Grandpa's Desert
By Sharon Snow

He lived, alone mostly, on the Anza Borrego. He was in his seventies. His wife, my grandmother, did not come here. She was allergic to the silence and the heat, and preferred to remain in Vista by the Sea. He came for solace and for healing of his infected lungs. He drove to the desert in an ancient Dodge that only ran for him and nobody else. While he was there I would sometimes visit him. I was seventeen.

His single trailer was not large - only big enough for him. The aluminum roof blazed like a second sun in the heat of daylight. His front yard was full of empty water jugs, tires, a few scraggly plants in pots, a table with an umbrella, some haphazard chairs, and a huge king sized mattress. When I came to visit him, I slept on this mattress.

Every morning my Grandpa would get up, yawn, stretch, and come outside to see if I was awake too. We woke up early, before dawn. He would make coffee inside, and bring it out for us to drink. He was cheerful in the morning, laughing while he shaved his grizzled face, and brushed his teeth with salt and soda, spitting on the rocks behind the trailer. He would also make me shake out my boots before putting them on. I never saw a centipede or a scorpion that close(I would have likedtoo!) but thanks to Grandpa I always shake out my shoes when camping.

Then we would take a sunrise walk. This ritual was something I will never forget. Once we found fossils, laying in the white alkalai dirt. I picked them up, some of them. Stone shells. We were standing on the bottom of an ancient ocean. Later I would joke with my grandma, 'You can come - the ocean is there too!'. Another time we found a petrified forest. I know it must still be there, but I don't know where we went to find it. Logs and sections of logs were on the ground, all petrified. It was in a narrow valley, choked with weeds, and somehow we stumbled into it.

Once the sun came up high, walking was out of the question. We headed back to the trailer to spend an afternoon talking, playing dominoes, and eating great stuff like cold canned peaches and sauerkraut on ice. (My German grandfather never lost his love of sauerkraut either!) Sometimes I'd pull out my guitar in the evening and play. I didn't play any particular tune - just whatever my fingers pulled out of the strings. I played the desert - the desert played me. Or my Grandpa would sing hymns while I played behind him. He had a fine tenor.

Once the sun went down, we built a fire sometimes, or sometimes we just sat in the dark. My grandpa knew a lot of stories about things and this was when he would tell them. Then I would lay on that huge mattress and watch the stars. The stars are huge at night - like celestial golf balls. Sometimes they flew through the sky as though the angels were playing a game of golf! Occasionally a big bug of some sort would whack into the side of my mattress (or the side of my head) and I would swat it away. In the silence of the night I could hear the beating of my heart. I could hear the wind singing, and smell the night smells of sage, mesquite, and heat soaked rocks. The desert crept close to me at night, and went into my heart. It remains there still, along with my Grandpa, who passed away in 1985.

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