This year the DPS banquet will be held on May 2nd, the first Wednesday of May, at Luminarias Restaurant in Monterey Park. Information on obtaining tickets will soon be coming from our Program Chairman, Mike Manchester.
In the meantime, in this column, I would like to announce our speaker for that evening. Ruth Kirk will be coming down from Tacoma, Washington. to be our guest and give the program. She will be talking about the desert as a home for those plants, animals (and some of us) who can meet it on its terms rather than trying to impose their own. Ruth will also have a film she made while exploring in the Pinacate area of northern Sonora.
Ruth Kirk needs no introduction to most of us but let me remind you that she has written many articles on the outdoors for newspapers, magazines such as Westways, as well as more than 13 books including Exploring Death Valley, Desert Life, and her latest book, published last year, Snow.
By way of making her acquaintance, I would like to quote a few lines from one of my favorite books, Desert, the American Southwest, by our 1979 banquet speaker. In this book she treats such diverse topics as the Hohokam, dew traps of the Bedouin tribesmen, the geography and geology of deserts, man and thirst (including the fantastic story of Pablo Valencia who survived eight days without water in the desert southwest of Yuma), desert pupfish, the Seri Indians, and so on. Ruth writes, "in the desert, mountain ranges bristle on every horizon, dividing the vastness into a series of basins. Furthermore, the peaks have a raw, angular look. They demonstrate an abrupt thrust; show their youth, their vigor. Desert terrain is very strong. Very little about it is halfway . . . It is a land that stretches the soul and lifts the mind far beyond the minuscule perspective of individual life. Harsh to be sure; but a harshness underlain and intermixed with harmonies." And finally, "plants and animals and people living in the desert are attuned to its extremities. They accept life as they find it, and have no time or energy or reason to chafe under its terms."
See you at the banquet.