S3E11: Desert Stories

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0:00:00 - (Chris): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90milesfromneedles.com/Donate or text the word "needles" to 53555. 

0:00:25 - (Joe): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. 

0:00:53 - (Chris): Thank you, Joe Geoffrey, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from Neerdles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and I am fresh from a visit to the Amargosa basin, which I visited with my friend Lucas Basulto, president of the board of Desert Advocacy Media Network, and with a couple of friends of ours, Ken and Karen Buchi, who came from Salt Lake City to enjoy a little bit of time in the Amargosa basin, including Death Valley National park.
0:01:11 - (Chris): We had a great time, and we spent it just appreciating the landscape of the Amargosa basin, just seeing what was there. We went to Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, spent the better part of a day there, did a bit of sightseeing in Death Valley proper, including at Saratoga Spring at the south end of Death Valley National park. We spent a lot of time looking at pupfish. We didn't plan to have a pupfish oriented visit, but that's what we ended up looking at, and it was fascinating. There were several different subspecies of pupfish that we appreciated, looked at, took pictures of, and outside of the aquatic realm. I gotta tell you, those of you who've been listening for quite a long time know I don't really like the term superbloom. I think it's misleading.
0:01:59 - (Chris): It describes just one phase of the life cycle of a lot of annual plants that are native to the desert. And the rest of that life cycle is important and interesting and beautiful, too. But if I was going to call something a super bloom, what's going on in the Amargosa basin right now definitely would qualify. I am unused to saying, come on and visit. I live near Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree has got as many visitors as it can handle, really?
0:02:28 - (Chris): And you're all welcome. Don't take that the wrong way. We need you to come. But we're struggling under the weight of visitors now. That's true for Joshua Tree. It's not true for the communities that surround ash meadows and Death Valley. They have been through a year where the roads have been out in a lot of places for months, and those roads are back in service now. You can see the evidence of them having been washed away with the floods from last year. But some of the people there who rely on tourist income have a deficit to make up.
0:03:03 - (Chris): So if you're looking for a place in California or Nevada to go, appreciate some spring desert wildflowers and buy yourself lunch and find a motel room and all that kind of stuff. Buying souvenirs, I gotta say, around ash meadows, Death Valley and the  Amargosa River basin, especially the wild and scenic river corridor near China Ranch. It's just an amazing bloom right now, dominated by desert sunflowers. But there's plenty of other things blooming there too, including the elusive five spot.
0:03:33 - (Chris): And even without flowers, it's just a beautiful place. But it's especially nice now. So if you've got some time in the next couple of weeks to get up there, you ought to do it and say hi to the landscape for me. We have an interesting episode here for you today, trying to leaven the unrelenting bad news a little bit with some stories, and we'll get to those in a moment, along with a news alert from our friends at the Rio Bosque wetlands park in El Paso.
0:03:57 - (Chris): But first, I wanted to remind you that we rely on your support to put this podcast together and to develop the Desert Advocacy Media Network and additional projects. We had a great board meeting this past week. We've got some big plans for the next nine months or so, and the reason we're doing this is because the podcast absolutely depends on your financial support. If you go to 90 miles from needles.com
0:04:24 - (Chris): donut, you'll see a couple of different ways to kick some cash into our till to help us out. We are a nonprofit. Your donations are tax deductible. I'm recording this on April 15, so that's the top of my mind, and probably the top of yours as I speak. I just filed my own taxes, and of course, if you're itemizing, every little bit helps. So please put yourself in a position for next year where you can benefit at tax time.
0:04:49 - (Chris): Because you helped us out at the Desert Advocacy Media Network and 90 miles from needles during fiscal year 2024, I promised you a news update. So for those of you who are in west Texas or southern New Mexico, or actually even extreme southeastern Arizona, anywhere in the vicinity of the chihuahuan desert, if you're familiar with the Rio Grande ecosystem, there's a really important fragment of the original river bottom ecosystem in El Paso. The Rio Bosque wetlands park is 400 acres of natural river valley habitat right in El Paso, surrounded by extremely modified and biologically degraded landscape managed by the University of Texas at El Paso.
