I am back from my first week of surveying in the desert. The town of Barstow wasn't the terrible sucking void of rural depravity that I had been imagining--but that may be because I only ventured out from my hotel room on one evening out of the four we were there. We arrived rather late on Sunday night and then I had a terrible time trying to sleep--the last time I looked at my clock it was about 1:20 a.m., and I had to get up at 5:45 in the morning. After a full day of stomping around on desert pavement on less than four hours of sleep I wasn't up to going out for dinner with my coworkers at all and hibernated in my hotel room. I was in bed before 9 o'clock. The next night we all piled into the two company vehicles and went to the local pizza place, which was nicer than we expected. But of course, they had nothing on tap that a beer snob like myself would consider paying to drink. However, to make up for this terrible affront to consumers of quality alcohol, they did serve an appetizer called Mafia Bread. I forgot to have some.
I do love working out of town sometimes. It gets tiring being away from home if you have been doing it for months on end, but in small doses it's a nice departure from the responsibilities of daily life. I had no chores to do, no pressing issues or business to take care of other than loafing in my hotel room and reading a good book. I also tend to eat better for some reason when I'm working in the field: I eat at least one piece of fruit every day and vary my diet beyond the ubiquitous bread and cheese that I subsist on at home. I'm really not sure why I can't sustain this kind of healthy eating behavior when I'm not out of town. Now I'm back to three meals of cold cereal per day, punctuated by the occasional yogurt.
The work itself was as exciting as ever; I am not being sarcastic in the slightest. Even though we found very little of archaeological interest and we were assaulted by gale force winds for three days, I had a great time. The area we are working in is south of Barstow proper by at least 8 to 10 miles, on the west side of the I-15 freeway. By many people's standards, I suppose it isn't pretty. I used to hate the desert myself. I'm sure it stems from my childhood trauma of relocating from the tree- and water-bound realm of New England to the hottest part of central Arizona when I was seven years old. As a child, I found nothing inspiring or beautiful in the denuded landscapes surrounding the Phoenix area. Family excursions to the painted desert were excruciating exercises in boredom, and Hole-in-the-Rock was just a mildly interesting geological phenomenon that barely held my interest before I was distracted by the delicious thrill of fear provided by our substantial new elevation. Even the varied and sometimes bizarre desert wildlife that I found so utterly fascinating and collection-worthy could not alter me from my steadfast opinion that the desert was an ugly, barren waste.
I was twenty-eight years old the first time I ever found beauty in the desert. I was working my first paid archaeological job surveying in Anza Borrego State Park. It was late winter, but springtime for the high desert. Every cactus in sight was covered in multicolored blooms, the ocotillo were in full riot mode, sporting fistfuls of tiny red flowers at the tips of skeletal green fingers, and there was even grass in many places. Grass! I finally began to notice that the landscape was not a barren wasteland at all, even without the flowers and the unexpected greenery. There is a symphony of color and texture to be found in deserts unlike anywhere else.
The desert outside of Barstow may not have the wildly varying topography of Anza Borrego, but the tenacious cacti in all their varied forms and the long, sloping lines undulating up to the horizon are still beautiful in their sparse way. The cacti out here are unlike any I've seen before--they are so thoroughly covered in long, interwoven spines that the cactus itself is almost completely hidden from view within the basket-like encasement of miniature swords. I even found several that had died, and the spines remained locked together in the shape of the original plant even though there was nothing inside anymore--all the cactus flesh had long since wasted away and the spines held nothing but air.
The last few days of our survey were unbelievable from a meteorological standpoint. I had never ever been outside in winds like that before. In the afternoons, we were still bundled up like astronauts even though it wasn't quite that cold, although the mornings were unbearable with the 45-degree temperatures coupled with 60-mph winds. I kid you not. We heard on the last day that there had been gusts up to 100 mph out there, and it certainly felt like it. We had to abandon our survey on some of the hills because the winds were so ferocious at the higher elevations that we were losing our footing on the loose rocks, and it was just too dangerous. Cheryl fell down 4 times, and I lost my balance on countless occasions. Both Cheryl and I did some experimenting and discovered that we could lean our bodies fully into the wind and it held us up. I counted a maximum of 6 seconds on one occasion before the wind finally let go and I started to fall. Up on top of the hill, before we gave up and went down to less treacherous altitudes, we encountered a related phenomenon. There is a cell phone tower at the top of the hill surrounded by a cinder-block wall. We all gathered on the lee side of the wall at one point to escape the wind, and every single one of us had the same experience getting there. Our bodies were so tense and leaning so hard into the wind that when we turned around the wall's corner, the sudden cutting-off of the wind made us all stumble and almost fall over.
That's me on the right, there; this was actually taken on one of the LESS windy days. There isn't much to report from an archaeological standpoint. The area we were surveying this week was mostly disturbed. People have been using the cell tower hill and its vicinity as a shooting range for a good long while. Absolutely everything there is full of bullet holes--even many of the yucca plants are all shot up. People evidently have great fun taking their old computers out to the desert and using them for target practice, along with just about anything else you can think of. We found bowling pins, bowling balls, a plastic human skeleton (nearly life size), numerous propane tanks, black light pot posters, and my favorite, a statistics textbook, all blasted apart and riddled with holes. Have something around the house you don't use anymore, doesn't work, or you just want out of your life? Don't sell it on ebay or take it to a thrift store--take it out to the desert and shoot the bejeezus out of it instead! K told me that the hill was used by the military for target practice before the general public discovered it, and it is now called Lead Hill. Apparently, there is so much lead from the spent ammunition that it is now leaching into the water table.
We found very little cultural evidence--only a few very sparse rock rings that may have been hearths at one point. We did see several desert tortoises, however. That truly made my week. I've only seen a tortoise one time before in the wild. We found a total of 4 or 5 between the two survey teams. Two of the tortoises were snug in their burrows, but the others were out an about, roaming their slow way across the desert terrain. We also found three shells/skeletons. One was a tiny tortoise shell smaller than the palm of my hand, and it made us all sad that the little thing died so young. The other desert life was pretty scarce--no snakes at all, and only a few lizards and the occasional jackrabbit bounding away from us. I believe that it was just too cold and overcast for the reptiles to be out in the open air. The second to last day of this week, we even got a few minutes of rain along with the wind and clouds. It was beautiful watching the clouds racing through the sky and their shadows zooming across the landscape were almost surreal, but it was terribly cold. The wind was just so fierce that sometimes I literally could not catch my breath.
Now I am home and enjoying the lack of wind. Actually, I am at K's house with her family. She is making french toast for breakfast, I am looking out the windows of the sun room at a canyon full of trees, and my cat is here bounding around like one possessed. I feel good.
