The first detailed description of the Mojave Desert before I encounter on the CLM Internship:

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“… over the pass and into the Mojave Desert, a burned and burning desert even this late in the year, its hills like piles of black cinders in the distance, and the rutted floor sucked dry by the hungry sun. … The Mojave is a bit desert and a frightening one. it’s as through nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California. The shimmering dry heat made visions of water on the flat plain. And even when you drive at high speed, the hills that mark the boundaries recede before you.”

Thank you Steinbeck for that bleak description of the Mojave Desert. But then he goes on about the mysterious aspects of the desert:

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” The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist and wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself adn in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life. And what the scorching, searing, freezing, poisoning weapons of non-life have failed to do may be accomplished to the end of its destruction and extinction by the tactics of survival gone sour. If the most versatile of living forms, the human, now fights for survival as it always has, it can eliminate not only itself but all other life. And if that should transpire, unwanted places like the desert might be the harsh mother of repopulation. For the inhabitants of the desert are well trained and well armed against desolation. Even our own misguided species might re-emerge from the desert. The lone man and his sun-toughened wife who cling to the shade in an unfruitful and uncoveted place might, with their brothers in arms- the coyote, the jackrabbit, the horned toad, the rattlesnake, together with a host of armored insects- these trained and tested fragments of life might well be the last hope of life against non-life. The desert has mothered magic things before this.”

For the whole chapter he writes about the desert in Travels with Charley. It was this northern girl’s first introduction to the desert. Sure, I have heard about deserts before on nature shows and in old west movies, but to know I will be there for the next five months, working in the desert… I have heard about the curious beauty of the desert, and those who inhabit it. Now I get to see it first hand for myself, and decide what I think of it. I have been told that every biologist should see the desert sometime in their lives to witness flora and fauna living in an extreme environment, and for me it is one of the first things I am doing on my way to becoming a biologist. Check that off the to do list. And as for the desolate absence of water and the searing heat I say… bring it on.