I was fifteen, and it was love at first sight of the desert. Unlike the industrial waters of the Monongahela flowing past the Western Pennsylvania mill town where I grew up, the rivers of the Desert Southwest ran green and wild. The canyon walls wept waterfalls, and maidenhair ferns grew out of the red sandstone cliffs amidst hanging gardens of red, yellow, and blue columbine. At night, silver deer walked out of tall silver grass and down to the rivers of moonlight. But it was in Zion Canyon when I looked up at the great white walls with their crimson stains that I first thought, yes, you can get blood from a stone. The poet in me stirred, and I began to believe in a kind of possibility that never existed for me in the classroom.
When finally I moved to the desert as a teacher in 1981, I was thirty-nine. Las Vegas was still just a gaudy strip down the middle of the valley. And every day after work, I would ride my bike out into the wide-open space of the desert. This space was filled with a stillness that absorbed all the bureaucratic absurdities that threatened to define my day. In the desert, I experienced a heat like no human passion I’d ever known. The danger was exquisite and immense as the bone-dry air wanted every bit of me, every nuance of flesh, every ounce of sweat, every tear, every intimacy of mind. It was a desire transcending all illusion. And there was no mercy so sweet as the sweet sage heat that filled the desert after a rain. What the desert gave to me, I aspired to give through my teaching.
The same year I won my big teaching award, developers began turning the desert into America’s fastest sprawling city.
With the mob bosses and one-armed bandits gone, corporate bosses had moved in with the intent to remodel the desert into mega resorts and amusement-park casinos. By the nineties, the desert had disappeared under such tourist attractions as an eight-acre lake with dancing waters, a lagoon with daily battles between full-sized pirate ships, and a digital buffalo stampede across a ninety-foot-high canopy the length of five football fields.
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Lured by the promise of fun in the sun, thousands of new residents were pouring into the valley every month with their gated communities, golf courses, hot tubs, and swimming pools. Food, traffic, coffee, malls, and shopping plazas were everywhere. The sweet sage heat was overcome by an orangish-brown smog that lay over the valley like a lethargic and acrid god.
Like one bearing witness, I watched as the big yellow machines stripped the desert from itself and dump trucks carried off acre after acre of those bristly little desert plants. I loved them—the creosote and the sagebrush, the prickly pear, the silver cholla and the teddy bear, the yucca, and the cat claw. They’d taught themselves over the millennia to take the heat beyond all water but had failed to anticipate the developers from hell.
By 1998, the only patch of desert within jogging or biking distance of my apartment was the corner lot at the end of my block where the neighborhood turned into a six-lane thoroughfare lined with shopping plazas and convenience stores.
Then one night I awoke to the beep beep beep of the big yellow machines. In no time, the last patch of desert had been stripped and graded for yet another gas station and mini mart—the fourth such combo of convenience within sight of that corner.
By the summer of 1998, the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning was the unyielding devotion of my cats. All my cats wanted of me was that I fill their bowls every morning and scoop out their litter at night. That’s all I had left to give.
The morning after a big silver tanker truck filled the pumps at the new gas station, I was on the way to my therapist when a guy in a hard hat motioned my pickup to a stop to make way for a flatbed truck rounding the corner. Looming before me was the embodiment of everything conspiring to crush my spirit.
Next: “The Pink Monkey”
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