0:05:31 - (Chris): And predictably, this wetlands park is facing a couple threats that friends of the Rio bosque could really use your help with one is a concrete batch plant that has a temporary use permit is trying to make that permit permanent. There is a public hearing at the El Paso City Council on that request for making the batch plant permanent on May 7. You can get more information@riobosque.org. R I dash Q U E.org dot there's a bigger threat, even though it's a little bit further in the future, a proposed 18 miles highway extension called Border Highway east.
0:06:08 - (Chris): Projected start date of 2033. So it's not a dire emergency right this second, but the border highway extension poses actually a more serious threat to the wetlands park than the concrete batch plant does. This would be a four lane divided highway with enough room to allow future conversion to six lanes. In March, the Texas Department of Transportation unveiled three different alternative routes for the project.
0:06:32 - (Chris): Two would occupy the open space corridor just east of Rio Bosque, and one would be along the west edge of the park right by the river. All three would have significant negative impacts on the park. The people that support Rio Bosque wetlands Park at the University of Texas, El Paso, UTEP and in the community could use your help opposing this, especially if you're local and can show up and give testimony.
0:06:59 - (Chris): This is a really, really important island for wildlife and for people who need a little bit of spiritual and emotional restoration in a beautiful but highly altered landscape. If you can help, that'd be great. Go to riobasque.org for more information. Comment periods with deadlines coming up very soon on the border highway extension, check them out. They could use your help. They're doing great work in a really important place, and we support them wholeheartedly.
0:07:56 - (Chris): All right, this is the Desert Stories episode, and I've got three stories for you. Each one I wrote for a particular purpose in the last decade or so. The first one, Burr Sage, I wrote for my letters from the Desert email newsletter, which you can see at lettersfromthedesert.substack.com subscribing is free, though there is a paid option. The coyote story. The second one I wrote for a public reading that used to happen every year in Joshua Tree. Up until a few years ago, it was called Desert stories.
0:08:28 - (Chris): And the third one, desert Magic, I wrote for the wonderful local literary magazine Luna Arcana, put out by my friends Rohini Walker and Martine Mancha, whose name you may recognize from credit for our podcast artwork. And I hope you enjoy at least one of them, if not all three. Bursage. Bursage is not what one would call a charismatic plant. It's leafless much of the time. When it does have leaves, they're not particularly remarkable unless you look up close.
0:09:17 - (Chris): And why would you? If you do? Those leaves sometimes resemble those of dandelions, only rounder at the edges, covered in a kind of grayish felt, and much, much smaller. Or you could say they look like moose antlers, if the moose in question was two inches tall and able to photosynthesize. And this leaf anatomy only shows up close, a typical observing height, with your eyes somewhere between three and 6ft off the ground, and with plenty of other, more interesting things to see in the neighborhood besides.
0:09:51 - (Chris): And you're probably looking the other direction anyway, and thinking about dinner or your boss or your taxes. Bursage does not command attention, except, that is, when it blooms, at which point the species membership in the ragweed clan of aster family flowering plants becomes rather notable indeed. Now, ragweed pollen happens to be one of the few kinds of pollen that I'm not particularly allergic to.
0:10:19 - (Chris): Grasses are more my thing, but for those who are sensitive, bris age pollen could be a miserable addition to the neighborhood. Along with its closest relative in the Mojave, Ambrosia salsola, also known as cheesebush for its odor bursage can make entire counties unhappy for three weeks out of the year if conditions are right, and then the plant grows spiny little spherical fruit that make your dog unhappy when she steps on them, though, mercifully, bursage is just as happy to reproduce by cloning, sending off root shoots that eventually grow their own plants.
