Too Hot For Morning
Old Essay, October Heat, and New Flash Fiction!
***After reading this newsletter, make sure to check out my new flash fiction piece at SHORT BEASTS published the other week! Linked below :)***
If I write anything about this heatwave, I think I’d just be repeating myself. I’d be sitting here telling you things that you already know, that I’ve already said, and that others have said before me. Maybe that’s just a bit of writer’s block talking, but it’s not far off from the truth. We’ve known the climate has been changing for decades, but we avoid the topic. I know I do. I can’t live with it each day. The pain and fear of it. The real cost of it is so great that, when I find myself overwhelmed by it, I become frozen, hoping everything will stop moving with me. That’s why I try to stick with hope, some slightly delusional persistence in the possibility that the world could be better even if that’s just a pipe dream, and to fight for the reality that hope could bring. But sometimes it’s just too hot out, and you need to rest, give in a little. It’s a contradictory world we live in, that we sometimes can’t help but be culpable for while also being mad at it all for making us so.
The climate is heating. It’s the morning in Oakland and already it’s eighty degrees. It’s supposed to be a hundred today. And while the local papers are talking about it, there really isn’t much new about this. We had a somewhat similar heatwave last October. I wrote about the heatwave last year and climate anxiety for E-The Environmental Magazine. I’ll link it below. But I wanted to share another essay I wrote for them in 2022, about driving down to the Mojave desert for the first time during peak gas prices, and the contradictions and fears I quietly, I suppose maybe you too, live with.
It’s pasted below, but give E-The Environmental Magazine visit. Roddy has been publishing this for decades and doing a fantastic job for such a small team!
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Shifting Light in the Cholla
Last night I dreamt that the hills surrounding my home were barren and chipping flecks of sandstone, the striations of rock horizontal with the earth and freshly cut open to the air like a new scar. The lushness of bay, oak, redwood, and of small streams curling down little arroyos had vanished and was left with heat, and golden hills without grass. Yet I felt free there, at peace in a wild place, like Baja, or maybe it was some hidden desolation in the dry lands of Nevada.
Deserts have always fascinated me with their open spaces. As a child I used to endlessly draw dunes and canyons though I had never seen them before. Maybe the fantasy grew from reading stories of Edward Abbey. Or maybe it was simply growing up in a suburban town north of San Francisco, surrounded by so many people, so much convention, longing for a respite from the culture to which I lived, the one that still asks me and all of us not to rest, or think, but to build, to tear things down and make them new again.
After a few busy weeks, I went to the Mojave desert with my brother and a few of his friends for two nights in March. I had just hurt my knee surfing on the north coast and couldn't run or walk very well. But, surrounded by so much silence, and rocks too fragile to climb, we couldn’t do much else but sit around anyway. That’s why my brother loved this place, he told me. It was so hot, so quiet, so unwelcoming to the outdoor adventurers who wanted to climb, or hunt, or bike around. Our neighbors in this place were an elderly couple and a man in his early seventies, traveling the West with his dog. Surrounded by yucca and many unknown needley plants, there was nothing to do but wander, find shade, and admire the light through the golden cholla.
There was no way to build there, to make this place a destination for hoards of people. I find these hard to come by places, often deserts, give us a space to be, to find clarity isolated from the ticking of the world with which most of us, rancher, writer, or cook, are bound up.
Perhaps that’s the fantasy of the desert — the illusion of desolation that I seek when I go to deserts or sagebrush lands. They’re quiet. I can pretend this world — the world of pages, of computers, of injustices stacked like heavy shelves of slate over our shoulders — doesn’t exist.
It’s simple to find peace there, genuine calm. In the heat that makes those dry landscapes there is a greater ability to find stillness and reflection within ourselves. In that environment, so far flung from what we as tropical primates love so fully with our bodies, we see our needs, projected onto the land like a mirage, sitting right in front of us.
It was there in the Mojave that I remembered how much I needed to slow down, cactus-like in my approach, wait out the dry seasons and cling delicately to the rains when they come. I had, and have, spent so much time alone in my room, writing words to myself, busying each day with menial tasks to find a sense of meaning in the din of the city where I live, trying just to hold onto the little claim I have on this land, and “make” something of myself. But in the Mojave, nothing moves like that. Animals and plants and lichens all survive, set on being a part of the living. All of this, all of our lives, are nothing more than that.
Yet, I found this peace with a gas tank and the money and time to drive south for seven and a half hours, and the generations past who built these roads, and the people who to this day maintain the way to this small sanctuary in Southern California. Without these roads, without oil, without that industriousness, I would never find myself there. Inevitably, I arrive in the desert to find peace away from society, yet society leads me, and anyone who visits, to this beauty.
In the desert, we build these roads and become interlopers. We, clever creatures cleaving our way to a rocky outcropping searching for peace “away from it all.” We exploited this place, perhaps at first for survival, then for profit as the western world arrived. Digging for water became digging for gold, silver, and lead. Seeking out shade turned into cutting the yucca to sell at a boutique craft shop in the Bay Area. Our love and peace was rapidly transformed to industry.
Through that industry, regardless of landscape, we as western society have altered these places well beyond the desert. From the dingo fence of Australia, the carpets of dense forest in the Sierra, the dredged marshes in the Mississippi Delta, to the building of Las Vegas in the middle of Nevada, we alter these lands through our exploits, and this morphs into the grave crisis we now face — the longevity of ourselves as a species. And from this crisis, we will watch the creation of more desert as the heat grows.
I doubt much of what I call home in Northern California will soon turn to desert, but it is not out of the question. That dream of mine last night to live alone in a barren wild world no longer seems just a childish longing for quiet and simplicity, but a reality that the land I love will be ever shaped by what my ancestors and I have chosen to do and not do. That dream last night perhaps is an acceptance of a possible future California, one more arid than I could have imagined as a little boy, drawing desert canyons, longing to listen to their silence.
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