The White Heart of Mojave: An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert. Edna Brush Perkins
first interviewed had ever been to Death Valley.
It was discouraging, but we persevered until we found a real old-timer. He was known as Shady Myrick. We never discovered his Christian name though he was a famous desert character. Wherever we went afterward everyone knew Shady. Evidently the name was not descriptive for all agreed on his honesty and goodness. He was an old man, rather deaf, with clear, very straightforward-gazing eyes. Most of his life had been spent on the Mojave as a prospector and miner, and much of it in Death Valley itself. The desert held him for her own as she does all old-timers. He was under the "terrible fascination." As soon as we explained that we had come for no other purpose than to visit his beloved land he was eagerly interested and described the wonders of Death Valley, its beautiful high mountains, its shining white floor, its hot brightness, its stillness, and the flowers that sometimes deck it in the spring.
"If you go there," he said, "you will see something that you'll never see anywhere else in the world."
He had gem mines in the Panamints and was in the habit of going off with his mule-team for months at a time. He even said that he would take us to the valley himself were he a younger man. We assured him that we would go with him gladly. We urged him—you had only to look into his eyes to trust him—promising to do all the work if he would furnish the wagon and be the guide, innocently unaware of the absurdity of such a proposal in the burning heat of Death Valley; but he only smiled gently, and said that he was too old.
Silver Lake turned out to be the place for us to go after all. He described how we could drive straight on from Joburg, a hundred and sixteen miles. There was a sort of a road all the way. He drew a map on the sand and said that we could not possibly miss it for a truck had come over six weeks before and we could follow its tracks.
"It ain't blowed much, or rained since," he remarked.
"But suppose we should get lost, what would we do?"
"Why should you get lost? Anyway, you could turn around and come back."
We looked at each other doubtfully. In the far-spreading silence around Joburg the idea of getting lost was more dreadful than it had been at Barstow. There was not even a ranch in the whole hundred and sixteen miles. We hesitated.
"You are well and strong, ain't you?" he asked. "You can take care of yourselves as well as anybody. Why can't you go?"
"You have lived in this country so long, Mr. Myrick," I tried to explain, "you do not understand how strange it is to a newcomer. How would we recognize those mountains you speak of when we do not even know how the desert-mountains look? How could we find the spring where you say we might camp when we have never seen one like it?"
"You can do it," he insisted, "that's how you learn."
"And there is the silence, Mr. Myrick," I went on, hating to have him scorn us for cowards, "and the big emptiness."
He understood that and his face grew kind.
"You get used to it," he said gently.
It was refreshing to meet a man who looked into your feminine eyes and said: "You can do it." It made us feel that we had to do it. We spent a whole day on a hilltop near Joburg looking longingly over the sinister, beautiful mountains and trying to get up our courage. Happily we were spared the decision. Two young miners at Atolia sent word that they were going over to Silver Lake in a few days and would be glad to have us follow them. Perhaps it was Shady's doing. We accepted the invitation with gratitude.
We loafed around Joburg during the intervening days. The stern, red mountains were full of mine-holes, but most of the mines were not being worked and the three towns were dead. Everywhere on the Mojave Desert mining activity had fallen off markedly after the beginning of the war. The population of the three towns had dwindled away and the few people who remained did so because they still had faith in the red mountain and hoped that the place might boom again. The big hotel at Joburg, which was attractively built around a court and which could accommodate twenty to thirty guests, was empty save for us. We looked at and admired innumerable specimens of ore. They were everywhere, in the hotel-office, in the general store, in the windows of the houses. Everyone had some shining bit of the earth which he treasured. We bought some of Shady Myrick's cut stones and received presents of gold ore and fine pieces of bloodstone and jasper in the rough.
We enlisted the services of the garage to get our car in the best possible condition for the journey across the uncharted desert. The general opinion held that it was too heavy for such traveling; the next time we should bring a Ford. When the two young men appeared early on the appointed morning with a light Ford truck dismantled of everything except the essential machinery they also looked over our big, red car questioningly. They feared we would get stuck in the sand and jammed on rocks; but generously admitted themselves in the wrong when, later in the day, they stuck and we did not. Of course they had the advantage, for we would probably have remained where we stopped, while the four of us were able to lift and push the little truck out of its troubles. It was the most disreputable-looking car we had ever encountered even among Fords, a moving junk-pile loaded with miscellaneous shabby baggage, tools, and half-worn-out extra tires. Our new friends matched it in appearance. They looked as tough as the Wild West story-tellers would have us believe that most miners are. We have found out that most miners are not, though we hate to shatter that dear myth of the movies. If you were to meet on any civilized road the outfit which we followed that day from seven o'clock in the morning until dark you would instantly take to the ditch and give it the right of way.
The drive was wild and fearful and wonderful. The bandits led us over and around mountains, down washes and across the beds of dry lakes. Often there was no sign of a road, at least no sign that was apparent to us. On the desert you must travel one of two ways, either along the water-courses or across them. It is strange to find a country dying of thirst cut into a rough chaos by water-channels. Rain on the Mojave is a cloud-burst. The water rushes down from the rocky heights across the long, sloping mesas, digging innumerable trenches, until it reaches a main stream-bed leading to the lowest point in the valley. When you go in the same direction as the water you usually follow up or down the dry stream-beds, or washes, but when you cross the watershed you must crawl as best you can over the parallel trenches which are sometimes small and close together like chuck-holes in a bad country road, and sometimes wide and deep. One of the uses of a shovel, which we found out on that day, is to cut down the banks of washes that are too high and steep for a car to cross.
Most of the mountains of the Mojave are separate masses rather than continuous ranges. Between them the mesas curve, sometimes falling into deep valleys. Instead of foothills, long gradual slopes always lead up to the rock battlements, the result of the wearing down of countless ages, the wide foundations that give the ancient mountains an appearance of great repose. They are solid and everlasting. The valleys are like great bowls curving up gently to sudden, perpendicular sides. The mesas always look smooth, beautiful sweeps that completely satisfy the eye. It rests itself upon them.
When the valleys are deep they usually contain a dry lake, baked mud of a white, yellow, or brownish-purple color. Crossing dry lakes is a curious experience. They never look very wide, but are often several miles across. You need a whole new adjustment of ideas of distance on the desert for the air is so clear that distant objects look stark and near. What you judge to be half a mile usually turns out to be five, and four miles is certainly eighteen. We were always deceived about distances until we trained ourselves a little by picking out some point ahead, guessing how far it was, and measuring it with the cyclometer. Dry lakes are not only deceitful about their size, but also about their nature. Along the edges is a strange glistening effect as though water were standing under the shore. Often the rocks and bushes are reflected in it upside down, and if the lake is large enough the illusion of water is perfect. You drive across with a queer effect of standing still, for there is not so much as a stone to mark your progress. It is like being in a boat on an actual lake. The sunlight is very dazzling on the white and yellow expanses and the heat-shimmer makes the ground seem to heave. Sometimes you have the illusion of going steeply up-hill.
Nothing grows in the lake-beds, but the mesas are covered with the usual desert-growths, sagebrush, greasewood and many varieties of cacti. A