S3E36: Laughing Coyotes and Saguaro Dreams: An Unlikely Desert Awakening

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:08 - (Chris Clarke): Think the deserts are barren wastelands. Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clark and we are getting really close to the end of 2024. There are a lot of good things that happened in 2024, and some of them happened in the context of this podcast. We put out almost as many episodes so far this year, if you count this one, as we did in the previous two years combined.

0:00:58 - (Chris Clarke): We weathered the departure, sad as that was, of my co host late in 2023. And I gotta say, there was a period in which I wasn't sure that people would wanna listen just to me talking by myself. That's part of why I've done a lot of interviews this year. But we've had a really good year in terms of just the variety and volume of different topics that we've discussed. We've talked to activists from El Paso and Tucson and Las Vegas and the California desert, talking about Joshua trees, Mexican wolves, drought, plutonium, talking about solar. Of course, we've talked to people like Terry Tempest Williams, who I interviewed on the steps of the Utah State Capitol this past spring about the Great Salt Lake, which was a high point in not just this year of putting the podcast together, but in my entire career.

0:01:50 - (Chris Clarke): I talked to people about the U.S. mexico border, about protecting wetlands along the Rio Grande, talked about legal decisions in Nevada that will affect water law in that state for years to come. We've talked about misguided legal efforts by the state of Utah to claim federal land for their own. We've talked about places and people and animals that mean a lot to me. We've had a lot of very hopeful episodes this year.

0:02:21 - (Chris Clarke): As an example, episode seven this year, season three, we talked to the wonderful women of Frontera Land alliance in El Paso who have been saving one piece of the Chihuahuan Desert after another, working to get the community behind the idea of protection of these lands. Texas is a weird beast compared to some other states. There's not a lot of public land in the desert there and so it's a really different experience working to protect lands in the Lone Star State.

0:02:48 - (Chris Clarke): I've gone to the Gila river and the Colorado river and the aforementioned Rio Grande Great Salt Lake. We've covered successful fights against ill advised tourist developments near Joshua Tree. Talked with Miles Traphagen in Tucson about the border wall and its deleterious effect on not only people but wildlife. Talked with author Ben Goldfarb about that same issue, put out an episode on Aviku May National Monument, one of the most important places to my heart.

0:03:22 - (Chris Clarke): We've talked about vandalism of archeological resources, talked about mining companies acting like complete jerks in the Amargosa Basin. One of my favorite episodes since we started this podcast is possibly the one that's going to have the longest shelf life. Episode 17 of this year, in June, talked to the inspiring Daniel Lavis on the Chemo Reservation, the easternmost piece of California, about growing food in the desert in conjunction with the living traditions of the Chemuevi people, and at the same time talking about how the Chemiuevi were displaced from their actual, real, viable farmland now underneath Lake Havasu.

0:03:59 - (Chris Clarke): People in the tribe are doing what they can to maintain lifeways after being displaced from that really fertile area. And that's a really good model for us this year, I think, as we anticipate some serious hard work and unpleasantness in 2025. And we have gotten some bad news too, and we've talked about it a lot in the last episode before I took a couple weeks off. One of the ways in which I generally cope with bad news now that drinking hasn't been an option for a decade or so, is just to think about what it is that I'm trying to do here in the desert. And not just with the podcast, not just with the Desert Advocacy Network, but with my writing in general, with my life.

0:04:43 - (Chris Clarke): The desert is so central to who I am that it's hard to imagine doing anything else. So I thought I'd talk about what brought me to where I am and offer you the chance to do the same thing in response. But before I start in on that, I want to thank some new donors really quickly. They are and thank you to Nancy, Betty Baumeister, Jennifer Eric, Mark Pritchard, Amanda Charost, Chris Cheek, Arch McCulloch, who made a very generous donation to the Stop 47 fund on our website.

0:05:25 - (Chris Clarke): Sherry Andrews, Margaret Marshall, Rosa Vasquez, Kristen Brangle, Marcia Clue, Jackie Guevara, and Becca Butterwick. Becca also provided a very generous donation in response to our Giving Tuesday appeal. Thank you all of you, for joining the wonderful group of people who make it possible for us to put this podcast together. And if you are not one of those people I named and you want to join the ranks of those good folks that I just talked about, go to 90miles from needles.com

0:05:56 - (Chris Clarke): donate I'm always curious about what brings people to decide that they want to protect a particular place, whether it's the redwoods. We had a lot of people trying to protect redwoods in the 1990s, the desert mountaintops in Appalachia. I thought I would talk a little bit on this episode about my history with the desert. Not to self aggrandize or to claim that I am special, but precisely the opposite.

