I was born or given to the light, as the largely Hispanic townspeople would say, in the impoverished desert municipality of Barstow, California. My mother, Ruth, was young and inexperienced; her marriage was already flaking away. I was her practice child, and she did things with me that in retrospect, she said, horrified her, although I suspect she was also secretly proud of the way we had managed. Sometimes she would put me in my playpen and take long morning walks in the desert with our border collie, which at least once saved her from the fat desert sidewinders that hunt in sandy washes before the onslaught of afternoon heat.
My mother was an amateur naturalist. It was a vocation stimulated by her poetry-spouting father, a Swedish immigrant with a passion for bird-watching. On her rambles through the nearby Rainbow Basin, a site of torqued rock formations, multicolored strata, and canyons, she kept her eyes peeled. She made lists of flowers as well as birds, and she picked up fossils, including a piece of petrified camel rib. (This, before the area was designated a National Natural Landmark.) In her bird books, photographs and descriptions of sighting locations are accompanied by many checkmarks and dates. Like her father, she also made sketches of birds in situ and later, at home, reworked them with colored pencils. By the time she died, she had documented spotting over a thousand bird species including, among the rarer ones, both a Violaceous trogon and a harpy eagle in Costa Rica, a Kittlitz’s murrelet on a scree slope in Alaska, and the world’s fastest disappearing crane, the grey crowned crane, in the Kenyan savannah. Along with her bird books, I inherited a few pages of notebook paper on which she had made, on one of her Mojave Desert hikes, rubbings of fossil footprints of prehistoric flamingos.
It was my mother’s passion for the Mojave, her exuberance for the desert light, that spurred me to study geology in college and then explore and write about deserts—the Gobi, the Sahara, the Atacama, the Thar, the Taklamakan, the Chihuahua, and more. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention; that my churning, judgmental thinking faded away as the vast, apparent sameness of the landscape diminished my sense of self-importance, and my body and mind became a single organ for listening. Not just for listening but for listening into. It fascinates me to find that across cultures, centuries, and continents humans have not only lived in deserts but have often intentionally gone there seeking visionary experiences. In its severity, the desert can induce an accepting, meditative disposition. You can’t fight it.
A few years ago, on a trip to Rajasthan, India, I visited the Thar Desert, a vast expanse of huge shifting sand dunes that skirt Sambhar Salt Lake, a saline wetland that is paradise for some ninety-seven bird species. Thousands of greater and lesser flamingos, many from Central Asia and Siberia, migrate to the Sambhar between October and February. I wanted to try my luck.
As my driver and I headed west from the state capital, Jaipur, the crackly countryside began to stretch out, spiked with dying khejri and neem trees. Though the land was flat, from the car I caught occasional glimpses of the Aravali Mountains, dramatic exposures of folded ochre gneiss. As we passed by innumerable small villages, I tried and failed to make eye contact with the many large Hanuman langurs, seated like sentries on shop roofs or border walls. Water buffalo outnumbered cattle. With two- and four-wheeled wooden carts dragging along behind them, enormous cud-chewing dromedaries came and went on market roads, led by men wearing, more often than not, white safas, which designate a family’s eldest male.
Apropos of nothing, my driver informed me that animals and humans can understand one another. When I mumbled my qualified assent, he added, Animals don’t read between the lines. You can talk to them plainly.
In less than two hours we reached the town of Jobner and drove through its tumultuous central market. Carpet makers, jewelers, embroiderers, agricultural tool sellers, and hand-block printers stood inside crowded shops, their awnings drawn against the desert afternoon’s blaze. Versions of the same lean, dirt-brown dog limped alongside the traffic, skulked through bamboo scaffolding that fronted buildings under construction, or sprawled unconscious on side streets. I was struck by the vivid dark red, orange, and yellow saris of the women and by their elaborate jewelry. Large gold nose hoops, earrings, bracelets, and gleaming hair bangles. Many of the local men hennaed their hair and wore silver rings on their fingers. Some had diamonds in their ears. In stark contrast to the dust-strewn, sun-blanched landscape, the Rajasthani attire was dazzling.
After Jobner, we passed fields of millet husks and a tall-chimneyed brick-making factory. Shrubs and jojoba trees dotted the arid landscape. Outside disheveled houses, women scrubbed dishes and cooking utensils with sand and ashes. Fewer men were visible. It was usually women that I saw herding goats and buffaloes munching dry vines in the culvert.
