THE FIRST DIRT I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. My father was rarely around. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons of Barstow’s Rainbow Basin, now designated a national natural landmark. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils—including a broken camel rib and a piece of mastodon tooth plucked from sedimentary formations after rain—piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology—the profession, it has been said, of those given to disinter memory. My mother died during the pandemic in 2021, but when I return to the Mojave, I feel her ghost in the ever so light breeze. And I feel an intense gratitude to her for teaching me, before I could venture out on my own, how to see the desert.
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