0:06:28 - (Chris Clarke): To just say that this is a bunch of stuff that happened to somebody who fell in love. It's a love story and I would love to hear from you, those of you who live in the desert and love it and have been working to protect it. Maybe you're somebody that we've interviewed. Maybe you're somebody that's been listening for a long time. What brought you to this place? What brought you to not only the desert as a geographical place, but to your interest in protecting its habitats?

0:06:59 - (Chris Clarke): You can email a story to me if you like at Chris C h r I s 90 miles from needles.com or if you would like to make things really easy for me, you could call 760-372-1996 and leave a voicemail with your story. And if it's a good story or even a just a very typical story, we might just use it in the podcast. Would be yet another good way of getting voices other than my own in this thing. Despite the fact that it's kind of hard for me to picture not being part of the desert from day to day, I spent the first section of my life in very different places with no desert experience whatsoever.

0:09:18 - (Chris Clarke): I grew up in upstate New York to the extent that I grew up at all, and aside from a really quick several days visit to the desert when I was 6 years old and about which I remember only a very small amount, I mean, what I remember is actually pretty funny. But at any rate, aside from that really brief trip that was just part of a cross country trip in which the desert happened to be in between places that we wanted to go.

0:09:45 - (Chris Clarke): I didn't lay adult eyes on the desert really until I was well into my 20s. At 22 years old, riding a Greyhound bus from Laramie, Wyoming where the rides gave out to the Bay Area going through northern Nevada on the Interstate 80 corridor, which at that point wasn't completed coast to coast, traffic on Interstate 80 had to stop at a stoplight in Lovelock, Nevada. Riding through Northern Nevada, I was pretty awestruck by the landscape.

0:10:13 - (Chris Clarke): I was not used to seeing a place that had so little vegetation. Now these days the sagebrush and shad scale and pinyon and juniper in the hills along that route look Positively identic to me. Now they. They look like paradise. So lush compared to the Mojave where I live. And then I landed in the Bay Area and had myself a kind of life you usually have with no skills in your early 20s, working odd jobs. And a couple years in, I had a family member involved in a really bad accident back in upstate New York. So I traveled back there to offer some help, which there really wasn't a way for me to help.

0:10:57 - (Chris Clarke): But driving back to New York to spend time with my family, we went on US 50, the loneliest road in America, between Fallon and Baker, Nevada Delta, Utah, and Then on Interstate 70 through the San Rafael Desert in central Utah. I was enchanted. I was in love. And not very long after that, we were moving back east for a couple of years so that my then girlfriend could go to law School in D.C. again. In order to get from point A to point B, we went through the desert.

0:11:34 - (Chris Clarke): And that was the trip where the desert really got to me. A lot of the desert was in complete darkness when we drove through it. I remember a restaurant called Reno's that's long since closed in Mojave, California, where we stopped to eat dinner coming into Barstow the back way, which was the only way possible at that point. Coming from the west along Route 58, Interstate 40 was being repaired. I'd taken a long shift driving, so I was sleeping in the backseat of the car after that. I woke up briefly when we were gassing up in Kingman and then on Route 93 between Kingman and Wickenburg, Arizona.

0:12:18 - (Chris Clarke): My girlfriend was driving as the sun was coming up, and the sun was coming up in a direction that was shining right in her eyes. The temptation was there to go from the squint she had to maintain in order to not be blinded to having her eyes close all the way. And she fell asleep at the wheel. She immediately woke up again, hit the brakes in a huge panic, and we skidded off the road and we were all fine. There was a little dent in the fender of her Honda Civic where we struck a reflector pole.

0:12:48 - (Chris Clarke): And I said, I can drive. I'm awake. I'm emphatically awake at that point. And I looked at where we were. Red rocks, cliffs, promontories and hoodoos and canyons. And there were saguaros and Joshua trees growing in the same place, which I didn't know back then was quite unusual. And then maybe a mile and a half down the road from where we'd skidded off the road, a coyote stood in the Middle of the highway, watching us and looking for all the world like it was laughing at us.

