Desert

It' been raining all weekend: grim, gray, dire. The wind has been fierce; throughout the area, power lines are down, trees have been felled on cars, and the streets are scattered with the spidery corpses of umbrellas and the limbs of branches. Someone died. [That happened a few weeks ago as well: Someone was walking in Central Park and a tree branch, over-burdened with heavy snow, collapsed on him. Game over. God pressing the quick-recall button.]

And yet for me, all this cold wetness just evokes the desert. The mind playing tricks, a three-card-monty of memory and misfiring sensory perceptions. But what links the two is the wind, that force like a mythic serpent or lost spirit.

Mojacar is in Andalusia, on the southeast coast of Spain. The Moors once ruled here, and their influence can still be found in the patterns on pottery and the certain harsh sounds of the otherwise fluid Spanish speech. When the taxi dropped me off in Mojacar, I walked out onto the veranda of my room at the Fudacion Valparaiso, the artists' residency, and looked out into the dry landscape; a small herd of goats or sheep were bleating in the distance, their small voices somehow magnified in the vastness. The wind was blowing, but calmly, cool in the setting sun.

In the morning, I set out. There was a flat-topped hill like a small mountain next door, rumored to be haunted; a long-abandoned cistern was embedded at its summit, like at Masada. There were short tufts of grasses here and there, tenacious and darkly green. The ground was strewn with things that once had been living: branches, mysterious seed pods, the skeletons of small lizards. And everywhere were the tiny coils of snail shells, as though the entire desert had not so long ago been an immense ocean, teeming with undersea life. If one walked in the opposite direction and climbed another hill, suddenly the Mediterranean appeared, like a vision in blueness.

Day after day, I dragged in things from the desert. Long branches bleached from the sun, the dried hulls of pomegranates pecked open by birds. An entire dried tumbleweed, which I put out on the veranda and kept like a pet, listening to it roll around and around in the wind. And I wrote--for an entire month I wrote about a thunderstorm in Ohio because that's what one does in the desert in Spain. During my last week, I sent home a small parcel at quite an expense, filled with dried pomegranates and a few of the white bleached shells. They sit on my coffee table now, part of a still life of journeys.

On the night before I left, I could not sleep because of a horrible storm that was all wind and sound and fear. I was sure that I would be visited by the ghost on that final night, but if it came, I couldn't tell if it was the storm or the ghost or both. The building shook. The gusts were ferocious, and I thought that if I survived, then I might just go mad by morning from all the howling. But when dawn broke, the sun was bright, and all was still. 

I got up, walked out into the desert, and set the tumbleweed loose in the landscape.