Chasing Light
Creosote bush, coyotes, and things not meant for human eyes.
When one of my best friends sent me photos of the aurora borealis from her window in Pittsburgh, I was stricken with jealousy. I vaguely remembered something about a sun storm and the northern lights heading south, but I hadn’t realized it was something we would see in the United States. I knew without looking it up that the likelihood of seeing them in Southern California was minute, but I looked anyway. There was, actually, the smallest chance that maybe we might, but if it was anything like a weather prediction in these parts, we wouldn’t.
I drooled over Lauren’s photos. Then I told myself to let it go and do something productive. When I looked up hours later, done with drawing, I was surprised to see that was 2AM and I hurried to bed. Once I was prone, I made the mistake of looking at social media though. There were photos from people who had seen the northern lights in Joshua Tree and Morongo. The lights had reached the desert east of me.
I clenched my jaw, told myself “NO, you have things to do tomorrow. Just don’t. Don’t do it.”
Then I got dressed again, jumped in my truck and headed east. By 3AM I was standing on a sandy trail, deep in the middle of the creosote, the red blinking lights of the towering windmills in the distance, and a riot of stars above me.
The wind hisses through the creosote bush in White Water most days. And at 3AM on this Saturday morning, it was just strong enough to jostle my hair against my cheekbones and mimic the sound that Jörmungandr might make passing through the desert. The sky was a blanket pierced by countless distance suns and it felt close enough to smother me. Facing north, I snapped photos of the horizon with my phone on the night setting. Then feeling pressed into a pocket-world despite the vast sands, I realized I would never discern the sounds of being stalked and I leapt into my truck, slamming, and then locking the door.
Granted, I’m normally asleep by 9PM and I was past punch drunk. I had pushed past it with hours lost in flow, losing time as I drew. Now, I was both hyperaware and fuzzy in my thoughts. And while I am usually one the most logical people you will ever meet, I am certain that this is the perfect combination for human beings to see things that they were not meant to see. And I believe that this is dangerous.
Several years ago, caravanning through the Mojave Desert near midnight, I had a similar moment. I wasn’t aware there was a meteor shower in the forecast, but on a pitch black road, deep in the desert, without a single set of headlights in the opposite direction, I watched the stars fall one after another.
I was so tired, I called my friend Niki, who was driving behind me to ask if she saw it too. She did, and we agreed that it felt as though we were travelling somewhere other than where we intended. As I wondered if we would even get to the hotel we’d reserved in Pahrump in the hopes of hunting our hawks in the morning, Niki told me a story about nights like this.
Driving through the desert in San Diego, late at night and exhausted, she had seen a man shimmering like the fey along side of the road ahead of her. She reminded me that she was tired enough to see things that couldn’t be there but continued her story anyway. As she squinted at the light that danced across man’s skin in the darkness, he leapt into the road, transforming into a coyote midleap. From the center of the two-lane highway, the coyote, which now that it was staring her down was obviously something more than a coyote, glared through Niki’s windshield. She told me that for the first time in her life she felt that she was seeing something that was not meant for her and wondered what the repercussions might be for witnessing it. So, when the coyote turned its gaze away and continued its journey to the other side of the highway, she didn’t feel any safer.
It was at this point in her story that we lost cell service and satellite. My phone was dead, Google maps was gone, and I was certain then that we would never make our destination. Two hours later, I was so grateful to pull into that shitty hotel with its blinding florescent lobby lights, that I hugged her and didn’t want to ever let go.
A few years later, on another long drive into the desert with a friend who is Cahuilla, I asked if there were skinwalkers in the stories of the local tribes. “Oh yeah,” he told me without a hint of humor. “My friend saw one once. You want to stay away from those.”
I stared at him, waiting for the corner of his mouth to turn up and when it didn’t, I just stared at the road in silence for a good while.
Locked safely (I hoped) in my truck, I flipped through the photos on my phone. I couldn’t see it in the sky with my bare eyes, but there on my phone, if zoomed in, was a magenta glow fading to violet as it met the star-pierced darkness. And I wondered if it meant for me to see. Either way, I decided I had seen enough. My FOMO was extinguished.
I don’t know what else was with me in the desert. I do know that you are never alone in nature and that the desert, despite its reputation, is more alive than the busiest of human cities on a spring night. Cool dark nights belong to the creatures of the desert. I am so grateful that habitat remains for them and perhaps for things that may not be for human eyes. These are places worth saving, even if some of what’s saved was never meant for me. In fact, I’d prefer to keep those things a mystery.
Ancient and primal forces. Good stuff. Very well done.