Read an Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
I was simply looking for a place to camp. That’s how this whole thing started. It was January 2015. We had a newborn at home, and my partner needed some extended rest, some quiet within the crowded rooms of our two-bedroom house. We had been hunkering down as the pregnancy deepened, avoiding long trips, and surrendering happily to those last hallowed months we had as a family of four. After our family grew to five, my older two children and I decided to hit the road for a few nights, longing for our own kind of quiet and for those bright stars against a dark sky.
Our two-year-old son, Leo, was just emerging from a life marked by colic, and his personality was brimming with newfound independence. But as it goes for most parents navigating the stormy unpredictability of toddlers, we still weren’t getting out much. Plus, our daughter Stella, five at the time and a kindergartener, was in her first year at “real school,” as she called it, so our family’s schedule was also dictated by an orderly calendar that didn’t leave much room for traveling or adventure. The writer Robert Macfarlane wrote about this sense of confinement: “Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that the streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac.”
After our youngest daughter, Vivian, was born in late November 2014, an event that coincided with the holidays and family visits and more hunkering down, I was eager to find some narrow country roads that might lead to anywhere with more earth than concrete. I searched and searched for available campground sites, but everything within a few hours of Los Angeles was booked solid. We were dismayed.
In a last-ditch effort to find something, I reached out to my friend Justin, the only human I knew who had a special knack for making campsites appear out of thin air. I explained my predicament and he said, “What about BLM land? I don’t think you need reservations.” To which I replied, “Where is this magical place you speak of?”
“Out in the desert.” He said this, half perplexed, almost like a question. As if to say, I think it’s out in the desert somewhere?
Even as an avid outdoor enthusiast, I had never heard of “BLM land” before that conversation. After hours of sifting through the BLM website, which felt like going back in time to the pixelated domains of dial-up, I found a place called the Trona Pinnacles, located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a breezy 171 miles from my home in Los Angeles. We loaded up our Honda Element and headed east, not quite knowing what to expect. But we were doing it! We were leaving our grand metropolis and heading somewhere out there, away from the hum of traffic, overhead helicopters, and the constant flicker of artificial light. I wasn’t even concerned about what the Trona Pinnacles looked like; the act of leaving was more important than whatever greeted us upon arrival.
As Los Angeles shrank in the rearview mirror, ever so slowly, and the landscape flashing by transformed from skyscrapers to industrial buildings to quiet neighborhoods to suburbia and finally to the open vistas of the desert, a sense of lightness settled over me. When we finally arrived at the Trona Pinnacles entrance off Highway 178, renewal was already threading its way through my overstimulated mind. We pulled off the two-lane road and parked near a weatherworn sign about the geological formations we were headed toward. The Mojave air was clean and cold, and I couldn’t help but draw in a deep breath.
[...]
Fast-forward to April 2020. I was sitting on the front porch with my wife, Kari, sipping coffee while the usual city noises went eerily quiet. Songbirds now took center stage, as if their harmonious volume had been methodically dialed up each day since the start of the pandemic. Changes to our lives had come fast and furious. The kids now greeted their teachers from our dining table, and just as my small furniture business was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, our “non-essential” retail store shut down, and custom orders were drying up. Since our trip to the Trona Pinnacles, my three children had grown five years older, and instead of having three kids under the age of six, we were on the brink of having three kids over the age of six.
Kari and I sat on the porch and discussed so many things that day: the unknown monster called COVID-19, our jobs (she was an ER nurse at the time), the challenges of parenting in this new reality, and what the hell we were going to do with our lives. It was a “State of the Family” type of conversation. If there ever were a time to pivot, to make some kind of bold leap into the unknown, this was it. After getting more coffee, we sat in thoughtful silence, watching a northern mockingbird in a nearby cypress. Every morning at the same time, he sang from the very top of the highest branch, perched like a star atop a Christmas tree.
Then out of nowhere, Kari said, “Why don’t you start going to see these BLM lands? You’ve been talking about it forever. I think this is the time. We’ll be good.” And that was it, the catalyst I needed. As our mockingbird sang his songs and the kids went to school on laptops, my journey to find and experience these lands had begun. We agreed to take it one trip at a time, between Kari’s hospital shifts and orders coming in at my day job. We would dive into the shallow waters of our savings account to make it work. The objective would be to systematically visit as much BLM land in California as I could access with our two-wheel-drive family van.
I had almost no idea what lay ahead, but I wanted to find out. If these so-called leftover lands had a story to tell, I wanted to play a small part in telling it. So, with camera in hand and notepad in pocket, I hit the road. Again and again and again, over the course of forty-two months and thirty-two trips, I traversed the Golden State, from Mexico to Oregon, Nevada to the Pacific. I have taken in these places slowly, step by step, attuning myself to their rhythms, and walking four hundred miles along the way.
During this time, I have also met and listened to the incredible people who work and care for these lands, and whether they were nonprofit workers, members of Native communities, policy advocates, volunteers, or dedicated civil servants at the BLM, all offered me invaluable insights that have led to my growing intimacy with these landscapes. Even as I slowly filled the story void, another set of questions emerged, only now finding the answers seemed even more consequential than before. My initial fascination with exploring new landscapes had deepened into a commitment to protecting all that I’d experienced. If these precarious places go unseen and unspoken, who will notice when the subtle beauties of desert, sagebrush, grasslands, and remote mountains slip away under the pressure to turn places into profits? In other words, how can we protect what we don’t know?
Despite their origin as “leftover” lands and the severe overgrazing, unchecked development, and resource extraction they’ve faced since their inception, BLM lands have endured. Their resilience lies in their ability to withstand adversity, reminding us that even lands once overlooked and undervalued possess a profound strength and beauty worth fighting for.
If we are going to expand protections on our most vulnerable public lands, preserving them for future generations, we will need a much broader coalition of people who love and speak up for them in the present. My desire for this book is that it will highlight what I have seen and what I have learned by telling the lands’ stories through words, images, maps, and illustrations. I hope this can be a starting point for many of you to have your own experiences on these lands, and I hope you’ll find your own role in helping to protect them.
