Into Thick Air (41 page)

Meanwhile, a combination of bombs and cholla cactus keeps out most folk. Outside the bounds of the air force range, the ranchers are reduced to a half-dozen diehards, beaten down by the facts of drought and the earnest meddling of save-the-desert folks like me. Occasionally a distressed cow wanders onto the bombing range. With joints of cholla cactus hanging from its tail, the desperate beast is looking for grass or mesquite pods but finding only creosote, the keynote shrub of the Southwest. A wispy bush with little shiny leaves as tasty and nutritious as tar tipped in turpentine, the creosote is a chemical bomb, and it's left alone.

A cow would be better off following me forty-three miles to the Gila River. With a watershed reaching into the conifer forests of Arizona, Mexico, and New Mexico, the Gila was the only perennial stream to cross this desert and reach the Colorado. That was before the canals took its water to feed the fields of dense green. Some are alfalfa, but most are cotton, being worked by green John Deere 7455 Cotton Strippers that cost over a hundred grand each. The machines steer themselves with guidance systems that follow the laser-leveled furrows. The driver's job is to turn it around at the end of the field.

I've never seen farms quite like these, all mechanics and drivers and a pilot who graciously pulls up his crop duster before its wing nozzles lay a shroud of pesticide over me. Like pennies that only a child would stoop to pick up, cotton bolls in drifts line the roadside. The air itself is cottony, plumped with moisture from the fields. The canals are filled by pumps that are run by power lines heading north to the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant. It's the most powerful nuclear facility in the United States, conspicuously sited on a creosote plain above the Gila River valley. Before I even contemplate a photo, a young guard behind the chain-link fence says, “Don't be taking no pictures. Not after the terrorists.”

His name is Walter. His badge says, “Unarmed Security Guard,” which seems an admission of vulnerability well beyond the call of honesty. If I
were hired on I might have to wear a badge that says, “Ticklish Security Guard.”

“Palo Verde is a no-fly zone,” says Walter. A pair of fighter jets shriek overhead. “Except for the F-16s.”

Only a mile north is downtown Wintersburg. It's a general store next to a large siren atop a pole. A placard reads:
What You Should Do In Case of An Emergency
. But everyone knows: if Palo Verde blows, lick your finger to test the wind, and flee upwind.

The wind is out of the southwest, at my side as I turn northwest and cross Interstate 10. On the bridge I chug the orange juice I picked up at Wintersburg and take a five-minute census of American interstate traffic. The result: fifty-two big trucks, thirty-six pickups/SUVs/vans, and twenty-four cars.

Satisfied, I take Salome Road, climbing by degrees out of the creosote and into the cactus hills. This is the old, pre-interstate route, ignored by most drivers. The greasy rumble of diesel trucks falls behind. When I'm twenty miles down the road, the sun drops behind the mountains, turning them into silhouettes like two-dimensional cutouts.

I find a track into the desert, carefully picking my way between platoons of chest-high cholla. Each is so densely spined it appears to be covered with fur, which is why some call it the teddy-bear cholla. In form it is a tussle of limbs and joints assembled with less-than-usual care, for the cholla has every intention of falling apart. Each knuckle that drops to the ground is a ticket to a new home, capable of rooting and starting anew. Gravity alone is the usual transport, but most hikers sooner or later look down to discover a clump clinging to their cuff or calf, which it seemingly leaped onto without invitation. Hence its other name: the jumping cholla. Each spine is invisibly but viciously barbed, so removal of the offending piece requires special care. Sometimes this means pliers. Always it means a vocabulary typically not used in the presence of teddy bears.

I scare off four cows—miserable scrub cattle eking by on mesquite pods and luck—with a yell, and claim as my own a smooth pavement of little stones fitted like puzzle pieces. The only big stone is actually a tortoise. Step by step it lugs its house of bone across the pavement, while chewing
a leaf with the slowest mouth in the west. The moment it spots me it halts and withdraws into its shell.

The evening, the night, the sunrise: not a breeze, not a sound. In the stillness of the first light I sit up and see that the tortoise is still waiting.

