living by impaling lizards and other small prey on thorns and spikes, certainly an ingenious adaptation, but one that Darwin might have included in his Devil’s chaplain’s book on the “low & horribly cruel works of nature.” They usually kill the prey before impaling it, and they impale it because they lack a falcon’s talons for holding it while they eat, but the practice still looks nasty.
The agitated falcon see-sawing back and forth over the unflustered shrikes seemed emblematic of civilization’s relationship to desert. If they weren’t so widely distributed, the raucous black and gray “butcher birds” might be considered desert specialists, and shrikes are especially common in deserts, watching for unwary lizards from ocotillos or other handy thorn bushes. The falcon’s behavior reminded me of a pendulum’s swings back and forth, and that is how civilization seems to have related to a biome it has found creepy and aberrant.
Like ancient northwest Californians, the cultures of forested western Europe regarded the world as relatively unchanged since distant origins. Greek and Roman literacy gave their myths an air of history, but they didn’t emphasize major earthly changes, and thinkers like Aristotle tended to assume that the world was virtually ageless. Cultures of the drier Middle East, on the other hand, resembled those of ancient southern California in seeing the world’s origin as something relatively recent that did involve significant change. When they became literate, their mythologies treated stories like the biblical Flood as historical events.
Middle Eastern cultures also resembled southeast California ones in that their myths didn’t personify desert, which suggests a similar ambivalence. Early civilizations feared the sandstorms, droughts, and marauding barbarians that regularly emerged from desert, but they also had old traditions for regarding it as a “supermarket.” Repeated biblical mention of locusts and manna, foods derived from desert lichens and plant exudates, demonstrate this. And, as the Bible’s burning bush shows, desert was an abode of the divine as well as the demonic, although, like the desert, that divine had a scarily unforgiving side. The Middle Eastern Sphinx may have been an aspect of this. The cherubim who guarded the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon’s Temple are thought to have been Sphinxes, suggesting that those who guarded the Garden of Eden were too.
If the Middle Eastern Sphinx was a guardian, its Greek transformation into a trickster reflected cultural and environmental shifts as civilizations interacted. Greek and Roman travelers often found deserts frighteningly alien. Herodotus wrote that fox-size, man-eating ants inhabited them and that “immense numbers” of bat-winged snakes flew from Arabia into Egypt each spring. He claimed to have seen heaps of their bones in mountain passes. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean coast was becoming ominously more desertlike from deforestation and overgrazing. As one of Plato’s dialogues observed, the fat of the land was wasting away, leaving food only for bees—flowering bushes.
Middle Eastern mythologies’ eventual displacement of native ones in Europe perpetuated a fearful sense of desert. As the Bible came to dominate their thinking, Greeks and Romans conflated desert with Christian ideas of the Fall, seeing it as the godforsaken wasteland into which sinful humanity had been banished. Old Testament prophets had gone into the desert to escape the Levantine cities’ devilish polytheism. New Testament saints did so to wrestle with the Devil himself. The desert’s fiery wastes became emblematic of the torments awaiting the damned at the world’s imminent end.
After the Renaissance, when naturalists perceived the great depths of rock strata and inferred that presently observable processes of land uplift and erosion were ancient, Europe swung back toward regarding earthly time as a lengthy continuum with a substantial prehistory. Yet, although they included the whole planet in this conception of “natural” origins, Europeans continued to see deserts in an infernal light. Early in the Beagle voyage, Darwin learned to regard the earth’s history as an ancient steady state from reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. He still shrank from South American desert as a ruined wasteland.
Darwin’s confusion reflected the nineteenth-century scientific schism known in geology textbooks as “catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism.” Before reading Lyell, young Charles had shared a then common “catastrophist” assumption that, although the earth is old, its formation included episodes of greater change than operate at present—abrupt mountain upheavals, continent-wide floods. Lyell’s outlook was called “uniformitarian” because he doubted that the earth’s past included episodes so different from its present.
