S3E6: Joshua Trees and Family Trees

[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:08 - (Joe): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:00:24 - (Chris): It thank you, Joe Geoffrey and welcome all to another episode of 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and this week, while I busy myself putting together a number of episodes based on interviews that I conducted while on my southwest tour in late January and most of February, I thought I would bring you in the meantime, a small excerpt of a book I've been working on for quite some time on the signature plant of the Mojave Desert, the Joshua tree.
0:01:00 - (Chris): Now this vignette takes place in the spring of 2005 on Cima Dome in Mojave National Preserve, at the time, my favorite place in the desert. Spoiler alert. 15 years after this takes place, there was a big fire that changed the place forever, but nonetheless, in 2005, it was an intact, unburned Joshua tree forest that taught me a huge amount of what I know about the desert. I hope you like this piece.
0:01:27 - (Chris): Let's listen it building a good fire is a matter of balance. Bright flames are cheery, but they're relatively cold. If your intent is to keep tolerably warm for quite a while, your fire can't be either too efficient or too wasteful. You've got to stack your firewood loosely enough that the air can flow through freely, but not too loosely. Each burning log heats the burning logs nearest it. If you have too much space between them, the fire will cool off.
0:02:52 - (Chris): Too little space between the logs and the oxygen starved fuel will keep its heat to itself. On a desert night like this, a cold one in March 2005, I want to coax the fire to share every bit of warmth it can for as long as possible. For the 10th time this evening, I poke at my little campfire and think about my father. A cold drop of water hits the back of my neck, runs down inside my jacket. I turn.
0:03:27 - (Chris): I scan the sky. It takes a moment of looking away from the fire for my eyes to adjust to the night, for the sky to resolve into starry view behind the ghostly, firelit blooms of the Joshua trees that are all around me. The moon hangs low above the western horizon. It's a thin crescent, not quite bright enough to wash out the stars. And above me, there's a small, dark hole in the sky. Moving eastward.
0:04:02 - (Chris): It's a rain cloud, a tiny one, and it has thrown a droplet with uncanny accuracy at the spot on me most guaranteed to raise shivers another minute, and the cloud passes out of sight behind Kessler Peak. I turn back to my little fire. I nudge a blazing log, sort of distractedly, with my hatchet. I remember watching my father do the same thing. It rained a little last night. I slept out, and though it never rained hard enough to wake me up, I did get up before dawn and found half a dozen plugs of ice in my hair where rain had hit and then frozen.
0:04:50 - (Chris): Tonight the sky is clearer and without its blanket of clouds, the desert is colder. By sunset, little after 06:00 p.m. I'd already put on a thermal shirt and jacket, and now I sit really close to the fire. My knees are too warm, the nape of my neck is too cold. According to the law of averages, I tell myself. I am therefore completely comfortable. Sadly, I don't find my argument persuasive. Maybe a little moving around will warm me up, stoke my inner fires a little bit, and get the oxygen flowing through them.
0:05:30 - (Chris): I hoist myself out of my folding campcher and I trudge over to look at a Joshua tree covered in bloom. Its flowers seem to shimmer against the wind. I'm glad it's not raining. The desert's been drenched the last few months. The experts are already calling the rainy season of four and five the wettest in southern California history. In August, a flash flood roared down Furnace Creek in Death Valley, killing two people and ripping out the road, which, as of this march, has not yet been reopened.
0:06:05 - (Chris): And at Zabrisky point the flood picked up 224 ton concrete outbuildings and moved them 200ft downhill. That was merely a dramatic summer prequel to the season just now ended. Mojave got five times its usual ration of winter rain. Underground rivers came to the surface, washes burbled with water. Dry lakes filled. In January. I stood at Badwater in Death Valley, 282ft below sea level, lowest spot in North America, and a gigantic sheet of water lay before me.
0:06:48 - (Chris): It was a ghost of Pleistocene Lake Manly, 2ft deep across miles of valley floor. I stood at the bottom of Death Valley, one of the driest, hottest places in the world, and I curse myself for not having had the forethought to bring my kayak. The lakes have shrunk in the two months since. The land around them now is mantled in pale green. And here on Cima Dome in the Mojave National Preserve, the soil, which is usually barren between clumps of blackbrush and menadora, grows a garden of flowers in the making.
0:07:39 - (Chris): Little green leaves gather sunlight to make new generations of green leaves. The desert here already looks improbably lush a month before the usual beginning of desert bloom season, and soon this place will blaze with color. Rain and freezing temperatures in January and February spur joshua trees to bloom in March. Stalks emerge from the clusters of sharp leaves at the ends of the tree's branches. These stalks look vaguely like fat asparagus spears about a foot and a half long, and from the sides of these stalks emerge subsidiary stems, at the end of each of which is a fat flower bud that will open into a pale white blossom about two inches wide.
0:08:27 - (Chris): At first glance, each blossom resembles an orchid, with three petals and three sepals. The flesh of these flowers is thick and waxy, has a mild, soapy flavor that's only a slight hindrance to edibility. I have battered and fried the blooms and eaten them happily. Joshua trees are monoecious, which means that an individual tree will produce both male and female blossoms. On occasion, one Joshua tree flower will possess both male and female parts.
