Palm Springs ... and the real desert nearby

As a long-time desert rat, I’m always excited to travel to hot, dry places (although the dry part is getting less appealing as my skin drifts toward the texture of parchment). So a trip to Palm Springs for one of my favorite annual conferences sounded doubly appealing.

bell hooks

The truth is that I usually spend conferences inside the hotel, except for an occasional dinner foray. So it generally doesn’t matter if it’s in Michigan or California in the winter, Florida or Aspen in the summer. But this time, for a change, I actually spent some time enjoying the locale.

First, the indoor part. This was a conference of the Association for Women in Psychology, a 1970s-born organization of feminist psychologists. The conversations tend to be rich, the conference sessions stimulating, and the humor a relief from the usual conference fare. It’s so satisfying to hang out with like-minded folks, to start from shared assumptions about women’s place in the world and then move forward from there. This beats all to heck the requirement that you first fight for that ground before you can talk about anything else. And with bell hooks as the keynote speaker, how can you go wrong?

After the conference, we stayed an extra day to spend time with friends whom we rarely see. The four of us decided to rent a car and drive from Palm  Springs (which held no particular appeal for this group) to Joshua Tree National Park. This was a great trip! What looked like maybe a 2-hour drive turned into 4 or 5 hours, as we stopped to take pictures and explore sights along the road. We also had some puzzles to figure out. The first was the rock formations. As a (very) amateur geology buff, I found these really intriguing. We speculated and guessed and watched for signs that would explain these odd rock piles—and then located a very clear description in the park brochure we were carrying with us (but apparently not reading too closely).

The next puzzle was the Joshua trees that give this place its name. These are a form of yucca, with the leaves/blades growing in clumps at the end of branches instead of growing individually on the ground. Some were huge, maybe 25–30 feet high, with many branches, sometimes at odd, twisted angles.

But others were (relatively) tiny, maybe a foot or two tall. These had a single central stalk with a bunch of leaves/blades on the end (instead of the many arms of the larger trees). We decided they were babies, but then speculated for a while about how fast they grow—a foot a year, 10 feet a year? Are these this year’s crop or are they from several years ago? Again, we found the answer when we thought to read the brochure. Joshua trees grow at the rate of one inch a year. One inch a year! So even these little ones are a decade or two old, and the big ones must be hundreds of years old. Think of what this means on a human scale—the big trees we were looking at were already around when the Declaration of Independence was signed. A reminder of the eye blink I mentioned the other day.

And then there was the desert itself. The Mojave: vast, dun-colored, with a wide, high sky, hot in summer (but just in the 80s the day we were there), seemingly barren—but, like most deserts, actually full of life. I love deserts. I have spent countless days in the red-rock country of southeastern Utah, exploring the canyons there. I’ve hiked, backpacked, road biked, mountain biked, canoed, rafted, and even 4-wheeled in that remarkable corner of the world. No place has the same hold on my soul as that area. Still, when we climbed out of the car to take a walk, I had this lovely feeling of being home in the dry, warm air, with the clean breeze, the clear sun, the sand and rocks and cacti. We saw a few creatures—a kit fox, some scrub jays, a lizard, and a bald eagle. And lots of people.

Despite the presumed collective wisdom of our group, we somehow forgot to take along sunscreen, hats, or enough food (“provisions,” we called it) to keep us fueled for the day. So, tallying our “compendium stupidium” (we created a substantial idiosyncratic vocabulary along the way), we decided it was best to cut our walk short and find a meal somewhere. In the tiny burg where we emerged from the park, the best option was Denny’s … not our best food of the trip, but it served our purpose just fine. We returned to Palm Springs and the hotel way too tired, but in a good way. It was a very different—and very welcome—way to finish off a conference.

Despite the deadly drudgery of getting through security at the Palm Springs airport, it was one of my favorite conference trips ever. Not because the conference was so stupendous, although it was good. But because of the really satisfying combination of the conference, good time with good friends, and a chance to spend some time in the open air of the desert. Any desert.