I fell in love at first sight. It was my first American road trip, driving west in a car full of guys and beer cans and laughter, and we drove all night, and the dawn came up in the desert of far-west Texas. “Stop the car!” I yelled. The trees were gone, the horizons had leapt out and something extraordinary had happened to the sky. It had lifted itself up and spread itself out and become inconceivably bigger and more beautiful than any sky I had ever seen. I stood there on the roadside, turning slow circles, utterly infatuated by this immense new world.
Some people from temperate climates, accustomed to their trees, fields, streams, gardens and lawns, equating natural beauty with the colour green, look at the desert and see a barren waste. There’s nothing out there, they say. The Grand Canyon is just a big hole in the ground. Others find the desert unsettling and disturbing – those vast inhuman spaces, utterly indifferent to human life and human time. Forests and woodlands are kinder, gentler, prettier places. The beach is soothing and relaxing. Mountains are dramatic and majestic. So what is it that deserts have, apart from limited rainfall, long horizons and what first appears to be a shocking scarcity of living things?
Mystery is the best way I can describe it, the closest I can come to that austere, primordial, inscrutable quality that deserts have. The land is stripped down to its geology. The sky dominates the field of vision. It should surprise no one that desert-born religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, found one, all-powerful god in the sky, and that forest tribes worshipped the life-giving earth and the spirits in the trees.
After the infatuation came the courtship. I scrabbled together enough money and time to spend two months driving around the American desert, visiting national parks and monuments, and I soon discovered that there were several very different deserts. Southern Arizona is cactus country, and its signature plant is the giant saguaro, pronounced “sah-wah-ro”. The biggest ones are 50ft high with multiple arms, and live to be more than 200 years old. They stand as lone sentinels on desert plains or cluster in great armies on the lower slopes of the mountains, and the wind makes an eerie hissing noise when it blows through their needles.
West Texas and southern New Mexico lie within the Chihuahuan desert. I would love to tell you that it was named after the packs of small, obstreperous dogs that run wild there, but Chihuahua is the Mexican state to the south and the desert pays no attention to the international border. It’s a higher, cooler, drier desert with icy winds in winter. Its plants stay lower to the ground except for the yuccas and Spanish bayonets, which grow tall, woody stems that were used as lances by the Apaches and Comanches.
All life in the American deserts is sustained by the dramatic summer thunderstorms, but the biggest, wildest storms of all happen in West Texas, and the most beautiful sunsets in New Mexico. The light there has a golden quality, and the sky is so big that you can sometimes see four separate thunderstorms at once, each divided by patches of sunshine and forming its own rainbow.
California and Nevada share the Mojave, the lowest, driest, hottest American desert. This is where the Joshua trees grow; tall, spiky, mad-looking plants named after an Old Testament prophet. This is the home of Death Valley, the second hottest place in the world (after El Azizia, Libya), dry lake beds, salt flats, mountains that look like iron and the ethereal Kelso Sand Dunes, which moan and hum as the sand slides down the lee of their crests, and sometimes make booming noises when you slide down them on your bare heels.
