J.S. Chase

J.S. Chase

" Somehow I felt unreal...."

11, November, 2018



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Desert Trails

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Here we find Chase, Kaweah, and their Indian companion inside
the Anza-Borrego Desert, south of the Salton Sea; a very forbidden
landscape as it seemingly unfolds to mirage before you. I've combined
two passages, chronologically concurrent, that put us with him in
' the valley of the shadow of death. '


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photo of the Anza-Borrego
j. develyn
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" We took up our march. Occasionally a wandering breeze blew for a moment,
and I opened my shirt and my heart to it, but it quickly died away, and again
the heat struck fiercely down.

It was impossible to maintain any interest in the view, but that was no loss,
since nothing changed, hour after hour. The mountain profiles merged and
emerged imperceptibly, and that was all.

It seemed a week that I had been creeping over this unending plain.
Somehow I felt unreal, as if I were a picture of a man in my position,
and wondered vaguely whether the man ever got anywhere.

This clay formation, wherever found in the desert, is the last extreme
of the barren, dreary, and dangerous. The vast network of gullies into
which it becomes worn may easily become a death-trap for the traveller.

Sense of direction is quickly lost: in the deep sand and gravel of the bottoms
a trail is almost as evanescent as if marked by water. The Indian who was
my companion pointed to the haze yellowish patch, twenty miles from
where we stood, and said, " Chee-chlicsh-noo-ah, devils house, we call that.
Very bad place. Man get in there no can ever get out. "

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(a defintion for the curious reader:
evanescent - soon passing out of sight, memory, or existence; quickly fading or disappearing: a shimmering evanescent bubble.)

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a short primer on the anza-borrego:




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