The Desert Dreams of Flying to the Moon

Editor’s note: In a chapter from her forthcoming book, Sharman Apt Russell visits the Coso Rock Art Site near Ridgecrest. “Petroglyphs are something I travel toward,” she writes, describing the images as animate and full of Being.

The Desert Dreams of Flying to the Moon is Russell’s tribute to her father, Mel Apt, a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base who died flying an experimental plane when the author was two years old. A well-known nature writer, Russell goes beyond the usual nature writing format to incorporate military history and magical realism: an imaginary road trip with her late father. In other chapters, she takes a grand tour of important art sites in the desert, including Hazel’s Garden in Wonder Valley, the Blythe intaglios and—yes—even Desert X.

Celebrating Petroglyph Park by Don McCauley

Excerpt from Chapter Three: A Place Made to Test Airplanes

In 2019, six years after I took my father’s flight suit to the Flight Test Center Museum, I returned to the Mojave Desert to see the Coso Rock Art Site. More than 100,000 petroglyphs are hidden here, deep in the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, another large military base fifty miles north of Edwards Air Force Base.

Petroglyphs are something I travel toward, those often-unspectacular images—a zigzag, a circle—made by pecking through a rock’s dark manganese coating to reveal the lighter coloring beneath. At the Coso Rock Art Site, some of the petroglyphs may have been pecked by Paleo Indians during the end of the Pleistocene, before 80 percent of North America’s large land mammals went extinct. I was particularly excited about that. The animals these people lived with! Herds of camels, horses, mammoths, mastodons. Long-horned bison, shrub-ox, tapirs. Saber-toothed cats, scimitar cats, American lions, dire-wolves, short-faced bears. Three different species of giant ground sloths. Above them, in the bright sky, the condors and teratorns. I travel toward petroglyphs half believing this landscape still exists, and I might tumble into it—and where more likely than a rock art site? Half believing I could flourish with the mammoths and dire wolves. For this reason, I need to keep certain skills honed. Re-watch that video on flint-knapping.

Captain Mel Apt (the author’s father) and his experimental X-2 at Edwards Air Force Base.

The Pleistocene extinctions are still something of a mystery. Most likely, these animals died off because of over-hunting by humans combined with a warming climate. For the next ten thousand years, human populations in the Mojave Desert would withdraw and expand during dry and wet periods. Their petroglyphs became more complex, from crude bighorn sheep to more realistically drawn bighorn sheep, from the single line of a throwing stick to bows and arrows accompanied by hunters. Possibly most of these petroglyphs were made 1,000 to 3,000 years ago by the ancestors of contemporary tribes like the Shoshone and Paiute. Or possibly not, because rock art is hard to date.

My father and I were a few days into a road trip that would cross the Mojave Desert south to north, from Riverside to Ridgecrest, and west to east, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Months in advance, I had arranged this tour of the petroglyphs. First we sat in a museum in the town just outside China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. Our group of twelve listened to a lecture here before driving to the guardhouse and gate, where our cars were searched for guns and contraband, while we were lined up and lectured again. Our tour guide would be in constant radio communication with military personnel. We would be constantly reminded that this was a military base. Hours later, once we were walking down Little Petroglyph Canyon, we had the constant awareness, too, that this was a sacred site. And here the work began: to understand what sacred meant to us and what sacred meant to the people who had created these images.

Bighorn Sheepdog Training by Don McCauley. Some of the Coso people trained dogs to hunt Bighorn sheep.

The petroglyphs astound first in their quantity. A stone panel with a half dozen bighorn sheep. Two human figures with heads like suns. A rattlesnake approaching from below. A mountain lion from above. A boulder covered in geometric design. More bighorn sheep. Throwing sticks, turtles, hands, dots, spirals. More bighorn sheep. More human figures or “patterned body anthropomorphs” watching from rocks above. There is so clearly a purpose here. This is such a large, deliberate collection of artwork, and I had references for that, cathedrals and museums, with the dissonance of fitting something I knew into something I didn’t.

