Locopelli - Progress & Mescal (from the April/May issue of The Sun Runner Magazine)

Locopelli- Progress & Mescal

(from the April/May issue of The Sun Runner Magazine)

I picked my way carefully through the cholla and on up into the rocks. Good old monzogranite. The full moon rising from the east made the climb easier. No eclipse tonight, I noted, the long deep shadows contrasting beautifully with the glowing desert floor. I sat down on one of my favorite rocks and looked out across the desert.



I always like this rock. I feel comfortable here, at ease. Not like those new age people who talk about power-emanating rocks and stuff like that. That’s just the pulse of nature they’re picking up on—the combination of all that is old and new, existing. Life comes in a lot of varieties, but rocks aren’t like people anyway. They see things a lot differently—and a lot slower—than we do. But that’s a topic for another time.



I looked north, out across the ever-increasing number of lights of Joshua Tree. At night, I relish those desert landscapes where no lights glare, and the Joshua trees leave long tall moon shadows.



After a time, I heard someone approaching and turned. It was my old friend, Coyote. He looked exhausted, worn out from carrying his full pack of medicine—not funny-named pharmaceuticals, real medicine.



"Hey, Loco," he growled.



"Hey yourself, you mangy old thing," I replied, offering him some of my mescal with a grin. I know how much he likes that stuff—the liquor, not the beans.



"I’m on my way," he said, gladly accepting my offer, looking out to the north.



"On your way where?" I asked.



"Out," he gestured vaguely to the east. "This place is done for. Wait for a lull in the traffic down there. If you listen then, you can hear it—the sound of the old soul of the desert being torn from the rocks, the sky, the earth. And when the soul of a place leaves, the place dies."
"You mean like Temecula, or Adelanto?" I asked. "They’re dead as can be."



"Precisely," Coyote replied.



We sat quietly for a moment, the only sounds being that of traffic down on Highway 62 and the low groaning of the rocks. They’re always moaning about something. An owl flitted by, intent on a kangaroo mouse down in the shadows below. Good eyes, those owls.



"I hear there’s going to be thousands of houses down there," Coyote gestured toward a dark Joshua tree forest between us and the highway.



"Yeah, but there’s going to be 16-foot-high sound walls along the highway, with berms so that only four feet of wall will show," I countered. "It’s going to be the ‘gateway to Joshua Tree National Park.’"



"No soul," Coyote replied dourly. "They say that within a century or so, maybe there will be no Joshua trees here any more anyway, so maybe it doesn’t really matter. Still, it does to me. I must be getting old."



"People have to live somewhere," I said.



He looked up at me in disgust.



"Everyone and everything has to live somewhere, unless of course, it stops living," he said. "Like the desert tortoise. When some human builds a house on a couple acres of land, there is still some room for the tortoise and other animals. This will be just the beginning. No one will hear the sound of the desert dying over the roar of the call of the money to be made. Money. It is a dead thing, yet for many, it is their god."



"People have to make a living," I noted, knowing I was just taunting my poor old friend who never had a penny, but always seemed to get by. His voice was rising in indignation.



"Making a living at the expense of all around you is not a ‘living.’ It’s a killing. Life," he opened his arms, indicating the raw desert nearby, "is worth more than little green pieces of paper. How much is the soul of the earth worth, anyway?"



"Hard to say," I replied. "It’s not traded on the NYSE or the NASDAQ or anything. I’d say it’s worth whatever a developer will pay for it, or whatever you can make cashing in on its funeral."
Coyote just sighed, then took another slug of mescal. We sat in relative silence for a moment, with just the low rush of traffic and the deep groaning of the rocks audible.



"Well, at least I hear there will be a Wal-Mart in Twentynine Palms," I said, trying to think of something to cheer him up. "I heard they want to put it at Utah Trail and the highway—you know, the entrance to the national park. Then everyone in Twentynine won’t have to drive so far to get…"



"Cheap nasty Chinese stuff," Coyote finished my sentence for me.