0:08:58 - (Chris): This is a condition botanists call perfect, which personally, I find rather enlightened. I watch tiny moths flit back and forth between the open flowers on this Joshua tree, and it's far too dark to see them clearly. And if I went to fetch the flashlight out of the truck to see them better, the white light would spook them. They don't mind red light, and serious moth watchers cover their moth viewing torches with red cellophane.
0:09:29 - (Chris): That's a basic camping essential that I have once again neglected to pack. Doesn't really matter. I know what the moths look like, and my mind fills in a few of the murky details. For me, they are Joshua tree moths. Here on Cima dome, they'd be the eastern species, tegeticula antithetica, as opposed to the teketicula synthetica I've found Closer to LA. They're whitish, sort of. Their wings kind of resemble those of dragonflies, two pairs of elongated ovals, the longer ones in front wingspan under an inch.
0:10:05 - (Chris): The rearward margins of those wings have a fringe of tiny hairs. The moths crawl into and out of the flowers with purposeful determination. Sometimes they leave one flower and crawl into the next one. Sometimes they come to the lip of a flower, then fly out of range of my night vision. The top log on my fire collapses, its strength burned away. Yellow flames flare up briefly, then die down. My little fire turns red.
0:10:43 - (Chris): It deepens. 20 ft away, I flip my collar up against the cold breeze and shiver, wonder if I should just let my fire go out. I'm ambivalent about night fires. They warm one, and on a night like this. That's no small favor, but they keep my eyes and hands busy and distracted. They blind me to the stars. They make a circle of not night in the desert, and they imprison my mind in that circle. The fact that we use fire distinguishes us from all the rest of nature, and at times it separates us from all the rest of nature as well.
0:11:27 - (Chris): Over here, with my fire dying down, I feel the night seeping into me. The stars grow in brilliance as the moon arcs toward Teutonia Peak. Out in the open desert, somewhere between me and that moon, a coyote yodels its traditional folk song at the stars. Another one, a half mile behind me or so responds in kind, and then a third. For a long moment, my desert night is filled with song, and then the moment is over.
0:12:35 - (Chris): I wait a long time for an encore. When it becomes clear after the moon sets that no encore is coming, I walk back to my dying fire and almost automatically, almost out of duty, place more wood on it. In 10 seconds, it's ablaze. I wasn't born a desert rat. I grew up in the wet country east of the Great Lakes, where summers brought rain that actually hit the ground and then rose back up into the air as humidity and mosquitoes.
0:13:28 - (Chris): I spent my first two decades living among pan oaks and silver maples, every untended plot of land a green wall, the forest soil a spongy, sodden mast shot through with moss and fungal threads and salamanders, the view in every direction blocked by a profusion of leaf and branch. Now and then someone would cut down one of those trees and saw it into cordwood and then sell the wood to my father, who would set it on fire tonight.
0:14:01 - (Chris): My fire is made of pinion and juniper, and their clean, scented smoke smudges my mind like burning sage. Back then, as I studied my father, placing each new log on the half burnt remnants of its companions, a smoke that followed me around the fire was deeper, its secrets better hidden. Even then, the upstate New York landscape seemed claustrophobic to me, second and third growth forest turned inward and brooding, as if suffering from generational trauma.
0:14:36 - (Chris): My father's campfires put out a moist smoke tanged with fungal woodland notes that hinted at old, unremembered pain, quiet questions I soon knew better than to ask. I left New York at age 22 and hitchhiked west and woke one morning in northern Nevada. The emptiness of the desert landscape completely unnerved me. The landscape seemed unadorned and ugly, and yet I couldn't tear my eyes off the far hills.
0:15:08 - (Chris): Everything was out in the open there, any secrets the sagebrush might have held seemed small and subtle. In time, the northeastern forests of my youth seemed stultifying, overgrown, and choked. My allegiance had shifted. I had adapted to the West's open terrain, still put me in front of a western campfire, and I'm transported back into a cloud of that older smoke. Sitting once again by older fires back east, my father would poke at the fire in resolute wordlessness, adjusting his precise fuel placement by increment.
0:15:53 - (Chris): For the first 15 years of my life, I started fireside conversations that went nowhere. My father met each question, each statement, either with a dismissive sounding sentence or with complete silence, leaving me feeling that I just said something stupid. Eventually, I began to feel as though my saying anything was a disappointment of his expectations of silence. These days I know that was wrong. These days I know. His silence masked old hurt, that it really had nothing to do with me.
0:16:32 - (Chris): I realize now how well he meant, how adrift he felt in a talkative world, his eldest son and campfire apprentice growing out of his paternal worship, his marriage to my mother slowly crumbling. I'm much older now than he was then, and now I get it. Back then, I blamed myself for the awkward silences. They made my heart shrivel. I never doubted his love for me, just his respect. One afternoon, on a bluff above the St. Lawrence river, my father gathered kindling for that night's fire, and I was nine or ten years old. I found a path leading beguilingly into the woods. And, not looking forward to the next hours of silence, I announced I was going for a walk.
