The Creosote Sea

During the pandemic I moved back to the Mojave Desert, my first home, as I had hoped to do pretty much since the day I’d left, about a decade before. With every penny of my savings plus a fellowship from a well-heeled arts foundation, I bought myself a cabin on five treeless acres. A plain dotted by creosote bushes—a striking and expressive shrub with wiry gray-blue branches—stretched unbroken from my front door beyond my invisible property line.

My new neighborhood was called Desert Heights, a real estate scammer’s name for a vast scattering of jackrabbit homesteads (small cabins built with government subsidies after the Small Tract Act of 1938) between the town of Twentynine Palms, California, and the largest Marine Corps base in the world. I loathed and feared the base, with its bombs, its light pollution, its pollution pollution, but I couldn’t deny that its nearness was probably what made Desert Heights affordable.

As ghastly as the pandemic was, its slowing and stoppages seemed to me long overdue. Secretly I hoped it might begin the end of the deep collective American denial that was killing the planet. I’d made chronicling this denial my life’s work, and before the pandemic this work had sometimes made me feel crazy. Very often it had left me feeling profoundly alone. But then, suddenly, the world joined me in my sorrow. I see now that I’d been ill for many years: lost to myself, suffering from righteousness and chronic disgust, striving mindlessly without satisfaction, writhing and wretched from a self-inflicted displacement I called my career. When I moved back to the Mojave, I was indulging the very human delusion that I might be OK—might find some peace—if I could just get home.

Yet once there, I struggled to arrive. It wasn’t just that everything was harder, scarier, slower in early 2020. I had also begun to realize that the peace I so desperately wanted—for myself, for the world—was a mere concept: “an abstraction, wholly unlived,” in the words of my friend, the poet Dana Levin. Peace was a mockable slogan, a zombie caricature of my parents’ dead revolution. I did not know what peace was, but I was starting to see that it was entirely unrelated to attaining the vast majority of my desires. Desire never kept its promises, and so many of my achievements had only made me emptier: achurn with a nothingness that tightened my chest and filled my guts with dread. I named my homestead in the Mojave “Nothingness Flats” because I intended to live inside this paradox: the felt texture of nothingness.

“If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the creosote,” wrote Mary Austin in her legendary essay “The Land of Little Rain.” The “immortal shrub,” as Mary called it, seemed to be just about the only plant growing in Nothingness Flats and the vast basin that rolled out beyond it like a speckled sea. In fact the basin had been a shallow ocean, the bottom of one, through the end of the Paleozoic era, some 245 million years ago. Perhaps this explained its expansive energy, which created the feeling I’d come for but could not name, a feeling that had something to do with smallness, with balancing on the cusp of annihilation. Like an ocean, this expanse could destroy me. Yet every day it didn’t.