The Ocean Went Away and Left the Desert

By Laura Newman

As the recipient of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award, I am excited to present a session at this year’s Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl on October 12, 2024. The subject of the session will be Writing the Desert West in Fact and Fiction. Michael Branch, a Nevada Writers Hall of Fame 2024 inductee, represents fact, while I represent fiction. Join us!

As an example of landscape as character, below is an excerpt from The Saints of Death Valley, my novella in which the desert is most certainly a wily character:

“The Mojave Desert is the smallest and the driest of the four North American Deserts. It is a place for the marvelous and the oddball. There is the Wee Thump Forest of ancient Joshua trees, limbs outstretched, guiding the traveler Onward; brown bats with their transparent wings, and the tiny desert night lizard whose babies look like toothpicks. The ghost flower, and bees that sleep—sometimes side by side—inside the petals of the orange globe mallow cactus bloom. There is jasper, chalcedony, and agate. Geodes that hold crystal universes inside plain brown packaging—an adapt metaphor for any desert.

The name Las Vegas is Spanish for The Meadows. There aren’t any left. Las Vegas is a mirage—there’s no water there. It’s the elusive pot of gold at the end of a neon rainbow. The city grew out of the workforce that built Boulder Dam. Vegas was the dam’s first customer.

One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Las Vegas, the desert hits its low point. Death Valley looks the lonely place. There’s a reason the word desert is synonymous with abandonment. Most who walk through Death Valley take the name as fair warning. Who would live in the wooly dust, drink from that heavy water? Dare to call the red hematite and green chlorite streaks worth the trek through every shade of brown? Cough to find lungs flurried with chalk-white borax crystals. But some call it beauty. Some prefer to be alone. The Mojave may be boney, but there’s a billion stars ablinkin’. A silk ribbon wind. When the rains come the flowers follow, tissue paper petals in baby doll colors. There are road runners, that joke of a bird, and stones that sail—don’t think it isn’t so. The ocean went away and left the desert. The desert doesn’t care. Better to blow in the wind than hoist a sea.”