Back to the Land

My first journey to Anza Borrego was a confusing one at best. Due to an endless list of complications, I wouldn’t set out on the road until well after 2:00 in the afternoon – which, during the winter months, is far too late to get anywhere worth going while it is still light. My refusal to postpone the trip again was at it’s highest point, and I continued out with little regard or forethought (which would be one of the key factors of the success of the trip, I later discovered). The traffic was horrific, much to my dismay, and seemed to only add to the list of powers preventing me from getting to the desert. My frustration only deepened when I realized the entire gridlock was the result of a single pickup truck pulled over to one side near the off-ramp, well onto the shoulder and, one would think, out of the way of traffic, but then I guess I never really understood traffic anyway.
After fueling at Escondido I made my final goodbyes to coastal civilization and made the sharp turn inland. My route was issued to me by the navigation system, and it did a fine job of displacing me completely upon my arrival to the park (I guess I can’t complain, as I got to see the rest of the area in the process), but the route from the beach to the mountains was an interesting one. Curving roads led me through canopies of oak trees, framing single houses perched on huge properties in the distance, nestled between the green foothills of the San Bernardino mountains. The plant life in this area was astounding, enough for me to question whether I really was on the route to the desert or not. The area reminded me of a slightly browner version of Hawaii.
By this time I had worn out my taste for Shiny Toy Guns and decided to move onto a more transitory natural sound. I started playing the soundtrack from Far and Away – it fit the bill perfectly. It was a fantastic transition from the city to the sticks – it was decidedly natural sounding, but more lighthearted than some of my more transcendental pieces. As I navigated the dark growths of the 78 highway, images of lush Ireland filled my mind – later, I rocketed down the curving mountain roads to a feeling of a Oaklahoma horse race.
The sun had set soon after I began my diversion inland. I progressed through most of the Hawaiin roads in twilight, and by the time I reached the break off for the mountain pass it was well into the night. I was very anxious at the idea of traversing the desert roads at night – but again, I pushed the idea out of my head and decided to live in the moment. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
I finally reached Anza Borrego and was greeted to an overwhelming display. A turnoff labeled as a primitive campground displayed a sign saying “Campers welcome – park 100 feet away from the road. No trash.” At that, I knew that I had found a new home for myself.
Almost immediately after passing the welcoming signs of Anza Borrego, I got my first taste of wildlife as a small coyote sulked across the road a good distance in front of me. I was overjoyed by the sight of it. Finally, my chance to live among the dogs. This was real nature in the real world.
The navigation system had done a splendid job of taking me to the opposite side of the park I wanted to go, so I decided to be done with it and check my traditional maps. I found myself to the Southern extent of the park, having apparently missed Scissor’s Crossing altogether and traveling many miles down the 78 in the direction of places I had little desire to visit, at least on my first trip. I turned around in the middle of the road, realizing in doing so just how desolate it really was out there to be allowed to turn around in the middle of a highway. I headed back to the North, stopping on the way to check out another primitive camp site just to get a feel for it. I couldn’t conclude much from my headlamps, but it looked comfortable enough.
After reaching Scissor’s Crossing (I was expecting the place to be full of tourist shops and mobile homes, but in fact it was quite desolate – it’s no wonder I missed it!) I made the turnoff to the S2 and started heading North, finally. I soon found the primitive camp site of Yaqui Pass and decided to have a look about in the case it was spectacular and worthy of staying. Indeed, it was nice, but rather flat and uninteresting. An RV was parked at the opposite end of the wash, interior lights glowing softly behind curtains, a Baja Bug parked next to it. I parked for a moment at the opposite end of the ground, rolled down my window and shut off all power. Instantly the darkness washed over me and millions of stars made themselves visible over the black outline of the surrounding mountains. The cool air seemed to ripple across my face as I looked up to the heavens, and I recall at some point saying to myself “I’ve never been more comfortable in my life”. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided to carry on to the Northern regions where I hoped to find a jackpot region to sleep in – Culp Valley. I gave the RV’ers their privacy.
I continued up the S2 on the way to Borrego Springs, still listening to Far and Away because I didn’t want to wear out my remaining music yet.
The desert highways get exceedingly spooky at night. I shut off my lights while driving more than once, just for kicks and giggles, and wow, does it make a difference. Instantly you have no idea of which direction you’re traveling.
At one point on the road I needed to pull over to urinate, so I left my headlights on and walked around to the front of the car, stepping onto the lip of the highway and on the brink of the darkness beyond. Surprisingly, I found myself not entirely frightened. I looked over my shoudler a few times, but I wasn’t all that disturbed when it came down to it. I heard things crawling in the bushes.
