Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  She’s heard it before. “Yes, but aren’t they attracted to heat?”

  No, ma’am, that’s the rattlesnake. But even snakes aren’t attracted to huge warm things like people—the snake can’t eat them, and the huge warm thing might kill the snake. As for scorpions, they like places to hide. Like tents.

  I’m not sure she believes me after I quoted Hall. But I believe her when she tells me that Dick Hall died of an infection after a pulled tooth.

  Such an unfunny way to go.

  Around forty miles west of Salome, over a low pass of crumbling granite and across a creosote flat, I find a dirt track leading toward the Plomosa Mountains. It’s late, no longer hot, with cirrus whipping high above. The road climbs and descends the gentle swells of the nude, muscular hills. The crests are stony pavements. The troughs are veined with palo verde and ironwood along the dry watercourses called arroyos.

  As is my nature, I favor the low point over the high, choosing for my camp a comfortable arroyo, six feet across. The sand is streaked with black magnetite, iron-rich grains laid down by the last flush of water. A sweep of my hand readies the sand for the ground cloth, inflatable pad, and sleeping bag. Off with the shoes and out with the sandwich and beer I picked up in town, and now I’m ready to read Dick Hall’s columns from the Salome Sun. “Out here in the Desert,” he wrote in his maddening capital letters, “you Don’t Need Much—and You Don’t Get Much either—and after a while you get so as you Don’t Want Much—and when you get that way there ain’t Much Use in going somewhere else to starve to Death . . . so we stay here.” Content in my fold in the landscape, I lie back as the sunset throws colors all around, as if I am at the center of something.

  FIRST LIGHT finds me lazing about camp. My duties are few: admire the peachy sunrise, check my shoes for scorpions (none), and scribble a few notes.

  Dawn, 69 degrees—SE wind—few clouds—smell of moisture. The desert is pavements of stone, sharp-edged gray limestone and deep red chert, little stones the size of my fingernail. Dune bursage and ironwood in the troughs, and creosote everywhere.

  The dune bursage, Ambrosia dumosa, is a shin-high dome of twigs with pale ghost-green leaves. Like the creosote, the dune bursage wears no thorns; unlike the creosote, its leaves are edible. To be vulnerable and tasty seems a curse, yet the dune bursage is more common with every mile closer to Death Valley. Drawn to aridity? Not really. It’s simply fond of sands and open space, and is glad as any plant can be for rain.

  It’s hard to say at first glance whether the ironwood is carefree or tormented. Typically a lopsided shamble, the tree is capable of fifty feet when it gets lucky, but my neighbors here aren’t much taller than me. Up close it’s clear that many of their limbs are dead, yet still clinging to the trunk. These badges of survival are one of the pleasing differences between plant and animal. You never see a coyote that’s a head, torso, and one leg dragging around three dead limbs, but an ironwood is often three-quarters dead, with limbs polished by sun and sand.

  Like many desert plants that spend much of their lives waiting for rain, the ironwood can live several hundred years. The oldest known is reckoned to have put down its roots around eight hundred years ago. In terms of current events, that’s when the holy war between the Crusaders and the Muslims heated up, and the unstoppable Kurd, Saladin, declared jihad and took back Jerusalem.

  Time passes, and the ironwood soldiers on. To those unfamiliar with the local seasons, its habits are baffling. It drops its leaves in April, and it refuses to unveil its pastel purple flowers until the thermometer climbs to 100. It’s all about water, naturally. Over most of the ironwood’s range, the seed pods split open just in time for the summer storms. In the Sonoran Desert, the summer storms are the ecological equivalent of spring. Every living thing struggles through the rainless months of May and June, counting on the bulge of heat over the drylands to suck in moisture from the Gulfs of Mexico and California. The storms erupt in July, flooding the arroyos that otherwise make the finest camps.

  Despite the tinge of moisture in the air today, I don’t expect rain—October is typically too late for a storm. Besides, the rains rarely penetrate west to the Colorado River, which happens to be today’s destination.

  The wind is a gift this morning. Back on the highway, the bike picks up speed until the breeze and I are heading west to the river together, the only sound the whiz of my tires on the pavement. The road drops out of the stony desert and slips between sand hills. It’s thirty miles to the river, with traffic picking up steadily after the junction with the excessively wide but admirably smooth Highway 95. A pickup with an American flag snapping from its antenna tows a bass boat with swivel stools. A Buick slides by, towing a flatbed with a golf cart wearing a flag sticker on its bumper.

