Seussian

Desert trumpet plant, seemingly assembled upside-down
when the instructions were lost in the wind. The bulbous
upper part is hollow and contains carbon dioxide. Some
insects like to leave their larvae in it.

Neither first or last, I nonetheless declare Joshua Tree National Park the source of Seussian fever dreams.

Now that I think of it, didn't Theodor Seuss Geisel live in La Jolla, just a couple of hours from the Mojave Desert?

(Now that I think more on it, didn't editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis get born in San Diego and educated in Long Beach, not far from the Mojave Desert? His [annoyingly bad] comic strip "Prickly City" used to feature a tumbledown background of stacked rounded boulders, so much like the Jumbo Rocks of the National Park.)

We camped at the dreams' source last week.

In short time, the Joshua trees became normal. The writhing, spiky non-tree trees inspired Mormon pioneers, or so is said, to name them after the leader of the Israelites, raising arms in supplication to God.

They grow in the Mojave Desert far apart from one another, as if planted there by some Johnny Joshua Seed, casting seedlings oh so carefully.

Relaxing beside them for a couple of days gave us a chance to examine them closely. Their fronds are bayonets, merciless against the complacent camper. Despite that, Gambel's quail and cactus wrens darted about their prickly defenses without a flinch.

The spikes fold down as they age, as new spikes from the ends of the tormented branches. Aging spikes become a barky beard enshrouding each branch.

The trunk is tree-like, rough like an elm or ash.

Having come to peace with the Joshua tree, I could obsess about other strangeness, notably the desert trumpet plant.

It's an anomaly. It shouldn't survive desert winds, being fat where it should be thin and vice verse. Yet there it stands by the side of the road, reaching to the spring sun, gray green in spring (we couldn't tell if spring is early, late or on time here). By fall the trumpet plant branches like neurons in the brain, and turns cream and red. Last week the top of each stem ended in little curlycues of future weird stems, future floo floopers, straight out of Whoville.

Happy Earth Day.

While you're busy making other plans*

This gets personal.

Three dozen sketchbooks threaten the integrity of a high shelf in my office closet.

The books mesmerize me, not for their number alone (have I really filled that many books all this time?) but for their content.

These are my everything books, for notes and sketches and scraps, part of my glacial epiphany of keeping it simple, Stupid. I used to have notebooks for notes and sketchpads for drawing, and would bring the one I didn't need and vice versa. Enough! Hence, the one-book system. Which is also the closest I get to a smartphone.

The books have become the wrinkles of my brain, where I go for reference and remembering — names and phone numbers, but mostly sparks for upcoming projects.

But they are grossly inefficient in that way. Unnumbered and out of any sensible order, they require I leaf through six or seven books at a time. In such large dosage, and susceptible as I am to serendipity, they are poison. In their intoxication, I can lose parts of workdays to reverie.

Here is a perfect example. Finally finding a long-ago drawing style experiment to resurrect, I turned one more page and found this. It's a journal-less journal entry, the summary of a day camping 13 years ago this summer.

We have mostly camped for vacations, and I used to get cheap composition books and write about them, trying to elevate the trips to a high plane of providence: Life-changing escape.

Then, life being what happens while you're busy making other plans, I stopped.

I brought my sketchpad on this camping trip, I'm sure, because I had a carry-over project to finish. I can never quite leave work at home. For whatever reason, I used this one page to record our trip. The preceding page contained vague notes for a project, and the following page held the experimental drawing swatches.

Here is that entry, enhanced with running commentary (I'll spare you the handwritten version):

Aug 14, 2000

Camp is quiet and we're glad — me, Mom, Maura and Liam. It is our second day here @ Reversed Creek Campground and what we feel is the pick of the place. Our site is secluded @ one end of the campground, set against a hill and deep in a grove of aspens toward the creek (which we have not found) and pine up on the hill. We can hear the cars on the road, but that's about all. Last night, Maura said, "It'd be nice out here without all the cars going by," and we had to tell her it was the wind in the aspens.

We try to pick a new destination each time we camp. This time, the June Lakes area near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. The mountain range gradually rises from the west, but then drops sharply stark and treeless in the east. June Lakes is a last oasis of cool green peace before the breathtaking drop.

I was reading Farewell to Manzanar at the time, and saw the stark beauty of the eastern Sierra in a new light, the massive jaw of a wild dog, forbidding U.S. citizens of Japanese descent from thinking their country would welcome them back.

Wind drove us here, about four miles from where we were @ Silver Lake Campground, up in the eastern Sierra southeast of Sacramento. Teeta gave me a book of campgrounds for my birthday, and we took its advice.

"Teeta" is my sister Tara. Auntie Tara became "Teeta." She is reliable for the right gifts at the right time.

At first we liked Silver Lake, even though we got the last site (on a Sunday afternoon!) out in the middle of a small grassy plain. A small, windswept grassy plain. We put up with the wind the first night, since that is what you do when you're camping. The breeze squeezed our tent to the ground until nightfall. We were entranced by being in the cradle of such steep, sawtoothed mountains, and the way they glowed by the nearly full moon.

Funny how fast I dismissed the squeezing-tent image. I can't remember if we had the giant tent with aluminum poles, or a dome tent with plastic poles. We camped big and sloppy back then, before Scouting taught us economy and austerity. Either way, the wind was so strong that it pressed the tent flat, right on top of us, our weight being the only thing that kept it earthbound. A pole broke, I remember; I also remember I was upset, but the journal entry makes it sound like I carried on with breeze and blithe.