0:10:55 - (Chris): What bursage shares with its cheesy smelling cousin, aside from noxious pollen, is an ability to colonize damaged desert landscapes well before other shrubs, then provide shelter for the tiny seedlings of those other shrubs. If you bulldoze an acre of the Mojave desert and then leave, which you should not do. But if you do, within a decade, cheese bushes a couple feet high will dot the area with bursage clumps only a little less common. After a century or so, those pioneering cheese bushes will be long dead.
0:11:30 - (Chris): But the original bursage clumps might well have survived to become clonal rings, and the creosotes and chollas and ephedras and sennas and gaeta grasses and yuccas and saurothamnases, etcetera, that were lucky enough to germinate in the shelter of that first couple decades worth of colonizing, ragweed might just be starting to look like a real desert again. And while bursage doesn't seem to be eaten by any big animals other than imported cattle.
0:11:58 - (Chris): It does support a remarkable diversity of insect browsers, many of which are ragweed specialists, and those insects are then consumed by other animals, which then in turn, et cetera. It is through relationships such as this that ecosystems are repaired. Also, bursage is self aware. Did I mention that? Yet? A bursage seed hitches a ride from its parent plant on the coat of an animal. Using its eponymous burs.
0:12:26 - (Chris): It lands in a likely spot, a bit of barestoil with a good mix of gravel and sand, and then it waits. When there is a winter that contains a few cold, damp weeks, the birds age sprouts with the spring's growing warmth, sending up a rosette of fuzzy leaves. The real action, as usual, is going on. Underground. Ursage roots lengthen cell by cell about an inch every three days, casting a fine, thirsty net through the nearby desert soil.
0:12:59 - (Chris): Eventually, later in the year, during summer monsoons or the first warm rains of fall, those roots will partner with mycorrhizal fungi, like probably 80% of the other plants of the desert. But at first they just grow, seeking out moisture to keep the above ground parts of the plant alive. Eventually, those roots will encounter other roots competition. There may be a creosote nearby, or a mesquite, or some other plant whose roots are after the same water the bursage seedling wants. And the bursage root keeps growing in an attempt to outcompete the other plant roots.
0:13:35 - (Chris): But if there are other bursages growing in the area, which is quite likely, because, let's face it, you never get just one bursage seed stuck to your pant legs. So that furry animal probably dropped a dozen seeds in the vicinity. The plant adopts a different strategy. When birth sage root encounters birth sage root, each one slows its growth, refraining from interloping into the other plant's personal space, that's a sensible enough trait.
0:14:02 - (Chris): It ensures that bursages don't compete with each other for moisture. But as usual in the desert, it gets more complicated than that. bursages from the same population seem to abide by the no root encroachment policy. Whether they're seedlings or clones, bursages from geographically separated populations, if grown together, are a little bit less polite. A bursage from Tucson might as well be a tomato plant for all that a Joshua tree bursage is concerned. If they're somehow growing in the same place, neither will slow its root growth to help the other.
0:14:39 - (Chris): And if roots from the same plant meet, they grow unrestrainedly. Now, this makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Plants in the same population are more likely to share the same genes. So avoiding competition with those plants in particular increases the possibility that your own genes will survive somehow. There's no point in avoiding competition with your own roots, because you get the water, whether one root or the other absorbs it. And I thought about this for a bit, and here's what broke my roots from genetically identical clones will avoid competing roots from the same plant. Don't.
0:15:20 - (Chris): And this means that the plant knows when it's encountering itself. How does it know that? I spent time trying to puzzle out, without success, how a plant root could distinguish between another root to which it's connected and one to which it is not connected, but is genetically identical. And I keep coming back to the obvious and counterintuitive conclusion. The plant is aware of itself. Now, in animals like you and me, a complex system of feedback in our nervous and musculoskeletal systems allows us to know, more or less, where our body parts are in relation to each other.