  Boating and golfing in the lowest hottest desert since I rolled out of Tucson seems as strange as the ironwood’s flowering in June—but this, too, is all about water. At the town of Parker, the Colorado is backed up behind Headgate Rock Dam. The slender green reservoir is called Lake Moovalya on the map, but along the shore of boat ramps and parking lots everyone calls it the Parker Strip. I test the water with a toe. Invitingly cool, yet nobody swims where the drag boats are doing 60 mph.

  “This is the place—the Strip,” says one Richard, of ample muscles. “They just motor down, turn around, come back, and go in circles all day.”

  He’s here from California with Cassie and a pair of 951cc Bombardier Jet Skis on a trailer behind a glossy beetle-black Ford Explorer. Cassie, with a well-tanned hide and suspiciously springy breasts, sees me scribble a note. “Just don’t say we’re yuppies.”

  I promise. Instead I’ll say they’re a friendly couple with an expensive habit ($8,000 per machine), looking for water to play in. “The Pacific,” says Cassie, “is awfully cold.”

  I pick up a sixteen-ounce Bud and a bag of pretzels at one of perhaps fifty liquor stores and bars, then try for a slice of pizza at a takeout. They’ve none ready to go, so I pick up a cheeseburger at the “country kitchen” next door, stash the lot in my handlebar bag, and confront the first steep hill of the trip.

  Fifteen miles upriver of the Headgate Dam, the land humps up in a ridge of dark rock perpendicular to the Colorado. The river long ago cut a canyon through the rock. Somewhat later, in the 1930s, Parker Dam was built in the canyon, and the forty-five miles of river above the dam became Lake Havasu.

  It’s a short but stiff climb over the ridge. At the summit is a car with a young woman sitting on the trunk lid. She’s from the pizza joint, and she bears a gift: a fresh slice on a paper plate topped with aluminum foil.

  “We thought you might still like a piece of pizza.”

  I even have a relatively quiet place to eat, but perhaps that’s because the boats of Havasu are barred from approaching the lakeside entrance to the Buckskin Tunnel. Bored through 6.8 miles of Precambrian granites and more youthful lavas, it’s not for vehicles but for water. All I can see of the tunnel is what looks like a swimming pool opening onto the lake. Only the web of power lines and the thrum of electricity betray a thirst that can hardly be understood by a man who’s been rationing a gallon a day.

  The pumps are gulping 22,000 gallons each and every second, lifting it over 800 feet, and disgorging it into the Central Arizona Project canal that runs 330 miles to Phoenix and Tucson. Along the way the water will be raised by additional pumps another 2,100 feet. Messing with the numbers, I figure out that this distance and rise is equivalent to running a fair portion of the Colorado River backward and uphill all the way to Utah—all because of our refusal to live with aridity.

  As for the natives, “The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations,” wrote Mary Austin in her 1903 The Land of Little Rain. Cheerful is pushing it, but they certainly know how to bide their time. The hills hold mostly creosote and bouquets of thick knobby stems called brittlebush. No leaves on the latter, and it’s no surprise. A survey with my binoculars confirms
my suspicion: only three saguaros in the neighborhood. Although the big cactus is a canteen capable of surviving a rainless year, the saguaro’s seeds cannot split open and reach for the sky without the summer rains. That they are vanishing is proof that the rains go no further.

  Usually. Climate is all about statistics, not the particularly large thunderhead that hunkers over the wreck of a mountain in the west. The sun, blotted out by the cloud, looks to be down for the count—but then breaks out to burn free on the horizon with one last ferocious shaft of light. Startled but feeling lucky, I pedal on to the perfect place for the night, a clear patch of pavements atop a ridge. To the south, beyond the ragged palisade of the Buckskin Mountains, the atmosphere is boiling over. The lightning delivers simple cloud-to-ground jabs as well as cloud-to-cloud shots that spread like cracks in shattered glass.

  I prepare my bed, rinse off with a liter of water, pop open a beer, and turn to see that there are now four storms, one at each cardinal point. A hoot owl tells me I’m not alone. Sitting on a warm rock, I watch, grinning goofily in anticipation. But no storm will come.

