Читать книгу The Oasis This Time - Rebecca Lawton - Страница 11

1.

THE SENTINELS

THE TOWN OF TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA, IS AS hushed as a morgue. Chairs sit empty in barbershops advertising marine haircuts for ten bucks. There are no families in the shops and cafés, no moms holding kids by the hand—just a quiet, Mojave Desert main street with traffic passing through. In a wind that hasn’t given up its spring chill, yellow ribbons stream from light poles, street signs, storefronts. They’re a faithful promise to endure, based on a pop song once played to death on the radio. The faded ribbons, bleached white on folds and curls, say that the waiting has gone on too long. Among stubby stands of sage and creosote, houses stand with drapes drawn to the ever-present sun. Inside, the residents must still be holding vigil, believing in the inevitable return of the warrior.

Lured by the call of anything wet, I check into the first motel I see. I find my air-conditioned room, pull on my bathing suit, wrap up in a big white towel, and wander out the back door in search of a hot tub.

A young marine greets me from a bistro table beside the water. He’s a junior officer, probably just a few years older than my own teenaged daughter. His face reveals no guile, especially when he smiles. He tells me he’s been assigned to an advanced course in communications.

He also volunteers an answer to the unasked question. “The base is dead quiet because everyone’s overseas.” He’s stuck in town while others in his unit have been sent to Iraq.

Although the water is lovely and inviting, he has his back to it—he’s in uniform, with a textbook spread before him. When he’s done with his course, he’ll ship out, too. The reading doesn’t bother him, except that it requires “too much math.” He says it in all earnestness, with no irony about the key role of numbers in his job. To him, they pose just one more barrier to getting to fight.

When I tell him I’m visiting from the northern part of the state, he asks if I’ve heard about a tank crew lost near Nasiriyah, Iraq. After some back and forth, I realize that I have: the gunner, a Scottish-born newlywed, lives close to my longtime hometown near San Francisco. The local paper has run a series on his going missing. His wife is expecting their first child any day.

“It’s an M1A1 Abrams crew,” he tells me. “They’re based here, in Twentynine Palms.”

I ask if he has updates. He does. The remaining members of the First Tank Battalion have no clue to the missing crew’s whereabouts. The last radio contact from the Abrams came in before midnight Tuesday, when the tank was patrolling without headlights west of the Euphrates River. Today is Thursday. Desert sandstorms and near-zero visibility have made search efforts impossible. Blowing sand has confined the rest of the battalion to their quarters. Photographs in the paper show the men praying together in a dimly lit building.

“Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask. “That an entire tank and its crew can disappear like that?”

The officer shakes his head. “Going MIA is one risk you take. And casualties are part of combat.”

My heart beats so hard I wonder if he can hear it. Probably not. He goes back to his books with the calm of a Zen priest.

Should I pray? Make a wish? Some months ago a friend taught me a time-tested method for wishing: fix your gaze on the nearest natural object and compose an eight-syllable blessing. My eyes go to a row of palm trees in the motel garden. I count out syllables on both hands. Please. Find the crew. Alive and well.

I unwrap from my towel and settle into the hot tub. Occasionally I check on the officer out of the corner of my eye. Now he’s pressing buttons on his calculator, writing on a notepad, flipping through the textbook. He’s eager, clearly, but how can he be so calm? As a Colorado River guide in the 1970s, I spent years working among veterans just home from fighting in Southeast Asia: former US Navy Seals, US Army Special Forces, US Marine Corps Enlisted—they could no more consider shipping out again than they could walk on water.

The hot-tub jets time out. The officer lifts his head. “Don’t get up. I’ll take care of it.” He speaks with dignity, as if bearing a torch of responsibility for his mother or a favorite aunt.

I let him handle it for me.

I’VE COME TO THE DESERT FOR THE WATERS: SPECIFICALLY oases. My heart has been captured by spring-fed groves of California fan palm since I was in grade school. Whispering Washingtonia filifera, hiding in canyons. Their secretive ways. During most spring breaks, although we lived two states away, our parents drove south from our home outside Portland, Oregon, through the days and into the nights, with four little kids in the backseat. South from the Columbia River, down the Willamette Valley, with snow-draped Cascade Mountains to the east. South through the Central Valley with the Sierra Nevada rising up from greening foothills. We skirted Los Angeles as best we could. Mostly we kids read comic books while our parents did all the work, found some campsite or motel with space every night, and made sure we were fed, clean, and not bickering. Destination: Palm Canyon Campground, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park east of San Diego, an arid haven of picnic tables under palm-frond palapas and windbreaks constructed of rock dug from nearby alluvial fans.

