Seeing the Desert....!

That there's no clear delineation, no border, is one of the first things to understand.  Our reliance on maps, our system of political boundaries, predisposes us to look for the marker that divides one space from another.  Even when we rationally understand that Nature doesn't draw  lines, that she knows only the continuity of everything, on some level we still expect those lines to exist.  So when you're heading out to the desert, understand that it will creep up on you.  The landscape becomes gradually flat, the flora becomes gradually squat and scrubby.  And then you realize that you've arrived.  You're in the desert.

Miles beforehand the windmills had appeared.  Enormous, majestic, each three-bladed giant in perpetual motion, driven by the eternal Westerly wind.  Conservatively estimating that hundreds were visible, I later found out that there are in fact 5,000 windmills in this stretch of desert territory.  Don Quixote would either die of joy or go mad on the spot.  This is the Kahatchapi Wind Farm, and in ranges from the flat Mojave lowlands into the distant mountains, harvesting power from the prevailing zephyrs.  Seeing the windmills from the car, where they seemed to recede even as we approached them, felt like chasing a mirage.  

The light was fading from the sky.  We tacked towards the windmills, turning off the main highway onto a narrow stretch of asphalt.  We drove past a few quiet homes built on plots carved squarely from the creosote.  Soon the pavement dead-ended and we pulled aside onto a spit of sand.  We got out of the car and stepped into the wind, which was both warm and surprisingly strong, the sky behind us blossoming into a pastel frieze of orange, yellow, crimson, purple, and powder blue.  I was mute with awe.  The wind kept me silent; even if I'd spoken, Nina wouldn't have heard me.  The wind was everywhere.  It inflated my tee shirt like a sail, but for all of its implacable force, it had a gentle touch.  A perpetual sigh that flows from beyond the mountains, warm and fresh and indistinctly fragrant.  When I looked in the other direction, where the hues of blue and purple were slipping into darkness, I could see a strange haze in the atmosphere.  I don't know whether this was moisture or dust, kicked up by the moving air and kept aloft.

Windmills belie the idea that technological progress is always brutish and ugly - an idea that I've long cherished, if mostly unconsciously.  Something about the scale, the fact that the energy they provide is carbon-free, their silence; they are like benevolent sentinels.  

Later, we dined at the Primo Burger.