In the Cliff-Face: Mojave Reflections - Ford Melillo

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

- W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Talk enough and you’ll stumble in on a truth. It’s unavoidable. You converse for a while, you get comfortable, and the words just start to flow; then, suddenly, like a beet breaking from the earth, something entirely true pops up. Like a mushroom. Like a tumor. It isn’t yours, but you found it. Listen enough and you’ll hear the wind. Smell enough and you’ll send the dust on everything. Drive enough and you’ll end up in the desert. You’ll bound up somewhere totally complete and constantly changing. Like a shoreline, or a person. And it’s never, never yours. 

From the top: one white Volkswagen Golf filled to the brim with luggage and two people. It turns off the interstate 5 for the first real time all trip, since hopping on in Seattle the day before. Southbound travel is exchanged for a sharp veer east towards Lancaster. Only two more hours before everything comes to rest in Rancho Cucamonga, California. This is everyone’s first time taking the backroad home–the car’s, the passengers’–through Antelope Valley, to avoid the righteous mess of traffic called Los Angeles. The two folks populating the car are myself, in the driver’s seat, and Jael, trusty passenger. That one called Jael is especially aware of the city they’re avoiding, attending UCLA and all. The driver is accustomed to its vehicular troubles as a necessity of visiting her. A year or two into our relationship at this point, having just lived together for the summer in Washington. Jael worked a well-paying job and I wrote, mostly. We lived in a basement next to Lake Washington, from which we spied on the state’s beloved volcano, Mt. Baker. Before that, I had lived and written in England for the Spring. That makes six months away from home and my first two times living outside the state. Heading home. Jael also grew up in Rancho but is always away from home, since her family is in the Philippines. The luggage is our shared life. 

In the time it took to set the scene just now, the 5 freeway slipped away and was replaced with more dry, cracked ground. The deep blues of Pyramid Lake shrink back into obscurity; aridness compounds from every direction. And so here we are: the Mojave. Mountains stretch from the West and the civilization momentarily reentered limps away again. It came back for just a moment as cities I know solely in motion, towns built around the busy 5 freeway that I’ve only ever experienced passing through. Not a thing now but sand and bright blue sky. Then there is a reservoir, I remember, surrounded by a gate and sidewalk and having nothing else to show. Silent, unadorned except by sunning lizards. It is the first notable amount of anything on this unfamiliar road. So quiet and quick-in-passing that I never learn its name, nor who it serves, nor who might tend to it. The semi-trucks gliding along in front of us seem unimpressed; we mirror their nonchalance and run along the street unimposed, about half-a-tank of gas, and pass them by way of the oncoming lane. Soon, again, it is only us and those mountainous trucks out here. Clear road otherwise, asphalt black and sun-loving. Jael looks out the window with curiosity as I hope for home. 

We turn onto another highway at some point maybe half-an-hour in and – Wham – the deepest pothole. Entirely unavoidable in the lane, having made no indication of itself. It feels as though the entire right front wheel sinks into the street momentarily, and we necessarily dip with it. I retroactively wince as we bounce out, anticipating the burst that should have ensued and did not. I doubt there is any real reason it did not explode, but just so; it stays as it had been, the wheel. And when our hearts settle back down, as if we fell into it through the hole, we are already miles deeper into the valley. 

To my memory, the colors are: peach, daisy-pit yellow, eggshell white, sage green, pepper, and, though this may only be dream, a drunk rosy pink. 

So begins the disorientation. Orpheus in the underworld, I shrink into my eyes. The sun up in the air all floating-like. Actually, moving faster than anything I can comprehend; yet, more still than a picture. And my body flying across this plain of sand noiselessly, within a metal box, within another sort of mind. Jael beside me but I’m caught in my skull. Dr. Strange Records sticker on the back window, maroon and white in the bright afternoon. Sun-stripped Snoopy license plate frame dragging along. I feel it all. My life and I, moving. A year ago, we came down the state our normal way with one untinted window–broken into in Portland, having had our things stolen in the night. When we got to the car, we saw they had left Jael’s boots sitting up on the seat. Still untinted now. Sandy light peeking into the back passenger seat, all our new stuff collecting its warmth. Clothes back there warm. Blankets back there warm without people. Noiseless dogs under porches lay with tongues out as we start to pass the occasional house. A thousand miles from what was just home, heading back towards the foothills where I grew up. A thousand miles from trying out life as a writer and losing bits of myself somewhere in the process. The first tastes of life untethered. And the promise of a familiar return. Jael’s always been moving but this is new to me, this is important. A new way home. Exchanging Mt. Baker’s distant mystique from the edges of Lake Washington for the ancient San Gabriel cradle that rocked me in my youth. I feel the Washington sun on my mind. All the beauty of that basement dwelling next to the water. I walked to the shore often. Lush green life, all that water and the promise of rain. The noises of the city and all its unspoken concern. That lively bustle. Now endless Mojave. 

