Even without open water, the little shade of the oasis beckons. Visitors are fenced out, though, because the weight of our trespass would damage the trees’ root systems. Washingtonia has pencillate rootlets just inches underground that reach as far as twenty feet from the trunk. Their job is to search for shallow groundwater. Too many pedestrians, no matter how appreciative our hearts, would trample and compress the soil supporting the vulnerable network. The palms are therefore barred with handrails and threats of hefty fines. We spectators stick to the trails and hold onto our cash.
Even with the park’s best efforts, the trees at Twentynine Palms fail to send their shallow roots to moisture. The water table has simply dropped too far. To keep the oasis alive, National Park Service staff regularly apply water directly to the base of the palms. They irrigate.
Interpretive signs further the fertility legend, as well as a second name for the oasis: Mara or Marah, meaning “big springs and much grass.” The word derives from Native American lexis—probably the Serrano language. In the legend, indigenous women of the Mojave traveled to the oasis specifically to give birth to sons. Archaeological studies may not support that, but they do document habitation by Native Americans in the area, first Serrano and Cahuilla then Chemehuevi, millennia before it became a base for men about to wage war. Footpaths radiate out from the once abundantly marshy Mara, a hub of prehistoric comings and goings. A count of 480 bone fragments in excavations at the site evidence a prehistoric human diet of largely black-tailed jackrabbit and desert tortoise, as well as lesser amounts of desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, smaller mammals, birds, and reptiles. For a time, a settlement near Mara served as home or camp for those foraging the nearby alluvial fans and hills.
The total number of palms at Mara, however, has not been recorded as twenty-nine; rather, oral and written accounts beginning in the 1800s note fewer than twenty. Even at the time of European contact, palms numbered in the teens.
Still, the legend says that sometime around 1500 AD, spiritual advisors or “medicine men” directed women who wanted male children to Mara. Blessed by shade in a land that had little, the palmgrove Mecca also had sweet water with reputed supernatural properties. Mara, the family clinic of the ancient world. The hopeful migrations to the oasis must have succeeded. In the first year alone, the legend says, expectant mothers who visited the oasis were delivered of twenty-nine male babies. They reportedly celebrated by planting one palm at the site for each infant boy. The trees they sowed grew tall, becoming guideposts visible over great distances. Only later did this same haven take on another type of maleness: a training ground for soldiers headed for oil-fueled battle in foreign deserts.
Thinned by fire in some places and trampled in others, the Washingtonia at Mara still summon visitors, murmuring veiled invitations.
We want sons, they might be saying. Bring us sons.
I walk the park service paths thinking of the pregnant women who may have blazed trails here. Strolling paths now paved and widened, I stop at a handrail to gaze into the hydric zone. This is the famous Oasis of Mara. This patch of sand and struggling palms. The formerly biodiverse, reputedly damp refuge is largely mesquite and Washingtonia.
Years later, on March 26, 2018, Mara was dealt another blow, when local resident and paroled arsonist George William Graham set fire to the palms. He played God with the remaining trees, taking a black BIC lighter to these besieged two and a half acres. Several stressed, historic palms were destroyed along with a few other remnant plant species. Reminders of a greater spectrum of wildlife and once-vibrant lineage of ancient people went up in swirls of ash. Park rangers arrested Graham as he stuck around to watch the blaze.
ON DAY THREE I RISE BEFORE DAWN TO EXPLORE ANOTHER oasis named for a tally of palms. Outside town, Washingtonia still grows naturally at springs and along fault lines in narrow canyons. That’s the case at Fortynine Palms, a 1.5-mile walk from a trailhead not far from my motel. I make the short drive; I reach the lot at daybreak. The day’s new sun throws beams over the facing ridge. Granite boulders shine beside the trail. Flakes of mica flash in the sand before my boots. Ridges along flanks of mountains shed light so that alluvial fans throw shadows. It’s a brilliant morning.
Fortynine Palms strings before me, a green necklace. The oasis has a narrow hydric zone in a long, arid arroyo. Fresh water tickles among horsetails, maidenhair fern, willow, and cottonwood where a small bit of flow is enough to fill tiny, clear pools. Glassy surfaces are topped by gaggles of water striders. A buzz fills the air as life stirs with the sun. Hummingbirds divebomb in mating dances and zoom into blossoms on scattered stands of globe mallow. Gnatcatchers and orioles call, and the sweet scent of things growing permeates the morning.
With every step closer to the water source, I find more surprises. A stippled cluster of doglike prints of coyotes at mud-rimmed pools, signs of a pack that’s come and gone. Scat stuffed with bones and palm seeds. The California fan palm is not a date tree, but its small, black fruit still lures many creatures, including large mammals. Watch out, California and Gambel’s quail—you could end up in the jaws of a hunting Canis latrans.
Moisture from below the surface seeps into my bootprints. It’s a life-giving aspect of these narrow canyons, their wet backbones. Here, groundwater lurks beneath the barest skin of gravel and sand. Alternately, in the rainy months, too much water may rip through here—high, fast, and sudden. A storm far up the drainage may drench bedrock, then send snouts of muddy runoff through narrow, shotgun canyons. Flash floods roar and rip and uproot. They’re the leading killer of California fan palms in tight, rock-bound arroyos. Not death by drying, as one might think, or the trampling of young palm pups under heavy hiking boots.
Rather, it’s the screaming, wild, rain-fed flood that upends elder palms and carries off seedlings, prying loose their shallow roots. Only the most sheltered and strongest survive these torrents that rise out of nowhere, churn through, and only spare trees if they’re protected by a random boulder or arm of alluvial fan. The mud floods leave silty scars on remaining trees, dozens of feet above ground. Look up in a palm canyon and you’re bound to see high-water marks far overhead.
Death by water in the desert: one of nature’s greatest ironies.
As the day’s heat mounts at Fortynine Palms, the music of birds fades. Insect drone takes over as bees of all sizes work the willow catkins. Two pair of quail pick at creosote and bob their way up-canyon, their loose-necked march mostly hidden beneath dry-channel canopy. I creep onto a boulder to let them pass. Three quail rely for safety on a fourth bird who perches on a pile of stones to serve as sentry. I hold my breath. The birds’ jerky, searching movements take them past, apparently without seeing me, until they all turn without warning toward my right foot. Everything goes fine for a moment, until one bird reaches my boot, the sentry cries, and all four scatter like tossed dice.
The boot that scared them off looks harmless to me. Past it, however, I find something in the pink granite gravel that’s shiny and not always so harmless—a single rifle shell, resting near my toes on the gravel-bottomed wash. Luckily the shell is a casing, spent and empty. As I study it, a jet fighter stealth-flies like a harrier overhead, throwing shadow. The aircraft rips away with a roar.
WASHINGTONIA, IMPERATIVE TO LIFE IN THE MOJAVE, HAS AS its doppelgänger the genus Phoenix in the Persian Gulf. Like the California fan palm, the highly cultivated, date-bearing Phoenix needs full sun, heat, and scads of subsurface water. Phoenix has long brought wealth and status to its growers, because there’s no end to what you can do with the tree. You can cut its fronds for shelter. You can weave its mature leaves into mats, screens, baskets, and crates. You can strip off its fruit clusters to prepare the fronds for brooms or weave palm fiber into skirts and sandals. The high-tannin date fruit has cured everything from intestinal troubles to alcoholic intoxication through the ages.
Even if palm fruit doesn’t cure hangover, as implied, the Phoenix tree of the Middle Eastern oasis stands for food, fiber, firewood. Survival for desert dwellers.
Ancient