hack

The desert can be quite beautiful but man I just cannot take the heat.

It's an acquired taste for most. I have been in one desert or another almost all my life. It is quiet sanity to me.

some nights when THE desert
Is wet and WARM

some nights when the DESERT'S moon
shows CLEAR as day

some nights the silent desert BREEZE
BRINGS you back

some nights in YOUR desert
I LAUGH and cry

I find the desert beautiful as well during the right times of the year, though i will say after a while I miss the green. The right times of the year are when it's blooming and relatively cool. And boy can it get hot. I've been in the desert when it's 130 degrees F (54C). And when a breeze blows, it feels like you are literally inside an oven. Which desert are you going to?

Oh and welcome to the blogs Hack.

When I was a kid I was given a remarkable gift. I was allowed, at about the age of 13 or 14, to spend nights camping in the nearby desert alone or with a few friends. At first it was for only a single night. Later, when I showed that I could be trusted to not abuse that freedom, I was allowed to spend more time at a single stretch. I have life long friends who, like me, consider these adventures to have been some of the best days of our lives. I can not get enough of it. Now, when the worst of the summer heat has passed I make my pilgrimages. The desert is my great cathedral. My God lives there, among the standing stones propped up by eons and the tiny cairns that I leave in my path.

I saw the pictures in your profile. Cool.

I have spent time in all the great southwestern deserts. I live in the eastern Mojave, and there is so much to see here that I know I will never walk it all, and that makes me glad.

I think I will go next into the Cosos near China Lake in eastern CA. There are fossils and petroglyphs there that are calling me.

You have to ask permission to travel through much of that country as a lot of it is restricted military property. If you are at all interested in native American rock art google coso range petroglyphs. The style of art there is distinctive and the anthropomorphs there are spectacular.

Thanks for the welcome Virgil. I have to go now, an overdue library book keeps staring at me here on the desk, I think I have a date.

Hey many years ago i was in that China Lake area. That's Death Valley. What's the town there? Ridgecrest? Something like that. Not too far (a couple of hours I guess) is the Joshua Tree park that U2 made famous.

Make sure you take plenty of water and watch for the rattlers and scorpions. But I guess you're a seasoned desert person.

You walk alone out there? Kind of scary, no?

Yeah, China Lake is at the south end of Death Valley. Nothing scary out there except me. Actually, the scorpions and I have a pact. I like to take a portable black light, and shine it on the desert floor after dark. A lot of bugs luminesce in the black light, especially the scorpions. It's amazing how many of them there can be on occasion. I've never bit or been bit by one yet.

Night all, don't let the red bugs bite (also avoid the poisonous orange and black ones).

I have recently been inspired to reread an old favorite," The History of the Siege of Lisbon" by Jose Saramago. It is not what you might expect from the title. If you have not read it, or even if you have, I wholeheartedly recommend the pleasure. Let me know what you think. I love almost everything he has written. This is particularly beautiful and inspiring.

I drove about 20 miles from home to a spot that has given up some nice horn corals (Rugosa) in the past. I did find a few corals, one decent horn coral and a couple of chain corals. The horn corals are at least 270 million years old (that is about when they went extinct) and could be as much as 450 million years old, although these are very likely closer in age to the younger date. The corals, in particular, fascinate me because they seem to have evolved twice. They did not become exactly the same organisms twice, but very close to it. They probably evolved from the same ancestral stock on both occasions.

I think that I became interested in the fossils here, in part, so I could have an excuse to go into the desert without my friends and family thinking that I have lost my mind. There is plenty of independent data to support that proposition, I need not carry coals to Newcastle.

No work today. I'll stay in, maybe a poem or two, if they will crawl out. It's nice to get a day like this once and a while. We may get a freeze tonight so I had better cover some of the more tender cacti and succulents before I sleep.

In the Mourning

In the morning
when we rise
we push the dead
behind our eyes

We think of them
by light of day
but in the night
caress and play

I'm glad to hold
my mothers hand
when my eyes
are filled with sand

I only mourn
each day I weep
that I should get
so little sleep

Hack, you should start a new blog every time you have a new subject.

Who is Katherine Louise Beal?

The poem is neat but it lacks a focus, or at least I can't pick a focus up. In the the second stanza, what is the antecedent of "them?" Who do we think of?

Virgil,
She was born on a mountain in Colorado.
Hack