Most days we hiked up Palm Canyon or some other trail into the desert hills. The paths wound past white-blossomed agave, red fans of blooms on the ocotillos, waxy petals of flowers on the prickly pear cactus. We paused in awe when we caught a glimpse of a coyote’s tail as it fled or picked out herds of desert bighorn sheep from cliffs they matched exactly. We endured the bird obsession of our mother, the times she stopped without warning to scan an inauspicious shrub with binoculars. She did manage eventually to make passionate birders of her husband and a few of her children; at the time, though, we small ones had little patience for standing statue-still to glimpse a nesting oriole or cactus wren.

Back then in Palm Canyon, most of the trees had long, full frond skirts, untouched by fire. Subsequently the trees were set ablaze by “careless” hikers, according to today’s state park signs. Back then, though, the rustle of palm fronds set the soundscape. No traffic noise. Few human voices. A clear-running stream fell over boulders, pooled in little basins, ran free over pebbles and gravel. Here there were no school tests, no student cliques, no yearning for recess. Who even had thoughts of going home? The oasis became a cherished refuge, a place where every molecule of water in our bodies could rest among peaceful canopies of Washingtonia.

AT THE ENTRANCE TO JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, 130 miles northeast of our beloved Anza-Borrego and one mile from downtown Twentynine Palms, stands a tiny palm oasis of the same numerical name. A fertility legend attached to it endures, repeated in newspapers, motel advertisements, and desert-rat tour books. It’s a mythical place not to be missed, the accounts say. The oasis is the town’s forebear, a stopover for travelers since prehistoric times. On my second morning in the area, I cross the motel lobby on my way out to find the storied refuge. Through gleaming windows, I spot the officer at work again by the pool and think immediately of the missing tank crew. Headlines in the motel’s newspaper rack tell me nothing. Hoping for good news later, I duck out to conduct my search: a short drive, a nearly empty parking lot at the National Park Service visitor center, a paved path to well-tended stands of Washingtonia.

In movies filmed in the desert, desperate, thirst-crazed pilgrims plunge into oases headfirst. The ubiquitous presence of water belies the fact that an oasis may not be wet at all. The hydric zone may be a spring or pool, true, but it is just as likely to be wet earth indicating groundwater near the surface. Here there is neither pool nor dampness. There’s no open pool anywhere, no yearned-for expanse of blue. Not only that, the surrounding oasis proper isn’t the obvious circle of palms, the stuff of kneeling camels and silk-swathed sheikhs. Instead, just a few palms string along the trails here—hardly a circle, at least not at first glance. The third and outer zone, the desert-oasis ecotone, is sparse. It’s not so different from the surrounding desert that lurks like a cruel bar bouncer on the outside of the precious palms.

Later I’ll read that the marshy, ecologically diverse center of the Twentynine Palms oasis dried up some thirty years ago. Declines in groundwater desiccated the springs watering vegetation and wildlife. Monitoring of groundwater wells by the California Department of Water Resources has shown the impact of a training base, a town, and the visitation of over 140,000 souls annually. Between 1939 and 2013, water levels dropped seventy feet and more beneath Twentynine Palms.

Even without open water, the little shade of the oasis beckons. Visitors are fenced out, though, because the weight of our trespass would damage the trees’ root systems. Washingtonia has pencillate rootlets just inches underground that reach as far as twenty feet from the trunk. Their job is to search for shallow groundwater. Too many pedestrians, no matter how appreciative our hearts, would trample and compress the soil supporting the vulnerable network. The palms are therefore barred with handrails and threats of hefty fines. We spectators stick to the trails and hold onto our cash.

Even with the park’s best efforts, the trees at Twentynine Palms fail to send their shallow roots to moisture. The water table has simply dropped too far. To keep the oasis alive, National Park Service staff regularly apply water directly to the base of the palms. They irrigate.

