Your desert rat is basically just another poor bare
forked featherless biped, like the rest of us, but he has certain
distinguishing features: a permanent squint, a hide well pricked with cactus
acupunctures, the big toes all purple and dead from kicking stones, and inside
the skull hardly any viable brains left. The desert rat loves water but
prefers to live, like his four-footed cousin the kangaroo rat, where water is
rare as uranium. The rarity makes it precious, therefore lovable. For this rat
the finest of all music is the tinkle of seep water trickling into a tin cup,
the periodic drip of unseen waterdrops falling in the shadows upon tympanic
stone. He is tolerably adapted to intense heat, constant glare, sand in his
eggs, scorpions in his shoes, kissing bugs in his bedroll. He doesn't mind a
landscape composed mostly of naked rock with some scrubby-looking plants
creeping cautiously out of the cracks; in fact he tends to find green pastures
and grassy lawns and trees-especially the fat sort with bushy green
foliage-stifling, even claustrophobic. Which brings us to space, outer-inner
space, and the desert rat's special fetishes. He loves all forms of life,
even people. But though he loves people (in moderation), he does like to see
them, just like trees and bushes, spaced well apart. At a comfortable spitting
distance from one another -say two miles, with a sawtooth hogback monocline
about a mile high in between for a fence.
This is not meant to suggest
that the desert rat is necessarily tougher than other rats. He is certainly not
nearly so tough, for example, as the Rattus rattus urbanus, that highly
specialized breed that thrives or at least survives on cement and steel, clamor
and crime, lethal gasoline fumes and the deadly double dry Martini. Compared to
him the desert rat is a delicate, fastidious epicene, tender as a water lily.
But the desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love
the kind of country that most people find unlovable. Cal] the desert barren,
harsh, bitter, dreary and gloomy, acrid and arid, lifeless, hopeless, ugly as
sin, foreboding as the gates of Hell-he will happily agree with you. Because in
his heart lies the secret belief that the awful desert is really sweet and
lovable, that the ugly is really beautiful, that Hell is Home. And if others
think he's crazy so much the better; he is reluctant to share his love
anyway. |
|