Desert Life, My Style

After a few years of living up here in the desert, here's what I know about it: Hardly anything at all.

The desert is an unpopular place to live, especially the part where I live. The most striking thing about it compared to the city where I lived before is the amount of land there is. Los Angeles is a huge city, no doubt about that, but you never get to see much of it at one time because of all the buildings, development, and overall evidence of human occupation.

The desert has hardly any of any of those. My neighbors are all over a hundred yards away, and each of them separated by at least that much from their neighbors. There are no multi storey houses within view and it's several miles to the first street light. There are a number of small enclaves of humanity between me and the nearest town, but mostly it's just desert. Rolling, lumpy, sand and rock marked with creosote bushes and the occasional Joshua Tree (for which the area is famous). Around many, if not most of the houses, foreign trees have been planted to provide shade and if you get close to them, your view of the desert is destroyed.

Those trees don't really interrupt the view, especially since they don't grow in clusters, and the bushes usually only get to about chest high.

Because of that, you pretty much can see to the horizon, or at least to the mountains that ring this part of the world. You can actually see the land, and there's a lot of it.

As I've mentioned before, this area is classified as "rural," but that brings up all sorts of associations for me that don't fit. Still, if your only options are rural and urban, it has to do. What rural means in this instance is mostly dirt roads and huge stretches of nothing between one thing and the next. Yes, there's a place to take my recyclables and one where I can buy fabric or office supplies or get water or propane services, but they're all miles from each other and often have unpaved parking lots. It took me some getting used to go to a business and find just the building with its perimeter scrubbed free of vegetation by hundreds or thousands of earlier visitors. You park where you want in those places. No one minds.

The three or four large shopping centers in the nearby town, of course, have paved parking lots with all the usual markings. As you'd expect, those shopping centers are also spaced out with naked desert buffering them on all but the side facing the highway.

I was really struck by how uneven the surface of the planet is. A two minute drive takes you up and down rises that I never noticed when all the land was developed and filled with houses and buildings or even with trees in the forests I've visited. When you can't see more than a kilometer in any direction, you can't notice it. Although the view from my home stretches almost to the horizon, I don't have to drive more than a minute to be in an area I can't see from home because it's in a dip or behind a small rise.

I expected the heat for which the desert is most famous (and famously shunned) and humbling views of mountains, but not how damn much land there is up here. I think I mentioned before how the realtor who found this place and helped me to buy it herself came from Redondo Beach and said a lot of former beach people moved here. In talking with some of the few people up here, I've come to see she's right. One of the same things that draws people to the ocean or seaside is copied in desert living: the sense of expansiveness. Quite the same state of mind that I got endlessly watching the waves come and go in the foreground of a seemingly endless body of water I feel when looking over the desert stretching out forever.

So, this ended up having nothing to do with the title, which means I can keep that idea in mind when I feel like writing next time.