Chapter 1 — THE FIRST FALL
Anza-Borrego Desert, May 2002
On a sunny spring morning, Trish and I picked our way along a sandy trail between rust-colored canyon walls in the heart of California’s Anza-Borrego Desert. Without warning, her long legs crumpled. I thought she had lost her footing, maybe sprained an ankle.
I rushed to where she had fallen amid a cluster of weathered, pumpkin-sized rocks. A reddish scrape showed at the outside of her left knee, just below the hem of her tan shorts.
“Are you OK? Did you slip?” I asked.
“I’m fine, please help me up,” she replied, sounding more annoyed than concerned.
We continued down the sloping path back toward the trailhead. I walked a few feet behind her. Her auburn hair hung in a loosely tied ponytail from beneath a white cap, and a daypack bounced on her back. I smiled and nodded as I watched her hips sway with each step. Only the soft sound of our footsteps disturbed the desert’s quiet. I felt happy I brought her out here, as an important next step in our developing relationship.
A few minutes later, she fell again.
“I’m sorry,” she said with a sigh. “It’s the heat.”
The heat? That seemed unlikely. I was puzzled, but also concerned for her. The April midday sun reflecting off the burnished rock slopes had begun warming the canyon earlier. But it didn’t feel hot enough to cause heatstroke or anything else I knew of that would trigger these falls. Something else was amiss.
On our way in, we had followed the winding trail for two miles up a gradual slope flanked by car-sized boulders. Some showed smooth morteros on top, created long ago by Yaqui women grinding seeds and nuts. The trail led to an oasis of forty-foot-tall Washingtonia fan palms—the only native California palms—with a ten-foot waterfall that dropped into a shallow pool where hikers could cool their feet. The ephemeral stream running down the canyon had gone into hibernation for the season, disappearing beneath the tan, coarse sand, and evidenced only by slender desert willow trees and gnarled creosote bushes whose deep roots continued to receive its nourishment.
We scanned the canyon walls for bighorn sheep, the park’s namesake borregos, which step down the steep slopes in search of water, but we saw none that day. Just before reaching the oasis, I turned and pointed up at a boulder jutting from the hillside and overhanging the trail at a point where it squeezed between rocks and trees.
“A couple of years ago, I was hiking here with a friend,” I told Trish. “A bighorn ram stood up there motionless, like a statue, and looked down at us for several minutes. He had huge horns, a full curl. They looked way too heavy for his skinny legs to hold up. He just stared, and we stared back. Then he turned and ambled away. It was one of those rare close-up animal encounters, like coming face-to-face with a shark or a giant sea turtle in the ocean. You wish you knew what they were thinking.”
“I know what you mean,” she replied. “In the Rockies, I’ve come across deer and other animals. Most run off but, once in a while, you’ll get one that will stop and stare, just like that ram.”
As we neared the end of our hike, stepping carefully amid rocks strewn about by occasional flash floods, I could feel the temperature rising. I remembered what Trish said earlier about the heat and hoped she wouldn’t have any more difficulty. The trailhead came into sight, and I spotted my forest green Explorer in the parking lot. Then, as we stepped down into a dry stream bed, Trish fell once more.
“Something’s wrong!” I exclaimed. “Let’s get you back to the car as quickly as we can.” She nodded but this time said nothing.
We made it the rest of the way without further incident. Once in the car, Trish looked away, as if embarrassed. I didn’t want to press her, but I wanted to understand what happened. I had hiked this trail a dozen times before with family and friends, often in hotter conditions, and never saw anyone react this way. Trish was an experienced hiker, so why, I wondered, was she having such difficulty? She would explain it in due time, I figured.
Trish and I had been dating for a few months, after meeting at a conference. She lived in San Diego and I in Los Angeles, but we soon began getting together most weekends. I had invited her to join me for this weekend at my favorite getaway place.
The community of Borrego Springs sits in a broad valley in the northern part of the 900-square-mile Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a sprawling collection of mountains, washes, oases, trails, and streams, in the northeast corner of San Diego County. The park takes its name from 18th-century Spanish explorer Juan de Anza and from the elusive borregos,
I began exploring the park in the early 1980s. Growing up in Central Europe and New England, my exposure to nature concentrated on forests, mountains, and seacoasts. But I became fascinated with the deserts I saw in documentaries and western movies. That interest soared during a driving trip around the southwest soon after I moved to California to attend college in the mid-1960s.
