Eastern Mojave

I left Los Angeles in the morning. After miles of bedroom communities, truck stops and creosote flats, I stopped in Ludlow, a sorry roadside town. The Dairy Queen stenciled a slogan on their sign, "God is with us al, intween evury each of us."

I asked the gas station attendent why she lived in Ludlow. "It's close to Vegas!" "Do you gamble?" "Yes, but I go to Laughlin for that. Loose slots." From Ludlow, I passed the signature black of lava fields, and the dotted plains of over 30 cinder cones and riparian riverbeds filled with yucca.

I left Los Angeles to test the suspension on the truck off-road, and to catch a glimpse of the wildlife of Eastern California. I ended up in the Mojave National Preserve, a vast tract of public land bordering Nevada. An electrical line maintenance road cut up a steep, pot-holed hill and onto a plateau, so I drove it.

From here, I could see for miles; the piles of boulders that formed mountains, the snow-capped peaks and the fields of cholla and yucca. To the north, I could see a white dune-field stretching for miles at the center of a long basin. The radio played Cesaria Evora, a fado singer from a former Portuguese colony off the coast of Africa called Cape Verde. This music, isolated by time and distance from mainland Portuguese or African music has developed distinctly from years of isolation. It was fitting for the Eastern Mojave, because this basin is in many ways an island, isolated by time and distance. It bears uniquely evolved life and geology.

I followed the route of the maintenance road several miles under the electrical lines, clearly off-access to the public, and the best view of California's most remote desert. I cut across the flats to Kelso Dunes, as they were called, and onto the main public access for the dunes.

The wind was blowing hard, I could see it was snowing higher up, and sleeting here. The ripples of the third-highest dune peaks in North America had been washed away by rains, and grasses spotted across the mounds of sand for miles. Coyotes, snakes, lizards, jackrabbits and tarantulas were the supposed wildlife of Mojave, but I saw nothing, just tracks crisscrossing in the sand. So I wandered the rest of the way back to the truck, and headed for the main road.

Finally, I saw something move. An animal, a large jackrabbit nonetheless, and it trounced in front of the truck, and came out the other end and I imagined seeing a large red stew. Scared of what I might have done, I looked - nothing. At least I was able to test my shocks. David Quammen, who examines the role of biology, highways and islands in the well-regarded book, The Song of the Dodo, tags along with biology teams. He argues that the unique isolation of islands creates some kind of a laboratory for the rest of the world.

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