By
the time I was to leave the eastern mojave, half of every animal I encountered
would be dead.
I
left Los Angeles in the morning. After miles of bedroom communities, truck
stops and creosote flats, I stopped in Ludlow, a sorry roadside town.
The Dairy Queen stenciled a slogan on their sign, "God is with us al,
intween evury each of us."
I
asked the gas station attendent why she lived in Ludlow. "It's close to
Vegas!" "Do you gamble?" "Yes, but I go to Laughlin for that. Loose slots."
From Ludlow, I passed the signature black of lava fields, and the dotted
plains of over 30 cinder cones and riparian riverbeds filled with yucca.
I
left Los Angeles to test the suspension on the truck off-road, and to
catch a glimpse of the wildlife of Eastern California. I ended up in the
Mojave National Preserve, a vast tract of public land bordering Nevada.
An electrical line maintenance road cut up a steep, pot-holed hill and
onto a plateau, so I drove it.
From
here, I could see for miles; the piles of boulders that formed mountains,
the snow-capped peaks and the fields of cholla and yucca. To the north,
I could see a white dune-field stretching for miles at the center of a
long basin. The radio played Cesaria Evora, a fado singer from a former
Portuguese colony off the coast of Africa called Cape Verde. This music,
isolated by time and distance from mainland Portuguese or African music
has developed distinctly from years of isolation. It was fitting for the
Eastern Mojave, because this basin is in many ways an island, isolated
by time and distance. It bears uniquely evolved life and geology.
I
followed the route of the maintenance road several miles under the electrical
lines, clearly off-access to the public, and the best view of California's
most remote desert. I cut across the flats to Kelso Dunes, as they were
called, and onto the main public access for the dunes.
The
wind was blowing hard, I could see it was snowing higher up, and sleeting
here. The ripples of the third-highest dune peaks in North America had
been washed away by rains, and grasses spotted across the mounds of sand
for miles. Coyotes, snakes, lizards, jackrabbits and tarantulas were the
supposed wildlife of Mojave, but I saw nothing, just tracks crisscrossing
in the sand. So I wandered the rest of the way back to the truck, and
headed for the main road.
Finally,
I saw something move. An animal, a large jackrabbit nonetheless, and it
trounced in front of the truck, and came out the other end a large red
stew. I hadn't felt a thing, so in some sense I had been successful at
testing my shocks. David Quammen, who examines the role of biology, highways
and islands in the well-regarded book, The Song of the Dodo, tags
along with biology teams. He argues that the unique isolation of islands
creates some kind of a laboratory for the rest of the world. Anyways,
he would have been proud of my kill. I proved a point.
)
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