0:15:58 - (Chris): This is a sense called proprioception or kinesthesia, and it's why you can usually drink hot coffee blindfolded without major injury. But plants don't have nerves. Self awareness is a complicated thing, and a big problem in defining it is that we define self awareness using self awareness, which is like trying to drive a nail using the same nail as a hammer. Whatever kind of self awareness a birthage has, it's almost certainly a mistake to assume that we know what it feels like.
0:16:33 - (Chris): We might call it an unconscious self awareness, but our kind of consciousness is pretty much what vertebrates do. We're probably being chauvinistic when we define consciousness as the be all and end all of self awareness. But at some deep sensory level, a bursage is aware of itself, how its roots are shaped and where they are, and it is aware at some level that it has family nearby. Scientists have only just started to look at what happens beneath the soil in the desert.
0:17:06 - (Chris): Bursage probably doesnt have a monopoly on underground self awareness here, but is a self aware desert dweller thats really good at repairing damage to the desert landscape. Somebody probably ought to put versage on a t shirt. Wild eyes at La Contenta it was about 815 pm on May 18, 2016, with the sky over Joshua Tree still darkening from sunset a half hour before, as I passed La Contenta Avenue heading eastbound on Route 62, doing about five under the limit in the right hand lane, that I died at least I think it was me.
0:18:15 - (Chris): I lose track sometimes. You need to understand this. In my entire life, spanning more than half a century, spent in the company of a staggeringly diverse cast of people, I have, as far as I'm aware, had precisely one nickname, Coyote, but pronounced the correct way Coyote, bestowed on me by my coworkers of mexican origin. In the cafe in Berkeley where I worked in the early 1980s, I asked my boss, Beto, why he started calling me that.
0:18:50 - (Chris): Because, Coyote, you shut up about them Never. Oh, I said. Never, said Beto. I see, I said. Jamas nunca, said Beto. I couldnt argue. Still cant. I'll confess that I am not always happy with this human skin I wear. Coyote has long seemed the better alternative. Where I live, there are always at least three or four coyotes within a quarter mile drifting through the creosote and Yucca, as silent as they wish to be, which isn't always very I've longed to fit into the land as seamlessly as they to drift through the Kreus out and yucca with them as heedless of bank accounts or twitter handles, and on occasion they allow me a moment or two of their time.
0:19:46 - (Chris): They stand a ways off, eyeing me as though I'm preposterous and likely to do something dangerous and stupid at any time. And then, once they've had their fill of me, they look sidelong at one another and vanish, as if due to some prearrangement. This is precisely the relationship I have with my birth family, and so it makes me happy, though it also makes me somewhat less certain of the precise boundary between homo sapiens and Canis Latrans.
0:20:15 - (Chris): I hear Coyote song, and I strain to make out the words. Disoriented. In the desert a decade ago, I found a fresh set of coyote tracks and cursed, certain that they were mine and I'd been walking in circles. You get the picture. When the species dysphoria kicks in, when the manifold flaws of the human race begin to rankle, there is a deep part of me that longs to run out into the desert, to chase down cottontails and sleep curled up beneath the creosote.
0:20:46 - (Chris): I see one of my coyote neighbors, and for a moment a part of me becomes him, or at least it wants to. There is a part of me that longs to blend into the landscape in full, grizzled coat, fading into the varnished rock and alluvium, to be just a pair of wild eyes surveying the landscape, the desert grown conscious of itself. I longed to be in the landscape not on it and certainly not driving across it, dog and bags of groceries shifting in the backseat, the panel truck to my left seeming to have trouble deciding which lane it wants to occupy.
0:21:26 - (Chris): I decide to slow and give him room. When we get to the east side of La Quinteta. He's pulled about halfway past me, his front bumper about 10ft farther east than mine, which is, I'm guessing, why me being hidden by the big truck and all the coyote making for the Joshua tree forest across the way, did not expect me there in the right hand lane. Sometimes I think that in order to really belong to a place, you have to have your heart broken there, to have your smug certainty stripped away and your sentiments shattered, brought to that state where every detail of the moment in that place is seared into you, every roadside can and broken. Joshua Tree branch branded on your heart forever.