The vastness of it all… ahead and aside and everywhere is a seamless mixture of sand and short shrub, cut perfectly and consistently by measured lengths of road. Nothing like the cities or anything else I have seen before. Alien in its perfect geometry. Street signs naming them: D Street, E Street, F Street. Once or twice, a joshua tree reaching skyward. Once, a blown-out, pink-painted school bus and four walls enclosing a plot. Roofless and empty-seeming. A commune, I presume. Not far down the road–just a couple of lettered streets, really–a small school that looks as barren and sun-bleached as a bull skull. Nothing tall enough to have a substantial shadow. Certainly not the children. No streetlights, barely stop signs. No people. It is like an infinite day, time passing inconceivably. It is like walking into the center of a rose. 

A couple of clouds crawl in the distance, high-up and textured. The billowing beard of some desert wizard making faces. I stare at them because driving here takes no effort. Occasionally, a car passes the other way slowly, unhurried. It is the greatest entertainment to see another car after so much emptiness. But then, all you can see of the figure inside is hands on a wheel, the windows are so black-tinted. Spectral. Ghosts of coyotes dance in the heat on the horizon-line, all sorts of drunken colors. I imagine them twisting their faces to bark and yap in the moonlight. In my mind I see them saunter up to an old desert dog outside at dusk and make dinner of it. Nothing gruesome, though; desert red turns sandy in an instant. 

Mojave winds blow over the ground and uncover other ghosts in the plots we pass. Memories, mine or collective, swim to the surface among dried-up relics. I’ll list some for the sake of registering their distinctive stings. Among them: 

• Visions of picnics in my backyard as a small child, looking up through palm fronds at great processions of desert clouds. Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before the allergies haunted me. Soft warm of a late-spring lunchtime. The summer before thunderstorms. 

• The people the Spanish called Serrano–highlander–and who call themselves Yuhaviatam–People of the Pines. The people of here and where I grew up. They who originally spent summers in the San Gabriel mountains and winters in the valleys. They who named Cucamonga in one of those valleys, where I was raised. Whose men, women, and children were slaughtered in a 32-day campaign. Whose creator, Kruktat, laid ill and died near Big Bear Lake not far from here. Their ancestors’ tears became the pines visible from the valley–the ones I used to think were dancing giants. 

• This place, Antelope Valley. Named so by white people for the antelopes they wiped out by 1890. The Yuhaviatam call it Western Mojave Desert. Mojave, which means beside the water. Sun Village, an unincorporated community in the middle of it; a river once ran through the town and they filled it with cement, sent the water elsewhere. 

• The play called True West. Two brothers imploding on the other side of the San Gabriels in Pasadena, near where I grew up. Back where I am natural. One brother an Ivy League screenwriter, the other a desert vagabond. Something like twins, and all that means. Shepherd writing a note on sound, saying, 

The Coyote of Southern California has a distinct yapping, dog-like bark, similar to a Hyena. This yapping grows more intense and maniacal as the pack grows in numbers, which is usually the case when they lure and kill pets from suburban yards. The sense of growing frenzy in the pack should be felt in the background… In any case, these Coyotes never make the long, mournful, solitary howl of the Hollywood stereotype. 

The sound of Crickets can speak for itself.

My uncle Ben’s dog went out one night in his small suburban backyard and five minutes later he was just meat. Cute little dog and some coyotes, classic tale. He found the skull down the street a couple days later, clean and white and dew-covered in a patch of grass. One day as a teen, my mom got a pet kitten and showed it around the house. She brought it into the backyard for it to explore. As it trotted along, an owl bent down and caught it. They heard it cry as the owl carried it off into the distant pines. All this over in Rancho, on the other side of the San Gabriels. 

So that’s it. Old dogs make dinner for four. The Wheel of Fortune spins on a TV in a house facing the street as we pass. Open door, dark; a shadow person turned from the entrance. 

And so the moment before Sun Village is just like the eight moments before that. Streets of unincorporated communities, plots toting small rectangular one-story houses with aged pets and silhouettes of people. Other squares containing only snakes and low, dusty bushes. Clear view far out, nothing but more of this and the slipping promise that it should, at some point, stop. All this in the silence of life before humans. Everything nameless to us back here. A single blanket identifier, Mojave, and the rest anonymous–it might as well be blank shapes and nothing more than a muddle of pained memories. And that drunk rosy pink. That would indicate enough. The desert spelling its name in the sand, blowing it away, writing it again as a new word. All of this in a language humans could never speak, the language of dunes. And all its untranslatable truths. The wind rushes but makes no song. The snakes speak but say nothing. The lizards walk and make no noise. Vultures float and their sound is elsewhere. The moment before Sun Village is when the Mojave speaks for itself; even the impositions of man (house, street) are lesser, are passive in the vicinity of its voice. It is the world being the world, thinking. It is the opposite of Los Angeles’ surface and the exact same as its hidden innards. It is the true life living beneath, unshaped and transmuting; the only reminder of man is geometry. Beyond Sun Village, we are dead.  