  Later, I wake to thunder. I get the tent up, crawl in, and count off the seconds from flash to rumble. When it’s forty-five seconds, it’s like counting sheep. But when it’s suddenly twenty, then four seconds, it’s like my wife’s labor pains, just before she yelled, “It’s coming!” That’s how baby Rosa was born at home, by accident. Some things are simply beyond our control.

  A hot bolt turns the world from black and white to color. The wind butts the tent. And with the first heavy splats of rain, the wait is over.

  RIDING INTO LAKE HAVASU CITY, I’m surprised that the first homes aren’t trailers but actual houses. The gravel yards are heaped in color-coordinated mounds topped with copper cutouts of the iconic flute-playing native, Kokopelli. Electric garage doors open and close, and vehicles with tinted windows come and go. But no actual humans are about, despite the Welcome to Lake Havasu City sign (Keep Us Drug-Free, Gang-Free, Graffiti-Free) claiming a population of 40,000.

  I ride until I find a cinder-block strip mall, but on Sunday there’s nobody at Sunshine Hair Styling or the gift shop trying to unload Beanie Babies. Things liven up at the Walgreen’s, with a marquee reading Patriotic T-shirts, 3 for $10. Doing my part, I buy some Made-in-America Sour Skittles.

  Lake Havasu City is dense with flags. The shops have directions for “Proper Flag Display” taped to their windows. They also sell the flag decals I’ve seen slapped on car and truck windows. The resulting loss of visibility might explain the big wreck on Highway 95.

  A man in a patriotic T-shirt and black horn-rims is reconstructing the accident for all who care to listen. He points to the filigree of skid marks and says, “Now you can see that the fifth-wheel couldn’t stop—too much weight! He was towing an SUV behind his trailer. Come down the hill and round the bend and skidded into that little gray car, knocked it clear across the intersection. ’Course the fifth-wheel kept on skidding, into that Suburban towing what used to be a boat.”

  Sherds of fiberglass are strewn over the road. A pity, because the boat had to go only another hundred yards to reach the World Famous English Village and London Bridge. I pedal down to the channel and watch the Dixie-Bell, a fake steamboat, cruise under the bridge.

  Unlike the Dixie-Bell, the bridge is the real thing. It was sinking into the Thames until Robert McCulloch, of chainsaw fame, bought it in 1968 for a mere $2.4 million (shipping and handling not included). He had a plan. In 1963 McCulloch had bought twenty-six square miles of land from the state of Arizona on the shore of Lake Havasu. It was supremely vacant of humans. Real steamboats, like the 175-foot-long Mohave, used to paddle the Colorado, but the dams had finished them off. Now there was nobody within forty miles.

  McCulloch pitched his master-planned community on television. The curious called a number, and a man would come to your house. One came to my family’s house, in a suburb of Chicago. My parents dearly wanted to escape the post-1968 desolation of the South Side. The pictures of swimming pools and palm trees looked good.

  McCulloch’s man flew them out for a look, and my father later recalled his impression of Lake Havasu City: “We’d just landed the astronauts on the moon—and here it was. There was nothing at all.”

  McCulloch needed an attraction. While my family packed up for Tucson (the Garden of Eden compared to Havasu), he had London Bridge rebuilt, stone by stone, near the lunar shore of Havasu. The completed bridge looked perfect if you didn’t notice that it spanned nothing but gravel. McCulloch next sent in the heavy equipment. With ’dozers and dredgers, the lake was brought to and under London Bridge.

  The year was 1972, and the effect was immediate. You could drive a boat under London Bridge, and thousands wanted to. By 1974, Lake Havasu City had seventy organizations, including the John Birch Society, Havasu Cactus Kickers, and Overeaters Anonymous.

  The overeaters are still here—or are those tourists? The young men by the Old English Pub look like Maori warriors, shirtless barrels of flesh with vaguely Asian tattoos and sun-peeled noses. One is barking into a cell phone, “Bin Laden just released his latest video, and we just released our latest bombs. Did you hear? Nine-thirty this morning. Afghanistan.”

  I can’t stop staring at these people, that bridge, those drag boats with chrome exhaust headers spitting pure noise and power. So I leave for something more familiar: breakfast at Denny’s, where the coffee is hot and the air is cool.

