The mystic draw of the desert

Physically, I'm back. Spiritually, the journey home will take longer. It may even end back in the desert.

I sense the desert still pulling me. I keep seeing it spread out endlessly before my eyes. I feel kinship with an environment simultaneously weird and hostile and subtle and vibrant.

My mind wanders over trails in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park east of San Diego, trails Capt. Joan Bautista de Anza and early stagecoaches traveled when European settlers first came to California.

But mostly I recall all the plants and wildlife.

Cottontail and jack rabbits shared sunrise and sunset with my wife and me.

They acted like we weren't there, yet watched every move we made, always on the lookout for danger.

A coyote pranced by one morning, probably as shocked to see us as were were to see it.

Another daybreak brought the rare chance to see a family of four peninsular bighorn sheep scamper down a mountainside and head up Borrego Palm Canyon for some water water from one of the park's 25 oases.

Of the 500 wild borrego (Spanish for lamb or yearling ram) in our nation, 300 roam the stark, rocky mountains and deep, cool canyons that rim the 600,000-acre park, the largest state park in the country.

Campfires at night yield enough light to watch kangaroo rates scurrying under starlit heavens.

The desert holds a strange, hard-to-describe fascination, kind of like crossing the dark, brooding rock 'n' roll of The Doors with the mystic, airy flute of Paul Winter.

It is simple and complex, sparse, efficient, fragile yet forbidding, an arid, sometimes harsh and unforgiving wasteland actually teeming with life.

Yearly rainfall averages about 2 inches. Summer temperatures hit 120 degrees. Ground-level heat can top 180 degrees Winds peak at 100 mph.

Life either adapts or dies.

Resourceful, nocturnal and fleet kangaroo rats eat only dried seeds. Then their digestive process produces water from food that has none.

In the intense summer heat, smoke trees grow green and sinewy in dry washes. Their hard seeds lie dormant until a flash flood smashes them against rocks that crack the seed's surface so water can enter. Then the tree takes root at a time when the sandy creekbed has water to nourish a young seedling.

Such bushes as the stick-like, ever-present creosote grow low to the ground so they can resist the winds. Their light-colored, leafless branches expose the minimum amount of surface to the sun and reflect back the maximum amount of heat back into the atmosphere.

Mesquite trees sink single roots 150 feet straight down to tap underground pools and streams that flow year-round.

Ocotillo cactus send roots over wide areas to firmly grasp the sun-baked sands and to gather every drop moisture the skies yield.

Instead of having broad, tasty leaves that give up moisture to the sun through evaporation, ocotillo grow slender, spiny branches lined with thorns, giving herbivores no place to bite and the heat no surface to attack.

Sometimes the heat rising is the only sound filling the desert.

Its silence is shocking, so absolute that every airplane flying anywhere nearby becomes an auditory assault on suddenly overly sensitive ears.

The panes cut through skies so blue they make San Luis Obispo air seem dirty gray.

Under the blue, the desert seems vast, broader than the widest sea.

The ocean's featureless horizon disappears after about 12 miles. Panoramas in the mountains are interrupted by competing peaks and tall forests.

In the desert, dry lake beds spread outward until they become badlands and washes sweep off into a distance that seems to go forever.

My wife and I becoming fairly regular desert rats, although simply using vacation time is obviously way too short.

Every time we go, we want to return and stay longer. We're convinced that after a lifetime living on the coast, the desert is where we'll end up.