The low, gravel-roofed, rectilinear Neutra imitations of Twentynine Palms, their cracked clay tennis courts, their empty stables.
The eerie auroral throb of Palm Springs swimming pools, dry, but with solar lights charged to bursting and ablaze. Each of that city’s 2,250 holes of golf a tinderbox begging for flame.
—
Naturally, there were efforts. The Essex town board planted the wild grasses they were told would deter the steady intrusion of sand. With seeds donated by the Sierra Club, FEMA funding, and meltwater from glaciers tugged down from Alaska, the town surrounded itself with thousands of acres of hearty, supposedly indigenous grassland. Still came the dune, rolling over the grasses like so many swaths of peachfuzz, the world’s most invasive species no species at all.
Baker and Ludlow erected fifty-foot retaining walls, Baker’s made of high-tech perforated flexfoam developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Ludlow’s old-fashioned concrete and rebar. The dune buckled both.
Windbreaks were constructed, tree lines were sowed, thousands of truckloads of gravel were dumped. Scrappy Needles—a town of three hundred truck drivers and rock hounds and recovering alcoholics—offered the mightiest fight, or at least the best-documented, stationing Caltrans trucks and the tanker from the county volunteer fire department at the edge of town and continually spraying the advancing sand wall with oil. Still came the dune.
Still came sand in sheets, sand erasing the sun for hours then days, sand softening the corners of stucco strip malls, sand whistling through the holes bored in the ancient adobe of mission churches. Still came the wind. Still came ceaseless badland bluster funneled by the Sierra Nevada. Still came all the wanderlusting topsoil of Brigham Young’s aerated Southwest free at last, the billowing left behind of tilled scrub, the aloft fertilizer crust of manifest destiny. Ashes in the plow’s wake, Mulholland’s America.
Still came the scientists: climatologists, geologists, volcanologists, soil experts, agriculturists, horticulturists, conservationists. In fluxed new-booted, khaki-capped men and women from the Northeast, stalking tenure in L.L.Bean. Still came journalists, deadline-hungry, sense of subtlety atrophied. Still came BLM and EPA and NWS and USGS, all assigned to determine why a process that ought to have taken five hundred thousand years had happened in fifty. All tasked with determining how to stop the mountain’s unrelenting march. All of them failed.
Or half failed. How it happened they could explain, a micro-chronicle even the layest Mojav might recite: drought of droughts, wind of winds.
Unceasing drought indifferent to prayer, and thanks to it rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers drained, crops and ranches succumbed, vegetation withered, leaving behind deep, dry beds of loose alkali evaporate.
Scraping wind, five-hundred-year wind, the desert’s primal inhale raking the expired floodplain, making a wind tunnel of California’s Central Valley. In came particulate, swelling simultaneously Dumont Dunes and their southerly cousins, Kelso Dunes. In barely a blink of desertification’s encrusted eye, the two conjoined across the eighty miles that had long separated them, creating a vast dune field over one hundred miles wide, instantly the longest dune in North America.
But knowing how it came would not stop it from coming. Still came the wind, hoarding sand and superlatives: widest dune in North America, tallest dune in North America, largest dune in the Western Hemisphere. The dune field overtook I–15 in a weekend, reaching a corpulent four hundred square miles, insisting upon its reclassification from dune field to dune sea.
Still rose the dune sea, and like a sea now making its own weather. Sparkling white slopes superheated the skies above, setting the air achurn with funnels, drawing hurricanes of dust from as far away as Saskatchewan. Self-perpetuating then, the sand a magnet for its own mixture of clay, sulfates and carbonate particles from the pulverized bodies of ancient marine creatures, so high in saline that a sample taken from anywhere on the dune will be salty on the tongue.
So came the name, amargo being the Spanish word for bitter; Amargosa being the name of the first mountain range the dune sea interred.