  Without air conditioning, few would live in a place where the temperature last summer reached 126 degrees. Yet air conditioning was invented in 1902 for printing, not people. Four-color printing then required four perfectly aligned runs through the press, but changes in humidity made the paper swell and shrink between runs. To keep the humidity low and constant, Willis Carrier devised the “Apparatus for Treating Air.” The trick was chilled coils that cooled the air so the water vapor would condense. That’s why air conditioners drip.

  But the machinery was huge and unruly, and the stuff in the coils was toxic ammonia—not for the home mechanic. It wasn’t until 1947 that affordable window air conditioners hit the market. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that, soon afterward, Americans reversed the post–Civil War trend of moving north. They headed south.

  They’re still heading south, following the tanker trucks and power lines to Lake Havasu City. They pass me as I head north on Highway 95 the next day. Some are seasonal nomads in cars with North Dakota plates (Discover the Spirit), and others are in for the long haul, behind the wheel of U-Haul vans (Adventure in Moving). With looks of neighborly concern they wave to me as they pass. They’re wondering, Why is that man standing by his bike in the desert?

  Jotting a few botanical notes. The saguaros are truly gone. The teddy-bear cholla look scorched. It’s no wonder: a typical year sees five inches of rain. Yet Lake Havasu City swells. People can live on the moon, after all.

  ON THE TV at a fuel oasis called the Pilot Travel Center, a man with a beefy mustache is explaining what America is about:

  “We put a human being on the moon.”

  He’s not an historian. He’s selling American cars that are superior to those from countries that haven’t reached the moon.

  “That’s what we believe at Anderson Ford.”

  I share the pride in homegrown ingenuity. Nowhere but America can I buy a foam beer cooler that doubles as an insulated coffee cup. It’s brilliant.

  I check out the bumper stickers for sale. “God Bless America” and “Remember the Towers.”

  One of my high-school friends was in the South Tower. He escaped, barely. He knew of my experiences with Muslims in Djibouti, Egypt, and Jordan. Now he had his own. As he told me, with elegant economy, “They tried to kill me.”

  I ride north to the Black Mountains on old Route 66, across an open valley of creosote and little else, then climb slowly up the bajada. The closer to the mountain, the rockier the desert and the happier the arroyos, thick with tall loose swit
ches of desert lavender. With a critical eye I judge the Black Mountains to be of questionable stability, tilted and busted into ramps and cliffs, and scabbed with old mines. Fortunately, most drivers bypass the narrow two-lane road in favor of the interstate. Along the shoulder are the hoofprints of what must be burros that outlasted the miners.

  I camp high on a tree-free ridge, facing west. The Colorado River valley, now 1,500 feet below, falls into shadow, yet up here the backlit cholla are radiant with a halo of spines. I strip and pour a liter of water over my head. With a smooth boulder for a seat, I drip-dry and read the Wall Street Journal I picked up in Lake Havasu City.

  There’s a review of survival gear. A “Level-A hazmat suit” can be had for only $2,700. If you prefer to run away, you might consider “radiation-detection equipment,” keeping in mind the advice of Mr. Hopkins of SurvivalLink.com: “If you’ve got to measure radiation levels, it’s already kind of late, you know?”

  Everybody is afraid of something. Desert botanists like myself fear certain plants, like the Sahara mustard I spotted down by the Parker Strip. This dreadful salad of prickles is smothering the native wildflowers. I felt the hot blush of xenophobia when I saw a big dead mustard tumbling along on the wind: nature invents the wheel, and the foreigners roll in without a visa.

  This spring, while working on a map of the Sahara mustard invasion, I wrote to a botanist in Kuwait. How, I asked, to get rid of this weed? He tactfully replied that it isn’t a weed in the Middle East, but welcome browse for their camels. They plant it.

  In my mind the mustard remained a weed—an uninvited agent of change. I like things they way they are, or, as wilderness defender Edward Abbey liked to say, “Let’s keep things the way they were.”

  The night slips in and soothes the desert. I put my shoes on and clear the sharpest rocks from a patch just big enough for my sleeping bag. So long as I keep my distance from the jumping cholla, I feel supremely safe. And it’s a relief to escape the parade of flags that was Lake Havasu City. Any time more than twenty people start cheering, I feel the urge to slip into the background. Neither can I happily attend a basketball game at the University of Arizona. The crowd’s enthusiasm for the home team includes a barrage of insults hurled at the opponents—as if we cannot support us without cursing them.