Satisfied I followed the path back to the saddle of the mountain, through the moonlit tangle of cactus and brush, over the rocks, back to my headquarters for the night.

LIFE IS GAUNT and spare in the desert; that’s what old time desert rats like best about it. They feel they cannot breathe properly without at least a cubic mile of unshared space about them. Let another man or woman appear on their horizon and they begin to feel the urge to decamp, move on, climb to the pass, investigate that purple range of barren hills beyond the gleaming salt flats, find out what’s going on up in there, among those shadowy valleys, those ragged battlements of broken-down rock. Where, as they should know damn well, they’ll find nothing but the same scatter of dried-out brittlebush, the same fireplugs of barrel cactus with spines like fishhooks, the same herd of feral burros gaping at them from the ridgeline, the same dun-colored rattler coiled beneath a limestone shelf, waiting its chance to strike. Don’t tread on me.

Desert plant life is much the same—private. Even the commonest shrub, like the creosote bush, keeps its distance from the next. Each sets alone inside an ample circle of open ground. Botanists say that the roots of the plant secrete a poison, a growth inhibitor, that prevents new, seedling creosote from getting a start within that charmed circle of solitariness.

So it is with the flowers of the desert, though not without some exceptions. In certain years, not frequent, when the winter drizzles have fallen at the right times in the correct amounts, and when the weather achieves exactly the proper balance in March and April between heat and cold, sunlight and cloud cover, you may be lucky enough to see whole desert valleys and hills covered, “carpeted” as they say, with a solid blaze of flowering Mexican poppy, or globe mallow, or mimulus or coreopsis. These are splendid and rare occasions, attracting flower freaks, photographers and desert flora fanciers from half the cities of the nation, odd people who think nothing of grabbing a jet plane and flying two thousand miles to see the flare-up of sudden orange when the Calochortus kennedyi takes over some Mojave valley down in California’s wastelands. That or the Mexican poppies. Or the brittlebush itself, an otherwise humble and obscure knee-high shrub, which can perform wonders: nothing is more striking than to see the grim black cinder cones in the Pinacate Lava Fields take on suddenly—almost overnight—a rash of yellow, when twenty thousand brittlebushes break out in simultaneous golden bloom. Ridiculous. And sublime.

But these are, as said, the exceptions. Generally the flowers of the desert reveal themselves in solitary splendor. A primrose lurking on a sand dune. A single paloverde flaring by an arid watercourse. One woolly clump of Baileya multiradiata gracing the edge of the asphalt, shivering in the breeze from forty-ton freight trucks. The great Agave palmeri, or century plant, blooms only once in its entire existence (“the garland briefer than a girl’s”), but in that supreme assertion of love and continuity it more than justifies the sacrifice required. For a decade or so the century plant grows, emerging slowly from the rock; the heavy spine-tipped blades that function as leaves wax fat, with an interlocking bulge in the center resembling an artichoke. Here the food and energy are stored. One spring a signal is given—we don’t know what or why. The bulge unfolds, like a slow-motion explosion, and a shaft rises from the center, growing rapidly, reaching a height of ten or twelve feet within a week. This is the flower stalk, efflorescing as it rises with a series of alternate flower-bearing stems from midpoint to the top. The yellowish, heavy blooms wait there, upright on the towering stalk, for a week, two weeks, are pollinated by bats and insects, then begin to fade. As they fade the plant dies slowly, by degrees, from stem to root, though the strong, rigid shaft, supported by the base, may stand erect for a year after death. The death does not matter; the seeds have been sown.