Subject: Landscape: The Mojave Sender: jya@pipeline.com (John Young) The New York Times Book Review, September 1, 1996, pp. 14,15. Inner Space: The Mojave looks a lot like the moon; unfortunately, it's easier to get to. THE MOJAVE A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert. By David Darlington. 337 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company. $25. By Janet Lembke (Janet Lembke's most recent book is "Shake Them 'Simmons Down," a collection of essays, poems and recipes about trees.) "The Mojave is an unceasing contradiction, a continual koan, a riddle designed to confound preconceptions. It's a wilderness defined by human ambition, an empty place full of activity, a blank slate brimming with meaning, an overflowing void." So writes David Darlington in the introductory chapter of "The Mojave," a book that explores the huge Southwestern desert. Mr. Darlington has investigated other aspects of the Far West in earlier books, one, "Angels' Visits," on the pleasures of zinfandel, another, "In Condor Country," on efforts to save the California condor. Now he takes on a tougher assignment: to convey the true character of a place that is almost unimaginably immense in both physical and perceptual terms. The Mojave's terrain is a moonscape of parched mountains, dry lakes, washes and salt flats. Its vast spaces not only encompass natural areas, like Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Monuments, but also include -- and dwarf -- military installations each the size of Rhode Island, among them the Nevada Test Site, Edwards Air Force Base, and Fort Irwin (where troops were trained for Operation Desert Storm). In its perceptual dimension, the Mojave has challenged and often defeated comprehension. Harsh yet beckoning, it has evoked every human response, from awed reverence to shudders, thrills and raw greed. It kills and sustains. But in 10 page-turning chapters, Mr. Darlington has managed to accommodate contradiction and to portray the myriad wonders that well up and bubble over in the apparent nothingness of an arid land. Moreover, he has managed to accomplish these feats with considerable lucidity and verve. The book's subject is not the natural Mojave but rather the wide-ranging impact of the human presence on a region that appears to be rugged but is perilously fragile and vulnerable. Plants gone, the desert does not reclothe itself quickly in second growth. The scrapes, gouges and deep pits inflicted by miners, troops on maneuvers, off- road vehicle enthusiasts, drive-through tourists, developers and a rushing horde of others, including cattle, cannot heal within a person's lifetime -- if they heal at all. The Mojave is actually two places in one: the visible desert and the desert that people perceive, not always in a rational manner. After an introductory overview, each chapter examines a particular aspect of the visible Mojave and also the ways people have turned it to their uses. "A Weird and Repulsive Countenance" focuses, for example, on a phenomenon of the visible desert -- the Joshua tree, a yucca with grotesquely contorted branches; not only is the plant an indicator species that points to the desert's state of health, but the limits of its habitat also furnish data that Jim Cornett, a curator of natural science at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, uses to determine the boundaries of the Mojave itself. "George and the Space People" deals with the perceived desert and relates the history of one of its more prominent features -- the notion that the Mojave is a locus of great interest to extraterrestrial beings, who, some believe, have landed near a gargantuan boulder known as Giant Rock. In the 1950's and '60s, the faithful gathered there for an annual convention under the aegis of one George Van Tassel, also the builder of a rejuvenating machine called the Integratron (and the most important of the several Georges who figure in this tale). Mr. Darlington devotes one chapter to the rancher's Mojave and another to the Mojave as a thoroughfare to California -- horses and wagons, turn-of-the century automobile tours, Depression-era migrations like that of Steinbeck's Joad family, the rise and demise of the fabled Route 66. He tells, too, of the miner's Mojave, where minerals and heavy metals have been torn from the earth for more than a century; to this day, the sorely disfigured land remains a place in which wealth, especially gold, lies waiting, "palpable but invisible, investing the desert with the bewitching allure of beauty and disaster." But the modern prospectors are large corporations, not old-time pickax-and-mule-team miners. Then there is the military Mojave, in which "to witness hypermodern jets against the bare brown mountains and pure blue sky is to glimpse something somehow archetypal, something evocative of evolution itself -- even if, in social terms, it illustrates how far we've failed to come." Nor does Mr. Darlington overlook the Mojave's role as a place in which to stash things out of sight: homicide victims, laboratories manufacturing illegal drugs, nuclear tests, nuclear wastes. The concluding chapter, "The Tortoise and the Hare- and-Hounds," deals with the Mojave as a battleground, the site of a one-sided contest between nature and artifice. Here human desires have sent roaring phalanxes of off-road vehicles and bulldozers into an environment as otherworldly as a condor in appearance and just as lacking in defenses. To represent the contestants for the Mojave's soul, Mr. Darlington has chosen paradigmatic pairs. One consists of the desert tortoise, a "knight in mottled armor," and the dirt bike, a "blue-jeaned, blue-skied, petrochemical version of liberation" in a place "where the mundane shackles of existence could be thrown off in pursuit of a richer, wilder life on the frontier." The desert tortoise, like the Joshua tree, is an indicator species: as the tortoise fares, so fares the Mojave. The animal is now endangered because of man-wrought damage to its habitat and increased mortality from the resulting stress. The conflict assumes human form in a pair of sparring advocates: Kristin Berry, the stubborn and feisty biologist who champions the burrow-dwelling tortoise, and the self-styled Phantom Duck of the Desert, a k a Louis McKey, co-founder of the Sahara Club, who preaches freedom and the biker's constitutional right to ride across the empty land in "hare-and-hounds" motorcycle races. "The Mojave" introduces many similarly strong, outspoken, hard-headed individuals: Fray Francisco Tomas Hermenegildo Garces, who traversed the Mojave in 1776; Dennis Casebier, a historian who conducts four-wheeler tours along Garces' route; Francis Marion Smith, the borax king who built a $20-million fortune as "the biggest producer of the chemical in the country" at the close of the 19th century; Curtis Howe Springer, the evangelist who founded the Zzyzx Mineral Springs resort in 1944; Dr. Rose La Monte Burcham, the boss of the Yellow Aster Mining and Milling Company at the turn of the century; and a host of equally quirky others. It is in this respect -- giving faces, voices and passion to an otherwise immense complexity -- that Mr. Darlington succeeds most brilliantly in presenting the Mojave as a whole rather than as a peculiar collection of disparate parts. The names, faces and voices give human proportions to phenomena that are otherwise apprehensible only by the head, not by the heart. As it must, "The Mojave" combines laud for the desert's wonders with lamentation for things irretrievably lost. (To his credit, Mr. Darlington allows himself only one outburst of sarcasm, in a passage on the machinations of developers.) It is not, however, a despairing book but one that reports also on efforts to save the desert and at the same time serve humanity. In the Las Vegas area, for example, hard-won cooperation among public agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and private organizations like the Nature Conservancy, in concert with local government, scientists, trade groups and plain citizens, has achieved an apparently workable compromise between an expanding human population's need for housing and the make-or-break requirements of the tortoise. People are, and will be, the desert's sworn conservators as well as its enemies. The Mojave has attracted the attention of many lively, keenly observant writers, like Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey and Barry Lopez. With this book, David Darlington takes a most honorable place among them. [End]