—
In the blurred background of the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, the remaining citizens of Needles, nine men and three women—the Needles Dozen, as they will be briefly known—are frosty with sand mortared to their oil-slickened bodies, white specters with dark holes demarking gas masks or goggles, handkerchiefs pulled over mouths, a dish sponge tied to a face with a shoelace. They look to the dune, perhaps rather than acknowledge each other stepping backward across the besieged playground they’ve vowed to protect. In the foreground a toddler—the caption called him “the forgotten child of the Mojave”—squats naked in a sandbox. A plastic bulldozer lies on its side at his feet, rumored the photographer’s salt. The child’s crusted face is tilted skyward, to the ration jug he holds inverted over his head. His tongue is a violent belt of glistening red, the last drop of water dangling from the lip of the jug. A wink of light in the droplet, too pure to be digital.
Still those once of Needles lingered, stationing themselves at the foot of the dune for three weeks after the town was buried, accepting only rations from Red Cross, wanting perhaps to stay as close as they could to their interred lives. They looked to the hot white whale glittering in the sun and saw their homes, shops, their football field entombed in sand. Preserved. Like those quaint towns they’d read about, long ago drowned by dams but reemerged, mud-logged and algaed and alien-looking, as the reservoirs drained.
But the base of the dune was not sand, reporters reminded the Needles Dozen at a press conference held in a tent with generators shuddering behind it, and had not been sand for some time. Question: Did they realize that the dune now behaved more like a glacier, albeit a vastly accelerated glacier? Question: Were they aware that geologists had ascertained that the base of the dune—the foot, they called it—was rock? That it carved the land more than covered it? Question: Did they wish to comment on the fact that the buildings they envisioned, in which they had spent the entirety of their short lives—their homes, say, or their twelve-step club—had already been crushed, were now but fossil flecks in banded sandstone?
And so retreated even the hard-nosed dreamers of Needles, California. So dispersed the last of the true Mojavs, though the term had already outgrown them. They were reabsorbed by New England, the Midwest, the South, all those moist and rich-soiled places their wild-eyed forefathers once fled. Some were granted temporary asylum in the petite verdant kidney of the Pacific Northwest. In retreat, the stalwarts of Needles comforted themselves by categorizing the dune as a natural disaster, though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.
But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast’s rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.
Metaphors were unavoidable. The Amargosa was a disease: a cancer, a malignancy, a tumor. A steamroller, a plow. A hungry beast, a self-spawning corpulence, a bloated blob gobbling land, various images of appetite, projections of our ugly, innermost selves.
The Amargosa was angry, cruel, or uncaring—personification inevitable and forgivable too, for at tim
es the mass did seem to move with discernment. Witnesses describe occasions when it seemed to pause its march, or reach its steady foot around a town rather than atop it, as though in embrace, allowing the citizens time to hitch their trailers to their trucks and haul them from harm. Its storms once lifted a child playing jacks in his yard and deposited him unscathed atop the dumpster behind the Terrible’s gas station where his mother worked. But just as effortlessly, a sandalanche humming ten miles away veered to take an entire town in minutes. It has been called the devil incarnate, but also the wide, open eye of God.
With the Needles Dozen, the last of the newspapermen, the lingering specialists from this institute and that withdrew. Civilization retreated; the frontier reasserted itself. Their staff and charges evacuated, local sheriffs’ offices disbanded de facto. Sinkholes gulped the interstate, rendering highway patrol moot. State troopers ceded jurisdiction to the Department of the Interior, whose last vestige of authority is a fee booth at the northwest entrance to Death Valley National Park, a shack with a busted mechanical arm flopping out front, a bulletin board tacked with maps bleached blank and disintegrating.
USGS concluded its modest survey efforts when an SUV with government plates was ransacked, stripped, and set on fire, the assessors found four days later, wandering the edge of the dune naked and nearly insane. As the New York Times put it, AMARGOSA DUNE SEA INTERNATIONAL WATERS.