According to textbook convention, the schism pitted a religious view that sudden supernatural change formed the earth against a scientific one that gradual natural processes have done so, with scientific evidence prevailing in the end. Historians have shown that this is oversimplified. “Catastrophist” scientists like Louis Agassiz based their belief in sudden change as much on natural evidence as on biblical traditions. “Uniformitarian” ones like Lyell based their belief in gradual change as much on philosophical traditions going back to Aristotle as natural evidence. Indeed, the schism persists in secular terms today as exponents of sudden wholesale mass extinctions by comet impact argue with exponents of gradual piecemeal mass extinctions by climate change. So, although Lyell’s “steady state” vision convinced Darwin intellectually, his overall attitude to desert continued to vacillate between the poles of sudden and gradual change, and later attitudes to desert did too.
Most early California naturalists were catastrophist in sharing Darwin’s sense that desert is a ghastly wasteland caused by a relatively recent and sudden episode of mountain formation. Some swung toward uniformitarianism in sharing his post-Origin of Species sense that aridity has restricted desert life’s development to a few slowly evolving, presumably very old forms. Later some swung back toward catastrophism by proposing that aridity might stimulate evolutionary change instead of obstructing it. Although anti-Darwinians originated such ideas, neo-Darwinians eventually incorporated them into their synthesis of genetics and natural selection. G. Ledyard Stebbins’s ideas of a shift to accelerated “quantum evolution” as California’s climate grew drier supported Daniel Axelrod’s of a new “regional desert” created by geologically recent changes so unusually severe as to seem catastrophic.
Despite public indifference to neo-Darwinism, California civilization seems to have assimilated a “quantum” sense of the desert as a dynamic, invasive phenomenon. John Steinbeck presented it as a lurking threat to coastal Arcady in his novel, To a God Unknown, wherein drought strikes northwestward like a monstrous claw to crush a homesteader: “He rode slowly home by the bank of the dead river. The dusty trees, ragged from the sun’s flaying, cast very little shade on the ground.... The hills were gaunt now; here was a colony from the southern desert come to try out the land for a future spreading of the desert’s empire.... A horned toad [lizard] came out of the dust and waddled to the bottom step of the porch, and settled to catch flies.”
A newspaper description of Death Valley contemporaneous with Steinbeck’s novel reads like Herodotus on ancient Arabia: “In the early spring gnats of great size sweep over the place in swarms of millions. Coyotes prowling around the fringes of the valley have been stung to death.... There is a peculiar kind of mouse which lives wholly on the scorpions which thrive there by the tens of thousands. Another variety of mouse consumes the centipedes.” This sense of threat multiplied in the megalopolis that mushroomed from the homesteaders’ Arcady.
One neo-Darwinist aspect that did enter public consciousness with a vengeance was the role of genetics in evolution. Hollywood was quick to exploit this as the reanimated corpses of 1930s horror movies morphed into the genetically altered monsters of 1950s ones. I have a nightmarish childhood memory of the 1954 movie Them!, which echoes Herodotus with man-eating desert ants mutated to automobile size by atomic radiation. Spawned in a bomb test site, the winged queens quickly colonize the Los Angeles sewer system. This is complete fantasy—insect physiology restricts them to little more than mouse size regardless of mutation. Still, I once talked with someone who’d visited nuclear test sites in Nevada and thought “lower animals” did better in the radioactive ambience than birds and mammals, “as though evolution was going backward.”
Such fantasies and anxieties implicate a mutation-haunted, invasive desert as an impending retribution for civilized excess. As one chronicler of the genuinely murderous desert “freaks” known as the Manson family wrote:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana wind will blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gregorio passes, blowing up sandstorms along route 66, drying the hills and nerves to the flash point.... I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea. There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four. Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a hundred times a day by dried bougainvilleas drifting up my driveway.... Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.
An irony of this lurid picture is that neither of its scientific progenitors saw the desert so. Stebbins and Axelrod both shared Edmund Jaeger and Joseph Wood Krutch’s sense of desert as a refuge from an increasingly threatening civilization. This sense may have nudged Stebbins toward regarding it as an evolutionary museum instead of an evolutionary frontier. He helped to start the California Native Plant Society, one of the state’s main desert preservation advocacies. Axelrod, with characteristic ingenuity, interpreted a recent desert as an especially vulnerable biotic treasure: “Our regional deserts represent new ecosystems: they have just been born! Unless we take better care of them, nothing will remain but a barren terrain like the largely man-made desert that now stretches uninterruptedly for 4,200 miles, from the Atlantic shore of North Africa to the Thar desert of western India. The choice is yours.”