It was my turn to sigh. Nothing I said, it seemed, would cheer up my old friend.



"Most people," he said, spitting out the last word with what I thought was a rather high degree of contempt, "are so removed and alienated from the real world, the natural world, that they don’t care about losing the soul of the desert, so long as the satellite TV keeps pumping out the crap. They never see the owl at hunt, or listen to the cactus wren’s gossip, or the doves and quail bedding down for the night. They watch TV instead of looking at the stars, and tear around the desert in fast, noisy vehicles instead of hiking into a silent canyon. They hate the wind that has so much to tell, and they ignore the beauty and power of the desert, longing for dirty mini-malls and one-upping their neighbors in some shallow, materialistic way."



"Oh that’s not fair," I replied. "Most of them are just trying to make a living and support their families. They just want to have a halfway decent life, and they’re always being distracted and manipulated by others who want to pick their pockets while they look the other way. They don’t have the time—or space—to think, let alone appreciate beauty or connect with the desert."



"I suppose you’re right," Coyote said, after a long pause. He sniffed the night air. "But I can smell greed, and remember—it often appears wrapped in a more palatable façade. But it’s still greed, and the soul of the desert here is still leaving."



"True enough," I admitted. I’d heard the wailing of the desert’s soul rising for some time. It was strongest down below still, all along the Coachella Valley where both the souls of the desert and the mountains were almost annihilated, replaced by smog, walled developments and country clubs, shopping malls, and politicians who kept spouting rhetoric about how they loved living there because of the "natural beauty," a beauty they often were directly responsible for destroying.



But the cries of the desert’s soul were also coming from Lancaster and Palmdale, Victorville, Hesperia, Adelanto, and up here in the hi-desert too. I wondered if soon the whole desert wouldn’t be in its death throes, soulless and vanquished, but I didn’t voice my fears to Coyote. I knew I didn’t need to. He could often see far into the future, father than I, and would know what lay ahead. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t bear to stay around and watch the process.



Coyote sat down one of his medicine bags, took out some desert sage and matches, and lit the sage. I didn’t need to ask what he was doing, but he told me anyway.



"I’m going to sing the prayer for this place, it will ease its passing," he told me. "And it’s my way of saying goodbye too. It’s an old prayer—very old," he said. "For all that has come before and all that will come to pass."



He raised the smoky sage up into the night sky and began to sing, his shape lengthening as he began to shuffle a little in rhythm with the chant. I dug into one of his bags and found the coyote melon rattle, to add to the beat. I did not know all the words to what he was singing, if words were, in fact, what they were, but I joined in when I could. It was a sad, beautiful, and powerful song, and even the rocks stopped moaning long enough to listen.



When it was over, Coyote placed the last of the smoldering sage on the rock next to me, after waving it around me for protection.



"You’re not coming with me," he almost asked.



"No, my friend," I replied. "I must stay a while longer. Someone must stay while the soul finishes preparing for its departure. I have been here a while, and a while longer I must remain. I too, will eventually have to go, I fear. But I know where to look for you, and you for me, and we will sing a happier song when next we meet."



He looked at me as if he wasn’t quite sure of my last statement. But then he smiled.



"This soul will not be gone forever, nor this land dead for all time," Coyote said, as he gathered up his medicine bags. "The desert will change, and for a time it may die and be soulless, but things pass, and as I and my brothers have seen, it will return. And I will return too, to dance again, upon its return."



He turned from me with a half-hearted wave, and began walking off through the moonlight.
"And that," he called out with the kind of strength that comes from a connection to all that is life, "will be a better day."



As he vanished into the shadows, I realized he had kept my mescal. Some things never change.
"Vaya con queso, you old rascal, you," I shouted, laughing into the darkness. Funny, I missed him already. Even though the desert seemed to be filling up fast with people and cars and houses and mini-malls and garbage and things like that, it was feeling lonelier by the day. Change was definitely on the wind, and I got the feeling that even the mescal wouldn’t be enough to dull the pain we both knew was coming.