Interpretive signs further the fertility legend, as well as a second name for the oasis: Mara or Marah, meaning “big springs and much grass.” The word derives from Native American lexis—probably the Serrano language. In the legend, indigenous women of the Mojave traveled to the oasis specifically to give birth to sons. Archaeological studies may not support that, but they do document habitation by Native Americans in the area, first Serrano and Cahuilla then Chemehuevi, millennia before it became a base for men about to wage war. Footpaths radiate out from the once abundantly marshy Mara, a hub of prehistoric comings and goings. A count of 480 bone fragments in excavations at the site evidence a prehistoric human diet of largely black-tailed jackrabbit and desert tortoise, as well as lesser amounts of desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, smaller mammals, birds, and reptiles. For a time, a settlement near Mara served as home or camp for those foraging the nearby alluvial fans and hills.

The total number of palms at Mara, however, has not been recorded as twenty-nine; rather, oral and written accounts beginning in the 1800s note fewer than twenty. Even at the time of European contact, palms numbered in the teens.

Still, the legend says that sometime around 1500 AD, spiritual advisors or “medicine men” directed women who wanted male children to Mara. Blessed by shade in a land that had little, the palmgrove Mecca also had sweet water with reputed supernatural properties. Mara, the family clinic of the ancient world. The hopeful migrations to the oasis must have succeeded. In the first year alone, the legend says, expectant mothers who visited the oasis were delivered of twenty-nine male babies. They reportedly celebrated by planting one palm at the site for each infant boy. The trees they sowed grew tall, becoming guideposts visible over great distances. Only later did this same haven take on another type of maleness: a training ground for soldiers headed for oil-fueled battle in foreign deserts.

Thinned by fire in some places and trampled in others, the Washingtonia at Mara still summon visitors, murmuring veiled invitations.

We want sons, they might be saying. Bring us sons.

I walk the park service paths thinking of the pregnant women who may have blazed trails here. Strolling paths now paved and widened, I stop at a handrail to gaze into the hydric zone. This is the famous Oasis of Mara. This patch of sand and struggling palms. The formerly biodiverse, reputedly damp refuge is largely mesquite and Washingtonia.

Years later, on March 26, 2018, Mara was dealt another blow, when local resident and paroled arsonist George William Graham set fire to the palms. He played God with the remaining trees, taking a black BIC lighter to these besieged two and a half acres. Several stressed, historic palms were destroyed along with a few other remnant plant species. Reminders of a greater spectrum of wildlife and once-vibrant lineage of ancient people went up in swirls of ash. Park rangers arrested Graham as he stuck around to watch the blaze.

ON DAY THREE I RISE BEFORE DAWN TO EXPLORE ANOTHER oasis named for a tally of palms. Outside town, Washingtonia still grows naturally at springs and along fault lines in narrow canyons. That’s the case at Fortynine Palms, a 1.5-mile walk from a trailhead not far from my motel. I make the short drive; I reach the lot at daybreak. The day’s new sun throws beams over the facing ridge. Granite boulders shine beside the trail. Flakes of mica flash in the sand before my boots. Ridges along flanks of mountains shed light so that alluvial fans throw shadows. It’s a brilliant morning.

Fortynine Palms strings before me, a green necklace. The oasis has a narrow hydric zone in a long, arid arroyo. Fresh water tickles among horsetails, maidenhair fern, willow, and cottonwood where a small bit of flow is enough to fill tiny, clear pools. Glassy surfaces are topped by gaggles of water striders. A buzz fills the air as life stirs with the sun. Hummingbirds divebomb in mating dances and zoom into blossoms on scattered stands of globe mallow. Gnatcatchers and orioles call, and the sweet scent of things growing permeates the morning.

With every step closer to the water source, I find more surprises. A stippled cluster of doglike prints of coyotes at mud-rimmed pools, signs of a pack that’s come and gone. Scat stuffed with bones and palm seeds. The California fan palm is not a date tree, but its small, black fruit still lures many creatures, including large mammals. Watch out, California and Gambel’s quail—you could end up in the jaws of a hunting Canis latrans.