No complete map of the Amargosa Dune Sea exists. Partial maps of one face or another are etched almost immediately to obsolescence by the ever-shifting sands. The most informed estimate of the terrain describes “nearly exponential exaggeration of features,” wherein each chain of dunes gives way to another taller, wider, hotter, until these crescendo at the Six Sisters, a chain of crestcentric dunes whose sandstone feet are estimated to be as wide as they are tall. Any one of the Sisters would easily be the tallest sand dune in the world. Atop these, the hypothesis goes, reclines the summit: a nameless five-crested star dune, entirely unmapped and ever shawled in rainless clouds. Though never scaled, the summit is suspected to be the second tallest mountain in North America. At last count, geologists estimate seven thousand individual peaks and crestlines accumulated to form the dune sea, though sandalanches and extremely hostile environs make an accurate count impossible. And anyway, funding’s dried up.
No one has circumnavigated the Amargosa, no one has ventured into its interior, and no one has crossed it. Unmanned IMQ-18A Hummingbird drones sent on scouting patterns inevitably encountered a “severe electromagnetic anomaly,” transmitting back only an eerie white throb. Satellite-imaging attempts were similarly frustrated, yielding only ghostly blurs.
BLM’s Survey of the Area Surrounding and Encompassing the Amargosa Dune Sea reports a population of zero. The one-page document—the Bureau’s shortest survey to date—is itself salted with words like inhospitable, barren, bleak, and empty.
A desert deserted, the official line.
—
Yet stories circulated the stuffed cities, rumors whipped around the social networks, urban legends rippled through the besieged green East: amassed at the foot of the dune was perhaps a colony.
Some versions people the colony with stubborn Mojavs, the calculation being that for every thousand fleeing the Amargosa, one stayed. A welder from Needles with fifteen years of sobriety refused to board the National Guard lorry with his wife and twin daughters. A high school geography teacher, supposedly a descendant of Meriwether Lewis, insisted on staying to finish the new maps. The ranger who once manned the fee booth at Death Valley National Park built himself a yurt and lived there with three teenage girls he called his wives-in-Christ.
The versions circling amongst the professional set populate the colony with refugees of the bourgeoisie. A spinster assistant professor failed to submit her tenure box in the fall. The environment desk lost contact with its Ivy League greenhorn. The anal-retentive manager of the illustrious lab failed to renew his grant application. A brilliant but antisocial postdoc did not return to his carrel at the Institute.
Underclass iterations have the colony an assemblage of shrewd swindlers, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen, hearts inherited from the forty-niners, awaiting the oil bonanza when the tremendous sand mass squeezes out its inevitable pods of petro, or the adventure bonanza when the summit outgrows Denali and helicopter rides to base camp go to the highest bidder, when brightly clothed cadres of the stubbled wealthy stand atop their piles of money to be the first to summit.
On the left it is a survivalist outpost, vindicated doomsayers with homes of abandoned freight cars of rusty oranges and reds and clear crisp blues and stockpiled with guns and canned goods and bottled water and military rations. Home to Libertarian drifters and vagabonds, tramps, wanderers preferring not to have an address, a garrison for the familiar cast of trigger-happy vigilantes scowling and squirting tobacco juice across the New Old West.
On the right it is ground zero of the eco-revolution, vital utopia where the beatniks of the Enchanted Circle have relocated from Big Sur—or the aging acidheads of Atlas City from Tucson, or the free rangers of No Where Ranch from Santa Fe, or the wispy vegans of Gaia Village from Taos, or the kinky paramours of Agape from Sebastopol, or the anarchist pinkos of Ant Hill Collective from Oakland, or the burnouts of Alpha Farm from Grass Valley, or the lesbo Amazons of Girlhouse from Portland, or the junkies of the Compound from Santa Monica, or the burners of New Black Rock City from Minden, or the shorn monks of the Shamanic Living Center from Ojai, or the jam band Technicolor Tree Tribe from Santa Cruz—all with their wheeled zero-footprint Earthships made of tires and bottles and clay.