0:13:24 - (Chris Clarke): Later that day, we stopped at the Casablanca Reservation in Eloy, Arizona. There was a cultural center on that reservation. It's been torn down since. Cultural center had a snack bar, hamburgers, French fries, coffee, that kind of thing. And we got lunch there, and we sat underneath a Palo Verde. It was the first one I'd ever really looked at. We kept driving through the Sonoran Desert into the Chihuahuan Desert. We grabbed dinner that night in Benson, Arizona, at Rebs Cafe, which people that know Benson will remember. It finally closed about 40 years later during the pandemic.

0:14:04 - (Chris Clarke): We had left Berkeley at 4 or 5 in the afternoon the previous day. And we drove through that first night and much of the way into the second night. And then we finally stopped just outside El Paso, a little bit north and west, grabbed a room in a Motel 6. We ended up in D.C. and I spent pretty much every waking moment when I wasn't commuting or working, reading books about the desert and longing to be in the desert. And there was a point at which my girlfriend was thinking about applying for a job with a legal services organization on the Tojono O'Donnell reservation, a little bit west of Tucson.

0:14:39 - (Chris Clarke): If she got that job, we'd be living on the reservation. And I was hoping against hope that that would happen. She never heard back from them. They probably were looking for a native person to hire, which makes sense to me. At any rate, coming back into California and the Bay area after almost three years in the environs of D.C. is pretty much when my fixation on the desert really came into full fruition.

0:15:05 - (Chris Clarke): The relationship ended, as relationships often do. My girlfriend found somebody else that she was a better fit with. They're still together 35 years later. Her kids are grown up. She lucked out, basically. But there was a little awkward moment, couple of weeks between the time that she got involved with him and the time that we broke up. And I was with her visiting her family in Los Angeles. And the new guy called.

0:15:36 - (Chris Clarke): And I don't know what he told her, but she said to me, I'm going to fly up and meet him. Going to leave a couple days early. Do you mind driving my car back from Los Angeles to the Bay Area? And I said, I can do that. On my way out of la, I got to the junction in San Fernando Valley, where you have a choice between taking Interstate 5 to go through the Central Valley and up towards the bay area, or one can choose to hop on Route 14, the Antelope Valley Freeway and go through the desert.

0:16:11 - (Chris Clarke): Now, my girlfriend hadn't told me when she wanted me back or if she wanted me back. So I knew I was going to return her car to her in good shape, in one piece within a few days. So instead of going directly back, I went to the desert. My first time in the desert by myself. It was also the first time I went to the desert just to go to the desert as opposed to getting to somewhere else on the other side of the desert.

0:16:39 - (Chris Clarke): And in a lot of ways, that's when my life really began. Shortly after that breakup, I became involved with the woman who would later become my ex wife, my friend Becky, still my friend. She was as much a desert aficionado as I am. In fact, the first time I ever touched a Joshua tree was on a trip with Becky. And I touched it not knowing, not having any idea in fact, how Joshua trees would affect my life in the future.

0:17:09 - (Chris Clarke): At the time, I was just very happy to be making that individual trees acquaintance. And the reason I did it was that Becky had just done it after asking me if I thought it was all right. Now, this was in 1990, and over the next couple decades, Becky and I spent a lot of time together in the desert. At some point, maybe I'll do a retrospective episode in which I tell stories of all the different times that I prepared poorly for our desert trips and pissed off my ex wife.

0:17:40 - (Chris Clarke): We get together and tell those stories and laugh. Now maybe you would too. But at any rate, she was in love enough with the desert once we started really getting there, that she went a few times without me being there at all. She rafted the Grand Canyon. She rented a pre Airbnb hogan on the Navajo Rez. The locals were renting out to travelers as a source of income and reported in a very pleased fashion that several of the Navajos she had met asked her if she was Navajo.

0:18:13 - (Chris Clarke): She was actually Chinese American, but she could have passed. And when the time came for us to split up, when it was time for me to move out of the house up in the Bay Area, she suggested that I move to the desert full time. It took me a while to realize that she had just suggested to her soon to be ex husband that he go far away for good. But at the time, it was the kindest possible thing she could have said.

