Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [72]
Few give a better account of deserts, especially those of southern California, than the pioneer of desert studies, the naturalist Raymond “Doc” Cowles. Cowles grew up in Zululand in South Africa, came to California in 1916 at age twenty, and eventually taught at UCLA. He became an expert in reptilian thermoregulation, and was an academic grandfather of many graduate students and professors who carried on the tradition.
Cowles proposed that the serenity and the severity of deserts makes people who are immersed in the loneliness of these regions into thinkers. In his own holistic views of nature and human ecology he speculated on the meaning of wilderness to society, and he lamented the experiences we were losing. He left for his friends a typed card signed on 1 November 1971. It read: “Raymond Bridgman Cowles, December 1, 1896, at Adams Mission Station, Natal, South Africa, has completed his tour of duty on [he here left a blank] and will now participate in the universal and unending recycling game. This gives notice that his name should now be removed from [reprint] mailing lists.” One of his daughters later inserted the date of his death: 7 December 1975.
Ray Cowles, in many ways my own academic grandfather, had experienced half a century of desert field trips on his feet and in his head before he wrote Desert Journal (published posthumously in 1977). In it he reminisced about “innumerable campfires and their evening sacrifice of incense from smoldering wood.” He was then “sadly reminded that such luxuries, such reverence for the gods of the open skies, are no longer ecologically excusable,” and said that “from now on the careful naturalist and his students must be content to enjoy fellowship and worship nature around a noisy hissing gasoline stove for as long as that store of onetime solar energy remains.” He anticipated the same “reverence for the gods” that is, as my friend from California recently reminded me, probably no longer possible even in the Maine woods.
Cowles’s love for the desert campfire of crackling and smoldering wood and his enjoyment of desert life are revealed in the following passage from a chapter in Desert Journal, titled “Around the Campfire”:
Summer or winter, there is something special about sundown and the coming night, and my desert camps were no exception. Not the least was the cessation of work, return to camp, and, in those days of fewer people, the gathering of scanty firewood. I often used cactus skeletons and the roots and stems of stunted shrubs. Soon my camp was rich with fragrance. Food cooked in the aromatic smoke from desert wood has a tang in this clear, unpolluted air unknown outside the arid world. Long before the summer sun has set, the first flight of bats commences, most often the little canyon, or pipistrelle, bat with pale silvery body, black wings and ears. Along the Colorado River they flicker across the sky, bent primarily on reaching water where they replenish the moisture lost during the day, even in their relatively cool rock-crevice retreats.
In the same locale nighthawks by the hundred appear soon after the heat begins to abate. They flutter and sail toward the river for the first drink of the day. During May and June, when many are still incubating or hovering over their eggs to protect them from the sun’s increasing heat, this first intake of water precedes feeding. The birds nest, or more accurately, lay their eggs, on the exposed ground. Throughout the day the relentless sun beats down. Air and ground temperatures may exceed 120°F for hours on end; the direct heat of the sun contributes to what for most creatures would be unendurable conditions. Insulated against heat by its feathers, each nighthawk sits in a self-made patch of shade and comfort. Plumage is as effective in shielding the skin and blood vessels from high temperatures as it is in containing body heat during cold weather.
From time to time they open their enormous mouths and flutter their