Rumors of a colony are nourished by the many who saw the dune sea firsthand and thereafter ascribed to it a curious energy. While it’s a fact that certain places woo, the Amargosa’s pull was said to be far beyond topographic charm. It was chemical, pheromonal, elemental, a tingle in the ions of the brain, a tug in the iron of the blood. The dune beckoned the chosen, they said. “I was overcome with this very powerful feeling,” one Mojav refugee told CNN of the first time she saw the dune sea. “A feeling of, well, belonging.”
Another refugee said, “I miss it. Sounds strange, I realize. But I do. I truly do.”
Another described the Amargosa as “a feeling, like that swelling inside you when you hear a song perfectly sung.”
“I saw it from the air, from very far off, back when there were flights out West,” wrote a mirage-chasing New York stockbroker on his blog.
The PWI [Palisades Water Index] had been banging against the ceiling for weeks, so of course I’m flying to pitch water derivatives in Silicon Valley, or what was left of it. A lot of my guys had gone back to Boston when Stanford closed, but there were still some whales floating around. I was polishing my presentation when the captain came on the intercom and said if we looked out our windows we could see the Amargosa. I thought, Bullshit. We were hundreds of miles north. But I looked out my window real quick and there it was, glowing. It was so bright, like a light I’d never seen before. I felt very full then, and couldn’t take my eyes off it. When we passed out of sight I felt just bereft, like someone I loved was dead. I’ve come to realize I need that full feeling. Very full but also incredibly calm, like heaven, or the rush of warmth before you freeze to death.
This last simile, those parting words of the stockbroker’s final post before he disappeared, was perhaps especially apt, for among the called the Amargosa is both siren and jagged reef, its good vibes a blessing, its curse just as likely. Fickle, it is said to be, false and traitorous. Others, wounds less fresh, describe it simply as an arbiter, allude only vaguely to its methods of exiting the unwelcome. You might have heard it on the eastbound evac lorry: The dune is rejecting me. Or later, among the jilted devotees in the Mojav camps: The mountain has turned its back on me.
—
See now from our imagined sky-perch. See through blurs of sand and waterless cloud
and obfuscating energy. See the stoss-side base of the dune sea, glittering. It is colloidal, this light, the sun wiggling as if across a braided river from above. A mirage, for the water’s run out. This is the sun reflected by aluminum, glass, the roofs of vans sandblasted smooth, mobile geodesic domes, shanties of salvaged metal. Nomads and neo-Bedouins belonging to no district, aligned with no representation, knowing no laws save their own.
The colony.
And beyond that, in terrain not yet subsumed by the dune, an anorexic wannabe orphan languishes in a vintage car on the shore of a sulfur lake, abandoned with the nameless child she took. Through playing house, dying of thirst.
When Luz came back it was her body that came first, tugging her behind it. Her skin was screaming. Her lips split, clefts puttied with scabs. The flesh around her nose was raw to cracking, like the plates along the bottom of a dry ancient sea, no moisture left to yield. The insides too, surely, for the simple, vital intake of air stung. Her fingers were swollen beyond bending, waxy and violet-tinged. Crimps of black vein ventured near the surface. Her windpipe was evidently collapsed, for she could not breathe, not exactly. Her tongue surged unavailingly against her palate, her airway clamped shut by her own forgetting how to talk to the different parts of herself.
She breathed, finally, though what passed through the flattened airway was altitude-thin and hot; it dissipated before making it all the way to the bottom of her lungs. Eventually, she did breathe deeply, and then the woozy smell of diesel came to her.
She was lying in a nest of dust-crusted pillows in a long dim narrow room. Its gently domed ceiling was low, and colored the last pale shade available to green before green becomes taupe, a shade insisting so obstinately on tranquility that it was surely blended for asylums, an interior decorator’s attempt to divorce the mad from their madness. Below the domed ceiling, the walls of the long room—it was more a hallway—were lined with blankets, swelling and slackening like sails. Behind the blankets was surely a row of high windows encircling the room, for these backlit the blankets, which were two-tone and faded, depicting scenes of vanished nature: wolves howling, a mustang and foal rearing, a mountain range foregrounded by evergreens.
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