0:18:40 - (Chris Clarke): I'd been taking every possible opportunity to go to the desert for the previous, I don't know, 14 years or so. A lot of that time spent on Sema Dome Camping among the Joshua trees pre dome fire. But I went other places as well. Went to Tucson a few times with and without Becky. That remains one of my favorite places in the world. Four Corners Pyramid Lake in northern Nevada on the Pyramid Lake Reservation. It was kind of our go to spot from the Bay Area if we wanted to do just a quick two night desert camping trip.

0:19:13 - (Chris Clarke): I thought I knew the desert before I moved here and compared to a lot of people I did, I guess. But oh the things I had yet to learn. And by the way, oh the things I still have yet to learn. There is just something about this part of the world that speaks to me. And that's true whether I'm in a thick Joshua tree forest like at Avikwame National Monument or open opinions in junipers like in the hills west of Pyramid Lake. The Virginia range, the Modoc Plateau lava tubes and western meadowlarks, sagebrush.

0:19:53 - (Chris Clarke): The saguaro and mesquite of the Tohono Autumn Reservation, Oregon pipe cacti and sanita cacti and elephant trees a little bit west of there. Part of it is in the desert. I can focus. I've always had problems focusing. About 20 years ago I realized that I had a pretty good sized case of ADHD which explained a whole lot about my previous 45 years of life. But I could focus in the desert. And that became even more true when I started taking ADHD medications.

0:20:29 - (Chris Clarke): Not long after I was diagnosed and starting medication, I was at Sema Dome camping by myself and I noticed a nanthill in my campsite. It's your basic California desert ant hill. Relatively congenial species of ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus, which is the same black and red ant that used to be in those ant farms that were advertised in the back of comic books. I spent hours one day just watching the ants with my face about 8 inches from the anthill, lying on my stomach on the ground in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

0:21:07 - (Chris Clarke): On that same trip, I realized that if I just sat and shut my eyes and just listened, I could identify about a third of the birds that I heard just by their sound. When I moved away from the Bay Area after Becky kindly kicked me out and sent me in the right direction. Getting close to 17 years ago as I speak, there was an awkward month between the time I left the house in the Bay Area and the time my house in Nipton, California was going to be available.

0:21:36 - (Chris Clarke): And so I for that month was officially homeless. Not the first time in my life it Was kind of exhilarating. Did go back east to visit a friend, but I spent the rest of the time camping up on Sema Dome and going elsewhere. Getting motel rooms in Barstow to take a shower on one of those nights. Early on, I believe it was after my trip back east. I was in a valley in the desert. I was the only person who knew where I was.

0:22:10 - (Chris Clarke): I walked out into that valley from my ancient and beautiful jeep and sisters and brothers. I was miserable. I was mourning the end of my marriage to Becky. I was mourning our dog Zeke, who had died a little bit more than a year before. I had just left an area that I had thought of as home for almost 30 years. And I walked out into the creosote. It was a really healthy creosote stand with not much else growing there. And I found a spot and I sat beneath the shelter of the creosote.

0:22:49 - (Chris Clarke): It was an odd thing. It didn't make me feel all that much better. I spent many days that summer locked in my little house and Nipton with the lights off and just feeling sorry for myself. But on that evening early on, as I watched the sunset from my hideout in the creosote, I knew I was in the right place. Now, new is not precisely the right word. It wasn't a conscious knowing. It was more an audible click as I snapped into place like the missing jigsaw puzzle piece.

0:23:21 - (Chris Clarke): These days, I have trouble distinguishing where I end and where the desert begins. I've certainly been impaled with enough cactus spines that I couldn't remove that I'm probably at least 2% desert, just genetically, maybe even by mass. Back when I lived in the Bay Area, I would come to the desert drive for seven or eight hours to get to Mojave National Preserve or somewhere equally cool. And I would get there and it would be dark already or pretty close to it, and I'd roll out my sleeping bag on a sleeping pad and pull out my camp chair and start a little fire.

0:24:00 - (Chris Clarke): And sitting there as the fire caught, I would feel like I was back in the real world. And that my life in the Bay Area had been an interesting and somewhat remunerative but nonetheless passing dream divorced from reality. And that I was finally waking up after however many weeks or months it had been. And now I'm awake almost all the time. It's not that other places couldn't be home. I was reminded this year, going back to western New York, that that's a place I continue to love even though I hadn't been there for 25 years.

