A Desert Home

I grew up in the desert. The Coachella Valley occupies a corner of the Colorado Desert, south of the Mojave Desert and west of the Colorado River. It provided me a playground for a beautiful childhood. When I was nine, my friend, Bruce, and I played in a large undeveloped lot of desert terrain behind his house. We would form cannonballs from mud and leave them in the sun to dry, then we would hide behind our respective dunes and lob the soil-based armaments at each other. We took pride in forming perfectly shaped mud balls. Is that the sign of an impoverished childhood? Toys made out of mud? I didn't think so at the time.

Mixed in with the sand all around us were tiny little seashells, remnants of the day when the whole valley was covered in water from the Gulf of California. By the time I came along, the water had receded to the Salton Sea, but it left a ring around the Valley and millions of tiny shells in the sand. Bruce and I spent hours playing in that sand. Every now and then a black tailed jackrabbit would run by and scurry away through the creosote scrub brush. After a spring rain, even this barren plot would bloom with occasional color. Yellow and purple flowers would appear briefly before the hot sun baked them away.

One afternoon when Bruce and I were finished with our mud creations, we returned to the house and found an unusual greeting. From a corner of the patio came an angry sound unfamiliar to us both. It stopped us in our tracks. We quickly located its origin in a cool shady corner; a big coiled rattlesnake was enjoying some afternoon shade. We were both old enough to know that we shouldn't tangle with him ourselves. So Bruce got his dad. He chopped the snake’s head off with a shovel. My heart pounded in my ears and the sweat on my back was not the result of the sunny day.

Now when I visit the desert I think back to that solitary rattlesnake. I’m aware that there is even less wild space for the likes of him today. The Wal-Mart parking lots, the acres of new housing tracts, the tony restaurants and fashionable golf courses have replaced his habitat. I guess he had more reason to fear us than we had to fear him.