I suppose I was due for a walk down memory lane. But I hadn't anticipated a two-month long trek. When I got a call asking if I wanted to take one of the California assignments they were having a hard time filling, I cringed; I had no intention of taking another assignment until next year. I had just started my vegetable garden, now protected by a proper deer fence and fitted with planter boxes which the young vegetables were clearly loving already. I was enjoying mornings with my cats and evenings with Marc. We were starting to let the horses out again, after almost nine months of being on stable arrest due to Dante's failing ligaments.
But when the caller mentioned China Lake as being among the difficult-to-fill assignments, with a time frame that got me home just as Marc started teaching again, I took only a day, after consulting with Marc, to decide.
"You'll take what?" the scheduler said when I called her back. She had assumed I wanted San Luis Obispo. It is, after all, what any normal person would want for an assignment. But besides the fact that it was a longer assignment, and China Lake was only two months, I was suddenly overtaken by an eerie sense that my old home base was calling me, and by a strange delusion that the Mojave Desert in June, July and August was just the treat my soul needed.
Marc and I had pretty much made up our minds we weren't going to take our planned, week-long vacation -- a trip on Amtrak to Colorado. We would have stayed in Estes Park and done some hiking and painting. But Marc was starting to get nervous about leaving the cats and the horses, we were having a hard time finding a housesitter, and there's always the money issue.
So instead of fleeing flames in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I'm facing fiery gusts of desert wind at Ridgecrest, California.
There is something about the Mojave Desert. There are those who look out across the vastness--glaringly pale sand dotted with tumbleweed and creosote bushes--and see nothing. Others see opportunity -- a cistern here, an irrigation system there, and voila! A circular field of alfalfa, a housing development, a weapons testing range. Some have an affinity with the austerity of the desert, or are in awe of the stark contours of mountain ranges and rock outcroppings, or are fascinated by the history of the Shoshoni populations who decorated the Coso range with petroglyphs. That's all well and good. My relationship with the lands that lie within Indian Wells Valley is less noble or ambitious.
This is where I made my first friend, where I started school, where I framed out ambiguous relationships with my sister and brother, where I saw my first fireworks while trembling with fear on the roof of our prefab duplex, where I learned to ride a bike, swim, bowl, and read. Where I first went horseback riding. Where I hiked with a friend up B Mountain. Where I had my first boyfriend, and then, after he broke up with me, my second. Where I learned to square dance, went with my brother to stamp collectors' meetings, and played Murder-in-the-Dark with him and his friends on hot summer evenings.
This was my foundation. So when I drove through the sentry gate, past the school which was built around the time I entered 2nd grade, up the road where two of the old duplexes still remain, to the museum housed in what used to be the officers' club--still saturated with the smell of old cigarette smoke--where I would sit in the bar drinking Shirley Temples while my parents drank Manhattans, I understood why I had come back. This odd community, born of war in the middle of virtually uninhabitable terrain, no doubt a shock to my mother's upstate New York sensibilities and a consort serving my father's lust for adventure, was my fundamental reality. I was formed from this place, and have carried its outline with me wherever I've gone. It isn't just a desert. When I got out of my car at the Chinese fast food restaurant which now sits next to the old Bank of America building and behind the house I'm convinced was ours, and stood in the searing heat looking down the gully toward the dry lake bed where we would walk, barefoot, to see the brine shrimp when it started flooding from winter rains, I recognized this as the only place that has ever truly been my home town.
NOTS, China Lake, California
1946-1953
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| A view of B Mountain, China Lake, 2012 |
