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Deserts & Cactus
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. ~Edward Abbey
I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams… ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
If you would know the world go into a desert and study your own heart. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
The Desert is—
A brown maiden
Basking in the sun.
~Ruth E. Meakin (b.1888), "April's Secret"
To a man left in the desert the first
The desert, bleached dazzling white under an afternoon sun... it lay stark and unromantic, colorless in a blare of heat. ~Winifred Hawkridge Dixon, Westward Hoboes: Ups and Downs of Frontier Motoring, 1921
The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the idea that the desert was merely a sea of sand? ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
...the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands... ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
Content can soothe, where e'er by fortune placed,
Can rear a garden in a desert waste.
~Henry Kirke White (1785–1806), "Clifton Grove"
A waste of intense heat and cold, of drought and cloud-bursts, of winds and lightning, of storm and death... What was the attraction...? What is there but a strip of sky and another strip of sand or water? But there is a simplicity about large masses — simplicity in breadth, space and distance — that is inviting and ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over the loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but
Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.
This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snow-line. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
The desert was quiet. The coyotes were not howling yet. I was my own howling coyote. Outwardly a comfortable-looking man in an arm-chair, smoking a pipe, I was inside a half-starved little coyote, out there on the dark desert, howling to the stars. ~J. B. Priestley, Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1917
Night in the desert. Nowhere else in all the world
Night comes like this...
My eyes, my human eyes, can see no end...
The hard bright moon seems far, so far away—
—The million, million stars that jeer at me—
Great God, how big it is—and I
But one more grain of sand beneath the immeasurable sky—
Night in the desert...
~Jean Wright, "The Desert"
For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "A Land of Little Rain," 1903
What makes the desert beautiful... is that somewhere it hides a well… ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and
Sometimes as I walk a desert wash,
pondering on planetary
history, I stop and listen
for sounds of affinity.
The rocks, the scrubby bushes
strike me with their airy silence
as if to wake me to their dreams,
and I am entangled in them...
~Cave Outlaw (1900–1996), "To Embrace a Skeleton," Wind in the Bell Tower, 1980
The cactus of the high desert is a small, grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it in the wrong way. ~Edward Abbey, "Cliffrose and Bayonets," Desert Solitaire, 1968
Lucy did not know what she yearned for, she did not know why the desert called to her, she did not know in what it resembled her spirit, but she did know that these three feelings were as one, deep in her heart. For ten years, every day of her life, she had watched this desert scene, and never had there been an hour that it was not different, yet the same. Ten years — and she grew up watching, feeling — till from the desert's thousand moods she assimilated its nature, loved her bonds, and could never have been happy away from the open, the color, the freedom, the wildness...
Hers always the desert seasons: the shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms; the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still! ~Zane Grey, Wildfire, 1916
The enormous draughts of emptiness and silence prescribed by the eremites are safe medicine only for a few exceptional souls. By the majority the desert should be taken either dilute or, if at full strength, in small doses. ~Aldous Huxley, "The Desert," Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, 1956
...the deep insistent red of things time-worn beyond memory. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive. These months are only approximate... the land sets its seasons by the rain. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with this immortal shrub, the creosote. It is odorous and medicinal, wandlike, with shining fretted foliage. Its vivid green is grateful to the eye in a wilderness of gray and greenish white shrubs. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
...to taste loneliness in desert places... ~H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia: A Sociological Holiday, 1904
The shadows of foliage, the drift of clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound of running waters — all the gentler qualities of nature that minor poets love to juggle with — are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh, and at first repellent. But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation! And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies. And at every step there is the suggestion of the fierce, the defiant, the defensive. Everything within its borders seems fighting to maintain itself against destroying forces. There is a war of elements and a struggle for existence going on here that for ferocity is unparalleled elsewhere in nature.