By the time we entered the outskirts of Sambhar Lake Town, we’d been on the road for more than two hours. A scrap vendor was plodding behind his rickety cart. The driver pulled over and asked him for directions. As soon as our car crossed a berm overlaid with railroad tracks, I could see, on the far side, white sand and dry lake beds. Doves perched on the telephone wires, and orange dragonflies zoomed in wide arcs. Rather than the refreshing salt air of a beach, the playa gave off a murky, vaguely chemical smell.
I was awake and primed for an experience. For the next few slow miles, however, that extensive dry lakebed was largely deserted. Spotting a group of women in red saris, who were walking away from the road along the top of a levee between two dry salt pans, I asked the driver to stop so we could ask them about flamingos. We stumbled out of the car, stretched a little, then hiked out toward the women, who were now sitting under the only visible tree. Below its dry crust, silvered with rills of salt, the playa on which we walked squished like wet clay.
Once we’d crossed the water channel on a sketchy bridge of unsecured railroad iron, I saw that there were cattle beyond the women, farther out, partly hidden between levees. It was close to midday, and most of the big dark beasts were lying down. The women remained seated, watching us approach. My driver explained that he didn’t speak Rajasthani, but he would ask them in Hindi.
Morning and evening, the women answered him—that’s when the big birds appeared. Only in the early sunrise or near sundown.
I was heartbroken. The driver had to return the car before evening. I stared out across the playa; water was barely visible against a far shoreline of short, chalky trees. No sign of flamingos.
We drove on without luck. We passed women herding flocks of sheep, cattle kneeling in the heat, a rudimentary school. We passed through the tiny village of Jhapok and then the tinier village of Korsina, where half a dozen men were arrayed on a concrete chaupal, the community hub, built around the trunk of a peepul tree. A flycatcher, alert in the tree, watched our car go by. Seeing signs to the temple of Shakambhari Mata (the goddess of nourishment and an incarnation of Durga), I asked the driver to take me there. Why not?
We removed our shoes and ascended the stairs to the temple. Its door was open, jambs marked with ruddy handprints, patterns of dots, and red swastikas. At the center of the temple’s vestibule, surrounded by smoking sticks of sandalwood and camphor, a gold-glazed ceramic lion, the goddess’s totem animal, stood facing an inner sanctum fashioned out of granite and intricately carved wood.
Within the sanctum, the altar to Shakambhari Mata was decorated with wreaths of areca flowers. On the floor below the persimmon-faced goddess, a lion’s head jutted from the hem of a brown curtain. Heaped below the lion’s paws were vetiver roots, tender coconut, bananas, and flowers—the gifts of devotees. At the side altar, a stone bull—Shiva’s animal form—faced a lingam strewn with orange petals while a carved figure of Hanuman, the heroic monkey-god of the Ramayana, looked on.
As I paid homage, it occurred to me how many Hindu gods are depicted as animals with human characteristics. I wondered if these shared qualities suggested a conception of the world in which humans were considered less exceptional than they are in Western culture. And I thought about the tradition of Tamil Sangam poetry, in which it was considered impossible to write about human feeling as though it weren’t affected by the world around and in relation to that human. The Sangam poets believed that boundaries between inner and outer landscapes are porous, and that the ultimate goal of poetry is the dissolution of any split between self and world. Here’s an example from the poet Māmalātan (circa the first century CE), translated by A. K. Ramanujan:
What She Said
Don’t they really have
in the land where he has gone
such things
as house sparrowsdense-feathered, the color of fading water lilies,
pecking at grain drying on yards,
playing with the scatter of the fine dust
of the streets’ manure
and living with their nestlings
in the angles of the penthouseand miserable evenings,
and loneliness?*
I put some bills into the donation box. The temple priest put red kumkum marks on our foreheads and gave us a palmful of jeera candy kernels. We exited, sucking on the candies, and wandered onto the viewing patio, where an elderly priest in a white sleeveless T-shirt, wearing silver rings on every finger, was sweeping up. My driver told him we had come to Sambhar Lake looking for the flamingos. The old priest’s eyes lit up and he turned and pointed. Tracking the trajectory of the priest’s finger into the distance, we saw a long white line of flamingos standing inside a strip of pure light. I reached for my binoculars.
Although it was already nearly 3:00 PM, my driver agreed to wait, and I descended the temple steps to the mucky playa. Starting out across the sloppy flats, I made my way awkwardly as a marionette, lifting my knees high, stepping flatly. The mud glommed on to my shoes, reeking and bacterial, then oozed from beneath its soles, revealing dark algal undertones. Everything beneath me, I realized, was alive.
