Desert View
Three perceptions of the desert to change with my visit:
One:
I’ve heard and read mild protests that the sets of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, largely shot on the plateaus of Spain, do not resemble the real deserts of the American west. In particular, they claim Spain is too yellow. I simply accepted that claim as given until I saw the area for myself.
Arizona, and especially the territory around the Grand Canyon, is quite red, with a few stripes of green and purple tossed in for variety. But it’s a big desert; there’s more to the Wild West than just the Grand Canyon. New Mexico is drier and more yellow, and quite flat over large stretches. Unlike the Rockies, which are up and down all over, New Mexico’s mountains are small, isolated ridges decorating a broad plain. I thought it an excellent match to Leone’s locations. The New Mexico we saw was thicker with scrub, but not much thicker. A dry pocket could be a dead ringer—although nobody would build a town in that particular spot.
Two:
The desert, even in mesa country, is not thick with amazing rock formations. Cliffs and canyons, yes; bridges and teetering rocks, not so much. Naturally, I didn’t expect the desert to look just like a Road Runner cartoon, but I did expect to see the formations touted in the tourism literature. Those photos you see of extraordinary rock formations are, in fact, of extraordinary rock formations.
Three:
Environmentalists are right: the desert can’t support, or even survive, all the people now living there. Settlement is nowhere near as dense as the Atlantic seaboard, where I live now, or the Great Lakes region, where I grew up, but it’s still too visibly too dense for the land, even to uneducated eyes like mine.
We experienced unseasonal rain in Arizona, in brief but heavy downpours. One man told us it had been seventeen years since Arizona last saw rain in October. Despite this, the dry runs remained dry, although the river beds developed murky streams you could jump across, no larger than the rivulet that runs through a gully along the railroad tracks here in Montclair. There’s not enough water to sustain the cities as they are, much less the building boom that’s underway, so the region is draining its water table. It won’t stop until the water table is gone, and with it the plants that hold the soil together. The problem isn't looming on the horizon; it's here, and has been here a good long while. There’s deserts, and there’s deserts. Shortly the Saguaro will look Saharan.
Sam Kinison famously decried relief to inhospitable regions in a vicious but valid standup comedy routine. “We have deserts in America; we just don’t live in ‘em, asshole!” Just you wait.