Two nights ago we had one of those big storms, walls of sand and sound and wind, that make you turtle up inside whatever shelter you can find and hope that nothing too irreplaceable gets carried away by whatever wild and hungering desert god demands sacrifice. We also had JessyLou of Louography come down for the night; after hearing her say how long she’d been waiting to visit, I remarked that it was a pity she turned up on a night not particularly conducive to photography. Of course, she promptly showed me exactly how little I know about the art by creating this:

Bam.

I thought I had seen Joe Holliday’s mammoth from every conceivable angle, had seen all the ways it could be made to pop, to shock, to be given new form. We do so love being proven wrong. I suppose the old ways are sometimes the best: nothing like a little mad science and lightning to bring a beast to life.

We finished the last of the clean-up this morning; before then we’d woken up to find bits of East Jesus knocked from their moorings and sand everywhere, in the folds of our clothes and cracks of our skin, in between teeth and hair and eyes, in sheets over the furniture and dishes and artwork. No permanent damage, no mess on the scale of the aftermath of the July storm that flooded the wash, but still workable in reassuring us that this remains very much the desert.

Which, if you live out here long enough (I’ll be hitting the one-year mark in a few days. Send cake) is something that you do forget from time to time. Call it an evolutionary aftermarket mindset brought about by Western imperialism and Manifest Destiny. Everything the light touches is our kingdom, and out here there is light in abundance. You get to think of the encroaching sand as an intruder, and the various birds, snakes, lizards, beetles and rodents as invasive species, instead of — rightfully — the other way around. Which is hopefully understandable, but still a transgression. As much as we like to pretend that this is the end of the line, end of the asphalt, end of the earth, there are numerous tethers to the ‘real’ world that we’re as of yet either unwilling or unable to sever. We’ve got a website, for fuck’s sake. FedEx delivers right to our front gate. At this point I think we’ve lost any and all claims to effective exile.

So, yes, it is a good thing that every once in a while a big black bastard of a cloud comes rolling down the mountains to kick our asses and remind us that we are here at the desert’s sufferance, and that any moment Mother Nature could throw a shit-fit that would sunder the earth to literally swallow us whole.

But we’ll be getting more and more of these little reminders soon. It’s almost that time of year. Windstorms and Airstreams. Extreme weather and extreme off-roading. Darker days and brighter shows at the Range. Driving through the Slabs and already there’s a scattered bloom of new RVs and trailers. As I write this I can’t turn up Beethoven loud enough to drown out the sound of the ATVs buzzing up and down the berm.

Tourist season.

… Hooray?

My body is not quite ready to cease hibernation, to shed the coat of isolationism and anti-socialism that’s developed over the long and lonely poison summer, but I can hardly expect the sun to sit still in the sky for me. Here’s a quite lovely bit by Barker, taken from The Hellbound Heart, that explains it better than I ever could:

The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.

Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

So August gave way to September, and there were few complaints.

That says most of it, I guess. Here’s the rest:

See you soon.