Some twenty minutes passed, but the closer I came to the water, the farther it receded. It occurred to me that I was looking at a mirage. I lifted the binoculars again. The water was there, and so were the flamingos, moving in teams, their heads up, rotating back and forth, their heads down, skimming the water, which was chocked with color. There were ducks as well, dark silhouettes tending to their own kind.
By then I was worried that it would take me too long to reach the shore. It seemed no closer than when I started out, although the temple on the hill behind me was tiny now. I started to jog, lost my breath, walked for a while, then jogged again.
Forrest Gander
The view from Sambhar Salt Lake playa back toward Shakambhari Mata Temple, 2020
The wet heat of the playa swarmed me. I pulled my running shirt’s long sleeves down over the tops of my hands to protect them from the sun. My breath was harsh in my throat, the air strafed with dusty evaporite. My sunglasses kept slipping down the wet bridge of my nose. Still, I didn’t look back. I jogged on, tracking left, closing in on the rising clamor, pausing to pick my way through mud zones that were slimy with bird lime and three-pronged tracks and pockets of foul water. At long last I came near.
There were more flamingos than I had imagined—hundreds, maybe thousands spread out across the lake, all involved with one another, spreading their wings for a few seconds at a time, twisting their muscular necks and preening. One stand after another, mixing and remixing. Some were on the mucky shore. Most circumambulated the shallow salt water, taking lengthy strides, mirrored in the water and across the wet mud. It seemed to me that their reflections weren’t merely copies of the original bird but somehow distillations of them. In fact the more I stared, my eyes fatigued by the glare from above and below, the more the water extracted the substance of the flamingo into its mild, rippling shallow depths, leaving above its surface a false flamingo, a form composed of raw, pink-streaked light, tugged into motion by the saturated double below.
Farther off, some of the birds were marching together in excited, focused clusters, their long legs like jointed steel rods. But while some, like those synchronized marching clusters, were intent with purpose, others stood around in small groups indifferently. Some courted and swam in pairs. I watched, rapt and exhilarated. Here they were—bizarre, gorgeous birds, a whole society chattering, posing, flirting, grooming themselves, cleaning one another, moving with the fine syncopation of flamenco dancers in groups through which feelings of communion, achievement, and fear surely undulated.
It couldn’t be mere anthropomorphism to believe I was witnessing something familiar in their displays, some measure of joy in their play. I found myself wondering whether between species there might, after all, be a continuum of interconnected relations whose nuances I could not even imagine. The flamingos were listening to and watching me and I was listening to and watching them. We were reading one another. How long ago had bird flight and birdsong been scored into the archaic human brain? Weren’t humans, for that matter, having come later, the ones acting like birds? What if the continuity between species was so deep that we all participate in a story of fundamental similarities?
As I watched, the main stand of birds divided itself into several sub-stands. In the one closest, each of the maybe a hundred or so flamingos, as though some invisible director had announced the time for its close-up, extended its neck as high as possible with the bill pointing upward and then pivoted its head sharply from side to side, projecting first one profile, then the other. A number of flamingos stretched their necks backward, retaining the S shape, and from that position rhythmically swiveled their heads.
In adjacent and more distant stands, birds began to lower their heads toward the water, their bodies rocking forward, tails cocked higher than their chests, as if practicing a common yoga position. Then each bird raised its partially opened wings above its back, with the bend in the wing aimed down. Reflected on the salt lake, the sky was both above and below; the innumerable flamingos were doubled, their colors, ventral and dorsal, doubly intense. The swaying, pirouetting figures that extended across the wide, glowing sky-water were symmetrical, like a Rorschach image. Upper bird and lower bird were different aspects of the same bird and iterated logarithmically, and all were set enjoined, distinct, dancing within a roiling dimensionless surround of orange and red chromatics.
I took one step closer and at once, hundreds of birds took flight. Each of them, I imagined, was disturbed by me and so carried the impression of my form into the air, wheeling, whirling, lining up in the sky against the sun. I froze in place, spellbound, breathless. Watching them fly off was like letting go of a secret thread, one that linked me not just to the flamingos but to everything that was not me. Though they disappeared into the evening sky, the thread hadn’t broken; we were still linked, or so I told myself. We’re all caught together in the curl of a wave rising from some common urgency.
