Joshua Trees are strange, archaic-looking things—stubby, twisting branches, gnarled elbows, no leaves. They look less like trees than like a child's bottle-brush drawing of a prehistoric plant: half cactus, half mistake. They survive only under precise conditions—dry desert soil, specific elevations. Go a little too low, a little too high, too wet or too cold, and they simply disappear.
The first time I ever saw one wasn't in real life.
I was about ten years old, sitting on the floor of my parents' house in Pennsylvania, watching an old black-and-white science-fiction movie set somewhere near Bakersfield. A pipe-smoking professor spots a meteor falling into the desert. Naturally, the "meteor" turns out to be something alien, and soon a kind of spaghetti-monster horror follows.
But what fascinated me weren't the special effects. It was the background—the spindly, alien Joshua Trees dotting the landscape. To a kid raised among softwood forests and green hills, that desert looked more alien than the monster ever could.
Decades later, after I'd moved to Southern California, I finally drove out to Joshua Tree National Park and saw them in abundance. I wasn't disappointed. The barren, rock-strewn landscape stretched to the horizon, dotted with Joshua Trees and desert brush. Up close, the trees looked ancient—old spirits, perhaps, frozen mid-gesture, solemnly guarding the land.
But nothing quite prepared me for a trip I took one January with my friend Peter, visiting from Germany. He was insistent. We had to see the park—despite steady rain in Palm Springs. We left late, climbing in elevation as the light faded. By the time we arrived at dusk, the rain had turned to snow.
A luminous gray gloom hung over the desert. Snow swirled in the headlights as my little car crept along the road. The Joshua Trees loomed out of the haze, their gray-green branches dusted with white—silent witnesses to something vast and indifferent.
Like Wordsworth's "host of golden daffodils," that image has stayed with me ever since, recollected in tranquility.
Photo by Neil Prior via Pexels