The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as you come to know the desert better. The sun-shafts are falling in a burning shower upon rock and dune, the winds blowing with the breath of far-off fires are withering the bushes and the grasses, the sands drifting higher and higher are burying the trees and reaching up as though they would overwhelm the mountains, the cloud-bursts are rushing down the mountain's side and through torn arroyos as though they would wash the earth into the sea. The life, too, on the desert is peculiarly savage. It is a show of teeth in bush and beast and reptile. At every turn one feels the presence of the barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beak and talon, the sting and the poison thereof... Everything is at war with its neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
Among rocks the cactus pads promise
to rise from beds at behest of sun,
like coral whose sea is brittle air.
~Cave Outlaw (1900–1996), "Of Time and the Word," Wind in the Bell Tower, 1980
For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God's world. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service... Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor
People say that they "love" the desert, but few of them love it enough to live there. I mean in the real desert, not in a make-believe city like Phoenix with exotic palms and golf-course lawns and a five-hundred-foot fountain and an artificial surf. Most people "love" the desert by driving through it in air-conditioned cars, "experiencing" its grandeur. That may be some kind of experience, but it is living in a fool's paradise. To really experience the desert you have to march right into its white bowl of sky and shape-contorting heat with your mind on your canteen as if it were your last gallon of gas... You have to imagine what it would be like to drink blood from a lizard or, in the grip of dementia, claw bare-handed through sand and rock for the vestigial moisture beneath a dry wash. ~Marc Reisner, "Introduction: A Semidesert with a Desert Heart," Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 1986
Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick downpours called
Here are the long heavy winds and breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling up into a wide, pale sky. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "A Land of Little Rain," 1903
How is it possible under such conditions for much vegetation to flourish?... All told there is hardly enough covering to hide the anatomy of the earth. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
There are flowers that bloom in gardens
Under a gardener's care,
And their lavish beauties charm me
As they flourish in luxury there.
There are flowers that blow in the meadows,
Kissed by the rain and the dew
In a riot of happy blooming
And I love their loveliness too.
But the flower that fills me with comfort
And makes Life's meaning sweet
Is the flower that blooms in the desert
In the midst of sand and heat;
Whose roots draw strength and beauty
From a land forbidding and wild,
Whose face turns bravely skyward
Nor pines for lot more mild...
~Hattie Greene Lockett (1880–1962), "To a Desert Flower"
Great big yellow mule-ear sunflowers are blooming along the dirt road... scattered more thinly over the rest of the desert are the others: yellow borage, Indian paintbrush, scarlet penstemon, skyrocket gilia, prickly pear, hedgehog cactus, purple locoweed, the coral-red globemallow, dockweed, sand verbena. Loveliest of all, however... with a fragrance like that of orange blossoms, is the cliffrose... ~Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968
The prickly pear... produces a flower that... is cup-shaped, filled with golden stamens that respond with sensitive, one might almost say sensual, tenderness to the entrance of a bee. This flower is indeed irresistibly attractive to insects; I have yet to look into one and not find a honeybee or bumblebee wallowing drunkenly inside, powdered with pollen, glutting itself on what must be a marvelous nectar. ~Edward Abbey, "Cliffrose and Bayonets," Desert Solitaire, 1968
Black, brown and gold
In diamond checks prevail;
Coats will be worn skin-tight,
Six to twelve amber buttons
On the tail.
~Margaret Wheeler Ross (1867–1953), "Spring Styles on the Desert: The Rattlesnake"
"Where are the people?" The little prince finally resumed the conversation. "It's a little lonely in the desert…" "It's also lonely with people," said the snake. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
My dear friend: Three or four months on the edge of the desert, all alone — how I envy you; and again, how I thank Heaven I am not in a similar position. ~Jack London, 1899
...there is something in the desert air
after the rainfall;
a clean smell, a calm, and the
freshness
of foggy clouds
that obscure the tops of mountains
as whole days become heavy with a
cool blue wetness.
for a short while the world is peaceful
and young again...
