The Mirage: Writing and Upheaval in the Chihuahuan Desert

The desert at dawn is green to silver, silver to gold. The desert at sunset is lavender and maroon and gold again. Songbirds, pronghorn, moths at night, southwest wind almost always.

Mountains cardiogram the desert: dusky purple, robin-egg blue, gunmetal black. To the northeast, a buildup of reef and limestone from 260 million years ago. Farther out, Paleozoic rocks slump toward a chaparral plateau. For almost a hundred million years the plateau was submerged: the desert here is the exposed bottom of a vanished sea, the Delaware. The igneous massif to the south that looks like the hatched egg of an enormous and menacing phoenix is a Paleogene baby, not even fifty million years old. The northern Chihuahuan Desert was drowned, kneaded, jabbed, blistered, ruptured, choked with ash for half a billion years of geologic tumult. Imagine the latent power of these violent tectonics.

The Chihuahuan Desert, the largest in North America, splotches northward to West Texas all the way from Zacatecas. For eight months I lived here, on a ranch outside the town of Alpine, Texas. Humans first came to the region at least thirteen thousand years ago. Who knows what drew them. Perhaps they had hunted themselves out of sustenance elsewhere and on this jagged and rocky plateau they saw food. Or maybe they were climate refugees, driven by the mass die-off of game that followed the last glaciation. David Keller, an archaeologist friend who studies this land, says they may have come here “for lithic resources”: that is to say, they liked the stones. One way or another, they stayed. The desert in West Texas is the easternmost home of Puebloan culture on the continent.

Desert, from the Latin , means wasteland, a thing abandoned. A kind of nostalgia saturates the: to feel the want of, to regret. This landscape mirages, shows you what you want to see: deliverance, supernatural feats, at least an epiphany. “All my life I have wanted to trick blood from a rock,” Barry Lopez writes in . “I have dreamed about raising the devil and cutting him in half. I have thought too about never being afraid of anything at all. This is where you come to do these things.” This is where desire brings you.