A few years after my first visit to this desert park, I bought a home at the Borrego Air Ranch, a rustic airstrip community ten miles south of town, composed of a few dozen homes clustered along both sides of a 2400-foot, black asphalt runway. I flew a single-engine Piper Archer in those days, so this development held a special attraction.
I loved that the town, with just 3,500 year-round residents, changed little over the succeeding years. That kept me coming back and made me want to share this place with close friends. With no nearby freeway, it didn’t experience the growth of the Palm Springs area on the other side of the Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. Small businesses along the single commercial street and a scattering of hotels sit almost dormant during the summer months, when temperatures stay well above 100 degrees. Winter brings an influx of tourists and “snowbird” refugees from colder locales. But the town’s claim to fame, in years when the temperature and rainfall cooperate, rests on spectacular springtime bursts of wildflowers that carpet canyons and roadsides in displays of magenta, scarlet, and gold. The flowers had come and gone already this year, but the desert offered us lots of other attractions.
Back at the house, we sat in the shade of the patio overhang and relaxed after our hike. We sipped Tecate beers in their trademark brown bottles with red-and-black labels, from a brewery just across the Mexican border.
For forty years, I’ve found this desert to be a magical place year-round. In my younger days, I even hiked isolated canyons during the intense heat of summer, feeling like I was sharing an experience with the onetime Native American occupants of the valley.
Once my relationship with Trish deepened, I wanted to share my special place with her. Now, still confused about what happened earlier in the canyon, I wondered if that would be possible. Perhaps sensing my unease, she turned serious.
“I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you this, but things progressed between us before I had a chance. I have MS, multiple sclerosis. It was diagnosed about fifteen years ago, when I was in my mid-thirties. I have occasional symptoms, usually when I get overheated, but I’ve been pretty lucky.”
Trish had my attention now. I didn’t know much about MS, except that it could be a serious, disabling condition. I wanted to hear more, but felt a chill at what might come next.
After a long pause, she continued. “The problem is there’s no way to know what will happen in the future. Odds are it will get worse at some point. How much and how soon, who knows? I have to live with that uncertainty. You may have to decide if you can live with it too.”
I didn’t want to react immediately. I had already experienced once before having a partner with serious health issues. My first wife, Joan, died of a heart attack after many years of illness and pain.
I put that aside and thought about what had attracted me to Trish. She was smart, attractive, and professionally accomplished, yes, but equally important was her love of travel. Like me, she had traveled extensively as a child with her family. During college, she spent a year studying in France and wandered all over Europe, from Bordeaux to Budapest to Dublin. Later, her work took her on memorable trips to Panama and Guatemala, and she roamed the Rockies as an avid fly fisher.
I looked up to see Trish furrowing her brow, pursing her lips, waiting for me to react.
“Yes, I understand,” I said, trying hard not to sound too concerned. “Meanwhile, there’s lots more we can do out here this weekend without getting you overheated again.”
Trish gave a smile of relief. No difficult discussion to upend the weekend. That might come later.
“Let’s drive to Font’s Point for the sunset. It’s a high spot named after a priest in one of the early Spanish expeditions through here. It has a spectacular view of the valley.”
“Great,” she replied with a nod. “Let’s go.”
As evening approached, we drove a back road that skirted the town. We then entered a broad, sandy wash leading four miles uphill and ending just before the point. Striations in the walls of the wash marked recent flash floods. Vehicle tracks swerved around islands of billowing palo verde trees. I drove this path for the first time ten years earlier in a regular street vehicle, repeatedly losing traction in the sand. A desire to explore the desert more led me to buy my first four-wheel-drive SUV.
Pleased to find few cars at the top of the wash, I parked and pulled a cooler from the back seat.
“What’s in there?” Trish asked, smiling and raising an eyebrow.
“You’ll see shortly. Are you OK to walk a little way?”
“Yes, it’s cooler now. I shouldn’t have any more trouble.”
I led her up a steep, sandy slope to the viewpoint. From there, we looked fifty feet down on variegated badlands terrain eroded from deposits left eons earlier by overflows of the Colorado River, now running a hundred miles further east. The late afternoon sun, preparing to drop behind the San Jacinto Mountains to our right, cast long shadows across the valley. To the left, the Salton Sea reflected the day’s last rays.
“Now, I have a surprise,” I said, pulling a bottle of champagne from the cooler. That drew a smile from Trish, and also from another couple standing nearby. I poured champagne into a pair of glasses, handed one to Trish, and held mine up in the manner of a toast.