When navigating the highways at night, it’s easy to forget your surroundings. Your headlmaps illuminate a narrow patch of asphault ahead of you, and you tend to not see past it, as if you’re driving down a tunnel. In that situation it’s often hard for you to remember that you are, in fact, in the midst of nature, and this reminder can often be quite startling, such as when a kangaroo rat scuttles across the road directly into your path at just the wrong moment, almost as if it were seeking shelter under your very wheels. I honestly hope I didn’t hit the poor thing. I don’t think I did, but…there wasn’t a whole lot of room.
After a good time I started to penetrate the outer reaches of Borrego Springs. Lights began to make themselves visible – lamps in nice resort areas, and some of the houses out in the flats had put up Christmas lights, much to my delight. There were street lamps occasionally, but they tended to be somewhat sporadic and didn’t do much good where they were. As I passed through the town, I didn’t gather much from it other than some street names and the location of a gas station. I wouldn’t get much of a feel for the place until the light came the next day.
After realizing how well I was doing on gasoline, I showed little hesitation to continue my ascent up the mountains to Montezuma road. It was a steep incline, and I felt like I was using a lot of gas, but, I told myself, I would make up for it by using no gas on the way back down.
I found the campsite and negotiated the creepy , narrow washes, made all the more eery by headlights, until I found a suitable place to park – near some bushes, but not too close to them. It took me a while to get in a mood to sleep, partly because I was so on edge from the stillness of the night and partly because it was only 8 o’clock. I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time just staring at the stars, flabbergasted by the sheer number of them and by the incredible brightness they gave off. The silence was petrifying. There was literally not a sound to be heard. I strained my ears to ringing. When you can hear the blood pumping through your veins, you know you’re in the middle of nowhere.
After acclimating, however, I eventually came to the realization that I felt safe in this desert. I had gotten a taste of the feeling earlier in the night but now made the full realization – this was my land. And at that, I unfurled my sleeping bag in the back of the car, wedged my Kukri between the seats, and slept.
The night was perfect. I slept with the windows open, and the air was cool, but not cold. I didn’t need the warm clothing I had brought with me. I watched Orion’s Belt rise steadily higher in the sky for a time, then eventually fell unconscious.
Little event passed that night, and I woke up at about 4:30. While lying down I still saw plenty of stars on the horizon, so I figured it must have been earlier than that, but it wasn’t until I sat up and saw the glow from the East that I realized the time. I had never before seen stars and sun occupy the same space as closely as that. The brighter stars stayed until the last minute. Soon, the rock walls to the East began to become darkly silhouetted as the sky turned a vibrant orange.
A soft red light began to fill the tops of the surrounding hills, and I finally got a good look around my place of residence. I was surprised at the beauty of it. Cholla Cactus was abundant in these parts, growing in great arcs across the flats of the valley, and large, wind-smoothed round boulders rose smoothly out of the landscape all over the place. I was surprised at the amount of greenery found in the area – indeed, we had just experienced a rather heavy, if short-lived, rainstorm. Bushes and grasses were vibrant all around, and the cactuses seemed to take on a greenish tint themselves.
A very inquisitive wren of some type had taken up perch on the bush next to the car and began calling to me frantically. “Good morning,” I said as he stared at me and flicked his tail. Several more of the birds were calling from the other end of the valley as well. The place that had been so seemingly absent of life in the night was suddenly teeming with it.
In the distance I saw some small animals, one of which seemed almost reminiscent of a prairie dog, sunning themselves on the red-lit boulders. I did the same.
After eating one of my peanut butter sandwiches and half of a pink Lady apple, I decided to make for a rather serene looking mountain in the near distance. Setting off with nothing but a canteen, a compass, and a camera, I crawled over the nearest bank of boulders and set off across the valley. It wasn’t long before I realzed that the mountain was in fact several miles away, and not only that but I didn’t feel very great from the night’s sleep and didn’t genuinely want to go hiking anyway. So, I doddled about in the valley for a time and headed back. On the way I chanced across a carboard box and several beer bottles shamelessly thrown into a bush. I picked them out and dragged them with me back to the car, disgusted. Even out in this desolate of a place, I still needed to take responsibility for man’s mistakes.
I left Culp Valley and headed out back down Montezuma road at great speed. Whether the name is a coincidence or not I don’t really have the liberty to say, but let me tell you that Montezuma Road is quite a deadly place. It curves sharply and quickly, and the descent is monstrous. I saw a group of motorcyclists going down it at full speed and only could wonder how they stayed alive.
I turned on “The Joshua Tree” by U2, which has always been one of my favorite pieces of music for the desert. I’m not a huge fan of U2, nor the genre in general, but that album has always been an exception. I find the sound of it rings true to the desert (California, in particular) and not only that but many of the sounds later in the album seem to express the ideas of Transcendentalism. I started listening, shifted the car into neutral, cut the motor, and coasted down the road.
