Blake’s grain of sand

I am currently working on something that has brought me to think about deserts. From my childhood, the first images of the desert have been from cartoons, then from those Biblical stories shown during Holy Week, then in those cowboy Westerns. One of the more romantic ones were from the motion picture Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O’Toole’s deep blue eyes penetrating the white desert and the book by Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist, and more recently, that indescribable scene in The English Patient. My own feet had buried themselves on an expanse of desert once before and I had been so surprised that the sands I treaded and burrowed my feet in felt quite cold underneath the surface. The uniform immensity in texture and color of the sands quickly grabbed me and I seized on a chance to try to understand this type of earth that is so alien to us who live in areas whose conditions do not breed this extreme sort of terrain.

Deserts are areas that experience very little cumulative rainfall, about 50 cm. annually at the most. The types of desert are hot and dry, semi-arid, coastal and cold. The most famous of the hot and dry desert is the Sahara, which receives only about 1.5 cm. of rain a year. But in North America, too, there are hot and dry deserts like the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin although annual rainfall in these deserts are much higher at about 28 cm. In semi-arid ones found in Utah, Montana and Great Basin as well as some in North America, Newfoundland, Greenland, Russia, Europe and northern Asia, the nights are cool and the annual rainfall is about 2 to 4 cm. Coastal deserts intrigue me. I have not been to one, yet I find them captivating being so close to the sea. The sight must be terribly expansive, with both sides of life possessed by undulations, the other of water, while the other of sands, both created by Aeolian gusts and sighs. The more famous coastal desert is Atacama in Pablo Neruda’s Chile. And yes, the strangest of them all are the cold deserts found in the Antarctic, Greenland and the Nearctic realm where winter temperatures can reach as low as minus 2 degrees Celsius.

And those pockets of lush life called oases, where all water allotted to given deserts is contained? The image of an oasis simply blows my mind in terms of the contrast and the seeming conspiracy of life to huddle at a secret spot and offer the rehydrating reincarnation to the lucky mortal who chance upon it.

In all these types of desert, plants adapt by most often having spines that shade them to minimize loss of water as well as physiological structures that enable them to hold water. Animals are mostly nocturnal since the environment is friendlier for food-hunting and other activities at night when it is cooler and they do not lose as much water as they would at daytime. I chuckled at the names humans have assigned to some of these creatures that have adapted to survive the desert. There is the "thorny devil," which is found in Australia which looks like a six-inch Godzilla that has persistently been having a "bad hair day" with its spines strewn all over its reptilian body. Then there is the "Gila monster" found in the deserts of Southern Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico which well I guess is kinda scary to humans being a reptile that is the size of a cat.

Even humans who have lived in the desert have adapted themselves to the conditions, breeding a culture that have great respect for the wind and what it can take away (or return) when it sweeps the desert sand. The tent itself of nomadic desert cultures is an ingenious creation of humans who desire a home yet acknowledge that it cannot be permanent in the shifting course of winds and sand in the desert.

Humans have not only adapted to deserts; they have also marveled at contemplating them. The poet William Blake saw an entire universe in a grain of sand:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

(from Auguries of Innocence c.1800)

Some tried to understand deserts. In a book called Sahara Unveiled by Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langewiesche, he recalled a remarkable piece of work by Ralph A. Bagnold, history’s closest observer of the Saharan sands. Bagnold was an Englishman who was both a soldier in World War I and a desert explorer, who called himself an amateur desert scientist. I like the way Langewiesche described Bagnot’s genius in having been able to think about the desert sand "grain by grain" in Bagnot’s masterpiece published in 1941 called The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1942). Langewiesche noted Bagnot’s perceptive genius to recognize the simplicity of repetitive geometric patterns in sand dunes known only in the minute scale of crystalline structures (such as of snowflakes and salt).

I have read somewhere a long time ago (I have forgotten who wrote it) that when you look at the infinite expanse of the universe, you sense man’s insignificance in the vastness of time; but when you stand at one point in the desert and look in all directions and see nothing but sand, you sense man’s insignificance right now. I can understand that in that you sense some kind of unfathomable inadequacy to take it all in yet you feel you must mimic a motion to cope, like perhaps, persist in your search for an oasis somewhere to drink.

"Imagining water is a normal human reaction to the Sahara," wrote Langewiesche in his book. True enough, I have to end this now and take a walk in that pond I can see outside my window as I write this desert piece. Hmm. I wonder whether the pond is really there.