Seeing Among the Joshua Trees

Written by Morrigan DeVito
Illustrations by Maria Volborth

I am still a little bit shy around Joshua trees. When I visit them, I don’t know what to write. Instead, my journal pages hold their long silences. But I want to be a good enough writer to honor them for taking care of the Mojave Desert, so I’m always trying. The raven says I’m silly, trying to use words. Life is feeling, not words, she says. 

The raven’s not so bad. Sure, she eats tortoise eggs and pesters the coyotes and Golden Eagles and shouts at me a lot in her wobbly voice, but she’s the first friend I made in this desert. When I was a kid, we’d talk on my family’s long drives to Southern California and Utah, me looking out the window and her gliding and dipping and diving as the creosote bushes and cars swirled and whirled in her dark eyes. We’d talk in the language of seeing, wordless but full of meaning, the desert gleaming. 

Now, as I turn into the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness, ready to try and write something, she’s rambling on and on telling me what that something should be: the ways that birds like to perch in the Joshua trees (the most horizontal branches are her favorite), or how so many birds nest in the Joshua trees (but not her because she likes to be different). And do not, she says, write about the golden eagles, gilded flickers, or Bendire’s and Leconte’s thrashers. I think she’s a little jealous of the attention they get. I tell her so and she guffaws and leaves me alone with the Joshua trees, at last. 

I’m coming here tonight, August 30, to see the supermoon rise and watch over the desert. Now it’s almost sunset, 97 degrees, and the desert is silent and still. If I had ears like a barn owl or a kit fox, I could perhaps hear the clicky chatter of harvester ants tunneling below my feet. Every now and then, there is the faintest breeze through the creosote and blackbrush, just barely enough to move their leaves. I thank the Joshua trees for letting me share this space with them. 

As I wait for the sunset, sitting cross-legged in the gravelly sand, I flip through my bird field guide and scan the pages of all the birds I’ve seen here before. Western bluebird, red-tailed hawk, western meadowlark, Brewer’s sparrow… but as I turn the pages, I realize, for all my birdwatching, I’ve hardly paid attention to any of their eyes. Had I ever really seen them, let alone seen the desert from their wordless, seeing language? So, feeling like I finally have something to say to the Joshua trees, I ask,

“How many birds have ever looked at you?”

They were quiet. It takes a long time to count something like that. I return to my silence as well. 

The sky becomes powdered purple, the same shade as shadows stretching over the sand. With my back to the moonrise, I pull out a journal and try to draw the basic shapes of the Joshua trees. I understand their language better at dusk and dawn, when the shadows stir their cells and their limbs bend and stretch like silent dancers, waiting for the throngs of birds, yucca moths, and giant ground sloths to slow dance with them, their wordless partners across time. The raven once said all yuccas are shy about their dancing, and that’s why I’ve only seen their poses, as still as the mountains enfolding the valley. 

When I turn around, giving them a chance to move, the moon’s red eye gazes at me, unblinking in the deepening sky. Humbled, wordless, all I can say is that it glows. It rises over the gentle slope of the bajada as an unseen chorus of Black-throated Sparrows sing a moon song to the desert, pouring silver light from their voices. The sun dissolves. And I, dissolving with it, feel the peering eyes of hundreds of unseen creatures across the desert, a language in their blinking, holding precious water in their eyes. 

As I fall asleep that night, after much moon-gazing, I find myself in other bodies, seeing through other eyes. A nighthawk flies beneath Polaris, mouth agape, its black eye reflecting the moonlight and illuminating tiny insects to eat. A Great-horned Owl hoo-hoos from one of the Joshua trees, listening to the underbrush for scuffling kangaroo rats, pupils deep and wide like two pools of moonless water. 

I follow the moonlight to other days, to other forms. I look across the desert from the eye of a Greater Roadrunner, as golden as the sunrise. The roadrunner coos and coos to the desert, to nearby mates and rivals. Suddenly, he flutters down, blinking. He pumps his tail and stands straighter, scanning the shadows beneath blackbrush and sunny rocks for lizards and grasshoppers. His stomach growls. He runs, parting salt and sand beneath his scaly feet, two toes forward and two backwards, like the paths crossing between dreaming and waking. He runs, stops. Scans, runs. As he hunts, salt leaks from his solar eye. He continues to zigzag through the brush and cactus spines… 

I fall away from the roadrunner, and the current of eyes carries me beneath blackbrush and into a creosote where ravens squabble overhead. A turkey vulture soars through the cloud of volcanic feathers, following the highway, looking for blood and guts against the tar with an eye as dark as a new moon. Thousands of feet below she finds a hairy splotch and sails down to a black-tailed jackrabbit, the buzzing flies talking into his ears. How to eat this? Guts first? She peers at the cloudless sky. Soon the ravens will come, hungry from all their creosote whirling. So she stabs her beak into the jackrabbit’s eye, hazel like dappled light on a Joshua tree’s stalk. Still wet.

That hazel eye spills me down a sandy wash where the jackrabbit ran. Clumps of mistletoe hang in a thorny thicket of catclaw acacias and mesquites, a trio of Joshua trees on the horizon. Here, a slate Phainopepla wurps from a hunched honey mesquite. The mistletoe clinging to its twisted branches is as red as the first flush of sunrise, as red as the Phainopepla’s eyes. She flutters and gobbles up some mistletoe fruit, red eyes eating red eyes. A male joins her, jet wings swooshing like a cloud’s shadow over the land. They frantically eat and eat, eat thousands of berries every day. Blinking berries and dreaming berries, they eat as the honey mesquite grows heavy beneath the mistletoe, redder and redder each day. Its roots plunge into unseen waters, sifting through sand that holds traces of the ocean millions of years ago…

A wave of awakeness crashes over me and I stir beneath the Joshua trees. My eyes feel dry, as if they’ve been open all night. The first flush of sunrise is as red as a phainopepla’s eye. Unseen, the black-throated sparrows sing a sun song as rising rays restore the forms of living things. I pace and shuffle the sand around the Joshua trees, thanking them for letting me spend the night. I wonder where the raven is and what she’d say about my dreaming… she’d laugh at all this writing. 

There is nothing more to write. The Joshua trees are still counting all the birds. They’ve reached the thousands now. In roots and eyes, wordless water flows.

Originally published in the 2024 issue of the Gold Beam magazine.