You know what? I am nowhere near done talking about southwestern gothic. I grew up in the high desert of southern California and I have a lot of thoughts and also feelings, so here we are:
- the yip and howl of a coyote pack running through the low hills late at night, your windows open because the a/c is busted again and there’s at least a breath of wind to twitch the curtains, and you wake with a start as the howls because a cacophonous high-pitched frenzy that means they caught something. the next day there will be new missing cat posters and you aren’t cruel enough to call the number at the bottom of the page and tell them what you heard, but maybe it would be a bitter kindness to quash their hope quicker
- I have no idea what people in other cities called it, but we called the bit of the Santa Ana river that cut through my city the Wash. I had no idea it had any other name until I was like fifteen, I had no idea people elsewhere might consider it a river because it wasn’t. It was a concrete trench miles and miles long, sometimes no wider than twenty feet and elsewhere maybe a quarter of a mile wide. At its widest parts the desert claimed it completely, treacherous sand underfoot and labyrinths of thorny scrub brush to catch on, a thousand burrow holes to twist your ankle in and maybe they were made by rabbits and ground squirrels but it was probably a rattlesnake you just pissed off
- All bodies of water are artificial.
- All bodies of water are artificial.
- people always talk about desert thunderstorms but I only saw lightning once when I lived in California, one small storm when I was seven years old that astonished me because I had never heard thunder before. I sat at the top of the stairs outside my apartment building and marveled at something I wouldn’t see again until I was twenty, the blue and purple flickers of light in the gray sky, the drum of thunder beating by seconds later, the baked asphalt smell fading under the smell of petrichor. it’s something i’ll remember the rest of my life.
- rain is a rare thing in the desert, and highly coveted. i don’t think it’s something people who didn’t grow up in a desert can truly grasp, nor something someone who did grow up in a desert can properly articulate. nine months could go by without rain, and most years it would. the grass would die. the trees would die. the wild animals and outdoor cats (that managed to evade the owls and coyotes and cars and cruel people) would die. the asphalt fades to a cement gray. everywhere you look blare drought warnings and fire warnings, please, be careful, there has been no rain and we are all in danger. and then the rain would come, soft and quiet, like it was embarrassed for showing up so late, and we all went insane.
- no, seriously, everything that could go to a standstill would when it rained. didn’t matter how old you are, you stop to appreciate the rain, you watch the ground soak up each drop, you feel a tension in your chest you were never even aware of ease. there is rain today. you can make it a little longer.
- i remember the first time i saw hail, I was in third grade, at school, just after lunch because my teacher was reading the third HP book to us, and it was another blisteringly hot day. the windows and door were open to let in what little breeze there was when all of a sudden terrifying rattle on the roof. it was like 90+ degrees out, and it was hailing. no one knew what to think about this, so we all just started hollering like lunatics
- and i really cannot emphasize enough how terrifying firestorms are. every year, like clockwork, we’d get hit right around the start of school. you’d see the towering columns of black smoke miles and miles away, and if you were dumb enough (bored enough) to get closer the smoke would fill the sky from horizon to horizon, the sun a cigarette burn, the cloyingly hot smell clinging to everything. sometimes you’d live near enough or manage to get close enough to see the fire eating away at the forests and the scrublands, and it was never more disquieting than to catch a glimpse of it at night, when the ground is black and the sky is black, and there are no stars and there are no lights and so it is just you and your friends in a car watching something bigger and deadlier than anything you’ve ever seen before chew through acres of woodland and homes equally
Also, I lived in Saudi Arabia for five months and let me tell you I have never lived anywhere so utterly on the knife edge of liminal space and I never want to experience that kind of persistent existential dread again, okay? I was convinced every single day some kind of malevolent spirit was going to swoop down on me and carry me through a heat ripple into an other-realm I’d never be able to escape. To be frank I can’t be sure that didn’t happen and everything I’ve known since then has been a fever dream, my brain convinced I live in high humidity while I’m slow-roasted for things with teeth in all the wrong places. Saudi was wholly and utterly Night Vale, and it was terrifying all the time. I Skyped my then-fiance not long after I got there and showed him the view from my bedroom window; he immediately nicknamed it Chernobyl, and if Chernobyl got to be 111 degrees everyday then yes, absolutely, that was it.
This has really gotten away from me but
- camel spiders are nasty fuckers and they will chase you if you are in their business and the day that happened had been maximum bullshit so i was too tired to do more than stagger back and plead at this hideous beige nightmare skittering after my shadow to please stop, can you not, oh i wish you wouldn’t
- cockroaches. jesus, cockroaches. this was not an issue i had in california, but ginormous cockroaches thrive in real deserts apparently. nothing like going to take a shower after a twelve-hour shift baking in the sun to find a cockroach the length of my hand scrabbling around in my tub.
- every single building was the same. it was like a town built out of sand-dusted legos, and every house was built to look like Neapolitan ice cream. only half the town was in actual use and the rest was left to decay, and i mean that literally. entire streets left to rust in the torrential spring rain and bake the rest of the year, doors and gates fallen from their hinges, broken windows, a quiet that without fail leaves your skin prickling
- hey remember the packs of feral dogs in night vale? THAT SURE IS A THING THERE
- there were dozens of identical playgrounds in dozens of identical courtyards, and no children to play on them.
- the sand wasn’t like beach sand or high desert sand. it wasn’t gritty. it was slick, like paint or chalk dust, and it got everywhere. you may as well not have bothered to shut and lock your windows and doors, the sand did not give one single squirting shit about them, it was in everything always. I mean it when I say you can’t get clean in a desert.
- one time my roommate screamed bloody murder because a spider with legs as long as my fingers had gotten stuck in the cracked panel of her wall light switch so there were just four long legs tapping the wall like it was impatiently waiting to be let free. we spent like an hour trying to kill it and it would not die. our neighbors fished it out in pieces. i’m pretty sure what was left in the wall was still alive, and also vengeful.
- there was one part of base that was definitely Not Real. It was an open stretch of sand, no buildings anywhere nearby, and hundreds of squat palm trees about a dozen feet tall planted in perfectly neat rows, and they were all dead. every single tree was dead, browned and blackened and mummified by the sun. it was like an elephant graveyard, but for unspeakably enormous tarantulas.
- there was a tower that loomed on the other side of the outer wall that looked exactly like that screaming octahedron angel from Evangelion on a pedestal and I had to walk beneath its eyeless visage every time I left my house. it was the worst. if I really have been dead this whole time that’s the motherfucker that killed me
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