0:17:21 - (Chris): My father brought me up short, with some anger. I wasn't going anywhere, he said. The woods are dangerous for unchaperoned children. He told me a story, vague and seemingly half remembered, about two boys who'd gone out for a walk in the woods near his father's farm. And they got lost, he told me, and when they were found, they were dead. The story, no more than five sentences long, had an immediate and permanent effect on me. And predictably, that effect was the exact opposite of the one my father had intended.
0:17:57 - (Chris): I was persuaded that the forest was a thrilling place. I gave my father 20 minutes to lose interest in what I was doing and walked nonchalantly up the path into the woods. I've spent subsequent decades doing the same thing, hoping that my old life would end and a new one begin among the trees. After a moth pollinates the joshua tree flower, that flower slowly develops into fruit. At the same time, the one, or sometimes two eggs, the moths lays in each flower develop into moth larvae.
0:18:38 - (Chris): They'll eat a few of the seeds before they emerge and drop to the ground, then bury themselves in the soil, awaiting a future bloom of joshua trees to emerge as adults and continue the cycle. The process is a matter of balance. A Joshua tree will shed a flower if the moth has laid too many eggs in it, or if the moth hasn't packed enough pollen into the flower, or if too much of that pollen came from the same tree, which increases the risk of inbred seedlings.
0:19:11 - (Chris): If not for developing Joshua tree fruit, the new generation of moths would have nothing to eat. If not for moths to pollinate the flowers, no new Joshua trees would be born. One by one, each generation makes its way into the forest. Each generation fades in turn in favor of the one that follows, a link in a braided chain stretching back to the dawn of life. And each generation bears the mark of those generations that came before.
0:19:48 - (Chris): More talkative than my father by an order of magnitude, I still inherit from him. His tolerance of dayslong silences, his ability to let important things go unsaid. I fight it in myself. I conscientiously tell people I love them. I try to return friends phone calls. Within a few weeks, I deliberately strike up conversations with complete strangers. And still I find I'm not fully at ease until I need not talk to anyone, until I'm sitting alone for long, dark hours among the Joshua trees.
0:20:28 - (Chris): The forest calls me, and I'm unsettled until I answer it, until I head toward yet another little fire like tonight's driven to it, like a moth to. Well, you know, dawn will break in a few hours, and I look forward to another day of walking in the Joshua tree forest. The desert floor here fills more each day with green. I'm already looking past the end of this visit and planning the next one. Two weeks from now, a month with all the winter rain, 2005 will certainly be a killer year for desert blooms.
0:21:13 - (Chris): Call it unfinished business, if you like. Call it wish fulfillment. It's the basic lesson of modern biology, all of evolutionary theory summarized. Trace the lines of ancestry of any two living things back far enough, and you find a common ancestor. The eastern and western Joshua tree moth species share an ancestor. Perhaps 15,000 years ago. Their mutual ancestry line diverged from mine 590,000,000 years ago.
0:21:48 - (Chris): If you go back another 400 million years before that, the Joshua trees line of ancestry converges with ours. And thus, when I speak of the kinship of all life, I do not intend metaphor. The moths, the coyotes, the pack rat now watching me from across the fire, the owl swifting past on silent wings, the trees presiding quietly above us all. We are related. We are kin. It's the family I've always longed for, and I cherish my place in it, sitting among my kin in quiet contentment now and then, posing the Joshua trees questions they never answer.
0:23:48 - (Chris): Well, that about wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Once again, I want to thank our voiceover person, Joe Geoffrey, for announcing our intro and outro, as well as Martin Mancha for providing us with wonderful podcast artwork, and Brightside Studio for our theme song Moody Western. This week. I also want to thank our wonderful board members, Lucas Basulto, Caroline Partamian, and Brooke Binkowski.
0:24:16 - (Chris): And I want to thank you for listening. The Desert Advocacy Media Network, which is the nonprofit home of 90 miles from needles, can always use your help. Check us out@thedamn.org. That's thedamn.org. On that website there are little places where you can click and have a donation box pop up. You can make a donation of whatever size you want, recurring or one time. The important thing is we couldn't do this without your help. We are incredibly grateful to you for the support that you've shown, whether by donating, by listening, by sharing this with your friends.
0:24:54 - (Chris): Lastly, a special thanks to Audrey Scheere, our friend in Tucson, for putting together a social media video based on an interview with me publicizing the podcast and the Desert Advocacy Media Network. Her instagram account is @oldPueblocuriosities. You'll want to check that out! And coming soon, we will have episodes on grassroots land Trust protection organization in slash Juarez that's working to protect pieces of the chihuahuan desert.
0:25:22 - (Chris): We're going to be talking about attempts to put a freeway through the beautiful and largely intact desert west of Tucson, and we're going to be talking about the border between the US and Mexico. And there's any number of other things coming up all the time that we will be covering in the next few weeks. If you have an issue you'd like us to take a look at, let us know. I can be reached at Chris at nine 0 mile from needles.com,
0:25:46 - (Chris): or you can call our Google Voice number at 760-392-1996 please stay safe and healthy. The desert needs you. Until next week, me and my dog, heart barking incessantly outside as I record this will both see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.
0:28:21 - (Joe): 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.