“To my favorite place in nature,” I began. “And to my favorite woman.”
Trish’s smile broadened. We sipped the first glass of champagne, then another. By that time, the sun had settled behind the mountains, leaving a bright yellow-orange glow over the peaks. In the twilight, I put my arms around Trish and gave her a long kiss.
“That was fabulous,” Trish said as we coasted back down the wash. “What a beautiful, romantic spot.”
“Yes, and I’ve got another surprise for you tomorrow.”
Back at the house, we drank martinis made with Trish’s favorite Chopin vodka, while I barbecued ribs on an outdoor charcoal grill. By then, the sky had darkened enough for stars to appear. Once we finished dinner, I turned off all the lights. We drew up chairs in the middle of the courtyard in front of the house. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, the sky overhead lit up like a magnificently decorated Christmas tree, confirming Borrego Springs’ status as an International Dark Sky community. And the Milky Way showed how it earned its name, as if poured across the heavens from one horizon to another.
“This is spectacular,” Trish said. “The only place I’ve seen a sky like this before was high up in the mountains.”
The next morning, I awoke from a deep sleep to a rumble that built to a roar and rattled the house.
“Are we having an earthquake?” Trish yelled.
“No! It’s that bomber I told you about!” I threw open the bedroom curtains in time to see a World War II-era B-25 fly by just twenty feet above the runway. Its twin radial engines sounded impossibly louder than any of the Air Ranch aircraft. The plane belonged to a friend of one of my neighbors. When the owner flew it from San Diego to airshows around Southern California, he sometimes buzzed the Air Ranch.
The pilot climbed enough to execute a U-turn and then streaked back the other way. In a departing gesture, he wagged the plane’s wings before climbing again and disappearing over the desert to the east.
After this brief drama passed, we sat outside in the morning sun. Song birds chirped beneath the fronds of a palm in a corner of the yard, and a jackrabbit bounded past, visible for just seconds through a window in the garden wall. Otherwise, only the faint hum of an occasional car on the highway a half mile away interrupted the silence. A smoky aroma from the creosote bush by the gate scented the air.
“What a glorious morning,” Trish announced. “I haven’t felt this relaxed in a long time.”
After a leisurely breakfast of nopales and eggs, along with a lot of coffee, we set out in the Explorer for the nearby community of Ocotillo Wells.
“Where are you taking me now?” Trish asked, her voice rising with excitement.
“Be patient. You mentioned you’re interested in geology. Get ready to see some geology that will blow you away.”
A cracked asphalt road took us past mobile home parks, business catering to RV travelers, and the locally popular Iron Door Bar. Like so many other desert communities, Ocotillo Wells was a refuge for people who didn’t like city life or couldn’t afford it.
The road eventually led south to the canyon known as Split Mountain. Three miles up a stone-strewn, sandy wash, we entered a hundred-foot-wide crack in the Vallecito range. The canyon walls exposed reddish-brown rock twisted and torn by intense heat and seismic forces eons before people came here. As I pulled over to get out of the way of speeding off-roaders, I recalled how I gasped the first time I came to this spot.
“This is a surprise!” Trish exclaimed, shaking her head and staring up at the hundred-foot rock face. “I almost can’t believe what I’m seeing. It really reminds you of the kind of force nature can unleash!”
As we prepared to return home that afternoon, I asked Trish, “Well, did you enjoy this weekend?”
“I did,” she replied. “I’m not as much of a desert rat as you, but I definitely understand the magical feeling you get in this place. I hope I’ll be able to visit other magical places with you.”
She paused for a moment, then continued in a lower voice. “It was a relief to be able to tell you about my MS, but I meant what I said. Before our relationship gets more serious, you really will have to make a hard decision. If you decide you can’t live with the uncertainty, I’ll be sorry, but I’ll understand.”
“I know, and I will think about it. But we don’t need to deal with that right now. Let’s just focus on how much we enjoyed being with each other this weekend.” Despite the tightening in my gut, I wanted the weekend to end on a positive note.
As I drove back to Los Angeles, my thoughts swirled. What if Trish’s condition worsened soon, or she became seriously disabled? Could I live with that? I didn’t know the answer for sure, not yet. I did know, though, that I was too attracted to this wonderful woman to just walk away. For as long as possible, I thought, we could have great travel adventures together.