San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Take an existential trip through the desert
Some of America’s most powerful literature rises from American deserts. In “The Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin finds transcendent beauty in the Mojave. In Frank Norris’ “McTeague,” greedy McTeague meets a grim end in Death Valley. In “Desert Solitaire,” Utah’s red rock country transforms Edward Abbey into a desert Henry David Thoreau. And the hallucinogenic road trip in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” scorches from its opening line: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Confessional, contemplative, intellectually adventurous, Ben Ehrenreich’s “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time” is a worthy addition to the library of American aridity.
A child of more wellwatered climes, journalist and novelist Ehrenreich fell in love with the desert on his first trip to Death Valley. He arrived at a personal nadir, certain he’d messed up his life and seeking a landscape to match his despair.
“Being young and over literary I decided to head for the lowest spot in the hemisphere,” he writes. Instead of inspiring anguish, the salt flats of Badwater Basin brought joy. He “can’t remember ever feeling so free.” Years later, Ehrenreich and his partner leave Los Angeles and move to a house near Joshua Tree National Park. Here they birdwatch, hike and learn the names of the constellations spangling the desert night skies.
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brood about: the election of a president he loathes, a furiously warming planet, random acts of chaos and violence. In response, Ehrenreich turns to philosophy, to myth, to literature. He reads the Mayan creation story, the Popul Vuh. He ponders German big thinkers G.W.F. Hegel and Walter Benjamin. And ancient gods: Astarte, Athena, Ishtar.
If you’ve come to “Desert Notebooks” expecting a straightforward jaunt across the American Southwest, these detours can be disconcerting. It’s as if your desert road trip was morphing into a
“There is a compressed, ambient violence in Las Vegas that I have never felt in any other city I’ve spent time in.”
Ben Ehrenreich
graduate seminar, with everybody in the car talking about Hegel when all you want is to take the next exit, grab a Coke at the Circle K and make Zabriskie Point by sunset.
Yet it works. Ehrenreich’s intellectual explorations are challenging but never pretentious. He’s searching, he’s trying to find hope and certainty in troubled, uncertain times. He makes connections. Written in a language about to be erased by Spanish invaders, the Popul Vuh is echoed in the 20th century struggle of Serrano Dorothy Ramon to preserve her people’s vanishing language. Athena’s owls are ancestors of the pair taking flight in Joshua Tree.
In part two of “Notebooks,” work takes Ehrenreich to Hunter S. Thompsonville, Las Vegas. His dislike of the Silver State Babylon incites some of the book’s most withering writing:
“There is a compressed, ambient violence in Las Vegas that I have never felt in any other city I’ve spent time in, even places that were actually at war.” Throughout “Notebooks,” Ehrenreich repeats a bleak mantra, “Worlds end all the time.” In Las Vegas he wonders, and makes you wonder, is now our world’s endtime?
It’s with relief that, in the final pages, Ehrenreich returns home to the Mojave in springtime. The rainsplashed hills shimmer with desert dandelions and pincushions. Some people, he knows, will never love the desert. “It’s not an aesthetic aversion so much as an existential allergy. They feel dread, something approaching panic.” But Ehrenreich revels in this world’s “urgency, brilliance, and stubbornness of life.” Maybe our time is not yet up. Western American historian Patricia Nelson Limerick once wrote, “Deserts have made fools of the wisest people.” In “Desert Notebooks” Ehrenreich shows that deserts can make us wise in new ways.
Peter Fish is a San Francisco writer and editor, specializing in California and the American West. His fiction has appeared in the Sewanee Review.