Peter Wild

The Catholic Desert

The four children were crying for water but there was not a drop to give them . . . . The mothers were nearly crazy, for they expected the children to choke with thirst and die in their arms . . . .

William L. Manly, Death Valley in '49

And there you have the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream landscape.

John C. Van Dyke, The Desert

We can understand the horror of people dying of thirst. Yet how could someone view the same, bleak landscape of the dying in terms of the lush and the beautiful? The curious explanation takes us back to the eastern United States, and it has to do with the fact that, about a hundred years ago, a significant portion of America lost its nerve.

However, we're not talking about the obvious, about the people stumbling toward California, part of that vast stratum of society working doggedly with their hands and backs to earn their bread. As to losing their nerve, no doubt many such people did, but they went mad or lay down and died with little notice beyond that of their immediate friends and families and with little resulting disturbance to the cultural fabric, one by one paying the price which in the aggregate was considered the unfortunate dues rendered in exchange for laissez-faire prosperity.

No, we're not talking about this group at all but, rather, about what would seem the most unlikely candidates for going haywire. By "significant portion of America," we mean not numbers but financial importance. It was the wealthy, enjoying the full fruits of others' labors--houses crammed with servants, silver plate, and art--who, when they should have reigned triumphant, instead teetered on their pinnacle and then fell into the most ridiculous poses--poses, however, which many of us who haven't seen a 100-dollar bill in a long time have assumed. Not all of them, of course, succumbed. Many a captain of industry, buoyed by a nineteenth-century optimism promising that despite a few glitches the world was getting better and better, got into a philanthropic fray, donating immense sums to improve the commonweal through creating art museums, libraries, and settlement houses in the slums. Such men of means had their reward, and to judge by the self-righteous sheen of, say, an Andrew Carnegie, it was immensely satisfying.

Instead, we're talking about some of their social equals, a small group within the privileged caste who, whatever their iron-fisted will in amassing fortunes, when it came to stepping back and considering the meaning of their lives, quailed. Dangerously, they addressed their purpose in life and found it not there. Having achieved what they wanted, would a still larger dose of sumptuousness--yet a larger summer mansion in Newport or more silver plate--make them happy? For them a resounding No shivered their very souls. The why behind this--why some gleefully accumulated greater wealth while others of their class disintegrated--we leave to the psychologists. Perhaps the common wisdom applies. Among winners of lotteries, a good number can't handle wealth. Once they have everything, some folks fall apart, and it was precisely these wealthy but disturbed individuals, in the dither of coming unhinged, who were a major influence on how we view our deserts today.

Such people, however, simply didn't slash their wrists and be done with it. Their lives were too precious, and finding some meaning for them was their perspiring goal, their new, almost full-time occupation. Few gave their goods away to the poor in hopes of achieving a spiritual rebirth. Rather, they kept their wealth while pursuing a stunning variety of "alternatives" to the traditional ways that had left them rich but sinking. Popular among this frantic set (including wives and daughters) dashing hither and yon were fad diets, spiritualism, colonic irrigation, and excursions into artistic creativity.

To take a clue from T. J. Jackson Lears' No Place of Grace, the watchword here, if any one term can serve as an umbrella for such diversity of fright, is "authenticity." Their old lives, now discovered to have lacked substance, must have betrayed them, must have been false; they wanted to find new paradigms which would reveal a sustaining Truth. And if urban life and all its horrid amenities was so empty, why, then, so the logic of some in extremis went, living as close as possible to the earth's cosmic forces would put their psyches in order.

In other words, Nature. But which Nature? Some aspirants fled to the seashore and some to palatial homes in the Catskills, and a few, really getting serious about it, headed to the Wild West in desperate attempts to find their souls by chasing buffalo which, in the main, no longer existed. Bear and antelope would have to do. The clawed rug on the floor and the goggling elk head over the mantel back in the city mansion bore testimony that the hunters had reached out and touched a curative wildness.

Still, which Nature would be best, that is, give the largest emotive jolt? Since all this involved escape from the known, a flight from the familiar into the arms of the exotic, one landscape became most alluring of all. That Nature would be best which was most unlike the familiar. Much of the Wild West was but a version of the East in the extreme, a land where peaks were higher, rivers larger, and forests more extensive. Yet around the turn of the century, a new region presented itself, the long- ignored desert Southwest, a place about as different from the rest of the nation as any place could be. Here were not only strange landforms of sandy wastes punctuated by pillars of red sandstone, but weirdly different peoples, Indians still dancing on mesa tops to bring the rain, Mexicans strumming guitars, speaking a strange but mellifluous language and caring not one whit for the noxious ambition which had given wealthy Easterners the gout and frazzled them into breakdowns.

Mind, the new aficionados of this dreamscape weren't the rawboned pioneers plodding across a continent toward the lush economic promises of California. To the contrary, when such hope-filled folks, accustomed to the green, well-watered hills of Ohio and Vermont, first topped a ridge and beheld the endless bleakness of dunes and treeless mountains lying in their path, they cringed, as did the young Manly quoted above. Until precious metals were discovered in such lands, they were deemed utterly worthless and, worse than that, called "The Devil's Domain," with all that implies. For those who survived the crossing, the hideous trial was seared on their memories for the rest of their lives.

Our desert appreciators were a different breed entirely. Their heralds knew nothing firsthand of marauding Apache bands, dry waterholes, and wracked bodies at the end of each day's slogging. Armed with fat wallets, the new desert lovers paid for the new technological conveniences available and crossed the blistering sands in Pullman cars. From that perspective, what they saw was beautiful:

The long line of dunes at the north are just as desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful. The desert sand is finer than snow, and its curves and arches, as it builds its succession of drifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful as the lines of running water.

