Race Across the Desert

Notes from Margo:

We usually preface the noun “desert” with a modifier like “vast,” “endless” or “empty.” And the 1,800 miles we covered in the past week have been a rapid pass through exactly that – a vast, endless, largely empty desert.

But vast and spare don’t mean the deserts are boring. We were surprised and delighted by how the landscape offers endless change. Around Lake Havasu City, the red-tinged Arizona desert is split by the Colorado River and bounded by jagged, barren rock formations. It wouldn’t be confused with the desert around Phoenix, flat as a chess board and dotted with saguaro cacti. In the canyons and mesas above Carlsbad Caverns in southeast New Mexico, the prickly pears and other cacti grow so thickly that it seemed the Chihuahua Valley could easily support other (non-desert) vegetation.

Driving across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southeastern California, we noted variations of sagebrush, yucca, agaves, dried ground cover, prickly pears, saguaros and mesquite. But in other parts of the desert, as in stretches of western Texas, the only crops are gravel, boulders and sand; the soil quality and lack of rain don't support a single cactus.

We drove through windstorms and even some rain, which mostly evaporated before it reached the ground. Empty blue skies changed to dramatic skyscapes with clouds that produced neon orange and vermilion sunsets.

Much of the desert is level, but then we'd pass volcanic craters (for example, in the Mojave Desert near Amboy, California). Who'd have thought, Lynn asked, that an alien spaceship would leave such a mess when it landed? We saw weird rock formations that looked like sand castles. And just when we thought we’d seen all the variety of cacti we were going to, up would pop some new sort of plant life. We saw cacti shaped like old-style hand-operated water pumps at Carlsbad Caverns. Joshua trees, looking like cheerleaders holding pompons in their upraised arms, posed near the two-lane road that was once a piece of historic Route 66 near the teensy hamlet of Ludlow, California. (We checked the historical markers and information on the Web. We quizzed the waitress at the Ludlow Café. But we still don’t know why that dusty, windblown crossroads is named after my husband.)

After we visited my cousin Kathy Macchi in Austin, we were running out of time, and I, for one, was ready to head for home. Our trip made a sudden change of pace, logging almost 300 miles a day for the last week. That’s about twice the average mileage of the earlier part of our journey, and we took much a much more direct course with almost no detours. Total mileage through arid territory: Beaumont, Texas, to Tehachapi, California: 1,863 miles.

Notable: In the Mojave Desert, on old Route 66, we saw our first rock graffiti. It went on for miles, mostly on a berm paralleling the highway that might have been an old road bed or rail bed. It was just normal graffiti, "Stephanie luvs Jason" and so forth. But all the writing was with rocks, the medium available where there's no hardware store to buy spray paint, and no walls to spray your tag on. (Photo at right.)

Also Notable: One disappointment: In more than 1,800 miles of desert, we never saw a single roadrunner. We don’t count an 11-foot Roadrunner statue billed as a tourist attraction in Fort Stockton, Texas. The cartoon character is dressed for the season in a Santa outfit. Rooted to the ground, he looks silently at traffic without so much as a “meep meep.”

Two unexpected thrills: Cactus wrens in the saguaros near Phoenix and long-billed curlews (shorebirds!!) in the arid hills near the Carrizo Plains west of Buttonwillow and Bakersfield. There are seasonal lakes nearby, it turns out, but it was a surprising and lovely sight. A dozen curlews flew over us, then landed and proceeded to peck around in the dirt around the sagebrush for food, just as they do in mudflats. It was a preview of being back in our non-arid homeland, San Francisco.

Our final odometer readings:

From Beaumont, Texas, to Austin: 280 miles

From Austin to Pecos: 431 miles

From Pecos, Texas, to Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, and on to Deming: 347 miles

From Deming, New Mexico, to Phoenix, Arizona: 328 miles

From Phoenix to Lake Havasu City: 202 miles

From Lake Havasu City to Buttonwillow, California: 341 miles

From Buttonwillow through Paso Robles to San Francisco: 288 miles

Total mileage of our trip: 11,983