At this point, I’m completely out of it. The car is basically driving itself, I’m staring at coyotes that don’t exist. I’m expecting translucent silver miners to start walking down from the mountains. I know the white heat outside means rain shadow, and I feel that darkness in me. We’ve gotten closer to the mountains as we’ve driven and now it looks as though we're sprinting alongside them, silently and rushed. Needing home will do that to you. Something in these hills is becoming deeply familiar, but twisted. 

Teens race along the dirt beside the street on quads and dirtbikes and I have to ask Jael if they’re really there, if those are real people out here in the Mojave, if that kid really just did a wheelie. Being carried along the desert by a single wheel! God, the traction! The balance! I swear I saw him race along on a blue bike like a beetle. Jael looks at me with concern, affirms that the kid just did a wheelie, and looks back out the window. She adores it out there, she loves noticing all the life we tend not to see when we settle somewhere. She never settles. She’s fascinated by the ecosystem and curious about all its happenings. I’m terrified that the shrubs’ shadows reach inside their hollow bodies. That they are filled with darkness. Words are exchanged slowly, on desert time. She is amazed, I am lost. We both say really and we mean things entirely different. 

The desert changes and is always its body. Always, always. Theseus’ ship and such. A moving vessel. I look down and our gas is in the red. No indication of a pump anywhere. Christ, where has my mind been! Oh, to be trapped here! To be stranded with all the coyotes–don’t mention the vultures! My eyes track to the thermostat: 106F. The untinted window still casts light that is warm to the touch. How long have we been driving? Has the sun moved an inch? 

More confusion. Real stakes and I am stuck in my mind. I am impossible to console–I cannot stop and I cannot see. My eyes turn from dreaming to frantically searching. Petrol, do they even get petrol out here? They redirected the water away from this town. Jael begins to shake me and, though I do not falter in my driving, my head has left. It is back in the snowcap of Mt. Baker; it is back in the vineyards of Rancho. I have no idea when the station appears but it does, like a mirage. I trust that it is real, I stop, I fill the tank. I imagine that I might really be on the side of the empty road, pouring sand into the gas tank; I hope this vision is not real. In my stupor I look around and have forgotten where we are. Is this California? Am I in beside the water? 

As I scan the world, I take in everything I can. The dry desert air, the crushing sun. I look towards the mountains and suddenly I know they are mine. The source of my disorientation. The San Gabriels. The backdrop of my childhood in the foothills, like a scene painted on a wall. Route 66 runs by my house and in Rancho it is called Foothill. I would look up to the mountains from that street. This is the backside, though; mirrored. Like someone forcefully turned them around–and someone did. It was me. I see them truly and it is like God is stepping out from behind the sky. Familiar in shape and shadow only, and with unique etchings upon the face. I wonder where along the line of peaks we are, since I am not as close with the mountaintops closer to Los Angeles. 

Suddenly, a quick shift of perspective: Mt. San Antonio, is that you? After all this time–after England, after Washington, after life? My side is covered in trees and bright mountain faces. The bottom is rich and green and always looked distant; it was where the oranges were made. From my house I saw the vineyards. I knew when grapes would come around. I would stomp them by the barrel-full in the city festival, I beat out adults. Green and orange and purple in the rock. My Mt. San Antonio. I could color it in behind my eyes any time except now. Like a song playing in reverse. Like every truth I’ve known spoken back to me upside down. It seems so much taller from this side, though perhaps I am genuflecting. I forget what movements I make in my shock, breathing Mojave air, charged with desert. Maybe I am praying. In my prayer I say: 

Absolution. Angel wings in the cliff-face. Devil’s tail in the snake-hole. And us rolling along, spilling off a bed of poppies into heavy dirt. I could catch the moon in my hands here. It’s that close and that far. I see flashes of cloud ahead of me and I’m not even watching the sky. It all blends and I feel myself rolling like the wheels below me. The whole of the moon in my mouth. My ears are small snails too soon to move; soon they will slip down my body. This is memory corrupting itself. This is the tragedy of memory corrupting itself. What am I feeling now? How complete is my world? How far I’ve moved through space since that day. God, what happened? When did the trumpets silence? I feel myself different, changed. Still the same arms at my sides. Maybe I died. Maybe that me isn’t around anymore. When was I reborn? This morning? I write this from the prison of the body, thinking of the wings of my heart. I write this from the soft sand of the lunar beach calling home, calling the Mojave and watching with binoculars. Kaleidoscopic life of Earth, call back to me! Call me back! I’ll come running to your shirt. I’ll carry my blanket. I’ll send the letter. I’ll watch the world. I’m ready to go.