Slide 6 : Signal: Notes on the Desert, by Gregory McNamee and Stephen Strom

Signal: Notes on the Desert

Prose by Gregory McNamee
Photos by Stephen Strom

Absences. Most deserts, in truth, are far from desolate. They swarm with life, albeit life that snarls, hisses, howls, bites, stings, or sticks. True enough, deserts lack water. But they do not lack for one thing: wind, and lots of it. What makes them deserts in the first place is not so much the absence of water as the fact that ever-thirsty winds pull such scant rain as falls from the clouds back skyward before it can reach or penetrate the ground. You can see this in the eerie “virga” rain phenomenon, where ghostly trails of falling water evaporate thousands of feet above the earth in the thermal-ridden air. In windy Bagdad, California, not a drop of rain fell on the earth for 767 days, from September 3, 1912, to November 8, 1914; yet the sky was full of clouds in their season, water kept from the earth by the constant flow of desiccating wind. A similar arid river blows across West Texas, so strong, local legend has it, that if it ever stopped all the cows would fall down.

Mudhills near Hanksville, Utah

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