Now Stebbins’s museum desert seems to be prevailing over Axelrod’s newborn one. The pendulum is swinging back toward uniformitarianism as geologists and paleobotanists begin to perceive western mountains and possibly deserts as much older than most early naturalists had imagined. This tells us little more than we already know about the evolution of desert plants and animals, but it does imply that there has been as much evolution of desert plants and animals as of forest or grassland ones.
It is hard to see how a California civilization that is used to rapid change will respond to this. Tractmongers don’t care if the bushes they bulldoze have been here three million years or thirty million. Even some prominent desert admirers seem indifferent to its evolutionary past. One of the late twentieth century’s best books on the subject is Scenes in America Deserta, which echoes John Van Dyke’s The Desert in that its author, Peter Reyner Banham, was an art history professor (at U.C. Santa Cruz) who reveled in the arid landscape’s spectacular colors and atmospheric displays. “I had been granted a vision of the desert’s ultimate splendor,” Banham writes of a “stratum of luminous white mist” seen above a dry lakebed in the Mojave. “My sensibility was transfixed, my consciousness transformed.” Unlike Van Dyke, however, Banham shows little interest in desert origins, either geological or evolutionary. Fascinated by its often bizarre interactions with American technological culture, he tends to regard desert as a figment of the human imagination:
The cliché “man-made desert” has become so worn with use that we hardly hear it any more, but it could be one of the great, awful, boring truisms at the basis of many of our desert attitudes. The self-conscious loner who goes out into the desert to “find himself” may do so in more than just the narcissistic sense the phrase normally intends—he may still be staring into the face of man.... Ultimately deserts are man-made in what may be a culturally important sense ... all deserts are deserts by definition ... desert is a concept of, and about, people.... The ultimate definition of a true desert may yet prove to be concerned with the number and type of people present, and what they think they are doing there.
Banham is right psychologically. There were no desert lovers until the term was invented and applied to arid places. Miguel del Barco, despite his fascination with Baja California’s weird plants, was certainly not one. Still, Banham’s disregard for desert deep time can lead him astray, as when he tries to explain the name of the place east of Death Valley where I watched Amargosa pupfish in their deep blue spring holes. Banham assumes it is a cultural reference, albeit one he finds puzzling. He regrets his inability
to hear with any inner understanding the depth of poetry and tragedy implied in a place name like “Ash Meadows.” One is apt to be so impressed by its blunt functionalism that one tends to lump it with all the Bitter Creeks and Sweetwaters one knows. Yet the concept of meadows made of ashes is as terrifying as it is poetic—it is a concept that a Ray Bradbury might have invented to describe the aftermath of an atomic explosion; but as a place name it goes back before both Bradbury and the Bomb (when it was a tent city staging post and the site of a short lived clay pit operation) and presumably represents some profound disappointment on the part of an early voyager.... But could it mean simply meadows with ash trees? I doubt it. Not in this landscape.
In fact, that is exactly what it means. Ash Meadows is named for the scattered, relict groves of stunted leatherleaf ash trees (Fraxinus velutina) that the springs’ fossil groundwater has allowed to survive there since climate dried after the last ice age. For an “inner understanding” of the place, Banham needed to go back much farther than he thought. Originally from England with its traditions of Arabian exploration, his first response to the Mojave was to wonder where the camels were. He might well have been standing on the buried bones of fossil ones.
Of course, better public awareness of the desert’s deep past won’t extricate California civilization from the troubles that its excesses have brought upon it. New evidence of ancient stability won’t allay suburban panic as desert winds blow stronger and wildfires burn longer with every year of “global warming.” It might add credence to the sense—expressed by writers like Jaeger and Krutch, and by parks and wilderness areas—that the desert is not a backward, ruined wasteland but an ingenious, healthy response to environmental constraints primal and inevitable on this planet.
For all his shrinking from New World desert, Darwin seems to have felt something of this in retrospect. The Voyage of the Beagle ends on a note of puzzled nostalgia:
In calling up images of the past, I find the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold of my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages, and there appears to be no limit to their duration during future time.