I鈥檓 in the Mojave Preserve, 150 miles south of Las Vegas, when I realize I haven鈥檛 packed food or water in the car. I don鈥檛 sweat it. Yesterday, the tortoise-in-residence at Red Rock Canyon emerged from brumation, the reptilian form of hibernation. I had worried him dead, as was often the case with the various pet tortoises that lived in our garden when I was a girl. But today, Mojave Max emerged blinking into the Southwest sun, and Governor Jerry Brown declared the California drought over. Today, there is snow on the Sierra Nevada and Mount Charleston and Mount Baldy. Today, a super bloom is visible from space, the second massive bloom in as many years.
The Bureau of Land Management has asked citizen botanists to on Twitter, and the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants has set up a聽, updated weekly and narrated by a cast member of Hill Street Blues. Southern Californians in particular are freaking out, overdue for good news. They flock to the desert to walk or motor among the blossoms, at least one miles and miles of goldenrod and lavender with her drone.
My ostensible assignment is to witness this. Purple sand verbena is bursting across Anzo-Borrego, so are primrose, the reliable yellow brittlebrush, the shy desert lily, the uncommon notch-leaved phacelia. But I won鈥檛 make it to Anzo-Borrego. I鈥檒l miss the phacelia and the lily. I am in the Mojave, a range or two away from the super bloom, practicing behaving as if not everything were mine for the taking. I am trying to be better than my programming, to do no harm among the common desert dandelions and the Joshua trees, which convince me to stay.
Is there a more offbeat omen of a tree than the Joshua? Karen Russell that it looks 鈥渓ike the world鈥檚 first draft of a tree.鈥 And it is not even a tree but a giant strain of yucca! Yucca brevifolia, a member of the agave family. That explains it. My guidebook says the flowers 鈥渉ave an amazing sex life,鈥 which I guess makes me a voyeur of the miniature erotic sublime, peeping up at creamy pyramids of glistening plum-colored pods, some already peeled back and releasing buttercups as invitations to the pronuba yucca moth, which will lay her eggs inside and pollenate the Joshua on the way out. The moth鈥檚 larvae will hatch hungry in the tree鈥檚 small green ovaries, where they will eat some but not all of the Joshua鈥檚 fertilized seeds. The tines of the Joshua tree are even sharper than they look. John C. Fr茅mont, the 19th-century explorer of the American West, called them 鈥渞epulsive.鈥 He would know. For my part, I am white in the American West, trying to resist my pioneer entitlement, trying not to cash in my bloody inheritance, trying to appreciate things without devouring them, trying to tread lightly in a land I want to call mine.
John C. Fr茅mont is dust and so am I, here among the Joshuas and the Mojave mound cactuses aflame with garish, velvety red flowers across their spiny hemispheres, the beavertail cactus with mauve polyps dotted along their crests, unfurling in fuchsia, the apricot desert mallow peachy with green-gray leaves that seem coated in bentonite clay, the red-orange phalanges of desert paintbrush like sparklers alight. Prickly poppy begs picking and then punishes with hairy needles, a kind of fiberglass. Jimsonweed, a Mexican nightshade, blooms wide along the sandy shoulder of the highway. For us, we might be forgiven for thinking, until its stink corrects.
