“I just don't see it, Daddy,” I said. “It looks ugly to me.” I stood watching my dad gaze in adoration over the desert landscape, his eyes resting in reverence upon what stretched before him.
“The desert has a beauty all its own, Diana.”
I was ten years old and enjoyed camping in the desert, scrambling over rock formations but saw nothing of beauty in the dusty landscape, cacti, and brittle shrubs. The view, in my eyes, was something to be tolerated, rather than enjoyed.
I never intended to become a student of the desert, but a decade ago my job as a court reporter led me to familiarize myself with all things desert as I took on an assignment to report public meetings held several times a year by the Desert Advisory Council, part of the Bureau of Land Management. The Council's duty is to gather information from the public to inform the Bureau of how their land-management decisions and plans affect people holding various interests in the desert.
Though many interests are represented among the positions on the Council – wildlife, renewable energy, recreation, off-highway vehicles, farming, mining, Native cultural interests, wildlife habitat and conservation – each person who is part of these meetings has a unique affection for the California desert. One of the hopes expressed by the Council is that people will not just see this vast landscape as a place to just drive through on their way to somewhere else, but to slow down and appreciate what the desert offers, to see up close what it is made of, its history, geology, resources, and ecologic systems.
The day before each meeting, I attend a field trip with the Council and the public, where we visit different sites that will be discussed at the next day's meeting. This affords me an opportunity to get to know the people who will be speaking the next day and familiarize myself with names of sites, projects, plants, and species that were previously foreign to me.
Just a gas tank to the north of where I live sits the loved-by-me Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, the area explored by John Muir, who wrote words of praise about the mountain range and its good effects on us.
But between my home and those glorious mountains sits a vast desert I previously saw as a wasteland.
As I look out the car window on my drive north to the Sierras, where towering pines and emerald glacial lakes await me, I now appreciate the harsh beauty of the vast desert, raw and exposed and not afraid to show me its not-so-pretty parts, somehow beckoning me to live more authentically. I see nuanced colors I’d previously ignored, and I wonder how I ever viewed the desert as devoid of beauty.
I see shrubs scattered over the landscape, with complex root systems that join with each other deep underground, forming their own internet! If one shrub becomes diseased, it sends out messages to the others so they can produce defenses against the threat they've been warned about.
I see solar plants that produce clean energy but are drawing upon groundwater deep below the earth's surface, water that's been flowing for tens of thousands of years and needs to be considered before too much development is planned on the surface.
I see Native American cultural resources, like the line in the sand I visited toward San Diego. An ancient tribe used to make a pilgrimage once a year to worship their god they saw as Creator. A while into their journey, a line was etched into the sand, now sun-baked and preserved for us to learn from. The story is passed down that, before the pilgrims would go any further on their journey, this was the space where unforgiveness was to be laid down. One could not make the journey with the extra weight on them so must leave behind the desire to retaliate against another before taking one more step.
I see rotting, vacant homes, weather beaten and barely standing. I now know that, if you find a piece of trash or abandoned property in the desert that has been there over 50 years, it is considered a historical artifact, and by law you are not allowed to move it! Rusted-out automobiles and tin cans tell a story.
I see dirt roads that lead to rockhounding sites, where those who collect rocks impress me with their passion and dedication to their hobby. While many of us look up in amazement – at the grandeur of mountains or the sky's expanse – rockhounds look down and are equally amazed at what they find. I've not seen a rockhound talk about their love of rocks without trying to hold back tears as they speak.
As I pay close attention to the people I listen to in this unique assignment, I'm reminded of my Dad with that look in his eye as he enjoyed the desert's beauty. Oh, if he were still here on earth, I'd love to tell him what I see now. When my father was 64, he suffered a fall and endured 19 months of being completely paralyzed and ventilator dependent, experiencing his own harsh desert journey through quadriplegia. After he died, I wrote a song about him. Here is the chorus:
“The desert has a beauty all its own
It’s not the mountains we adore
No tall trees, no sandy shores
Just look closer, take some time
Feel the wind, hear the rhyme
Dry earth below, blue sky above
Clay-colored rocks to climb upon
Stop to see what I see, then you'll know what I know
The desert has a beauty all its own.”
A beauty all its own. That is a refrain that is sometimes difficult to remember or believe. Lately, I've been dividing life into pre-pandemic time, pandemic time, and gratefully, post-pandemic time. The pandemic was something we endured (and for some are still enduring), a desert highway in many ways, a wasteland of space through which we traveled with visions of just getting through to the other side.
But if we stop to reflect, we will find it was more than a space of barren, dry land. There were people we connected with who sent encouragement from afar; ancient, life-giving springs below ground that made us dig deep to reach them; lines drawn, where we were challenged to let go of deep-seated unforgiveness, adopting understanding instead; gems we picked up along the way; and artifacts, stories of faith we left behind for Christ-followers in the future, who will look for signs of how we endured, believers we will one day surround as a cloud of witnesses.
May the Lord give us eyes to see what He sees, so we will know what He knows.