In my group, the response for most of us was a desperate making of our own images, usually with smartphones. Sometimes we took the same picture over and over, not quite able to leave that image behind before hurrying to the next one, taking picture after picture after picture.

Coso Medicine Woman Healing by Don McCauley

I knew that some archeologists believe these petroglyphs were created by male shamans at the conclusion of a vision quest. Many of the patterned body anthropomorphs have headdresses similar to those of shamans from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, usually older men who entered the supernatural world to seek the help of spirit animals. These men wanted the power to cure people or curse people or bring rain. The spirit bighorn sheep, in particular, assisted a rain deity. The Coso Rock Art Site also includes entoptic patterns, grids and parallel lines typically seen by the human brain and eye when a human is in a trance. Found at rock art sites around the world, these neurological patterns plausibly connect shamans and petroglyphs, power and art.

We don’t really know what drew people here to make these images. But what can be felt in Little Petroglyph Canyon, by every visitor, is the presence of land and sky. The empty desert that is not empty, the lift of rock—one rocky hill after another—a range of bony mountains—one range after another—the dry valley floor and white lakebed—one valley floor after another—clouds and clouds and space and space and more of that over the horizon and the sense that all this goes on and on and that all this is a kind of Being. That you are surrounded by Being and even, sometimes, by a particular Being, indifferent but approachable.

Flight is a theme here, too. In a trance state, humans commonly feel weightless or dizzy, with the visual perception that objects are far away. This can be perceived as flying, and shamans in almost all cultures fly. For some desert tribes, whirlwinds contain spirits, and the faces of many anthropomorphic figures at Coso Rock Art Site are filled in by concentric circles or circles with radiating lines, something like whirlwinds. Like rising up in a whirlwind. Like flying. Many of these whirlwind figures have bird talons instead of feet.

Sharman Apt Russell rests by a spiral petroglyph near her home in New Mexico.

My father was particularly interested in the flying shamans. In this tentative exchange of lives, we looked at the petroglyphs together, seeking out those images of men part bird and part whirlwind. “Some shamans might have been female,” I told him. “The idea that these images were only created by males is an assumption, usually made by a male archeologist.”

I was educating him about the Women’s Movement. He had missed the 1960s.

Mel made an encouraging sound, and I continued to quote from books I had only recently read. “The Chemehuevi had female shamans, who were given the same respect as males. The primary Creator of the Chemehuevi is Ocean Woman. Not really female,” I clarified. “But associated with the female.”

Coso rock art, courtesy of Maturango Museum

I had come to southern California partly to write about the wild desert tortoise, which is listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. For that reason, we also searched for petroglyphs of these turtles, easily recognized by the geometric design of the reptile’s shell. Another tortoise motif could be seen in the shields or bodies of the patterned anthropomorphs. In the mythology of the Chemehuevi, Tortoise stands for a cultural ideal: surviving through patience and stamina, facing death with dignity. Desert tortoises are also tasty and their carapaces handy as bowls and ladles. Even so, a few desert tribes valued the animals too much to eat them.

In the 1950s, in the middle of the twentieth century, you could find hundreds of tortoises in a square mile of the Mojave Desert. Today, in many places, you might find one or two. Specialized to flourish in heat and aridity, dependent on native flowers like lupine and mallow, the tortoise is an indicator species. Healthy populations indicate a healthy desert. A day ago, my father and I had visited an expert on desert tortoises, Dr. Kristin Berry. Tomorrow we would be at the Desert Tortoise Natural Research Area, looking for actual desert tortoises. In another week, we would be toe-deep in hatchlings at the Ivanpah Desert Tortoise Research Facility. This was my idea of fun.

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of a dozen books and a winner of the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. She is a professor emeritus at Western New Mexico University.  https://sharmanaptrussell.com/

Don McCauley worked as a physicist at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station and took up painting as a second career in 1975. In 2015, the Ridgecrest resident was enlisted to paint petroglyph images from the nearby Coso rock art site on service boxes to welcome visitors to town. (He was assisted by his wife, Judy.) The art was shown at Maturango Museum in an exhibition called Coso Rock Art Expressions.  https://cosorockartexpressions.com