 

“THAT'S A VERY BIG BEAR,” says the bald man with a goatee. We're seated over eggs and hash browns at the breakfast counter at the Salome Café, staring at a velvet painting of a muscle-man in a feathered headdress. He clutches a rifle, poised to take action against the mythical desert grizzly. Perhaps it is a trick of perspective, but the bear appears to be an easy hundred feet tall.

The bear is a joke. So is the sign by the door, “Coffee Boiling Hot.” The town of Salome is a joke, but that may be as its founder intended. His name was Dick Wick Hall, and in 1906 he bought a piece of land along the dirt road from Phoenix to Los Angeles. He liked the place and loved the desert, and his genius was in realizing that others didn't. Hall put up signs: “Smile. You Don't Have to Stay Here But We Do.” He mimeographed a fake newspaper, the
Salome Sun.
By 1925 it was a nationally syndicated column, carried by twenty-eight newspapers. You can still buy the collected columns, so I do, and read about his pet rattlesnake, Lizzie.

A framed article in the café mentions Hall's “untimely death” at age forty-nine but doesn't explain how. “They say he was shot by an irate husband,” says my waitress, “but they also say that that's what Hall said.”

Another joke. I ride off, to ask around. Salome is mostly an aluminum village of mobile homes, gleaming like mica under an enthusiastic sun. The lady at Outback Realty doesn't know how Hall died. She sends me down the road to a shop brimming with a hundred variations on Hall's favorite
fiction: the frog who hopped around the desert in asbestos sandals, never finding water. I buy a frog postcard and a frog Styrofoam beer cooler, and ask the lady behind the register how the frog sales are going.

“To tell the truth, I'm not a frog sort of person. I felt an obligation to the town and Dick Hall.”

She spies my bike. “Do you sleep outside?”

Whenever I can.

“What about the scorpions?”

I give her Mr. Hall's line: A scorpion is just a lobster who has lived in Arizona a long time.

She's heard it before. “Yes, but aren't they attracted to heat?”

No, ma'am, that's the rattlesnake. But even snakes aren't attracted to huge warm things like people—the snake can't eat them, and the huge warm thing might kill the snake. As for scorpions, they like places to hide. Like tents.

I'm not sure she believes me after I quoted Hall. But I believe her when she tells me that Dick Hall died of an infection after a pulled tooth.

Such an unfunny way to go.

Around forty miles west of Salome, over a low pass of crumbling granite and across a creosote flat, I find a dirt track leading toward the Plomosa Mountains. It's late, no longer hot, with cirrus whipping high above. The road climbs and descends the gentle swells of the nude, muscular hills. The crests are stony pavements. The troughs are veined with palo verde and ironwood along the dry watercourses called arroyos.

As is my nature, I favor the low point over the high, choosing for my camp a comfortable arroyo, six feet across. The sand is streaked with black magnetite, iron-rich grains laid down by the last flush of water. A sweep of my hand readies the sand for the ground cloth, inflatable pad, and sleeping bag. Off with the shoes and out with the sandwich and beer I picked up in town, and now I'm ready to read Dick Hall's columns from the
Salome Sun
. “Out here in the Desert,” he wrote in his maddening capital letters, “you Don't Need Much—and You Don't Get Much either—and after a while you get so as you Don't Want Much—and when you get that way there ain't Much Use in going somewhere else to starve to Death . . . so we stay here.”
Content in my fold in the landscape, I lie back as the sunset throws colors all around, as if I am at the center of something.

 

FIRST LIGHT finds me lazing about camp. My duties are few: admire the peachy sunrise, check my shoes for scorpions (none), and scribble a few notes.

The dune bursage,
Ambrosia dumosa
, is a shin-high dome of twigs with pale ghost-green leaves. Like the creosote, the dune bursage wears no thorns; unlike the creosote, its leaves are edible. To be vulnerable and tasty seems a curse, yet the dune bursage is more common with every mile closer to Death Valley. Drawn to aridity? Not really. It's simply fond of sands and open space, and is glad as any plant can be for rain.

