Finding Neverland

So long, summer

Today’s accompanying tune: “Lost Boy” by Ruth B.

Seven summers. Seven summers, seven different kinds of broiling heat, flash floods, sweaty evenings. Seven consecutive snake seasons, scorpion seasons, monsoon seasons, fire seasons. Seven summers is what it takes to call yourself local to the Mojave desert.

I’ve only just wrapped up my third, agonizingly far from the midway point of permanency. Four more summers loom, each unique in their stillness and brutality. By the time I realize I’m half-way, I will likely be over the proverbial hump, rounding out my fourth summer, my fourth hibernation season, my fourth slow season, the slowest of seasons. The respite of fall never comes soon enough and only lasts imperceptibly before the harshest winds bring with them the chill of winter. Shorts and tank tops fall to the back of the closet, replaced quickly with jeans and sweaters. Soon, though, they’ll be back, picked again from the crevices of storage, ready for another season in the sun.

Living in the desert for any summer is a test of endurance, a test of willpower. You adapt slowly then all at once, a process I’ve deemed gaining my summer skin. Like our reptiles, the sun hardens the softest parts of us, leaving behind earned armor that seeks only to protect the softness that remains inside. It’s only when I can walk out into the sun on a windless, sun-drenched 90-degree day and remark on how comfortable it feels that I know I’ve acquired this year’s summer skin. Still, I slather on moisturizer, body lotion, sunscreen, lest my summer skin take on an entirely different meaning.

It’s in this skin I’ve gotten to know most other “locals,” official or not. Those that embrace summer in the desert are of their own, made as much by the heat and sun as their own flesh and blood. They rise early, make the most of the long, sunless evenings. It is only a season, they say. Best to make the most of it. If not this summer, when? They recount previous summers, their trials, their successes. That one summer spent reinforcing the natural washes on their property so that their cabin doesn’t flood when the next monsoon hits. The other summer spent almost entirely at the bar without air conditioning and hardly any windows with a room-temperature beer in hand, the bar’s existence as temporary as the season’s. The one year where there was so much rain grass painted the hills green in August. That one smoke-tinged sunset they still think about. The 124-degree day. Hiking and climbing by headlamp. A weekend trip to the mountains for relief, a full avoidance of the lower desert lest they be subject to the furnace-like temperatures at lower elevation.

Best remembered of all, though, is always the first summer. The first time they’d stepped out of an air conditioned car into 110-degree heat. The first time they couldn’t touch the steering wheel without gloves. The first snake. The first scorpion. The first monsoon. No matter where we came from, the desert’s summer left a mark. And no matter how long we stay, it’s the first that remains easily accessible in our minds, its ferocity and awe such that we couldn’t look away. We were, for a season, absolved of what led us here, what we were running from, a community of lost people seeking solace and respite in the expanse of the desert instead finding presence in its heat, its brutality, its force.

The desert’s harshness has done little to dissuade those lost, those suffering, those mired in angst from attempting to make it their home. The wandering seek something — they don’t yet know what — but are sure it lies somewhere buried next to the cholla and creosote. Without knowing it, they retreat into themselves, into their art, into their passions that led them to this place at this time. They abscond community in search of healing, of redemption. Eventually community comes, bonded through the harshness of living in a harsh place at a harsh time, tenuously bound by shared grievance, shared ambiguity, shared lack. A community of a particular place and time, of this place and time. A community with which to weather that first summer, that most brutal of summers, under the glare of a relentless sun.

The season of life that finds us in the season of desert summer is, like all seasons, ephemeral — at once endless and fleeting. The tenuous bond of that community weakens when the season expires, members find what they had lost, found where they needed to go. As the splinter grows, the community tires, those left behind more lost than ever, more sure than ever that the answer they’re searching for is indeed here, they just don’t know where yet. Their Neverland expanding and contracting around them as friends drop to the earth, feet grounded, while others float up to join as newly lost themselves. The newly earthbound pack up, the desert having done its healing work, and set off to where they were meant to be. Where they feel at home. Where their purpose and passion and art need them to be. For many of them, the desert is just a waypoint, a single summer in a string of summers peppered by outlandish characters and “would you believe it” stories.

But for others, the answer was the desert all along, the creosote, the long days of summer and chilly nights of winter. Nothing more, nothing less, than the place they had run to in the first place, looking for a sign that was there all along as they wound around mountains and through passes to arrive in the high desert. All it took was a summer, that first summer, to convince them. It is the light on the hillside, subtly different from days before, as the sun so gently tilts to the south. It is the return of the turkey vultures circling overhead. It is — if you’ll believe it — tarantula mating season. It is summer, it is fall, it is winter, it is spring. It is the sun and the clouds and the stars and the moon. At the end of the longest day, it is home.

As I was editing this piece, I realized my most recent summer was indeed, my fourth summer. I passed the half-way point, and didn’t even notice.

Here’s to finding Neverland, and coming home.

- Megan