No pioneer in his right mind would have written such words. They are, rather, the wispy sentiments of a man gazing out the window while whizzing across the sands on smooth rails, a mint julep in hand. Appreciating the desert had become a luxury of the rich. In this case, the author of the above, John C. Van Dyke, fits the model perfectly. In 1901, Van Dyke published The Desert, the first book devoted to praising the despised lands. He was an art critic at ivy-covered Rutgers University whose rarefied musings about nature had great appeal in the Eastern salons of wealthy neurotics. For them, the old gods were dead. Overwhelmed by the logic of Darwin, which when applied in a new way to society presented a bleak determinism, they continued to long, if not for God, at least for god-like experiences. For them, the idea of Nature became their balm, their All, in effect a secular religion.

Whatever one might say about religions, they tend to be multifaceted, taking in the whole range of emotions. Fear, love, hate, bliss--such are aspects likely familiar to the devoted, whether a Buddhist or a Methodist. It's the job of religion, after all, to take in the whole world and to make sense of it. The difference lies in emphasis. The wealthy under discussion, questioning their harsh Protestant heritage, tended to flirt with Roman Catholicism. If they couldn't swallow its substance and discipline themselves to live according to its rules, at least they could squeeze their eyes shut, flap their arms, and enjoy the temporary satisfactions of its emotional flights. To measure how this applied to what they imposed on the dreamland of deserts, imagine a medieval cathedral shimmering with great spaces and colored lights as contrasted with the stark, chill box of a New England church.

One is warm and invites the imagination to play, for it offers the mysterious mother love of the Virgin Mary, while the other is stripped bare, demanding. Yet, lest we be deceived, not all is beer and skittles in the Catholic Church. Underlying the pleasant fantasies on which we might float is the abyss of hell, the smell of our own flesh burning. But that was part of the emotional charge, too. The "grandeur of the desolate," Van Dyke called it, blending the fear of Hades with the appeal of the BVM. Subsuming all, in Van Dyke the desert becomes a goddess who lures in only to consume her lover, for, as thrill seekers well know, pleasure soon flags if it's not kept keen by fear, even if it is an imagined fear. Even players of let's-pretend, if they take themselves seriously enough, can work themselves up into a buoying froth.

Hence, although the desert was a pretty safe place by Van Dyke's time, few people beyond its borders knew that. Playing off the legendary bad press of the arid lands and the prevailing ignorance of them, Van Dyke worked the place over, presenting to far-off Easterners a landscape of animals constantly tearing one another and of great, golden epical storms, a land at once frightful yet alluring. His was a grand confectioner's creation, made of attractive colored sugars, irresistible yet poisonous, where the soul, even while feeding itself, in that very act is damned. Or, rather, already is damned anyway. For if life is meaningless, what else can one do between here and there but appreciate the beauty, even the savage beauty, as we pass through and thus have the opportunity to burn with Walter Pater's "hard, gem-like flame"? This came down, for those who enjoy labels, to a Neo-Darwinian, Pseudo-Roman Catholic, Aestheticism, a mouthful of a term but one offered only half tongue in cheek. For according to Van Dyke, the mysteries of the desert provided the best place to set oneself afire, to sacrifice oneself to beauty. How could the romantic, especially the armchair romantic pondering such imagined glories from afar, ask for more? That's the desert Van Dyke offered, an appealing, frightening, and colorful fiction lapped up by the bored and sedentary rich.

Van Dyke's ideas stuck. The desert he created, with few modifications, is the one we have today, after a hundred years still appealing to a romantic nation continuing to yearn for escape into the exotic. Of course, now it's not as easy to hoodwink the public. Through education and travel, we now know the desert isn't the dangerous, forbidding place Van Dyke offered on his colorful canvas. Still, the idea has its residual tug. What backpacker, tinged with the heroic, hasn't started out in the morning, facing the vastness of sand and rock without the thought that he might not return? The possibility but whets the appetite. And it's a pleasant fright confirmed now and then by a few people who actually don't make it back, hikers who miss a trail and motorists who, turning venturous, are found quite dead, mired in sand traps--misfortunes sure to make the top of the news.

As for the rest, just pick up a copy of Arizona Highways, with its colorful Navajos, romping cowboys, and mesas striated by wild brush strokes. In the mystic lands of those pages you'll find the confectioners' desert already mentioned, a soul-satisfying land of edible colors. Schooled by such things, by our own longings for the strange, and ably helped along by the urgings of an aggressive tourist industry, we continue to exaggerate the qualities Van Dyke first suggested. There's no argument that the desert is, all by itself, a different and wonderful place for patient observers; it's just that, taking our original cue from Van Dyke, we keep making it over for modern, hurry-up tastes.

One issue, apparently contradictory, remains in this overview. Writing for the monied few, Van Dyke certainly didn't have most of us in mind. How is it that his elitist ideas have come to permeate the culture and now dominate popular sentiments about the desert? First of all, once he turns them loose, a writer's ideas no longer are his own. Secondly, the romantic string Van Dyke struck in his wealthy friends was generally present in the country, although only the rich of the time could afford its stroking.

Add to that prosperity. Just think: colonic irrigation, fad diets, spiritual searches, and adoration of creativity--nothing new about that in our culture today. With the spread of wealth has come the spread of self-indulgence. What once was a privilege now is democratized, has become common in society. Certainly no grubby pioneers, now we, too, can enjoy the pleasures of the rich, whizzing across the desert, mint julep in hand, imagining the dangers and beauties of the all-encompassing goddess.


Further Reading:

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Manly, William Lewis. Death Valley in '49. 1894. New York: Wallace Hebberd, 1929.

Van Dyke, John C. The Autobiography of John C. Van Dyke: A Personal Narrative of American Life, 1861-1931. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993.

The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances. New York: Scribner's, 1901.