Chapter 24

Soon after that we emerged from the canyon, on the south side of the Vontrigger Hills – although they curve around east of the canyon, until they're running north and south. We headed over that way, toward a place I couldn't see from where we were but which I knew well. We had left Joshua trees behind in Lanfair Valley, but this part of Fenner Valley was thick with cholla and greasewood, the cholla especially forming thickets that we had to walk around. There would be half a dozen cacti growing together, old and thick at the base, littering the ground around them with cholla balls that could go right through boot leather. We stepped carefully around the thickets, and everywhere else; cholla spines won't kill you, but they hurt worse than any other cactus I've ever gotten stuck by.

The ground was cut up with gullies, where water ran off of the hills. They angled southwest, away from the high ground. Off to the west, on the other side of road, there was a big gully, the largest water course I've ever seen that didn't have a river flowing in it. It was the main drainage of the Fenner Valley, or at least this part of it, and come the flash floods it must be a sight. It's got banks – bluffs, really – 10 feet high or so, and a sandy bottom 50 yards wide perhaps. I've intended, since I first found it in my early teens, to find its source and then follow it to the end, and I've never done it. Robert Burns was right when he said that "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley."

We tramped over hill and dale – though the gullies probably weren't any sort of real dales – drawing closer to the other side of the Vontrigger Hills' curve. As we got closer we got higher, each rise a bit taller than the one before, and eventually arrived at a falling down old place. As far as I know no one's lived there since the 1970s, when John Fraze's wife died, and he moved to Goffs. He was a real desert rat, having lived there I don't know how many years, and strong as a horse. I've seen him lift one end of a telephone pole by himself, when it took two people, man and teenage boy, to lift the other end – and the other man no wimp either. No doubt he was dead now, though I'd never heard anything of it. I'd left the desert in 86 and not come back for 10 years, and in that time Fraze, who hadn't been young, had vanished, whether to a graveyard or a nursing home or somewhere else I never knew.

From there we turned almost due west. We were making a sort of traditional walk, one that we take most times we come south through the canyon. Down the slope we went, though it was again a slope cut with gullies. The cholla thickets thinned out as we came down off the lower slopes of the hills, and greasewood became more predominant; further south, toward Goffs, it's the main vegetation. Some people call it creosote bush, but I've never noticed anything about it that reminds me of creosote, which has a very distinctive smell – they use it as a preservative for the telephone poles that march up north from Goffs.

Eventually we came to what remained of a clearing 100 yards or so from the road. When I was eight or nine years old a family had moved into a trailer house right here. They'd come from Washington, not far from where my brother lives in fact, and lived at the time, though the boys had all been born in LA. The oldest boy was a desert rat in his blood, which is where the true desert rat lives; you can't make someone into a desert rat. They've got to be born that way. I remember that he cried when they moved back to Washington in 77. We'd gone to school together, though he was Memphis' age, five years older than me, and I'd been, I think, his closest friend. I never knew what happened to him after that, for our family stayed in our Lanfair Valley isolation.

Now the clearing was empty, the trailer house years gone, and the grass and brush were continuing their slow reclamation of the ground. Somewhere underneath the coarse soil there was a water tank and a septic tank, both no doubt totally dry by now. I couldn't even see where the leach line had once discharged its contents, creating a slightly greener zone of growth.

We followed the driveway, now almost obliterated by wind and years and encroaching growth, out to the road, and turned north. Up that way we'd pass the Hogeyboom and refill our canteens, and perhaps stop for a snack. And if I judged from Darlia's expression, she was going to ask to go swimming, for the cattle tanks there are more than big enough to serve as swimming pools for her. What little swimming I know I learned in cattle tanks, among them the tanks at the Hogeyboom, but Darlia's good a swimmer as Cecelia, who though she seldom relaxes enough to put on a suit can swim like a fish – or, considering how thin she is, like an eel.

And then past the Hogeyboom there'd be Hackberry Pass, with its cattle guard where the pavement ends, and then on the other side of the pass the Blazer, waiting for us. We could walk all the way back to camp without much of a problem, though Darlia would be mighty tired when we got there, but it was nice to know we had transportation just a mile or two away. I took Cecelia's hand, and she leaned her head against my shoulder, seeming somehow smaller than she really is. And I couldn't think of any way to make the day better.