Pastures Of Plenty
In the fall of 2013 I took a job teaching two classes—one at eight a.m. and the other at 3 p.m. — twice a week at the College of the Desert's far-flung Mecca/Thermal campus.
It yielded me little pay but I gained this story I now share about adjunct teaching in Mecca and the long, strange, mostly silent commute from Twentynine Palms. The crossing between desert worlds began the first day when I started driving before sunup and had to stop for a coyote rolling around in some puddle of putrefaction just before the entrance to Joshua Tree Park. Without even looking up, the coyote stood, ambled over to the shoulder, let me pass, then resumed wallowing.
As I made my slow-winding way through the Park, the dawn was misty and cool. At Cottonwood Springs junction I saw a desert tortoise enjoying the damp by the side of the road. I stopped, took a photo with my flip-phone, and moved on.
But most mysterious was the third creature I saw that morning. At about seven a.m., as I came around what I hoped was one of the final curves in the road to Cottonwood Springs, a tall, two-legged figure emerged from behind an ocotillo and held up a stop sign. You know, I had hoped to see maybe a hawk, a road-runner or two, at least a lizard. But no. What creature, exotic to these environs indeed, did I encounter deep in the wilderness of JTNP? A dude with a ponytail. Holding a stopsign lollypop. I stopped. The dude shuffled over. He said, "pilot car will be here shortly to take you through the zone." The zone?
Just then I had the sense— as I had often had in New Mexico, driving to and from Española, which was bordered by the Santa Clara and Okeh Owingeh pueblos, borders which one routinely traversed while on the same stretch of highway just to go to work or Walmart—that I was preparing to cross one of those invisible, intangible, yet impossible-to-fully-permeate borders between cultures. For the moment, however, what it really came down to was orange cones and caution tape. So I had to stop. And wait. There was no one else around. Just me and ponytail dude. I paced by the car and drained my ever-thickening black coffee, trying to ignore the roaring panic in my skull, instead tuning in to the silence of the ages. I felt myself becoming a fossil.
After the time-warp in the Park I took a half-hour roller-coaster ride over the ten and through Box Canyon. Then I got lost in Mecca. The map I printed out had somehow made it look as if the campus would be waiting for me at the foot of Box Canyon Road. Nope. Box Canyon Road, which wound through shadowy ravines and around various uptilted pink and brown strata—evolution ham sandwiches—deposited me into a yawning plain of lush and sudden agriculture. Here, with the doomed, glittering Salton Sea as a backdrop, flourished grape vines, fig and citrus trees, cabbage rows--and date palms with paper bag ballerina skirts hiding their high, sweet secrets.
Only when I drove through a corridor of lemon trees did I get a break from the rotten fish smell that permeated the area. Where was the college? Outside the Mecca Boys and Girls' club, I pulled off the road and called for help.
An arrangement was made whereby a student named Norma would meet me and lead me to campus. Arriving to class a half-hour late, toting a huge bag of books and papers, hair flying, make-up missing, and my sandals trailing high desert dust, I asked myself: How the hell am I going to make anyone believe me about anything? at all?
But the students were there in rows, just waiting for me to show up. They were dressed nicely too, and I made a note of that. They laughed when I smiled and possibly even forgave me for being tardy. So I did my job: got their names down on day one, and became the part-time extrovert one must become in order to teach English 71.
During the course of that long day the rain gushed down across the Coachella Valley, muddy rivulets spilling into the parking lot from the adjacent cabbage fields. By quitting time I learned that Box Canyon Road had washed out and I'd have to find another way home.
Many of the Mecca students live in towns that ring the Salton Sea and are native Spanish speakers and speakers of tongues indigenous to whatever regions they pilgrimed from to get to Mecca. With their families, they probably harvest your fruit and work at the manicured resorts to the west.
That semester I learned about the stark contrast between the handling of environmental and water resource issues in the East Coachella Valley vis-avis in communities like Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert.
The two ends of the same valley are a world apart. Water is life. Water changes lives. Water divides lives. When you check in to that bougainvillea-draped hotel reception in Palm Desert, walk past the sparkling water feature, and toss your Lambo keys to the valet, you are the flip side of a dusty row of field hands, their faces wrapped in bandanas, working under a fierce sun in those Mecca grapes.
The stories of the students' journeys north flooded my folder when I assigned that first personal essay. "…we climbed out the hotel window into the cold morning..." "…they sent us back so the next day we tried again." "…my mother was pregnant and we didn't have food…" These are the dreamers. Remember them?
And when I asked them to write about something they knew how to do that I did not know how to do, and a student wrote about "working in the strawberries" and how at the end of her first day she vowed through a fog of pain to never do it again but then went back to work the next day because everyone else did—I recalled times I went strawberry picking just for fun. When another student, in her essay response to the Cesar Chavez film, wrote: "Why do we pick the fruit? Oh, that's right, it's because white people can't!" I said, "You know, there's another movie you should see. It's called The Grapes of Wrath..."
Box Canyon and Cottonwood Springs remained impassable for a couple of weeks, so I took various long ways home and often wandered off the highway, finding date ranches with Arabian Nights iconography, and produce stands selling fresh greens and Mexican pastries. Once the Park route reopened, I commuted home that way. No radio, no phone service, only a slow ride through sunset into dusk and moonrise with bats and nighthawks swooping through my headlight beams and, if I got lucky, a long-shadowed, high-heeled tarantula or two stalking across the warm asphalt.