Broccoli Trees...

We blew in on a spring breeze from somewhere lush and green and humid to an arid, intensely panaramic land; the High Desert.

From jungle-green forests surrounded by corn and soy and waving golden prarie grasses, we now live surrounded by sweeping vistas. Mesas make the roads meander, washes make them dip and rise; one hill leads to a broad valley twenty miles in breadth, the next a winding grade through a mountain pass. The stars twinkle overhead, so distant yet more tangible because we can see them now - with all we can see of their billions upon billions it is hard to imagine that we can't see them all.

Greasewood bloomed dainty yellow along its slender limbs. I remember because they made me sneeze. Something purple bloomed by the roadside, round and pincushiony like Allium. Pentemons, red, grew neat and tidy in the median plantings, as cultured as English garden flowers but as wild as the cactus planted around them.

And then there were the Joshua Trees. Single trunked, shaggy, their arms twisting skyward - a children's book excuse for a tree! Broccoli Trees. Comical yet stolid, a strange mix of the fantastic in the real. Cousins to the agaves, their narrow leaves come to a sharp black point yet the top surface glimmers irredescent green in the sun. A field of them - a forest of Joshua Trees - stretches crooked, leaning east from the winds above the brown earth, brown scrub, brown greasewoods, bright and cheerful and radiant in the sun.

And now when we drive through the movie scapes, roll down a wash or two and onto a plain, I look for these Joshua Trees, these Broccoli Trees, and pretend I'm in a valley on the moon or a ridge in a Martian landscape. They're just that cool.