All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys In A Desert Landscape

The vast, sere Colorado Desert of southern California, on the verge of the coastal range east of San Diego, is a forbidding landscape. Its sandy flats are dotted with cattle skulls, its skies with vultures, its maps with names like Hellhole Canyon, Devil's Ditch, and Bone Wash. Yet, writes Lawrence Hogue in this lively natural history of the area, which includes Anza-Borrego State Park and the Salton Sea, the desert's fearful aspect has not kept fellow travelers from the place, seeking solitude, enlightenment, or gold.

Hogue examines the lifeways of the original desert peoples, the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay, who gathered staples like mesquite beans and farmed in scattered oases, and who taught the first Europeans who came to the desert essential survival skills. He also considers the history of those who came after them: cattle ranchers, miners, the odd bandit, and, later, the American military, which has used the desert as a training and proving ground. "The Cahuilla creation story is still going on," Hogue writes of the shattered landscape. "It is as if God has been driven out of this place, hounded out by howitzers and bombs and missiles."

All those armaments notwithstanding, much of the Colorado Desert remains little changed by the human presence. "At this scale of things," Hogue concludes, "the desert is truly eternal, far older and deeper than I can comprehend." His book is a well-crafted, learned companion for any voyage into that arid country. --Gregory McNamee