I once was hitchhiking in the Sonoran Desert, and after several luckless hours got a ride in an old rattletrap Dodge Powerwagon. The driver was in his late fifties or early sixties, with a deeply tanned, leathery skin, wire-rimmed glasses, tousled gray hair, and dressed in dusty khakis. He'd been down in the Pinacate Desert of Mexico, which is as dry and desolate as almost any place in the world. We talked for a while about landscapes of the Southwest and I mentioned that I liked the country around Flagstaff, with its sheltering expanse of ponderosa pines. The driver glanced over at me, shook his head in dismay, and said, "All those trees; they make a man feel like he's in jail." At the time I did not quite understand what he meant - but after spending so much time in the Mojave, Great Basin, and Sonoran deserts, I now do. . . . It's the seduction of what the Australian novelist David Malouf described as "A high, wide emptiness that drew you into an opening distance in yourself, in which the questions that posed themselves had no easy sociable answer. . ."
My first true encounters with desert country occurred during my undergraduate years at Prescott College in Arizona. I worked summer field jobs in the Verde Valley area, hiked and rafted the Grand Canyon, explored some of the Sonoran Desert and Colorado Plateau country. Later, my first "real" field biologist's job took me to Death Valley National Monument, where I studied feral burros for the National Park Service. It was here that I came to fully understand the seduction and power of the desert, and the meaning of these lines from Octavio Paz's poem, "Native Stone": Close your eyes and hear the song of light Noon takes shelter in your inner ear. Close your eyes and open them: There is nobody not even yourself. Whatever is not stone is light.
After Death Valley, my life took me mostly away from the desert, except for short, sporadic visits scattered across the years. But in 2010 I returned to the Death Valley region and began working on the project that would eventually result in Relicts of a Beautiful Sea. I so very feel fortunate to have rediscovered the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, their heat and light and space, their plants and animals, their emptiness.