By Monday morning, we were lulled into thinking the site would suit us, until the wind picked up and never let up until early af before we finally decided to look elsewhere.

This new site is so good, we wondered what the catch is, since the other people were holed up in lesser sites.

Truly, this is the Site of Sites, a place so perfect it makes campers jealous the world over. It had a long driveway off a hairpin turn, just enough sun, just enough shade, out of view from the campground road and other campers. We thought it must have been bedeviled by sewage backup or bubonic plague, because we couldn't believe our good fortune. Not absolutely quiet — nature-quiet. The wind in the aspens really was wind in aspens, blowing high above our perfect shelter.

So now all is right with us. With a quiet site, no breeze to frustrate us, we can get busy camping. This morning, Maura and Mom took an hour-long horse ride while Liam and I hiked four miles round trip into the sawtoothed mountains to a mountain lake. Each pair had fun, and we capped the day at a crystal clear beach on June Lake.

Liam would go into fifth grade a couple of weeks after, Maura into third. For me as a parent, particularly where our son was concerned, school was still reaching the "Lord of the Flies" fever pitch, the flaws and hypocrisies of Catholic school starting to reveal themselves. But both kids, one in and one out of college, will tell you they made out all right. At this trip, on this summer, they were still children, hopeful and at play.

Liam was not yet in Boy Scouts, but we were both anxious to learn how to backpack. Though we didn't go far up the mountain trail, we might have gone farther than what we had provided for in food and water, and we were wearing the wrong clothes for the task. But the reward was great: Towering views of the lakes around us. A group of backpackers came down the trail, their bear bells ringing. We longed to have gone on the trip with them. Someday. On my office wall I still have the panorama I shot of the trail, assembled David Hockney style, Liam slightly out of focus in his San Francisco Giants spring training hat on the right end of the spectrum.

@ the moment, Maura, Liam & Mom are busy making furniture for Maura's Playmobil™© people. It's quiet time that makes us reflect on the week ahead, tasks waiting for me, and about the journals of Lewis and Clark I'm reading.

God bless Nancy, always up for play, for setting the safety net for imagination to leap far above the earth. Maybe the journals (I had finished Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage and wanted to read the primary sources) inspired this page.

The campsite inspired us to return, but we never have. In fact, family emergencies and various expenses and circumstances prevented us from camping or even taking more than a few days off this year.

What John Lennon said.

* most popularly attributed to John Lennon in "Beautiful Boy," but others apparently said it first. Spot on wise, no matter the source, and this version still gets me.

The best kind of time capsule

Aug. 13, 2001

Our daughter painted these exactly 10 years apart. The first was a kind of therapy when she was nine and became famous in our family for her declaration of disgust for backpacking.

Exactly 10 years later …

Her reason rang loudly and clearly off the mountainsides of the Mokelumne Wilderness, in tear-choked blurts: "BACKPACKING … IS … JUST … NOT … MY … THING!" We were four miles from the trailhead and two miles from the lake we had planned to lounge beside, at the base of a steep slope that none of our carefully packed trail descriptions had bothered to mention, and our daughter had had enough. We had redistributed her gear among the rest of us in the family, but that did not help.

We spent the next two nights inside the edge of a forest before hiking out again. The forest did not boost our daughter's mood, because it turns out it wasn't just the long walking she disliked about backpacking, it was the isolation. This was a Brothers Grimm kind of forest, and in retrospect I wonder how we all agreed to it; I can't even remember where we had gotten our water for two days.

To take our daughter's mind off matters, I let her paint in the water color satchel my sister had given me the previous Christmas. Water color papers had been stitched into a leather sheath, and the book was held closed by a long leather thong. My sister might also have given me the small box of water colors that I took with me on the trip.

As with so many other things, life gradually got in the way, and I fell out of the habit of taking the leather water color book with me on trips. I rediscovered it a few months ago in my belongings, and decided to take it with me camping with my family last week. The first few pages were painted on with energy and hope, and the rest was blank, like a mountain of notebooks I still possess for no good reason.

That's when I discovered our daughter's painting, and the date, Aug. 13, 2001 — a month before the World Trade Center fell and life changed drastically. I had noted on the opposite page, "Mokelumne Wilderness near Granite Lake," as if hopeful we'd eventually see that lake. I still haven't except in photographs on the Internet.

When I rediscovered the painting, it was Aug. 12, 2011.

None of us can be sure what our daughter was painting back then. She isn't even certain. Our son says it was our blue backpacking tent, which we still have, or one of the mountains. I guessed that it was a mountain of her imagination, and our daughter added that it might have been a cave, though no cave comes to memory from that trek.

Then 10 years later, she painted our campsite at Joseph Stewart State Recreation Area outside of Medford, Ore. ("Recreation Area," as opposed to "State Park," usually is short for, "We welcome loud partiers who trash campsites; ignore your neighbors who are camping to commune with nature!") This was camping more to her liking, with other campers nearby (though not too close; we managed to be set in a relatively remote loop of the campground) and relaxation without having to pay for it with a long hard slog into the wilderness.

This is her tent amid madrones and pines near the lakeshore. Our daughter was quickly critical of the chair and the firepit which she says are grossly out of perspective.

They are the very essence of keepsakes.