Layover in the Panamint Valley

East away from the Sierras, south from the Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

February is a great time to go to the desert. It is usually cold, wet, and dreary, in the Bay Area and the desert promises the warmth of clear skies. This year is different, for the first time since 1860, February will not bring any rain to the Bay Area and while we were getting ready to go to Death Valley, the forecasters kept forecasting rain. I have been rained on in the California desert, maybe, five times and only once was the rain hard enough to get us wet and that was a cloud burst that lasted about thirty seconds, so the forecast did not seem very threatening.

I was aghast when I realized that I haven’t been to Death Valley in seven years. Seven years! In my mind’s eye, I go to Death Valley twice a year and, I did, from the late seventies to the early eights, but I tapered off to once a year in the nineties, and then, apparently, I kept tapering. And now once every seven years? However, going over Tehachapi Pass, at the southern end of the Sierras, as we climb out of the San Juaquin Valley – as the southern part of the Great Central Valley is called – and enter the Mojave Desert, nothing much seems different. Oh, sure, there are more windmills and bigger windmills but nothing else seems to have changed.

Once in the Mojave, we see a new lake only to realize it is a giant solar farm. One of the things that I like about the drive from the Bay Area to Death Valley is the subtle change from very urban to very wild. The Mojave nearest Tehachapi is strangely high-tech with Edwards Air Base – which bills itself as The Center of the Aerospace Testing Universe – the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake which tests naval air weapons systems, and The Mojave Air and Space Port in the town of Mojave where several billionaires are racing each other into space. Next comes the RV Mojave where more RVs are flying American Flags and now, some Trump flags, somehow, flying a Trump flag on an RV in a public campground in the desert seems like an angry act of defiance. It makes me wonder how long those feelings of injustice – both real and imagined – have been festering. Then Trona, an old-time mining town gone high-tech. North of Trona is the Slate Range Crossing with a super overlook into the Panamint Valley. We expected to catch the sunset there and then go on to meet Courtney, Gina, and JR at Panamint Springs for dinner, but the sky was getting increasingly overcast and the light flat.

Over dinner at Panamint Springs, Courtney said that the precise forecast was rain about five in the morning continuing until about eleven. We went to bed, under cloudy skies but there was no rain of any real substance until about seven the next morning. Then it started to rain for real. Then it kept raining and raining, off and on, all day. I’ve been seriously rained on in the desert in Nevada and Utah, even in the Atlas Mountains, but those were cloud bursts and this was different. Even though this seemed to be frontal rain, it was not a drizzle or steady rain, but big drops of rain that seemed to be falling through an otherwise very dry sky. Plop, a drop would hit my jacket with a noticeable sound, then another one, then another, even as the first drop dried so that my jacket and the ground was always almost dry.

Whatever reasons Americans may pretend for taking a gun out into the desert, most of them are going to fire at road signs, water tanks, memorial plaques, wind pumps or old beer cans.… Even if it is no more than a symptom of mindless vandalism, this mania for shooting at human artifacts is not quite senseless; the identifiable humanness of their origins gives these objects a different status from everything else in view. The works of man inevitably attract the attention of mankind. Reyner Banham in Scenes in America Deserta.