A hundred years ago, one could see the desert of the southwest as it was before the reclamation began.
John C. Van Dyke saw it as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, before twentieth century Americans set out “reclaim” the vast desolation, the wasteland, which is the way the natural desert appeared to their progressive minds. They reclaimed the desert from its state of desolation for humanity’s agricultural, commercial and residential use.
Van Dyke could see that the reclamation was about to begin and did not like what he saw. In his book, The Desert, he lamented the coming change. The reclamation happened, of course, just as he feared it would. His sense of loss was the same as Edward Abbey would write about seventy years later after the reclamation had progressed, the same sense of loss, the same grief, that is found in almost all nature writing since the reclamation of the desolation began.
Grief often finds a reason for hope. In Van Dyke’s writing, as in much other nature writing, that hope is paradoxical. It is the hope that someday when the species humanity dies, the desert will be restored, will come back and be as it was. It is a hope bound up with a belief that we are part of nature, but, at the same time, bound up with a feeling that we are a bad part of nature. It is bound up with the belief that humanity like all other individual species seen in the fossils will perish completely, but that the natural process that made humanity and all the other species will go on. It is bound up with the belief that humanity, in its quest for progress, in its quest for its own eternal life without suffering, is destroying life.
I wish I could have seen the desert as it was, before the reclamation. I wish it would come back restored and that I could see it then.
Here is an excerpt from the end of Chapter 3 of Van Dyke’s book, The Desert, the chapter titled “The Bottom of the Bowl.” The Bottom of the Bowl refers to the Salton Basin in the Lower Colorado Desert in Southern California.
“When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor human tongue speaks its loveliness.”
In nature writing it seems, as in Christian writing, so much depends on a vision of a second coming.
Lost Borders 
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January 12, 2008 at 3:29 am
Benedict
This reminds me of a short story by William Saroyan called “The Pomegranate Trees.” In it, the main character’s uncle buys a spot of desert with the intention of making it fertile, and so he (completely unsuccessfully) plants pomegranate trees in his new real estate with the idea of making things grow in the desert. It is an absolutely hilarious story, but it contains much that is profoundly poetic, life-giving, and (dare I say it) spiritual. For what better way to symbolize the renewal of life, a resurrection, than by planting the fruit of fertility in the sands of death.
January 14, 2008 at 1:02 am
Ken
I will look for that story.
It is ironic that so many plants can be grown in the desert, including pomegranate, and all over arid southern California, with imported water – the water that made the reclamation possible. At the same time, the native plants and animals are so fascinating, surviving, as they do, on so little moisture. It is also ironic that before the Colorado River was dammed (or is it damned?) it naturally flooded a large area in southern California once called Lake Cahuilla. Now that area no longer floods. The lake is gone forever, or at least until civilization collapses and the dams burst.
The pomegranate trees in the desert are dormant now. Their leaves fell off in the last few weeks when the weather was cool. Winter does not last long in the lower Colorado desert. Spring begins early in January.
I will see the pomegranate in the desert differently now that I have read what you have written here.