Along the Urban Ecotone
The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the sky over Vegas glowed like a fully lit aquarium.
Sunrise was a nuclear blast, not a single cloud to stop it. Mountain shadows floated away and the city in its basin filled with brassy November light. The same light landed on this outer edge where my friend and I had slept at the foot of a range past the last construction port-a-potties and banners announcing grand openings of new subdivisions. I sat up in a sleeping bag next to my bicycle, gear gathered around me like an island. Biologists speak in terms of transition zones called ecotones, where dissimilar biological communities meet. This was an ecotone of the city and the wilderness beyond, the ground a matrix of bottle caps, bullet casings, and Mojave Desert scree.
In a chill morning breeze we packed camp onto our bikes a hundred yards behind a pair of green municipal water tanks. Departing the city to get away from its dominating lights, we were on a trek which would take us more than 200 miles to reach full darkness. At 150 miles, Vegas would still be casting a shadow. The next nine days would be 4×4 wilderness where we’d bum drinking water off a Jeep caravan and sleep in growing dark. This morning was our last full breath of the city.
An ecotone can be a forest reaching the brink of a meadow, or saltwater curling around freshwater in an estuary, places known for their biological tension, and for richness of species and diversity. My companion on this trip, Irvin Fox-Fernandez, is a biologist by training who now works in DC for the Forest Service, and together we explored burned out couches and hunks of oddly welded metal mixed with soaptree yuccas and dark green creosote bushes. This is where worlds washed together.
When I was a kid, I watched my dad’s house in the desert north of Phoenix succumb to a tsunami of subdivisions. Rocky, natural arroyos were cemented into flumes. Brambled routes where I pretended to hunt cottontails were razed, giving birth to neighborhoods and grassy parks. The ecotone was fragmented, marginalized, but still there. Saguaros and ocotillos grew behind houses where I could still find scorpions under rocks. These are composite environments in a constant state of assembly and disassembly: conflict, survival, overlap, symbiosis. They are ribbons of experimentation where extinction comes easy and evolution is known to happen at a quickened pace.
Outside of Vegas, a black, sunburnt suitcase had been disgorged like a shark kill on a beach. I walked through its strewn sweatshirts, toiletries, and a few pair of high heeled shoes blistered by a year or two of weather. The original owner, it appears, had come to party and someone snatched the luggage and unloaded it behind a foxhole where city lights don’t reach. It makes sense we camped in the same place, getting just out of range of the direct electric blaze.
Not far from that were the desiccated remains of a desert tortoise smashed inside the scar of a motorbike track. The animal had been reduced to sherds of carapace and plastron, little claws held together by sun-dried tendons. These are tough places to exist. Unusual adaptations are the way to survive, like growing spikes that could ward off fat tires, as if evolution happened that fast.
Back on the road with our bikes, we cruised this transgressive boundary, dipping in and out of subdivisions and enormous earth-moving works designed to channel floodwaters. Hydraulic installations looked like Dynastic Egyptian architecture with the earth bladed into lifeless, geometric rubble. From there, we followed a power line road across a Paiute Reservation north of Vegas, grinding up and down ruts, tires spitting gravel.
A figure appeared a quarter mile down the road, a person walking alone along a causeway of power lines. I was first to come up to the man, stopping my bike beside him, leaning the weight of panniers and handle bar packs onto one leg. I said hi and cheerfully he said hi back. Mid-thirties I’d say, a couple weeks since a shave, he said he’d walked here from Death Valley a good hundred miles away. His belongings were bundled in an American flag carried in one hand. He was missing a front tooth. Irvin pulled up behind me and the traveler asked where we were headed. I said we were avoiding the interstate, going north, and he said he was on his way to Vegas. I pitched a thumb behind me and said it was right over the horizon, he was almost there. Heading opposite directions, we didn’t linger. I didn’t learn his name or why he was walking a power line road. He didn’t seem interested in why we had bikes loaded like mules. We filled an empty water bottle of his, and he offered us Skittles, saying he was living off candy, the cheapest form of calories.
We were species rubbing shoulders in an interstitial space. The extra water may have been exactly what he needed, what he might not be offered in the angry core of the city with its hustle and crime. Out here on the edge is a meeting place, a confluence, an intersection. You can’t be sure what you’ll find. Maybe, if you’re lucky, refuge.
Photo: CC