Photo: Rachel Freeman
Author’s Note: The high desert of Southern California is stranger than fiction. All facts are true as reported by me while names have changed.
The full moon crept up from the horizon and illuminated the giant boulder fields of Joshua Tree. I’d been coming here for eight months straight, each month on or right around the full moon.
I wish I could say that I planned each trip around this time as some sort of pilgrimage to meditate or something cool and grounded like that, but instead every trip had been more or less a desperate fleeing from La Jolla, a wealthy off-shoot of San Diego. When the hourglass had filled with too many tourists feeding seagulls candy, encounters with some of the soulless that wander around Southern California, and just tiring of my own self, I’d pack it in under 15 minutes and hit the road east.
It wasn’t until the fourth month when I went to flip the calendar that I saw the full moon graphic on the day I was leaving and made the connection that I kept returning to Joshua Tree every month around this time. I got a pit in my stomach but the car was already packed. My head was full of nothing good and I knew I needed a few days of desert wandering to fix it.
I slept restlessly that night. It was cold and windy and for the first time I opted out of a campground in favor of sleeping alone, with the exception of the coyotes. Around 4 a.m. the moon sank low over the horizon and I knew dawn was close by.
I drove into town for some coffee and and an internet connection. I plugged my ears with my headphones and turned my back to the only other two people there; but I couldn’t help but overhear words like sound healing, shamans, and something called the “Integratron.” Curiosity got the best of me and I asked what they were talking about. I found myself at the Integratron the next afternoon with Anna, one of the people from the coffee shop. I drove back to the coast in high spirits thinking I’d found what I’d come to Joshua Tree for and could quit my pilgrimages there for a least a few months.
The next three months came and went and each had its own set of circumstances that drew me east, always around the same time, and always desperate for a few days of lonely desert wanderings. Every trip I’d run into Anna, usually at the coffee shop. We quickly became friends. Whether it was our similar pasts or finding ourselves with a similar type of wrong man, there was always some odd parallel that allowed us to share deep insights to the each other’s lives.
On one of these trips, I’d wandered far off trail in a region of Joshua Tree’s far northeast corner that I nicknamed “A Needle in a Haystack” and traced the wrong wash back. I ended up lost for a couple hours. I saw two men come over the hills behind me, but recent life events had made me so skittish that I hid in the boulders and watched them pass. I waited another 30 minutes until they were out of sight. I then searched for the trail they were on. I found it. As soon as I found my car, I gunned it out of the park, only stopping to get gas.
I ran into Anna at the gas station. Of course I did. I said I couldn’t believe I was back here around the full moon again.
“You’re listening to the forces,” she said. We both laughed.
I knew that would be my last monthly pilgrimage to Joshua Tree. I mean, I’d gotten lost. Yes, I got out, but I was not going to push it anymore.
Several more months passed, and each time I found myself back there — watching that moon rise and set, getting lost, chatting with the locals, and always sharing odd life parallels with Anna. Soon it was month eight, and I sat, fixated on the moon coming over the horizon. I strummed my ukulele slowly. I felt happy for the first time in a long time. I was alone but the night was warm.
The coyotes suddenly started yelping and I turned towards the west, where the noise was coming from. There they were: five piercingly bright yellow lights in the sky. I actually laughed and thought to myself,This must be some kind of joke. Maybe someone has slipped something into my ginger tea. But I was alone and I’ve always been deathly afraid of hallucinogens. Earlier in the year, I’d helped in the search and rescue effort for a guy in Joshua Tree who’d run from his friends on a freezing cold night. He arrived back at his campsite after his friends found him several hours later. He’d run over 15 miles shirtless and shoeless and narrowly escaped a gruesome fate of exposure.
The lights hovered for what must have been over 15 minutes. All the while I cursed and tried to joke myself out of hysteria. They sank to the ground, then rose again, this time closer. When they finally disappeared, I was sure I’d temporarily lost my mind and but was somehow able to coax myself to sleep.
The next morning I arrived at the coffee shop. Anna was standing at the counter. She was leaving that day, she said, heading north to Yosemite. Some guy in town had been giving her trouble and she’d met an Australian who was hitchhiking his way across the US. His eventual goal was Alaska.
“I have to show you something before you leave, this video I took from last night,” I said.
“What, did you see an alien? They’ve been around,” she exclaimed.
“I saw lights,” I explained. I’d since learned to leave the phrase “oddly enough” behind when in Joshua Tree.
In the cafe there were a couple speakers from the alien conference in the area. The “Woodstock” of alien enthusiasts had recently wrapped up. (Didn’t know there was a Woodstock of alien enthusiasts? Me neither.) One of the speakers analyzed my video.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Those are extraterrestrials!”
He appeared excited and jealous, like I had found what he had been looking a long time for. I said I’d just thought they were chinese lanterns, except they were far too bright and the park was virtually empty. The buzz in the coffee shop revealed that I was really the only one with any doubts.
My adrenaline turned to exhaustion, and I knew it was time to head home to the coast. Anna would be heading north soon and the temperatures were rising as summer set in. I felt my game of desert solitaire was nearing its end.
I still don’t know what to think about what I saw. But what I do know is that these last eight months of wandering the desert have made me more receptive to the life around me. I found the ability to be alone under the spell of the full moon with only the coyotes around. I’d found the bright faces among the many steel-faced road wanderers that look like they’ve been sucking on diesel fumes.
With a glimmer in her sharp blue eyes, Anna joked that she was one of the blue aliens. We hugged goodbye.
I laughed and said, “See you up north.”
We knew the forces would bring us back together, just not here.