0:24:37 - (Chris Clarke): Long story. Showing it to Lara was really remarkable. Berkeley and Oakland were home. They've changed a lot since I left. I know it's home intellectually, but it increasingly doesn't feel that way when I'm there. It's been more than a year since I've been there. I have friends there. It's like I see them and no time has passed, including Becky. But that chapter of my life is closed. I've been lucky enough to fit into quite a number of places.

0:25:10 - (Chris Clarke): The Finger Lakes, western New York, Northern California, D.C. and its suburbs, Los Angeles. But the desert is where I am meant to be. And it seems to me like it always has been. Like it's been telling me for more than half my life at this point that I am supposed to be here. I am so much saner now than I was before. I take things in stride more, and especially in the last year. I'm less upset, able.

0:25:48 - (Chris Clarke): I don't walk around stewing over stuff nearly as much. I walk out my front door and I see one row of houses across the street from us. And then it's desert, stretching to the Colorado river and beyond. Millions of acres of desert. That's where I live. It's my home, it's my refuge. It's my family. The coyotes that antagonize my dogs. The sidewinders and the tarantula hawks, the carpenter bees, the gambles quail that insist on trying to occupy our front yard despite the dogs.

0:26:30 - (Chris Clarke): Cottontails and jackrabbits, speckled and northern Mojave rattlesnakes, Joshua trees and Mojave yuccas. New yuccas that I've fallen in love with having seen them for the first time this year, in which I got to know the Chihuahuan Desert a little bit. That was a big blank spot in my desert map. And now I have friends there, and not all of them are human. It's a weird thing for somebody who has spent his life putting words in various orders together, but I'm surprised at the difficulty I'm having in really conveying what I mean in words.

0:27:08 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe the thing to say is just something I heard said by my former co host here. She said I am the desert and the desert is me. And I can never know precisely what she meant by that. But I'm happy to appropriate that motto for my own. I am the desert. And you, dear listener, if you live here, if you're rhapsodizing internally about missing the desert from your outpost in Minnesota or New Jersey, if You're fighting for the desert.

0:27:42 - (Chris Clarke): You might be the desert, too. And the desert might be you. At this point, I could no more walk away from working to defend the desert than most good parents could walk away from defending their children. No more than most children could walk away from defending their parents. One of the few really solid lessons of the life sciences is that all of us, all of us, me and you and the creosote and the gila monsters, the wolves and the jaguars, the desert trumpets, the fungi under the soil surface that connect up with the roots of plants, the migratory birds getting zapped by the Ivanpah Solar project, every single driver on Interstate 15 between Barstow and Vegas, the native people that still live in the desert, the coyotes, the ospreys, the devil's hole pupfish.

0:28:40 - (Chris Clarke): We are all of us family. We are literally all related. How can we not defend this place? How can we not take a stand? How do we not work to persuade the more misguided members of the human subsection of our family not to destroy this family legacy that we have here in all of the deserts of North America? I suppose that's a rhetorical question. You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:30:00 - (Chris Clarke): Don't take your dog on a desert hike in summer. And that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, who put together our podcast artwork. And again, new contributors, Nancy Betty Baumeister, Jennifer Eric, Mark Pritchard, Amanda Charist, Chris Cheek, Arch McCulloch, Sherry Andrews, Margaret Marshall, Rosa Vasquez, Becca Butterwick, Marcia Clue, and Jackie Guevara. Thank you all for joining a wonderful group of people who make it possible for us to put this podcast together.

0:30:47 - (Chris Clarke): We've got at least one more episode this year, should be live next week, and then I may take the holidays off or I may put another episode together. Have one in mind. But you can also keep in touch with us if we take the second half of this month off by signing up for our email newsletter@90mfn.substack.com you can also check out our Our Desert News newsletter, which comes out roughly weekly. Almost every Monday, we curate a bunch of desert environmental news stories from, I actually counted earlier close to 60 different media outlets across the desert, some of them big and well known, others not so much.

0:31:33 - (Chris Clarke): And we take all the environmental news that's been reported on in those places and put it all in one spot for you with links and it's free. Desertnews.substack.com Tell your friends the holidays are always nuts if you do anything other than hunkering at home. Please travel carefully. Be safe. The desert needs you in 2025 more than it did in 2024. And I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. SA 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.