Moisture from below the surface seeps into my bootprints. It’s a life-giving aspect of these narrow canyons, their wet backbones. Here, groundwater lurks beneath the barest skin of gravel and sand. Alternately, in the rainy months, too much water may rip through here—high, fast, and sudden. A storm far up the drainage may drench bedrock, then send snouts of muddy runoff through narrow, shotgun canyons. Flash floods roar and rip and uproot. They’re the leading killer of California fan palms in tight, rock-bound arroyos. Not death by drying, as one might think, or the trampling of young palm pups under heavy hiking boots.

Rather, it’s the screaming, wild, rain-fed flood that upends elder palms and carries off seedlings, prying loose their shallow roots. Only the most sheltered and strongest survive these torrents that rise out of nowhere, churn through, and only spare trees if they’re protected by a random boulder or arm of alluvial fan. The mud floods leave silty scars on remaining trees, dozens of feet above ground. Look up in a palm canyon and you’re bound to see high-water marks far overhead.

Death by water in the desert: one of nature’s greatest ironies.

As the day’s heat mounts at Fortynine Palms, the music of birds fades. Insect drone takes over as bees of all sizes work the willow catkins. Two pair of quail pick at creosote and bob their way up-canyon, their loose-necked march mostly hidden beneath dry-channel canopy. I creep onto a boulder to let them pass. Three quail rely for safety on a fourth bird who perches on a pile of stones to serve as sentry. I hold my breath. The birds’ jerky, searching movements take them past, apparently without seeing me, until they all turn without warning toward my right foot. Everything goes fine for a moment, until one bird reaches my boot, the sentry cries, and all four scatter like tossed dice.

The boot that scared them off looks harmless to me. Past it, however, I find something in the pink granite gravel that’s shiny and not always so harmless—a single rifle shell, resting near my toes on the gravel-bottomed wash. Luckily the shell is a casing, spent and empty. As I study it, a jet fighter stealth-flies like a harrier overhead, throwing shadow. The aircraft rips away with a roar.

WASHINGTONIA, IMPERATIVE TO LIFE IN THE MOJAVE, HAS AS its doppelgänger the genus Phoenix in the Persian Gulf. Like the California fan palm, the highly cultivated, date-bearing Phoenix needs full sun, heat, and scads of subsurface water. Phoenix has long brought wealth and status to its growers, because there’s no end to what you can do with the tree. You can cut its fronds for shelter. You can weave its mature leaves into mats, screens, baskets, and crates. You can strip off its fruit clusters to prepare the fronds for brooms or weave palm fiber into skirts and sandals. The high-tannin date fruit has cured everything from intestinal troubles to alcoholic intoxication through the ages.

Even if palm fruit doesn’t cure hangover, as implied, the Phoenix tree of the Middle Eastern oasis stands for food, fiber, firewood. Survival for desert dwellers.

Ancient Mesopotamians encouraged Phoenix to grow at scattered hydric zones by planting them there and protecting the growth of young palm pups. Communities depended on the trees they had fostered. Honored in myth and mirage and a thousand Arabian nights, the date palm stood from time unknown in the wedge of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Archaeological evidence of cultivars goes back to four thousand years before Christ. In a way, Phoenix is a messiah in its own right—abundant in its gifts, revered in the earliest bas-relief sculpture, exalted on the faces of antiquated coins.

A wonder tree. Own a palm, own the world.

Because the trees are critical to life both in and out of the oasis, they are strategic targets in times of war. Phoenix lore holds that in the 1824 siege of Suckna, a station on the caravan route between Mesopotamia and central Syria, the conqueror Abdel-Gelil cut down more than forty thousand trees to compel the town to surrender. The campaign worked, and the scorchedpalm tactic has been used in many conflicts since to gain dominance over populations. For the Iraqi people, who have long led the world in date production, the much-harassed Phoenix has become a military Achilles’ heel. Iraqis, wise and hardworking stewards of Phoenix, develop many of the most popular cultivars, including those bearing soft, sweet Halawy and Khadrawy fruits. Then, standing tall, holding the bread of life and unable to hide in an exposed landscape, the generous palm falls in mute capitulation when the enemy comes swinging sabers.

