A wonder tree. Own a palm, own the world.
Because the trees are critical to life both in and out of the oasis, they are strategic targets in times of war. Phoenix lore holds that in the 1824 siege of Suckna, a station on the caravan route between Mesopotamia and central Syria, the conqueror Abdel-Gelil cut down more than forty thousand trees to compel the town to surrender. The campaign worked, and the scorchedpalm tactic has been used in many conflicts since to gain dominance over populations. For the Iraqi people, who have long led the world in date production, the much-harassed Phoenix has become a military Achilles’ heel. Iraqis, wise and hardworking stewards of Phoenix, develop many of the most popular cultivars, including those bearing soft, sweet Halawy and Khadrawy fruits. Then, standing tall, holding the bread of life and unable to hide in an exposed landscape, the generous palm falls in mute capitulation when the enemy comes swinging sabers.
We in the West have done more than our share to destroy the palm in the Tigris-Euphrates. Iraq’s forty million commercial trees had already come under attack in the 1980s’ Iran-Iraq War. Sometime during the descent of allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War, numbers of palms registered just fifteen million. After September 11, 2001, Allied forces again invaded Iraq, albeit years later: US and British air strikes that began on March 20, 2003, and continued for three weeks coincided with and interrupted palm fertilization to Iraq’s remaining ten million trees. Little has been written in Western news about the destruction of palms north of Baghdad in 2003, but newspapers from the area reported invading armies bulldozing farmers’ trees to extract information about guerrilla insurgents. In 2005, Iraq’s annual output of dates, usually twenty to thirty tons, was slim enough to only meet children’s needs and provide dessert for growers’ guests. In 2006, the same newspapers reported that any surviving trees were expected to be barren.
Exterminate the date palm, and you take a knife to the throats of its people. Kill the tree that rims the oasis, and you help bring Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Egyptians, Arabians, Iranians, and Iraqis to their knees.
WAR FOUND MARA, TOO, COMING IN ON THE ANCIENT NATIVE footpaths. After the shelter and open water drew miners, homesteaders, cattlemen, and the stage line, small outposts gradually coalesced into the village of Twentynine Palms. No longer the sacred destination for mothers desiring to make sons, it drew the sons themselves. Most men arriving there had either just returned from war or were about to go. Veterans of World War I who’d suffered lung problems during the gassing in France came to the clean, dry air to regain the power to breathe. Mara became life itself, with long horizons and unbroken sunlight. Basins of rock and sand, a world away from the mud and gloom of trench warfare and the dark, northern forests of Europe, meant a return from the dark side of the moon.
When World War II loomed, the US military found the open skies of Twentynine Palms ideal for glider instruction. The Navy expanded that use into an auxiliary air station that later transferred to the Marine Corps. The Semper Fi have live-fire trained there with no breaks since 1953. No rest for the warrior in either war or peace.
RETURNING TO TOWN, I’M JONESING FOR MORE HOT-TUB TIME and maybe even an umbrella drink beside the swimming pool. Aglow from hiking, I pass through the motel lobby and catch sight of a headline on a newspaper in the media rack. Buying a paper, I detour to a plush chair in the lobby. TANK CREW FOUND. The oversized font usually reserved for presidential election upsets and fires that force evacuations now applies to the team of men who trained right here only months ago.
When the Abrams was finally located, it was by Navy divers in twenty feet of Euphrates River water. Somehow disoriented even after the sandstorm cleared, the driver missed a turn and plunged off the end of an unfinished bridge. The tank flipped, its turret and escape hatch shoving into soft river mud. Trapped inside the Abrams, all four crew members perished.
The Scotsman’s pregnant wife is brave as she faces the reporters from regional and national newspapers. “He loved his job,” she says of her deceased husband. “It totally fit him.” She’s showing huge composure and keeping things brief. There are no hints about risk. Nothing about the irony of death in a desert river. Reading her words, I want nothing more than to find the communications officer. I rush to the swimming pool to discover he’s still at his post. He looks up from his math with a quick smile. His face fills with the light of recognition.
I ask if he’s heard about the tank crew. He has. The news has only firmed his resolve to join his unit. His expression turns solemn. “I want to go soon. I don’t want to be like a prizefighter who trains day in and day out for two years and never gets to go in the ring.”
The thought of him taking the blows suffered by pugilists, both in and out of the ring, hurts my heart. I try not to let my face show it as we fall into a tentative silence. It’s a fool’s desire to think that he might keep his wide-eyed, shining look. His young brain is still maturing, still growing its ability to reason. Only when he’s lived to the ripe old age of twenty-six, I’ve read, will his nervous system be considered adult. Only then will he recognize life’s warning lights, like the oil lamps on car dashboards that stop us from driving into danger. Risky behavior is especially attractive to a certain demographic, specifically Caucasian males under the age of twenty-five with high school educations or less. This young officer may qualify on all counts, but I won’t ask. Neither is he about to bring it up.
He goes back to his math. I don’t fold him in a protective embrace, but someone should. Should I pray? Or make a second wish? With my gaze on the motel palms again, I compose another eight-syllable blessing: Please. Survive fire and water.
He keeps his vigil with the books. The face of the pool shimmers. It’s groundwater, Mara-sustaining liquid, pumped out of soil and rock and into the desert air. Taking my place in the hot tub, within the hydric zone in this otherwise arid garden, I hold a vigil of my own.
2.
SEND IN THE CLOWNS
Chaos and order, yin and yang, Abbott and Costello.
—Joe Lee, author, cartoonist, and student
of the former Ringling Brothers and Barnum
& Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida
MY FIRST VISIT TO LAS VEGAS: AN OVERNIGHT WITH MY mother, father, and siblings on a road trip home from Arizona. We’d hauled across three states in our old Chevy station wagon, my father driving, my mother navigating. We four kids crowded into the backseat, maybe one of us in the seatless way back. It had been a wandering break from our home in rainy Oregon, the kind of trip we all loved. We’d milked the best out of every campground we’d found in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, often dry camping where no one else had pulled off. The nights sparkled with stars. The songs of coyote packs edged the dark. While our folks slept on a plywood bed in the wagon, we kids lay out under a shelter of sky, with only the thin layers of well-worn cotton sleeping bags between us and the godforsaken wilderness. They were more than enough.
When we entered Las Vegas’s orbit, we were still in thrall of the natural wonders of the Grand Canyon. We’d gotten dusty in mining and farming towns. We’d hung out on wooden porches in Old Tucson, were right there when outlaws challenged each other in the dirt streets. By contrast, the city had the shimmer of mirage. A fantasy of flickering lights—at first beckoning, but then proving hard and gray and dirty with littered streets.
We stayed less than twenty-four hours, arriving at dusk one day and leaving after breakfast the next. I remember just one, vivid episode during that small window of time. Our family of six was returning to our motel room via a concrete alleyway. My folks were out in front of us kids. Maybe we had our shoulders hunched to the chaos. Maybe