Tag: desert

Ode to a Cheeseburger

When, at long last, I spotted the Colorado River from my perch atop the Poison Spider Mesa, I waxed poetic to my new friend about the singular pleasure of a Milt’s malt, and how I believed I was finally ready to take my relationship with Milt’s to the next level: Would I finally take the plunge and order tots AND onion rings?

Emma1 Comment

In 1987, the New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI, and Giants quarterback Phil Simms kicked off what has become perhaps one of the best-known phrases in marketing history.

“I’m going to Disneyland!” he exclaimed.

Thanks to a tragically short attention span, I don’t really follow professional sports, and I’m certainly not one of those steel-trap folks who can tell you sport-trivia from decades before they were born. But this phrase rings true with me. Continue reading “Ode to a Cheeseburger” →

Advertisement

It’s hard out here for a plant: A (very tentative) guide to surviving harsh and hostile lands

Emma1 Comment

“The living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

—Edward Abbey, 1968

A fine layer of red dust covers everything in the tent. It’s the same scene I imagine would greet campers waking up in the vast red desert on the surface of Mars, were they lucky enough to survive a windstorm there.

I unzip the door and thrust my head into the landscape outside the tent. The vista from here is similarly Martian: gargantuan red cliffs tower overhead; craters two, three, four thousand feet across fall away from the red dunes of fine sand across the mesa. It is eerily silent.

The only distinguishing factor—all that stands between us and the Mars rover, it seems—is the series of scrappy juniper and sage bushes dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see. Squatty, hardy, and with a low center of gravity, they appear to have withstood last night’s dust bowl better than we have. Then again, it’s taken them untold generations to get it right.

Continue reading “It’s hard out here for a plant: A (very tentative) guide to surviving harsh and hostile lands” →