Halfway down the road a turnoff gave an impressive view of the desert. I stopped to take some pictures. From a distance, the desert looked like most in California. Great mountain ranges surrounded it from all sides, angling gently downward in the foothills to form a basin in the bottom. In the back of the vista, I could just glimpse the shimmer of the Salton Sea. Beyond that, nothing – just the white desert floor, blending into the sky like an ocean. It could have stretched on forever for all I knew. Yet it looks like such a small area on the map!
After reaching the bottom of the range, I progressed quickly along the central flats into Borrego Springs, a quaint little town where people ride bikes and make artwork. I usually hate the “desert communities” that bring to mind green lawns, swimming pools, and old ladies sitting in their mobile homes with air conditioning units. Memories of Arizona in my childhood are painful. This place, however, was an exception. Not a pool or artificial lawn in sight, just some rough-shouldered roads, some traditional  houses that were far between and beautiful, squatting on dirt patches and sporting gardens and gravel. Although the resorts were plentiful, they were down to earth (the “desert sands” resort I found to be particularly charming). No money pit establishments, no tourist shops, no photo-op gags. There was nothing to hide. These people knew they were living in the middle of a desert, and they were happy about it.
Borrego Springs is a desert community that got it right.
I got gas from a welcomingly labeled “Desert Auto Service” establishment, and was enthralled when I figured out that I didn’t pay until after they pumped the gas, which was done by a guy coming out to the car and doing it for me! It was like being in 1953. I tried to get my gas gauge looked at too, because I figured there must be something wrong with it for me to have lost nearly no gas (in fact, gained some) after my ascent and descent into the mountains.  I guess luck would have it that there was nothing wrong with the meter and I spent 20 dollars on gas for the whole trip (10 of which was spent in paranoia of topping off the tank).
I had a day to spend and no idea what I was doing, so I picked a direction and started driving. After leaving the town, a lone stretch of highway continued off into  the distance, and I decided to follow it. This took me directly through the flat basin, in the true center of the Anza Borrego desert. I stopped for a while and just ran around in the flats. I noticed, to a bit of surprise, that the floor I was walking on was very much alive. Large ants, black ones and red ones, were everywhere. There was also a type of curious, round beetle that seemed to be particularly abundant. And it just goes to show – people think of the desert as being so inhospitable, so unforgiving, so empty of life. Well, those beetles are there, aren’t they? Heck, the people in Borrego Springs are there, aren’t they? It’s all in the mindset. You can live wherever you want to.
I found more beer bottles near the road and started to pick them up, but left them after I saw how much trash was all over the place. There’s only so much I could do. It was a battle that couldn’t be won.
I saw an interesting looking formation in the distance, and I guessed it to be the Borrego Badlands that I had been eager to visit. But so close? It was on the other side of the park from Culp Valley, and I hadn’t expected to be able to visit both sites at once. But a quick check of my map revealed, yes – it was the badlands. I took off down the road and arrived shortly to the turnoff. A sign read “Font’s Point – 4 mi.” Four miles was a short distance, easy to be walked back if the car failed on the 4WD road. I decided to go for it. The road was very well worn, and I had little difficulty traversing it in the car. The landscape around me was bizarre – truly alien. Strange, rounded shapes loomed up out of the ground, partial canyon walls appeared on the side of the road and were just as quickly gone again. Everything was pressed down – even though there was no way of knowing, I could tell that I was far below sea level.
Halfway to Font’s Point I spotted something in the road, instantly identified it, and yelled out “whoah!” as I slammed on the brakes, kicking up a large cloud of dust around the car. I was out of the vehicle immediately with camera in hand. What I found lying in the road was a Brown Tarantula – a massive thing, larger than my hand by ease. I had nearly hit it with the car – now there’s a strange thing to say. It moved briskly across the road, not running, but with enough purpose that it knew where it was going. As I walked around it to take pictures it followed me, but eventually just kept moving. It was utterly strange, watching it walk. Each leg moved independently from the rest. It walked with heavy steps which left large imprints in the sand – hard to believe coming from a spider, I know. I got the feeling that this was one of those things that ate small birds. The funny thing was, I had no idea that these spiders lived in Anza Borrego. Had I known, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so willing to sleep with the windows open.
I reached Font’s Point at noon and walked over the hill to a sight not of this world. A gust of wind nearly blew my hat off, and as I pulled it down I saw that I was somehow now on top of a cliff face. Below me stretched off into oblivion a sea of pyramid-shaped rock formations, rising out of the ground like iceburgs. They created a maze of pathways and washes that snaked unnavigatable throughout the visible world, calling to mind visions of being lost among them like a droid in the beginning of A New Hope. I sat at the peak of Font’s Point for a while just staring out at the scene. Eventually it started playing havoc with my eyes. There were so many layers of rock, and at such a great distance, that my depth perception began to get a little crazy and I had to stop looking. It was definitely a pretty cool place.