We in the West have done more than our share to destroy the palm in the Tigris-Euphrates. Iraq’s forty million commercial trees had already come under attack in the 1980s’ Iran-Iraq War. Sometime during the descent of allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War, numbers of palms registered just fifteen million. After September 11, 2001, Allied forces again invaded Iraq, albeit years later: US and British air strikes that began on March 20, 2003, and continued for three weeks coincided with and interrupted palm fertilization to Iraq’s remaining ten million trees. Little has been written in Western news about the destruction of palms north of Baghdad in 2003, but newspapers from the area reported invading armies bulldozing farmers’ trees to extract information about guerrilla insurgents. In 2005, Iraq’s annual output of dates, usually twenty to thirty tons, was slim enough to only meet children’s needs and provide dessert for growers’ guests. In 2006, the same newspapers reported that any surviving trees were expected to be barren.

Exterminate the date palm, and you take a knife to the throats of its people. Kill the tree that rims the oasis, and you help bring Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Egyptians, Arabians, Iranians, and Iraqis to their knees.

WAR FOUND MARA, TOO, COMING IN ON THE ANCIENT NATIVE footpaths. After the shelter and open water drew miners, homesteaders, cattlemen, and the stage line, small outposts gradually coalesced into the village of Twentynine Palms. No longer the sacred destination for mothers desiring to make sons, it drew the sons themselves. Most men arriving there had either just returned from war or were about to go. Veterans of World War I who’d suffered lung problems during the gassing in France came to the clean, dry air to regain the power to breathe. Mara became life itself, with long horizons and unbroken sunlight. Basins of rock and sand, a world away from the mud and gloom of trench warfare and the dark, northern forests of Europe, meant a return from the dark side of the moon.

When World War II loomed, the US military found the open skies of Twentynine Palms ideal for glider instruction. The Navy expanded that use into an auxiliary air station that later transferred to the Marine Corps. The Semper Fi have live-fire trained there with no breaks since 1953. No rest for the warrior in either war or peace.

RETURNING TO TOWN, I’M JONESING FOR MORE HOT-TUB TIME and maybe even an umbrella drink beside the swimming pool. Aglow from hiking, I pass through the motel lobby and catch sight of a headline on a newspaper in the media rack. Buying a paper, I detour to a plush chair in the lobby. TANK CREW FOUND. The oversized font usually reserved for presidential election upsets and fires that force evacuations now applies to the team of men who trained right here only months ago.

When the Abrams was finally located, it was by Navy divers in twenty feet of Euphrates River water. Somehow disoriented even after the sandstorm cleared, the driver missed a turn and plunged off the end of an unfinished bridge. The tank flipped, its turret and escape hatch shoving into soft river mud. Trapped inside the Abrams, all four crew members perished.

The Scotsman’s pregnant wife is brave as she faces the reporters from regional and national newspapers. “He loved his job,” she says of her deceased husband. “It totally fit him.” She’s showing huge composure and keeping things brief. There are no hints about risk. Nothing about the irony of death in a desert river. Reading her words, I want nothing more than to find the communications officer. I rush to the swimming pool to discover he’s still at his post. He looks up from his math with a quick smile. His face fills with the light of recognition.

I ask if he’s heard about the tank crew. He has. The news has only firmed his resolve to join his unit. His expression turns solemn. “I want to go soon. I don’t want to be like a prizefighter who trains day in and day out for two years and never gets to go in the ring.”

The thought of him taking the blows suffered by pugilists, both in and out of the ring, hurts my heart. I try not to let my face show it as we fall into a tentative silence. It’s a fool’s desire to think that he might keep his wide-eyed, shining look. His young brain is still maturing, still growing its ability to reason. Only when he’s lived to the ripe old age of twenty-six, I’ve read, will his nervous system be considered adult. Only then will he recognize life’s warning lights, like the oil lamps on car dashboards that stop us from driving into danger. Risky behavior is especially attractive to a certain demographic, specifically Caucasian males under the age of twenty-five with high school educations or less. This young officer may qualify on all counts, but I won’t ask. Neither is he about to bring it up.

He goes back to his math. I don’t fold him in a protective embrace, but someone should. Should I pray? Or make a second wish? With my gaze on the motel palms again, I compose another eight-syllable blessing: Please. Survive fire and water.

He keeps his vigil with the books. The face of the pool shimmers. It’s groundwater, Mara-sustaining liquid, pumped out of soil and rock and into the desert air. Taking my place in the hot tub, within the hydric zone in this otherwise arid garden, I hold a vigil of my own.