I drive slowly on the shoulder of HWY 160, thirty miles west of Las Vegas, outside of Pahrump, Nevada, looking for the land which will become the western edge of the Rough Hat Solar project. I come to a clearing with several trucks, one white truck that says “Bio-Logical” in blue letters on its side. Before the four-square-mile patch of Mojave wilderness can be bulldozed, this company has been contracted to remove the tortoises, on account of the animal’s federal status as a “threatened species.” They dig them up from their burrows and transport them to the relocation area at Stump Springs, the same place where 133 tortoises from the nearby Yellow Pine Solar were relocated, where 26 were eaten by badgers in the first week. When a tortoise is found and dug up, it is placed, with a bit of water, in a large, dinner plate-sized Tupperware. With its head and dinosaur feet withdrawn into its shell, the tortoise can just fit.
I spot the tortoise-snatchers not far off, heading back towards their trucks. Always walking in a line and always young, just out of school. Baggy clothes, no company t-shirts. I look at them from a distance, and they look at me. Ducking under the wire fence, I begin walking down a jeep trail that leads onto the designated solar sacrifice zone.
The biologists are back at their trucks now, having lunch. One of the boys pees, looking at me from afar with a hooded sweatshirt draped over his head and neck.
I come to a young Joshua tree, and an even younger sapling sprouting up next to it.
Across the jeep trail—the first tortoise burrow. Perfect half-moon opening, so shaped for the shell. It’s at the base of a wide creosote and, in the darkness of the hole, I can see some of the plant’s thin roots. The root system of the oldest known creosote has been growing outside of Barstow, California, for more than 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. When solar developers finish with this valley, millions of old-growth creosote and Mojave yucca—a cousin of the Joshua tree—will be destroyed. I look back at the biologists’ trucks. I see a beach umbrella angled out of one window.
The Rough Hat project is owned by Candela Renewables, based in the Bay Area. They did another photovoltaic project in California’s Ivanpah Valley, directly adjacent to the notorious Ivanpah Solar Facility, the three apocalyptic towers and mirrors of which are now set to be decommissioned because photovoltaic energy has become so cheap.
“You can’t even see it,” their public affairs guy, Jim Woodruff, told me in the winter of 2021, at our meeting outside Starbucks in Pahrump. He was meeting privately with most of the opposition, making certain calculations to be sure. “All my friends that drive by on their way to Vegas say they can’t even see it.”
*
At my mobile home in Pahrump, a large beige bird flies past my living room window. The bird has a bulbous upper body, and he is going so fast.
I take a walk around the block. Over near Blosser Ranch Road, beside the grazing field for Longhorn, I hear the hawk’s cry. He is on a telephone pole. He has a nest in a family’s enormous pine tree. He caws and caws, peering down at me, and he follows me through the air in wide concentric circles, follows me as far as his pine tree, all the while shrieking.
I’m directly beneath the hawk. The blue sky and sunlight fold into the underside of his wings. I stare up at him, almost seeing upside down.
It was you that flew by my window.
It was me, it’s always me.
There was a moment ten years ago when my nephew was just four, and we were feeding birds at the lake. A storm had driven the seagulls off the ocean, and they started flying in circles over us. We were throwing hunks of bread to the seagulls, and every time they caught it in mid-air, the winter sun behind their white bodies.
This morning, only a sliver of snow left on Mount Charleston. Beside my house, there’s a baby creosote, offering a single yellow blossom.
*
When you peer into the open heart of a desert valley, you can feel something called reciprocity: how much we love the earth and how much it loves us in return.
*
I’m trampling all over the desert’s crust, its black outcroppings of fungus, the networks of mycelium, its face. Dammit. It’s crunching like cereal beneath my feet. I imagine releasing little puffs of carbon with each step. I think of the black widow in her web at the Mizpah—the stack of rocks that a group of artists and citizen activists, me included, made outside the newly built Yellow Pine Solar facility, and on land slated for the Purple Sage Solar facility. The Mizpah is a place for God to be witness. It pays homage to the life lost, and looks to a new way of Being. I think of the spider in the space between colored stones, between the rungs of Jacob’s ladder—earth and heaven.
I gaze again through the dense groves of Mojave yucca, across the undulating clay hills, and there’s the line of biologists—one two three four five—moving towards me out from the horizon. Hoods and shoes. The metal shovel. My God, if this isn’t the end of everything. They shuffle along five feet apart from one another, as I suppose they must be trained to do. I think for a moment about how these young people could bludgeon me out here with their shovel, all the while peering from beneath their hoodies. They pause. Are they looking at an animal? They drift over the landscape. Because time in the desert is horizontal, is vertical, is a minefield, you feel the enormous weight of creation itself. I think of the Crucifixion painting by Antonello: Christ’s thin body, the shape of the sky, the pull of some good earth.
One of the biologists is walking with a long stick outstretched in front of her like a baton. Oh sweet, sweet water. I remember the oleander in Las Vegas. I remember my grandfather smiling in front of a corn field in Ohio, the corn robust and green as the man.
They’re crouching down, now standing, pounding the shovel against the ground. I try to appear casual, listening to their voices through the air. We’re finally too close for me not to greet them. I call out hello, and then I add that I never see anyone else out here. I’m playing dumb, see? One of them says, “Hi, are you looking for something?”
I say, “No, I just come to walk out here,” but my voice is too high, like a person on television, like the screen itself. And I shouldn’t have said, “out here.” I think this immediately, almost as I’m saying it, because it calls attention to the place in a way a casual person probably wouldn’t. I should have said “hike” instead of “walk” because that is what people understand is done in the wilderness.
“Oh, neat,” one of them says.
I ask, “Are you looking for something?”
“Tortoises,” one of them answers.
“Have fun,” another one says in an equally high, dumb voice.
*
You know we aren’t choosing what to do. It’s the earth inside us. The earth tells the bird to fly, tells the fish to bite the worm in the river, tells the fisherman to cook the fish. The earth tells the worms to move at night in the grass, tells the sky to rain. It tells me to wake up and come into your room.
*
To watch someone without their knowing, particularly from afar, is a most peculiar thing.
The Rough Hat Solar site is officially no longer public land. If the biologists want, they can call the police and have me escorted off.
Today, I stay in the wash, resolved to follow it to its natural end. I am immersed in the scent of lemon fennel and a blanket of green. Mount Charleston is behind me. After some time, the walls of the wash taper away, and I find myself at the western edge of Rough Hat, on the perimeter road, the tortoise fence crawling up and over one wash and then another, out into the warm day. I sit down in the shade of a fine yucca.
I’m wearing a bright pink sun-shirt so it will be easy to spot me. Although I might just as easily be mistaken for a beavertail cactus in bloom.
***