I didn’t really want to spend the night out here again, so I figured I would start heading home now and give myself enough time to make some stops if I wanted to. I went back down the highway, bypassed the town, headed up past Culp Valley again and continued along the S-22 towards home (the route I was supposed to take the first time). Among the higher points of the mountains I found a rocky, steep-sided crevice and decided to pull over and poke about for a bit before leaving the desert for good. I climbed all over the mountainside, perched on top of a narrow rock with my hands and feet and braced myself in a crouch against the winds that threatened to topple me as I stared out across the valley. Then I was on my way again.
As I passed through the range, the desert changed forms – a new type of grass made itself visible in long, sweeping carpets, among the cactuses at first and then eventually by itself. I was listening to the score from Legends of the Fall at this point and as I drove I watched the winds tossling the grasses, recalling some of the powerful natural undertones of that film and feeling quite a connection.
One thing about the Anza Borrego desert is the way it sneaks up on you. On the way there it seems like your in the mountain forests until the last minute, and then suddenly you’ve entered a desolate wasteland without even realizing it. Leaving is the same way – at one moment you’re surrounded by sand, rock, and cactus, then a bend in the road turns you around and all of a sudden you’re in San Bernardino again. The journey home from the desert was one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on. On my way out of the park I took extra precautions to take the S-22 highway instead of the 78, so that I could see the way I was “supposed” to have come in from the first time and get a better feel for it for my return. Now the S-22 has got to be one of the most brilliant things in California. It’s the simplest of roads – it goes straight, it knows where it’s going and it gets you there without any confusion. The turnoffs are scarce and are more often than not merely dirt driveways and mailboxes. It doesn’t require much thought to follow, which is a fantastic development when taken into consideration the scenery of which it arrows through.
After descending from the mountains, I flattened out in a large valley (or perhaps several). The scenery that then surrounded me was the stuff of Steinbeck country. Rolling green hills paved the foundations of quaint farmhouses, beautiful houses overgrown with green vines and shaded by well-kept trees, billowing light, wispy smoke from brick-layed chimneys. Pastures of the softest grasses stretched as far as the eye could see, harboring herds of grazing cattle the likes of which I had never seen outside of fiction – healthy, black and white spotted cows, some of them eating the grass in a mood of utmost satisfaction and peace, others lying gently under the shade of an occasional, ample Oak tree and generally giving an aura of goodness that I found hard to disagree with. Horses were also abundant in these fields, beautiful, big, strong horses, true stallions had I ever seen them. Tin-roofed barns and wooden herding pens brought to mind images of an antiquated form of cattle farming that I had thought to be long extinct. At curves in the road, I would see low-lying walls made of piled stones, spanned by wooden fences and swing-gates and sometimes harboring a metal mailbox or two. The Oak trees would occassionaly spread a canopy over the road, creating a cascade of golden-tinted rays that would bring all the leaves to sudden and unmistakable life. Lake Henshaw made itself visible under the panorama of mountains and pastures, practically glowing blue in the sunlight, it’s browned beaches spotless and delicately curved. A single boat was floating in the middle of the lake, with a lone man on it, appearing to be sleeping, trailing an arm through the water off the bow. The water was still, for there was no wind, and not a thing in the valley stirred. This was true cattle country. Previously I had not been aware that areas like this still existed in Southern California. It was a pleasant surprise.
Civilization became stronger in waves as I neared closer to the coast, and by the time I was en route to Escondidio I had switched out of my transcendental mood and was now listening  whole-heartedley to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. The drive back was uneventful after that, although the route through Camp Pendleton is always a bit interesting.
Although short – only 24 hours – the experience was just what I had so desperately needed for over six months. My thirst to be one with nature – to be at home in the desert – was now quenched, and my life seemed all the better for it. A truly rejuvenating activity, by all means.
It will not have been my last trip to the region of the Anza Borrego desert. Surely I will return, and eventually I hope to make it a second home for myself. It’s a serene place, filled to the brim with the wonders of God’s creation, and one that I will cherish forever. The image of it will sit in the back of my mind constantly, helping me through my day to day life, and then one day, the call of the desert will overwhelm my consciousness and I’ll set out again. The land beckons.
I am a creature of the desert.

Kevin Kreger is a photographer, filmmaker, and writer. His contributions to Verivex include science fiction, history, and reflections.Learn more about Kevin Kreger on his website or connect with him on Facebook.