This newsletter presents a small, occasional collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own world building and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other writers, too.
I don’t know if I will ever feel at home in the desert, but like Salty, who drove one of the famous Borax mule teams1 in Death Valley, I find myself drawn in again and again by the harsh landscapes, where the bones of the world have been exposed.
It’s harder to ignore mortality in the desert, not because the desert is lifeless (it’s not!) or because death can come so much quicker in the desert (if you’re unprepared). It’s because without the shroud of greenery to mask it, the geologic scale of time is starkly on display. In the desert, it is impossible to ignore how long these mountains, these valleys, these very stones have stood just so upon the earth, and how little the span of human life — let alone a single human life — measures up.
The desert is vast, in space and in time, and I am just a speck who can only look with awe upon it.
Here in California, the larger Mojave Desert is unavoidable, and I recently went on a solo writing retreat to Joshua Tree. It was great to get away, immersed in a landscape that informs my work-in-progress. I’ll share my thoughts about that remarkable place soon, but in the meantime here some stories from the other end of the Mojave, the lowest place in North America, and one of the hottest places on Earth… Death Valley.
“The World is Golden in an Instant”
The valley shimmered with myriad points of color, as if Georges Seurat had touched up a Georgia O’Keeffe. The dominant presence was desert gold, a sunflower that blossoms on a long, spindly stem. Notch-leaved phacelia, in colors ranging from blue to lavender, were also common, along with the free-floating white blossoms known as gravel ghosts. Scarlet clusters of paintbrush spattered higher elevations. The flowers were especially thick along the shoulders of the roads, since runoff soaks the ground on either side. They seemed to greet you as you went by, like bystanders cheering a parade — or, perhaps, like protesters silently resisting the incursion of asphalt.
As the day went on, the landscape was overrun by people. They moved through the fields in slow motion, their legs extended at funny angles, their heads bent down. From a distance, they appeared to be playing Twister or performing modern dance. Once I got off the road, I understood why people were contorting themselves. You did not want to step on any of the brave little blooms that were coming up in this unlikely terrain: bone-dry sandy soil, cracked sheets of dried mud, patches of soil on the ledges of cliffs. The desert-five-spot flower looks up at you with a tiny, bright-painted face — purple petals speckled with red.. All that color has a practical purpose: to seize the attention of hummingbirds and other pollinators. But it was hard not to see it symbolically, as a defiant assertion of life in the face of death.
Read more: Death Valley is Alive
Homeland
Tümpisa (timbisha) is the Shoshone name of red-ochre earth sourced by the Old Ones from the Black Hills overlooking the popular Furnace Creek recreational area. This medicinal material is smudged onto faces and used in homes to “strengthen their spirituality.” At times tümpisa was provided to other Shoshone bands that traveled to the valley in order to obtain it because of its “powerful healing properties.” The Timbisha have in fact resided in Death Valley — a contemporary place name that many Timbisha loathe — for thousands of years. Vast physical artifacts affirming their occupation can be found throughout its borders, including the often overlooked Grinding Rock at the Furnace Creek Inn’s lower parking lot with foot deep holes on its surface that were created from the continuous grinding of mesquite beans into flour over time.
The decision by the federal government in the 1930s to exclude the Timbisha from the monument was a conscious one. After all, the Timbisha had no treaty rights because they were not officially recognized as a tribal entity with no sovereign land base to call home, rendering any bargaining power that the Timbisha may have had as nil. Rather than admit that the Timbisha had a long and enduring presence here, federal officials simply chose to “pretend” that the Indians did not exist in Death Valley to allow the proposed national monument to proceed as planned.
Tüpippüh is the Timbisha name for their ancestral homeland. Tüpippüh encompasses the valley floor, playas, dunes, springs, meadows and mountains -- every landform and ecology within the borders of today’s national park and the surrounding region. Although anthropologists believe that their Uto-Aztecan ancestors migrated into the region more than one thousand years ago, the Timbisha state that they have been here from time immemorial.
Source: How the Timbisha Shoshone Got Their Land Back
Ancient Waters
“Death Valley seems like a place that’s super, super dry,” Franco says, “but there’s actually an enormous amount of water just below the surface here. Death Valley is actually on top of one the largest aquifers in the world. And so there are springs in the park that generate water, and that is where all of the people who live in the park get their water.” In fact, people have been living in Death Valley for millennia, including the Timbisha Shoshone, a federally recognized Native people indigenous to the area on the California-Nevada border, who still live there today.
Franco says one of her favorite spots is Badwater Basin, an enormous salt flat which, at 282 feet below sea level, is the lowest place in North America. (For a sense of scale, sea level is marked high up on the cliffside.) What Franco loves so much about this place is the way it allows you to “really see the different layers of time colliding.” The valley started forming 14 million years ago, and when you explore Badwater Basin “what you’re walking on is actually over two miles piled up of sediment from an ancient prehistoric lake that was there. It really gives you perspective about the scale of the world that we’re living in.”
Read more: The Ranger Who Lives and Works in the Hottest Place in North America
Whoa, Team
Driving the wagons was another story. It required a complex system of harnesses and a “jerk line” that controlled the whole team. A steady pull by the driver told the animals to turn left while a series of jerks indicated right. To stop the team, a voice command as well as the brake were used. Turning the wagon was a complicated maneuver, requiring the mules to jump over the chains that connected them to keep the wagon from swinging out of the turn.
The harsh environmental conditions stressed both human and animals. One driver named Salty Williams described the difficulties of the journey, as recorded by Mary Hunter Austin in The Land of Little Rain: “Hot days the mules would go so mad for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar of hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains.”
Salty, meanwhile, would curse and yell at the mules until they were silenced. After his swamper died, Salty quit his job because it was “too durn hot.” Yet he took up the job again because of the “call of the land.”
Source: The Twenty-Mule Teams of Death Valley
Far, Far Away
Three and a half miles south of Furnace Creek is Golden Canyon, one of the park’s most popular day hikes, where Jawas hid themselves before zapping R2-D2 with an ionization blaster in "Episode IV: A New Hope." My kids are about the same size as the school children who played the film’s Jawas, small and dirty creatures. They naturally gravitate to the many side canyons, narrow slots that zig and zag out of Golden Canyon, climbing, crumbling and sampling the rock walls.
Other scenes from "A New Hope" were filmed here as well, like when Luke was conked on the head by Tusken Raiders, dangerous sand pirates wrapped in rags with grotesque metal protrusions for eyes and mouths.
About 7 miles south on Badwater Road, we detour onto a short one-way road that leads to Artist’s Palette, a riot of colors splashed on the hills, with iron, aluminum, magnesium, titanium, hematite and chlorite serving as the pigments. In an unmarked gulch that runs along the north side of the Artist's Palette parking lot, Jawas carried off R2-D2 in Artoo’s Arroyo. In the nearby Black Mountains, old Ben Kenobi lived in a hermit hut.
Source: I went to California’s Death Valley to visit all the places where 'Star Wars' was filmed
There’s some dispute over the actual number of mules.