Chapter 9

We didn't ride a great deal that day. We hadn't brought anything to eat, and just one canteen apiece, though we didn't expect to use that water – I knew where to find fresh, cold, pure water without going too far. There's water all under the desert; it's just on the surface that it's dry. How true it is I don't know, since I've never drilled a well, but I heard growing up that you can find water anywhere in the desert just one or two hundred feet down. That's too far down to nurture vegetation – even the plants with long taproots can't go down that far – but it's sure nice for people, just so long as they don't put in too many wells. In the desert you don't recharge an aquifer in a hurry, so you'd better not drain it.

We none of us wanted to get saddle sore our first day in the valley, so we took it easy. It was easiest on me, as it always is, for my year of working for the ranch had taught me plenty about riding a horse. But Cecelia had only started riding after we got married, and Darlia, though she's been riding nearly her whole life, only does it during our month in the desert. No, that's not quite true. Whenever she goes up to the rez, whether by herself or with us, she rides, for there are horses all over the place up there and my brother Memphis has begun teaching her – whenever she's there – about traditional Lahtkwa culture, which includes riding. There are several family names in the tribe involving horses – I can think offhand of Rider, Horsetail, Spotted Horse, and Longhorse, and probably could come up with others if I worked at it. But Darlia's young and it's not as easy for her to sit a saddle as it is for me, or for the Indians who ride up on the rez.

We'd gotten to the ranch fairly early, but in August fairly early is still pretty warm. We didn't see much life flitting about. There was the occasional lizard, darting from a bush near us to one farther away, and once we saw a road runner, keeping pace about 15 feet to the left before he got bored with our slow progress and darted off. There was one buzzard, far off to the west, circling slowly, but he was alone, and so I knew that he was just waiting, not watching anything in particular. It's amazing how the buzzards gather from out of nowhere when something dies in the desert. They've got a good sense of smell, or good eyesight, or ESP, or something that allows them to congregate in numbers that you'd swear the entire desert couldn't support.

Animal life we saw almost nothing of, but the vegetation was all around us. Few deserts are all sand. The largest area of sand dunes in the world – the Arabic word is erg – is the Empty Quarter on the Arabian Peninsula, the Rub' al Khali, but it's only part of the peninsula. Most of the Sahara Desert is gravel and dirt, and the same is true of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. The Gobi Desert, as far as I've ever learned, has no sand dunes at all. Antarctica is the largest desert in the world – for all its sheath of ice miles thick, it qualifies as a desert by either of the two standard tests. That continent receives less than 10 inches of precipitation a year, and its rate of evaporation exceeds the rate of precipitation. It's a cold, ice-cloaked desert, but it's one of the driest places on earth.

The Mojave Desert likewise is mostly rock and gravel and dirt. There are areas of dunes – the Kelso Dunes cover a pretty large area between the Providence and Granite Mountains – but mostly it's rocky ground. And on that ground grows a sometimes profuse assortment of plant life. In Lanfair Valley the most striking plant is the Joshua tree. Mormon pioneers named this odd tree, thinking that it was Joshua who held his arms up during the fight with the Amalekites. It was actually Moses who held his hands up, while Joshua led the army on the plain below. Whatever the right and wrong of the allusion, Joshua trees are about the strangest plants you'll ever find in the United States. They twist and writhe, and they grow spikes for leaves, and when the spikes die they don't immediately fall off, but flatten downward and clothe the trunk in a gray covering that looks something like coarse fur over bark that resembles an elephant's wrinkled hide.

Along with the Joshua trees there are greasewood, which a lot of people call creosote bush; and catclaw, which if you get caught in it will explain for itself why it has that name; and ironwood, which when you try to chop it with an ax lives up to its name; and all sorts of cactus – cholla, hedgehog, barrel, old man, fishhook ... And when it's a wet spring you even get grasses blooming, and poppies, and other things you'd never expect to see in a desert.

The only flowers you can count on, though, are those of the cacti. They don't need a lot of water to bloom – people who put a cactus in their yard or in a pot sometimes drown it, because cacti can't take too much water – and so they bloom every year, though not every individual cactus will. And cactus flowers are waxy, to retain moister, and so they seem to glow in the sunlight, as though God had put His own glory within them. I can live without daffodils and irises and lilacs and forsythia and whatnot, but I will always love the sight of a cactus blossom in the hot desert sun.

As we rode Darlia chattered away, pointing out different plants, cutting from side to side to see things that interested her, once vaulting down from the saddle to pick up a pretty rock. She's taller than most girls her age, and so she was able by jumping and grabbing the horn to haul herself back into the saddle – and it didn't hurt that hers wasn't a big horse. I knew better than to offer to help; she'll accept help without shame when she needs it, but if she can do a thing for herself she wants to. She's going to be a self-reliant woman when she grows up. And it hit me then that in another eight years she would be grown, and perhaps ready to move out, though as far as I'm concerned she can live in our house forever. I want her to be independent, able to take care of herself, but if she chooses to do that with Cecelia and me, it won't hurt my feelings at all.

Cecelia and I rode close together, my left hand to her right, as we do when we walk. We even held hands across the gap between us a time or two, though only briefly; what's easy afoot becomes a bit more difficult when you're in the middle of a horse and dodging brush. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, drinking in the warmth of the sun. She still had her sleeves buttoned, the dry heat preventing the sticky discomfort that a humid climate uses to drive people out of their clothes, but the collar was open, and because I was slightly ahead of her just then I could see the glint of her gold necklace at her throat. "You're gonna get a good tan if you ain't careful, C," I told her.