Fire In the Mojave: Field Notes, March 22

Fire season is soon to begin in Southern California. The terrible drought of the past six years has eased somewhat for us here, with just enough rainfall this winter – though not the heavy drenching expected by El Nino forecasts- to touch off the current wildflower "superbloom,"which continues to permeate the entire California desert expanses as we move from a blooming late winter into spring.

I had a great day of field research for my book project. Started with an interview with Serrano cultural leader Ernest Siva at the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning, where Ernest shared cultural stories of traditional/past Serrano and Cahuilla occasionally deliberately burning out the many palm oases in the Coachella Valley and little San Bernardino Mountains as a means of purification and health of the vital oases. 

Then I traveled on to the Morongo Reservation to interview the Morongo Fire Crew, where I did a great interview with a fire chief who had worked on the nearby fatal Esperanza Fire of 2006, where five forest service firefighters tragically lost their lives. 

I then made a visit to the Malki Indian Museum to learn how many native California Indian people historically used fire to gather caterpillars - driving them into the ground for later harvesting, and visited healthy and lovingly tended plants in the museum's Temalpakh Garden, which are representative of the botanic life in the Inland Southern California desert and chaparral wildfire zones.

From there, I drove uphill through the wind-tossed Little Morongo Canyon/Highway 62, and farther up into the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree National Park for more fire research, where wildflowers and Josh Trees were in full bloom. The kiosk below discusses one of the Park's more recent large wildfires, the Memorial Fire in 1999, which ripped through Joshua forests and mountains of the park. Exactly what I had come looking for - besides spring wildflowers in this year's incredible, desert-wide #superbloom , and I stopped to pull off the road and park. Grabbed my Canon digital camera and iPhone6.

As I walked through the eastern edge of the eery old burn zone, I found downed Joshua Trees that were still charred on the inside, and my fingers picked up the black smudges; this area was barely decomposed, even after 17 years! A reminder that deserts are so very slow to recover from any trauma such as wildfire, if they do at all. A few hopeful wildflowers poked up through the scarred, open landscape, and several healthy young cholla cactus also gave it their best to stand proud and tall in the empty space they inhabited.

I remembered what it was like to work on the fireline, in my days as a seasonal wildland firefighter....I worked on several big fires in the park in the 1980's, in heat and blistering sun. The smell of the charred Joshua Tree brought so many memories back, of days long gone but also right there with me as I wandered alone, taking photographs, feeling the wind make occasional magic little dance steps, playfully but with serious intent of a stiff, cold, and strengthening northwestern Santa Ana wind event. 

Across the high desert plains, healthy Joshua Trees, bursting at their tops with their cream-colored white flower bulges, filled the horizon, and the Wonderland of Rocks glowed in iridescent brilliant light that made me feel like I was in a powerful warp of beauty and timelessness.Just me out there, strolling and exploring through the burn, and in the hour I spent, remembering and forgetting, not one other car stopped along that busy road into the park to marvel at memory and persistence, at the graphic power of loss and renewal demonstrated so insistently in the old burn area of the Memorial Fire of 1999. 

It was me, alone out there, but not alone. So many friends I've spent so much time with in Joshua Tree over the years, and it was down to this, down to me, down to memory, down to the grooved bone appearance of ancient rock, sky, wind and sun. But they were with me, too. Friends, and ex boyfriends, and my baby daughter, and campouts, and rock scrambles, and day hikes, and more. People who have come and gone and left their indelible impressions on my mind and my heart, some good memories and some rather bad. How could it have come to this....where had they all gone? Had they really burned through my life, through the years that once felt so long but now seem to have passed as quickly as a wildfire, leaving behind nothing but mostly-empty space, silence, and the longing for fuller landscapes?

But somehow, I felt them all right there with me, in a bittersweet kind of way, and though I tried to avoid it, I couldn't help savor each wonderful memory, even though this made me smile and feel sad at the same time, and I pushed through the memories I wish I could forget or undo. And they were all part of the puzzle of the desert landscape, coming together right then and there to offer proof that my loved ones, and loved ones with who I'd fallen out, hand't gone far at all. Everyone and every story in my past in that desert park had risen and shimmered right there with me, taking in all of the glorious, late-day views.

And as if to offer proof of this ghostly feeling, shortly after I left the burn zone, drove a bit down the road, and then off to view what I've heard through my extended desert network of friends is a particularly intensely blooming Joshua Tree forest a side dirt road that leads to Lost Horse Canyon - off limits to the public after the first few hundred yards, but where I've led poetry writing workshops and also once spent the night in a paper USForest Service issue sleeping bag while working on a big wildfire years before.....I saw a white car coming my way....and I could've sworn it was my friend Caryn, who is a longtime park ranger, and who in fact had attended one of my writing workshops up there! We nodded and smiled and through the wildflower haze and my own sense of superflousness and disjointedness that always overcomes me when I'm in desert wildlands, I couldn't be sure it was her, as we each kept going our own directions on that same desert road, different destinations in mind yesterday. 

And I called Caryn today, to check on this. And it turns out, that was her. We made plans to meet for coffee in Palm Desert, where I live. Next time she comes down this way.

Alive in Joshua Tree, everyone and everything, in a perfect sort of desert symphony, even the old leftover Joshua tree skeletons that crumple and scatter the fire-cleared landscape where I stopped yesterday to explore. Soon, as spring unfolds and temperatures begin to rise, there will be dried grasses in Joshua Tree NP and our inland deserts and mountains, tempting the start of new wildfires with calf-high brittle brown grasses. 

But the memory of wildflowers in this year's #superbloom won't fade. I, for one, will have pictures to prove it. Just as those bones of desert trees, still blackened with charcoal on the inside, remind us of another one of nature's necessary uses of force, the spirit of wildfire, slowing us down, making us watch, making us learn. Fire season 2016 is almost here.

-by Ruth Nolan 

Fire On the Mountain: Stories of the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California is an ongoing mixed-media book project by Ruth Nolan conducted as a sabbatical project in the 2015-16 academic year. Follow on facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/fireonthemojave/?fref=nf 

 #superbloom #superbloom2016 #mojavedesert #joshuatree #national park