In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey writes, “And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? … Hard to say – and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it.” He suggests that the desert defies words but is “knowable when you see it,” invoking Justice Potter Stewart’s assertion (about porn).
How do you speak desert? Its language is not spoken but sensed. You don’t study vocabulary—you attune.
Its alphabet consists of sun-bleached bones, twisted branches of juniper trees, and the striations of rock that mark time in colors.
You learn to read the shade as shelter, the cactus bloom as resilience, and the cracked earth as memory. You begin to listen to its stillness, feel its power on your skin, and sense its indifference with each breath. Every slot canyon is a whispered invitation to enter. Every lizard is a punctuation mark in motion.
Its nouns are Joshua Tree, Cushion Foxtail Cactus, Spiny Senna, Yellow-backed Spiny Lizard, Black-headed Grosbeak, Townsend’s Solitaire, Western Tanager, Chuckwalla, stark red Barrel Cactus, blooming Ocotillo, woefully un-cuddly Teddybear Cholla, purple-flowered Desert Willow, Desert Bluebells, and stunning Apricot Mallow.
Its verbs are the silences between the blowing wind, the curves of a canyon wall, the sparseness of the Joshua Tree forest, the steepness and rockiness of a canyon trail, and the ladder reaching toward a skylight opening in the ceiling of a slot.
Its conversation is not voiced but imagined in the claustrophobia of a slot canyon, the needles of a prickly cholla patch, and the vastness of an infinite basin. It shouts at you from within while clinging prostrate to the side of an almost trail, overlooking the abyss of a hundred-foot sheer cliff, and recoiling at the silence of a rock-hugging rattlesnake while gazing into the darkness of a twenty-foot drop. It sometimes speaks whimsically in an Ocotillo arch and among the rock formations: the Robot, the Skull, the Whale, the Claw, Kong, and the Big Crunch.
As Abbey writes, “The Desert waits outside, desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny thorny, stunted and twisted as they are tenacious.”
However you choose to arrive—whether in your Sunday dress and open-toed shoes, with your pet cactus to meet its wild cousins, or adorned with all the cosmetic enticements of human attraction—if you approach it with curiosity and respect, and take the time to learn even a little, you’ll find that the Desert doesn’t just open up; it communicates with you through an ancient, unspoken intimacy.