0:22:15 - (Chris): The look of surprise and terror in those wild eyes stakes your heart to the ground. The knowing that you cannot stop in time. The knowing that you cannot stop time. I will grant you the kindness fortune denied me and spare you most of the details. But here is the worst of them. It was subtle, the roman soldier's nails going through Christ's wrists as if he was made of mist and seafoam. Coyote dies all the time in the stories I know, and his friends roll their eyes and set to reviving him.
0:22:53 - (Chris): And I have tried to imagine this since as a comfort without much success. Because in that endlessly extended second, Coyotes eyes riveted on me in surprise and terror. I recognized that look wholeheartedly. My eyes were the same on him. Our hearts broke the same in that place just 10ft from the Joshua trees in safety. Our eyes, our hearts. We are the same. We are the same. Sa sa desert magic. Three ways to tell if someone is new to the desert.
0:25:07 - (Chris): One, they carry water bottles that hold less than two pints. Two, they speak three or four times as loud as is necessary, even when whispering. Three, you ask them what they think of the desert, and they craft a sentence in reply that contains the word magical. Of the first error, I cannot add much of use to the cautionary volumes already written, other than to observe that, in the main, the error contains the seeds of its own correction.
0:25:38 - (Chris): Either the visitor learns from her thirst or she does not. The second arrow takes a little longer to unlearn. The desert instills a thirst for quiet as relentlessly as it dehydrates. But that thirst for quiet takes a while to notice, and an even longer while to understand. Arrow number three is the hardest one to shake. That's in part because the desert does indeed wear a veneer of magic. But do not be deceived.
0:26:14 - (Chris): This is that form of magic that relies on sleight of hand. The desert will dazzle you with sights sublime and improbable, ostentatiously pulling the ace of spades from behind your ear as it lifts your wallet. Exposure to desert magic has been linked to financial reversal, vehicle repossession, marital discord, loss of hair and of teeth. While you're entranced by the shifting of light and shadow, the valley wide floral carpets, the menacing plants in passive aggressive fauna, the desert will sneak up and steal a vital organ.
0:26:54 - (Chris): And sometimes, like a pack rat dropping a shiny object when a better one hoves into view, the desert will leave you something in exchange for the pieces of you. It is decided it needs more than you do. A cholla stem where your heart used to be, a snake's rattle for that wedding ring in exchange for hope. The cone of a pinion pine opened almost all the way, one nut still clinging, a speck of desert varnish in place of your fears.
0:27:26 - (Chris): The desert magic is beside the point, is what I'm saying. It's packaging. It's the cherry flavored sedative the desert slips you before it starts your species reassignment surgery. The subsequent increase in your blood creosote levels is not magic. Nor is the slow implantation of winter constellations in your optic nerves, or your newfound sensitivity to the slow tectonic waltz of mountain ranges. Across the road, a dead cholla limb whirls in a slight wind pushed turn, relaxes back again.
0:28:04 - (Chris): Another turn, another release. There are stories in that deft weftwork branch longer than any tale told by human tongue, longer, in fact, than all such tales combined. Same with a piece of granite upon which it rests. Same with the wind and sun. This desert built by an eternity of floods, this desert shaped by barely perceptible rains. These mountains rising up and wearing down this gravel. The mountains sloughed off skin.
0:28:41 - (Chris): Billions of words to describe each grain of sand, each curl of wizened leaf. The way the range of the Mojave ground squirrel adjoins the range of the round tailed ground squirrel, an epic spanning thousands of generations against which tales of Odin and Gilgamesh are flash fiction. That pale stripe in the darker mountain over there, a hundred million year saga of paradise is lost, then regained, then lost again.
