I Like These Truces Of Wind And Heat That
The Desert Makes, Otherwise I Do Not Know How I Should Come By So
Many Acquaintances With Furtive Folk.
I like to see hawks sitting
daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a feather,
and doves in a row by the prickle-bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze.
I like the smother of
sand among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open
places, but I never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep.
The wind robs them of what wit they had, and they seem never to
have learned the self-induced hypnotic stupor with which most wild
things endure weather stress. I have never heard that the desert
winds brought harm to any other than the wandering shepherds and
their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little Pete showed me bones
sticking out of the sand where a flock of two hundred had been
smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the four-foot posts of
a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown dunes.
It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch
the cloud currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge,
say, you look over Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on
the level desert air; south of you hurries a white troop late to
some gathering of their kind at the back of Oppapago; nosing the
foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps south. In the clean, smooth
paths of the middle sky and highest up in air, drift, unshepherded,
small flocks ranging contrarily. You will find the proper names of
these things in the reports of the Weather Bureau--cirrus, cumulus,
and the like and charts that will teach by study when to
sow and take up crops. It is astonishing the trouble men will be
at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the eternal
meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get
the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of
your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.
THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES
There are still some places in the west where the quails cry
"cuidado"; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle;
where all the dishes have chile in them, and they make more of the
Sixteenth of September than they do of the Fourth of July. I mean
in particular El Pueblo de Las Uvas. Where it lies, how to come at
it, you will not get from me; rather would I show you the heron's
nest in the tulares. It has a peak behind it, glinting above the
tamarack pines, above a breaker of ruddy hills that have a long
slope valley-wards and the shoreward steep of waves toward the
Sierras.
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