cynthia23 wrote:Yikes, Wildhorse! A thoroughly horrifying read. The most disquieting to me is the murder of the young man last seen in Baker. Some of those ramshackle tiny Mojave towns like Johannesburg are really, really creepy--like Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre creepy. You feel stopping in them would be very unwise.
I sometimes wonder how the indigenous Chemehuevi/Mohave people kept their sanity. Their population density even pre-contact was very low--a few thousand people scattered across thousands of empty miles of desert. No roads, no police, no hospitals, no grocery stores. Just a silent, empty, mostly waterless desert filled with sharp, spiny, plants and venomous or predatory animals and the tiny band of your relatives. I know it was the world they were born into, the only world they knew, but still ... some of their petroglyphic art is very disturbing and seems to reflect a deep sense of terror.
I love how different two people's perception of the same thing can be!
I love the desert. I love the desolation, the glacial indifference to my own harried existence. In such a dry climate, things grow slowly and change slowly, and I love it. Only when I leave roads, police, hospitals, and stores behind do I feel my core slowly starting to unwind. Otherwise I'm in a constant state of tension, ready to defend myself against those who are indifferent to me and would see me suffer or die to further their own ends. Not necessarily criminal elements, even. Every day at work I have to fight for my slice of the pie, with people I like as colleagues, every night I have to read about powerful people wanting to make decisions that might hurt me.
In the desert every spike, every spine is deliberate. It cost a plant energy to grow this defense mechanism, and now it is before me - stark, elegant, timeless. All life wants to live - and in the desert, where life is sparse and hardened, the thought that I need to take life - plant or animal - to sustain my own takes on a meaningful weight.
The desert holds no terror for me - only calm, stillness, relaxation, an opportunity to look at myself and what is around me, and try to find the meaning behind what I am. When I stop walking, and silence is all around me - no noise, my own footsteps silenced, no sign of life at all ... that is when I can truly start relaxing. None of the venomous animals around me are predatory. If I step on a snake it might bite me but unless I threaten it, it will leave me be. The predators in the desert are not large enough to harm me, as long as I am healthy. A stray mountain lion may consider me a tasty treat, but I am more at risk in an urban or suburban environment than I am at risk to fall prey to a mountain lion in the desert.
Seeking out petroglyphs and pictographs occupy a lot of the spare time I have. Once or twice, I have come across sites that I found disturbing, but most of the time, I have found only a peaceful melancholy, or a deep sense of history and connectedness, at the sites I have visited. Maybe I haven't visited enough sites in the Mojave yet, but so far I have found them to be peaceful. They are often vibrant, disorienting even, with elements overlaid on each other and meandering over the varnished desert rock, but to me that embodies the energy a hallucination or other vision quest might bring, not necessarily the environment the person making the petroglyphs found themselves in.
Thinking back, the most disturbing sites I've visited were all at elevation in the Sierra. One site had an element painted in a pigment that was disturbingly close in color to congealing blood. Another had some anthropomorphic figures appearing to raise out of the ground, and had a really unsettling feel to it.
Now ... small desert towns like Johannesburg? Yeah, I pass them by. But it is because of the human element. These little desert towns are seams between modern civilization and the wilderness, and they do collect all kinds of people.