Seren: Julia Lynam's Blog: Something Better

I’ve heard it said than in making a prayer of request for something, it’s a good idea to add at the end: “Or something better”. Now, that might be a bit greedy, so perhaps “Or something else equally good” would be more reasonable.

Awesome boulders like these abound
in Joshua Tree National Park!

Whichever way it goes, this idea brings to mind my many experiences of not finding what I set out to look for, and instead finding something unexpected which is appropriate and soul-satisfying.

I frequently don’t find what I think I’m looking for.

It happened again today. After careful research I set out finally to find the arrastra at Pinto Wye. Those terms might need explanation. “Pinto Wye” is easy enough: it’s a Y-shaped road junction at the northern edge of the Pinto Basin, which lies in the south of Joshua Tree National Park and is where people used to live along the banks of a wide and shallow river 10,000 years ago.

An “arrastra” dates from much more recent history: it’s a mechanical device for crushing ore. Yes, the ore that contained the so-precious gold. This arrastra consists of a circular stone floor and a crushing device designed to rotate around a pole set at the center of the circle – or so I’m told. I still don’t know for sure, as will become apparent.

It was a cold and windy January day. I wore jeans, thick socks, hiking boots, an undershirt, a tee-shirt, a fleece and my nice blue wind-proof jacket. I’ve had that jacket since the early 1990s. It was a sample provided to the electricity company I worked for in England. They were looking for new fabrics to use for their outdoor workers and for some reason the buyer gave me one of the sample jackets. He said it was made of "son of Gortex". It’s light and weatherproof and definitely durable, although it was challenged today by the famous catclaw acacia of the desert, the “wait a minute” bush.

I also wore my nice leather National Park issue gloves and a woolly hat I’d knitted myself. I hoisted on my fancy new back pack and shut the car door. Then I re-opened the car door to add the nice grey fleece scarf I bought in the thrift store last week.

Thus equipped I set out on the three-quarter mile hike to find the arrastra.

I walked up the wash, between the rocks and continued on for about half a mile. “It should be around here somewhere” I thought. No arrastra. I walked another quarter mile. No arrastra. I walked on.

Now, you have to understand that walking stimulates my mental faculties. Once I start swinging along, well trudging along - it was uphill in a sandy wash – my mind gets busy and time evaporates. I’d planned out two complete science lessons for my home-schooled grandsons before I stopped again and thought: “I must have missed it”. But then, I’m always thinking that I’ve missed something and subsequently discovering that I haven’t gone far enough. So I continued on.

I enjoyed the terrain: the wash, after narrowing through towering rocks, opened out into a wide sandy swathe punctuated by desert scrub and paddle cactus. It narrowed again and rocks appeared underfoot. I scaled a nearby slope to look for arrastras but, seeing none, descended and continued up the wash. An hour elapsed. Still no arrastra.

By this time I really was thinking I had missed it, when I spotted a tailing pile. That’s a pile of rubble extruded from the mouth of a mine. Joshua Tree is riddled with mines, so one rapidly learns to distinguish tailing piles from the natural rock formations. Clambering up to peer at the filled-in shaft behind the pile I thought: “Well, if there’s a mine, there may be an arrastra nearby; I’ll just go a bit further.”

The mine overlooked a flat and wide part of the wash, a good arrastra site, but it soon narrowed yet again into a rocky channel clogged with bushes.

As I negotiated my umpteenth catclaw I looked up and knew that I’d reached my destination, a totally unexpected destination. A ten-foot tall granite boulder dominated the center of the wash and on the upper portion of its peach-colored face, incised by nature or human hand, I know not, was a long and winding snake.

It took my breath away.