The Oasis This Time. Rebecca Lawton

SENTINELS

      THE TOWN OF TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA, IS AS hushed as a morgue. Chairs sit empty in barbershops advertising marine haircuts for ten bucks. There are no families in the shops and cafés, no moms holding kids by the hand—just a quiet, Mojave Desert main street with traffic passing through. In a wind that hasn’t given up its spring chill, yellow ribbons stream from light poles, street signs, storefronts. They’re a faithful promise to endure, based on a pop song once played to death on the radio. The faded ribbons, bleached white on folds and curls, say that the waiting has gone on too long. Among stubby stands of sage and creosote, houses stand with drapes drawn to the ever-present sun. Inside, the residents must still be holding vigil, believing in the inevitable return of the warrior.

      Lured by the call of anything wet, I check into the first motel I see. I find my air-conditioned room, pull on my bathing suit, wrap up in a big white towel, and wander out the back door in search of a hot tub.

      A young marine greets me from a bistro table beside the water. He’s a junior officer, probably just a few years older than my own teenaged daughter. His face reveals no guile, especially when he smiles. He tells me he’s been assigned to an advanced course in communications.

      He also volunteers an answer to the unasked question. “The base is dead quiet because everyone’s overseas.” He’s stuck in town while others in his unit have been sent to Iraq.

      Although the water is lovely and inviting, he has his back to it—he’s in uniform, with a textbook spread before him. When he’s done with his course, he’ll ship out, too. The reading doesn’t bother him, except that it requires “too much math.” He says it in all earnestness, with no irony about the key role of numbers in his job. To him, they pose just one more barrier to getting to fight.

      When I tell him I’m visiting from the northern part of the state, he asks if I’ve heard about a tank crew lost near Nasiriyah, Iraq. After some back and forth, I realize that I have: the gunner, a Scottish-born newlywed, lives close to my longtime hometown near San Francisco. The local paper has run a series on his going missing. His wife is expecting their first child any day.

      “It’s an M1A1 Abrams crew,” he tells me. “They’re based here, in Twentynine Palms.”

      I ask if he has updates. He does. The remaining members of the First Tank Battalion have no clue to the missing crew’s whereabouts. The last radio contact from the Abrams came in before midnight Tuesday, when the tank was patrolling without headlights west of the Euphrates River. Today is Thursday. Desert sandstorms and near-zero visibility have made search efforts impossible. Blowing sand has confined the rest of the battalion to their quarters. Photographs in the paper show the men praying together in a dimly lit building.

      “Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask. “That an entire tank and its crew can disappear like that?”

      The officer shakes his head. “Going MIA is one risk you take. And casualties are part of combat.”

      My heart beats so hard I wonder if he can hear it. Probably not. He goes back to his books with the calm of a Zen priest.

      Should I pray? Make a wish? Some months ago a friend taught me a time-tested method for wishing: fix your gaze on the nearest natural object and compose an eight-syllable blessing. My eyes go to a row of palm trees in the motel garden. I count out syllables on both hands. Please. Find the crew. Alive and well.

      I unwrap from my towel and settle into the hot tub. Occasionally I check on the officer out of the corner of my eye. Now he’s pressing buttons on his calculator, writing on a notepad, flipping through the textbook. He’s eager, clearly, but how can he be so calm? As a Colorado River guide in the 1970s, I spent years working among veterans just home from fighting in Southeast Asia: former US Navy Seals, US Army Special Forces, US Marine Corps Enlisted—they could no more consider shipping out again than they could walk on water.

      The hot-tub jets time out. The officer lifts his head. “Don’t get up. I’ll take care of it.” He speaks with dignity, as if bearing a torch of responsibility for his mother or a favorite aunt.

      I let him handle it for me.

      I’VE COME TO THE DESERT FOR THE WATERS: SPECIFICALLY oases. My heart has been captured by spring-fed groves of California fan palm since I was in grade school. Whispering Washingtonia filifera, hiding in canyons. Their secretive ways. During most spring breaks, although we lived two states away, our parents drove south from our home outside Portland, Oregon, through the days and into the nights, with four little kids in the backseat. South from the Columbia River, down the Willamette Valley, with snow-draped Cascade Mountains to the east. South through the Central Valley with the Sierra Nevada rising up from greening foothills. We skirted Los Angeles as best we could. Mostly we kids read comic books while our parents did all the work, found some campsite or motel with space every night, and made sure we were fed, clean, and not bickering. Destination: Palm Canyon Campground, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park east of San Diego, an arid haven of picnic tables under palm-frond palapas and windbreaks constructed of rock dug from nearby alluvial fans.

      Most days we hiked up Palm Canyon or some other trail into the desert hills. The paths wound past white-blossomed agave, red fans of blooms on the ocotillos, waxy petals of flowers on the prickly pear cactus. We paused in awe when we caught a glimpse of a coyote’s tail as it fled or picked out herds of desert bighorn sheep from cliffs they matched exactly. We endured the bird obsession of our mother, the times she stopped without warning to scan an inauspicious shrub with binoculars. She did manage eventually to make passionate birders of her husband and a few of her children; at the time, though, we small ones had little patience for standing statue-still to glimpse a nesting oriole or cactus wren.

      Back then in Palm Canyon, most of the trees had long, full frond skirts, untouched by fire. Subsequently the trees were set ablaze by “careless” hikers, according to today’s state park signs. Back then, though, the rustle of palm fronds set the soundscape. No traffic noise. Few human voices. A clear-running stream fell over boulders, pooled in little basins, ran free over pebbles and gravel. Here there were no school tests, no student cliques, no yearning for recess. Who even had thoughts of going home? The oasis became a cherished refuge, a place where every molecule of water in our bodies could rest among peaceful canopies of Washingtonia.

      AT THE ENTRANCE TO JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, 130 miles northeast of our beloved Anza-Borrego and one mile from downtown Twentynine Palms, stands a tiny palm oasis of the same numerical name. A fertility legend attached to it endures, repeated in newspapers, motel advertisements, and desert-rat tour books. It’s a mythical place not to be missed, the accounts say. The oasis is the town’s forebear, a stopover for travelers since prehistoric times. On my second morning in the area, I cross the motel lobby on my way out to find the storied refuge. Through gleaming windows, I spot the officer at work again by the pool and think immediately of the missing tank crew. Headlines in the motel’s newspaper rack tell me nothing. Hoping for good news later, I duck out to conduct my search: a short drive, a nearly empty parking lot at the National Park Service visitor center, a paved path to well-tended stands of Washingtonia.

      In movies filmed in the desert, desperate, thirst-crazed pilgrims plunge into oases headfirst. The ubiquitous presence of water belies the fact that an oasis may not be wet at all. The hydric zone may be a spring or pool, true, but it is just as likely to be wet earth indicating groundwater near the surface. Here there is neither pool nor dampness. There’s no open pool anywhere, no yearned-for expanse of blue. Not only that, the surrounding oasis proper isn’t the obvious circle of palms, the stuff of kneeling camels and silk-swathed sheikhs. Instead, just a few palms string along the trails here—hardly a circle, at least not at first glance. The third and outer zone, the desert-oasis ecotone, is sparse. It’s not so different from the surrounding desert that lurks like a cruel bar bouncer on the outside of the precious palms.

      Later I’ll read that the marshy, ecologically diverse center of the Twentynine Palms oasis dried up some thirty years ago. Declines in groundwater desiccated the springs watering vegetation and wildlife. Monitoring of groundwater wells by the California Department of Water Resources has shown the impact of a training