It's hard to say at first glance whether the ironwood is carefree or tormented. Typically a lopsided shamble, the tree is capable of fifty feet when it gets lucky, but my neighbors here aren't much taller than me. Up close it's clear that many of their limbs are dead, yet still clinging to the trunk. These badges of survival are one of the pleasing differences between plant and animal. You never see a coyote that's a head, torso, and one leg dragging around three dead limbs, but an ironwood is often three-quarters dead, with limbs polished by sun and sand.

Like many desert plants that spend much of their lives waiting for rain, the ironwood can live several hundred years. The oldest known is reckoned to have put down its roots around eight hundred years ago. In terms of current events, that's when the holy war between the Crusaders and the Muslims heated up, and the unstoppable Kurd, Saladin, declared jihad and took back Jerusalem.

Time passes, and the ironwood soldiers on. To those unfamiliar with the local seasons, its habits are baffling. It drops its leaves in April, and it refuses to unveil its pastel purple flowers until the thermometer climbs to 100. It's all about water, naturally. Over most of the ironwood's range, the
seed pods split open just in time for the summer storms. In the Sonoran Desert, the summer storms are the ecological equivalent of spring. Every living thing struggles through the rainless months of May and June, counting on the bulge of heat over the drylands to suck in moisture from the Gulfs of Mexico and California. The storms erupt in July, flooding the arroyos that otherwise make the finest camps.

Despite the tinge of moisture in the air today, I don't expect rain—October is typically too late for a storm. Besides, the rains rarely penetrate west to the Colorado River, which happens to be today's destination.

The wind is a gift this morning. Back on the highway, the bike picks up speed until the breeze and I are heading west to the river together, the only sound the whiz of my tires on the pavement. The road drops out of the stony desert and slips between sand hills. It's thirty miles to the river, with traffic picking up steadily after the junction with the excessively wide but admirably smooth Highway 95. A pickup with an American flag snapping from its antenna tows a bass boat with swivel stools. A Buick slides by, towing a flatbed with a golf cart wearing a flag sticker on its bumper.

Boating and golfing in the lowest hottest desert since I rolled out of Tucson seems as strange as the ironwood's flowering in June—but this, too, is all about water. At the town of Parker, the Colorado is backed up behind Headgate Rock Dam. The slender green reservoir is called Lake Moovalya on the map, but along the shore of boat ramps and parking lots everyone calls it the Parker Strip. I test the water with a toe. Invitingly cool, yet nobody swims where the drag boats are doing 60 mph.

“This is
the
place—the Strip,” says one Richard, of ample muscles. “They just motor down, turn around, come back, and go in circles all day.”

He's here from California with Cassie and a pair of 951cc Bombardier Jet Skis on a trailer behind a glossy beetle-black Ford Explorer. Cassie, with a well-tanned hide and suspiciously springy breasts, sees me scribble a note. “Just don't say we're yuppies.”

I promise. Instead I'll say they're a friendly couple with an expensive habit ($8,000 per machine), looking for water to play in. “The Pacific,” says Cassie, “is awfully cold.”

I pick up a sixteen-ounce Bud and a bag of pretzels at one of perhaps
fifty liquor stores and bars, then try for a slice of pizza at a takeout. They've none ready to go, so I pick up a cheeseburger at the “country kitchen” next door, stash the lot in my handlebar bag, and confront the first steep hill of the trip.

Fifteen miles upriver of the Headgate Dam, the land humps up in a ridge of dark rock perpendicular to the Colorado. The river long ago cut a canyon through the rock. Somewhat later, in the 1930s, Parker Dam was built in the canyon, and the forty-five miles of river above the dam became Lake Havasu.

It's a short but stiff climb over the ridge. At the summit is a car with a young woman sitting on the trunk lid. She's from the pizza joint, and she bears a gift: a fresh slice on a paper plate topped with aluminum foil.

“We thought you might still like a piece of pizza.”

I even have a relatively quiet place to eat, but perhaps that's because the boats of Havasu are barred from approaching the lakeside entrance to the Buckskin Tunnel. Bored through 6.8 miles of Precambrian granites and more youthful lavas, it's not for vehicles but for water. All I can see of the tunnel is what looks like a swimming pool opening onto the lake. Only the web of power lines and the thrum of electricity betray a thirst that can hardly be understood by a man who's been rationing a gallon a day.