0:29:11 - (Chris): The broad valley south of me is breaking news. The leading edge of a rift in a continent tearing itself slowly in two. The unprepossessing shrub near my back door is a millennium old, but a newcomer nonetheless, one locust in a vegetative swarm that has swamped the desert over the last 10,000 years. These desert stories are told around us all the time. The desert speaks its tales in deep silence, in the slight murmurings of verdans and quail, of one rock hitting another as a handful of cliff gives way.
0:29:51 - (Chris): On occasion, the relentless wind keens and flash floods utter freight train growls. On occasion, coyotes sing arias for the evening's hunt. The louder sounds are punctuation to underscore the desert's mostly quiet voice. We cannot grasp the sheer, brutal grandeur of these stories. Most of us resort to verbal defenses. We label the desert with that five letter word, m a g I c, so that we can stop thinking about what's really there.
0:30:29 - (Chris): And just to be certain, we fill the air around us with needless noise to drown out all but the desert's loudest voices. Atop a modest desert mountain. Not long ago, I watched the desert replace each part of me in turn. The Providence mountains, my ribcage crescent peak to their north, the nub of vertebra between my shoulder blades. Ivanpah Valley, my encumbered heart. Seema Dome, my soul, each range, each plain as familiar to my eyes as my palate is to my desert stilled tongue.
0:31:08 - (Chris): It was a shocking familiarity. I listened in silence as the stories took me, a summer storm filling my canyons to their rims. And that brings us to the end of yet another episode of 90 miles from needles. Thanks for listening. We want to thank Shiela Sasek, friend of a couple of years, for starting up a recurring donation on our give butter site. Shiela's been promoting our podcast to all and sundry on social media for the last couple of years, and we are incredibly grateful for all the ways in which she has supported us.
0:32:24 - (Chris): Look forward to working with her in the future. We are now publishing our podcast to YouTube. You can find us at 90 miles from needles. That's easy enough to remember. This is something that we embarked on basically because Google podcasts is going out of business, and that's what Google suggested as an alternative. One thing I'll point out is that this makes it really easy for you to share the episodes of your choice on social media, including that big blue monstrosity monolith election subverting organization.
0:32:59 - (Chris): Of course, I'm in my mid sixties and so I'm required by law to have a Facebook account. And if you do too, you might consider putting an episode or two on your page so that other folks suffering through Facebook can see them as well. Thanks to Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast art guy. Our theme song, moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. I'd also like to thank our board of directors.
0:33:30 - (Chris): We had a great meeting last week hatching some plans for financial development and fundraising of this organization. Have some great ideas that we're going to flesh out and try to implement in this year and next year. Great work by Luke Basulto, Caroline Partamian, Brooke Binkowski, and our newest board member, Tucson's own Audrey Scheere. Just a great group of people. We're going to be building our board a little bit more.
0:33:58 - (Chris): Many hands make light work if you are wanting to support us, but you're not really in a position to contribute financially, which I thoroughly understand. I myself have been unemployed since January. If you're not in a position to donate financially, you can really help us out by going to one of those places that takes reviews of podcasts, whether that's Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatever, and writing a nice review for us if you like us and giving us four or five stars according to your taste. Obviously, if you don't like us, you have the complete right to give us one star and call us socialists or whatever. I fully support your right to do that. That will not help the podcast prosper. However, if you are donating financially and you want to do more, you can write a review too.
0:34:45 - (Chris): It'd be really helpful. We just are so appreciative of your listening and of everything you are doing to advance awareness of what the desert needs and how we can help it survive into the 22nd and 23rd century. Thanks so much for everything you do. I am going up to the Amargosa again this weekend. It's the 40th anniversary of the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. That's a really important anniversary, a really important place.
0:35:14 - (Chris): And speaking of round numbers, our next episode would seem to be our 50th since we officially launched this podcast. So we'll have to come up with some special idea in the next week as a way to celebrate. I promise we will not do a clip show. Thanks again for listening. Take care of yourselves and we will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 
0:37:42 — (Joe): 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.