desert diva.

Lizard Lee didn't even think twice about why I was out in the middle of the desert in the middle of August by myself. I think it was because he understood. He was a fulltime resident, caretaker of the Saline Valley hot springs. "You must be Lee," I said when I arrived at the springs one afternoon, likely the first person he had seen in weeks. "I'm Molly, I'll be here for a couple days." He smiled but said nothing and that was the last I saw of him.

I am a social person, I enjoy metaphysical discourse and dinners and gossipy tea parties as much as anyone else. But I also need to get away from it all and lose myself in my thoughts for several weeks. Ever since I was a kid in Canada, I have had a strange fascination with the desert, and my decision to move to San Francisco was based as much on wanting to get as far away from home as on San Francisco's relative proximity to the Mojave Desert.

The desert is hot, windy, harsh, and unforgiving. But it's also quiet. For the first few days, the echoes of civilization -- the roar of freeways, the whine of office equipment -- ring in your ears, and then . . . nothing. Nothing but the wind moaning in the canyons, like sad songs played with a tissue paper on comb. Nothing but rocks giggling and tumbling down the cliff faces. Or the morose braying of burros, descendents of pack animals abandoned by long ago miners. And when it rains, you can hear the dust stirring.

On rainy desert days, the creosote bush emits an odd medicinal smell that for desert lovers is a defining aroma, a melancholy fragrance. Creosote is tenacious, an ungainly shrub with leathery, small leaves and spindly branches like iron, and it thrives in solitude. It is a symbol of the desert and for the people who love it. Sagebrush, another desert plant, is popular at suburban shopping malls, where you can buy it at interior lifestyle stores as bundled smudge sticks promising to respiritualize you. I am sure it does, but creosote is my desert talisman.

Winter is rainy season in the desert, but there is plenty of water even in the summer: hot springs, mountain runoff, and flash floods from rains hundreds of miles away. But most of the water cannot be consumed and a lot of it is hot, if not boiling. But even a dip in a hundred-degree spring is refreshing when it's one hundred and twelve outside.

My favourite springs are the ones in the Saline Valley, an enclave of five pools developed from a natural source. There is a grassy area shaded by palms and spots for primitive camping, although I have seen the occasional intrepid airstream trailer or camper van that have braved the punishing trail. There is a rudimentary airstrip marked out on the playa, but the only planes I've seen are the bombers from nearby China Lake, zooming low with their high-resolution observation equipment leering at the people who come to soak. The springs are a decades old sustained anarchy of nudists, hippies, and bikers. And since the area has recently come under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, there are curious, abashed SUV-driving tourists lurking about too.

Two Augusts ago I had the place to myself, aside from Lizard Lee. It was a burning, prickly day when I arrived after several hours of loping along the washed out road from Lone Pine. I spent the afternoon submerged in one of the pools, only my nose bobbing above the water. It was clear and I could watch the cirrus clouds and the sun drift across the sky. I surfaced at sundown, wrinkly and waterlogged, in time for the wind to whip me dry.

Shortly after sunset, the winds always come. It has never occurred to me to find out why. There are a lot of things about the desert that I accept unconditionally. Perhaps if I discovered the whys, the desert would seem less magical and lose its hold on me. But the winds do come, picking up out of nowhere and bringing a sudden change in temperature. In the summer, the rocks and the playa radiate heat long after dark, but the air chills and in the winter it is bitterly cold.

Cold or hot, I love it. People who love the desert call themselves desert rats, and they generally fall into three categories. There are the exuberant nature lovers, the macho men, and the eccentric loners.

The nature lovers have been a wealth of information for me: what to wear, the names of plants, where secret hot springs are. But often they are so focused on one thing -- the rocks, the flowers, the mines -- to the exclusion of all else. I know history buffs who'll explore a cold dark mine on a sunny, breezy day. Why not go at night? I will happily spend an afternoon rockhounding with an amateur geologist, but I'll pass on an entire weekend of crawling up washes in search of the perfect Apache tear if the Mojave Asters are in full bloom.

The macho men amuse me. I am a small, feminine woman so I have grown accustomed to a certain amount of patronizing. If it's from a genuinely concerned man with old fashioned values ("What's your husband letting a little lady like you out here by herself?") I even don't mind. I will listen politely to their slightly awed admonitions. I nod when they regale me with war stories of their own vehicular meltdowns, yet I would never drive a junker into the desert. No girl with a good car needs to be justified.

I give the loners a respectful distance and they respect mine. And there are plenty of them: fulltime desert denizens who come out of the canyons to help a motorist in trouble, and then quietly retreat unnoticed. Like the Garbos of the desert, content in their solitude. By no means am I at that stage yet, but I do envision an old age in the desert, perhaps with a handsome young Navajo lover visiting every so often. If Georgia O'Keefe could do it, why can't I? I would be no desert rat, though, I would be a Desert Diva.

Molly Kiely, 1998.