For my father, Russell E. Lawton,who beamed us to the oasis
CONTENTS
I have watched the workings of Fortune; I know her genius for envious dealings with [Hu]Mankind; and I also know that her empire is most absolute over just those oases in life in which the victim fancies his sojourn the most delectable and most secure.
—Polybius, Histories, 146 BC
Let’s keep each other alive. Let’s help each other out here.
—Wesley Smith, Grand Canyon river guide, 1996
INTRODUCTION
WHAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT OASES? THAT THEY ARE LUSH and lifesaving refuges in landscapes that are otherwise harsh and apt to kill us. That they are rare. That we’re crazy for them, to the point of spending billions to build them in places where they wouldn’t last a day without our adding vast amounts of water. That we’re willing to murder for them, commit environmental crimes to emulate them, and fly the world to worship at their feet. That we’ll pour our hearts and souls into basking in their shade and sustenance with the little free time our schedules allow. It’s no wonder. The oasis is a rarity among ecosystems, a unique gem in an inhospitable world—in the words of the inestimable Oxford English Dictionary, “a fertile spot in a desert where water is found.” Oasis conjures up the true palm sanctuary, the frond-fringed, shady haven of our collective imagination. We’ve expanded that waking dream to embrace any river, spring, pocket of rainwater in bedrock, and natural pool resilient enough to survive in an otherwise waterless environment. In those shimmering rarities, we know that we find life.
A desert, not a vague concept, is technically an area receiving less than ten inches of rainfall a year. The word comes from the Latin desertum, “something left waste.” In a geographer’s lexicon, the world’s largest somethings-left-waste reside at the poles, together totaling approximately ten million square miles of ice, snow, and tundra (in the Arctic) and bedrock (in the Antarctic). Next largest is the Sahara, nearly three-and-one-half million square miles of gravel plain, sand, and dune spread over thirteen countries and a quarter of the African continent. After that, the Arabian Desert: one million square miles reaching into six steadfastly arid countries. Equal to one-fifth the area of all the continents, often inhospitable due to extreme temperatures and lack of surface water, deserts lure us with their starkness. They also hold the unequaled possibility of stumbling onto natural oases. Some of the most alluring land-and water-forms on the planet have a brilliant cachet due to, not in spite of, their hostile surroundings.
Deserts have their sworn allies. “But oh my desert / yours is the only death I cannot bear,” Richard Shelton writes in “Requiem for Sonora.” (Edward Abbey chose Shelton’s words for one of three epigraphs to his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The other two were by Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.) In the same poem, Shelton pens:
and you lie before me
under moonlight as if under water
oh my desert
the coolness of your face
Cool, yes—seasonally or by night. Lying underwater, though, not so much; no surprise that Shelton spins it into metaphoric moonlight-water. When the rare surface water does come, created in spring runoff from mountains or the outpouring of a thunderstorm or the brief season of monsoons, then, in those pockets, we do find the coolness of the desert’s face. There, and in the oasis, where there may be a central pool of open water, the hydric zone that quenches the thirst of desert travelers. Surrounding it stands the true oasis, or ring of water-dependent shrubs and trees—often palms. That circle or band of wet-zone plants lies within the outlying desert plants of the ecotone. Unique and eccentric shrubs of the ecotone are armed with spikes and claws, buffering the oasis proper like mean streets surrounding a glittering downtown. Even taken together, those three precious zones hold a tiny share in the vast expanse of our deserts. The oasis exerts its global influence in a matter of a few square miles rather than millions.
The bulk of these essays I wrote in my longtime home in Sonoma Valley, at my desk in the house I built with my husband, Paul Christopulos, on a wooded piece of streamside property he’d owned for decades. We found peace there, a neighborhood, friends, work, community, love. In the months in which I was finishing The Oasis This Time, we were preparing to leave for my new job in central Oregon. It would be a return to my birth state and a departure from a beloved place where we’d put down deep roots. Paul and I both raised our children in Sonoma, separately. We met through our shared passion for music and writing. Still I felt drawn back toward the wild places that had shaped my youth. Paul was open to a new journey, too. Now we’re living on a slim, fragile margin between the Cascade Mountains and the Great Basin, a place we barely know and hardly expected to find. There’s a familiar feeling to the not knowing—a memory of first trips on rivers and in canyons that later felt like home.
Thoreau wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” No truer words have been written, or at least none that ring more true to our city- and town-weary ears. Now, on a planet that’s undergoing increased desertification due to extended drought and heat, with water the limiting factor to wild and domestic populations, I see this sentiment and raise it. In the wildness of the natural oasis, in the sanctity of well-watered refuge, is the preservation of our beautiful, beleaguered world.
Rebecca Lawton
Summer Lake, Oregon