Cool here in Carmel. Some rain and Dot is back from knee surgery so we are not walking around the berm anyway.

Dot is pretty doped up after her first knee surgery. Not sure how her ligament’s wore out but they were giving her plenty of pain. So now we’re laying about recovering.

So after days of rain and four days without power we piled into our car and drove eight hours south to the Anza Borrego desert and laid out in a cheap motel. We drove into the outback to look at flowers (which were plentiful and lovely but not really “super”)then to come back the motel in the early afternoon to swim in the pool then walk to the store to pick up some dinner. There was no TV so we napped and I read an old Tony Hillerman novel I had read years ago. Coyote Waits is a fine book. I always admired how Hillerman kept on track and wrote so clearly across cultural boundaries. I only met him once and he helped me out with my first book. He was a real gentleman, especially when meeting fans.

I first went to the Anza Borrego desert when I was six years old. My folks ended up living there in their first years of retirement. Jan and I lived there one winter just after we first went to Sitka. Jan worked in a tree farm and I was shoing horses. We loved the desert then and we love it now. I love the quiet in the desert and the bird song in the morning. The deep heat when the sun is out and the wonderful smell just after the rain. We had some rain at night this trip. But this trip was too short for it takes me about four days to let the quiet seep in and after about the forth day I feel a calmness come over me. Then it was time to pack up and get going up the river of concrete to get back to the rainy north. The inland valleys showed scouring of floods and the agricultural fields seems damp and muddy.

The little town of Borrego Springs never seems to change much. They plan for the big real estate boom which never comes. Today water seems to be the great limiting factor to growth. Many of the ornamental trees that Jan helped to plant and grow seem starved for water around the old developments that never really took off. Borrego is an anomaly in California, the seed of change that never took root. But birds and big vistas still crowd the sky. Borrego Springs is proud of their night sky and it is a marvel to me seeing a local newspaper which features the most current constellations appearing in different corners of the sky.

Here are some photos offered for their evidentiary value rather than artistic merit:

Now we are home. Cars swish by on the highway and the hummingbirds worry the feeder. California is a big state that allows itself to be almost completely roaded, which makes it feel more democratic than Alaska. All but the very center of the LA basin, which is huge for sure, but all the rest of what we saw in the state was very green this trip, green and mostly pastoral. Beautiful in its own unique way.

The desert was green and blooming and as always quiet. So quiet and clear you could almost believe your could hear the stars.

Mocking bird sings

in a water starved thorn tree.

Stars turn in the sky.

Here is an old erotic poem I wrote in the desert years ago during an actual superbloom.