~Ken Sekaquaptewa and Candy St. Jacques, Sahuaro, 1970, yearbook of the Associated Students of Arizona State University
It was in the winter when the winds were fiercest. With them at times came a sharp cold, the more biting for the thin dry air of the desert. All the warmth seemed blown out of the basin with a breath, and its place filled by a storm-wind from the north that sent the condor wheeling down the blast and made the coyote shiver on the hill. How was it possible that such a furnace could grow so cold!... At those times the springs were frozen... and down in the desert it seemed as though a great frost-sheet had been let down from above. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it… ~Robert Edison Fulton, Jr., One Man Caravan, 1937
The desert's emptiness and the desert's silence reveal what we may call their spiritual meanings only to those who enjoy some measure of physiological security...
But even for those who enjoy security against the assaults of the environment, the desert does not always or inevitably reveal its spiritual meanings. The early Christian hermits retired to the Thebaid because its air was purer, because there were fewer distractions, because God seemed nearer there than in the world of men. But, alas, dry places are notoriously the abode of unclean spirits, seeking rest and finding it not. If the immanence of God was sometimes more easily discoverable in the desert, so also, and all too frequently, was the immanence of the devil... Be still, and know that I am God; be still, and know that you are the delinquent imbecile who snarls and gibbers in the basement of every human mind. The desert can drive men mad, but it can also help them to become supremely sane. ~Aldous Huxley, "The Desert," Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, 1956
In any land what is there more glorious than sunlight! Even here in the desert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain of meteors, it is the one supreme beauty to which all things pay allegiance. The beast and the bird are not too fond of its heat and as soon as the sun is high in the heavens they seek cover in the canyons; but for all that the chief glory of the desert is its broad blaze of omnipresent light. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
Painted lizards slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands. Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of the creosote... How many there are of the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive, small folk of the rainless region. Many are so swift you would not believe they exist without seeing the footprint tracings in the sand. They are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and white. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
Water, water, water… There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. ~Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968
...face reddened by desert sun-heat... ~Alexander Smith, "Books and Gardens," Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country, 1863
One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but
The desert is overwhelmingly silent. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
I had to do some lighting up myself, with a torch, in order to pick my way past prickly pear and cholla and cat-claw and other hooking and spiny growths, vindictive by day and devilish so late at night. ~J. B. Priestley, Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1917
Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
But the most beautiful individual flower in canyon country, most people would agree, is that of the cacti: the prickly pear, the hedgehog, the fishhook... the various cactus flowers have earned the distinction claimed for them on the basis of their large size, their delicacy, their brilliance, and their transience — they bloom, many of them, for one day only in each year... The true distinction of these flowers, I feel, is found in the contrast between the blossom and the plant which produces it... from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born... a splendid flower... soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites. ~Edward Abbey, "Cliffrose and Bayonets," Desert Solitaire, 1968
The desert is a scorpion's tale of stings and survival. ~Terri Guillemets
But let not our thoughts be only of happiness. For does not the old Arab proverb — "all sunshine makes a desert" — faithfully remind us that the cloud and the storm are likewise needed for the most complete and satisfactory results? ~William P. Finney, 1907
The yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
There are no fairy-folk in our Southwest,
The cactus spines would tear their filmy wings,
There's no dew anywhere for them to drink
And no green grass to make them fairy rings.
~Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934), "Western Magic"
Desert — a piece of Earth that God forgot to water. ~Terri Guillemets, 1996
But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. ~Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1968
The Colorado desert, with the exception of some fifty miles, is a mass of light clay, which, when dry, rises in the finest form of dust, and yet supports a peculiar vegetation of the mesquite tree, which is a low feathery acacia with large spreading roots. This shrub covers scores and hundreds of miles almost exclusively, where there is no grass, no other flowers, but everywhere this mesquite. It would be a pleasing shrub if not associated with such disagreeable remembrances of dust for days together.
There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room. So much earth must be preëmpted to extract so much moisture. The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is underground... ~Mary Hunter Austin, "The Land of Little Rain," 1903
Throughout history, the desert has been a place of trial, penance, and hard-won revelation. God lives in the desert. But Satan does, too. ~Jon Talton, Cactus Heart, 2007, jontalton.com
Perhaps I can tell you something of what I have seen in these two years of wandering; but I shall never be able to tell you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the glory of color that wraps the burning sands at their feet. ~John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901
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