Since I have moved into the territory of The San Diego Chapter, I have been leading a Desert Botany Study trip every month or so into the Anza-Borrego and environs. This permitted me to meet a remarkable gentleman---Erik Jonsson. He is a Swede. He spent much of his life in Sweden, but now lives in San Diego. He is a genius at plant identification and has discoveries to his credit. But it is his philosophy of the desert which has really struck me deeply and emotionally. Attached hereto is a sheet containing a memo which Erik wrote and gave to me. I have read and read and re-read it. I hope you will print it in the Sage for others to enjoy.
THE RIGHT TIME TO GO TO THE DESERT.
I remember an old ad for Tuborg beer. Two hobos sitting on the roadside drinking beer. One asks: "When does a Tuborg taste best", and the other answers: "Every time".
I have had so many people asking me. When is the right time to go to the desert this year. When will it be the peak of the flowering. As if the right time to go to the desert was when the desert looks least like the desert!
I would say instead like the hobos that the best time to go to the desert is every time, any time, even the hottest part of the summer when all you can do is stay the night and look around quickly in the morning before it gets to hot to endure. In order to really know and appreciate the desert you must have been there and experienced all its moods. The dry heat, the ice cold winter night, the total silence, the roaring storm, the rainy day. Only after ten years of desert hiking did I have the privilege of seeing its strange new aspect, its different surprising beauty when totally soaked on a rainy day. I got pretty soaked too but it was worth it.
You have to be humble when you go to the desert. Instead of expecting the desert to imitate a picture of what it is supposed to look like in order to be happy and content with your visit, just go there and gratefully accept what the desert has to offer you at that time.
Instead of worrying: "Will the desert look right today ?" just go there with relaxed expectation: "What mood will it be in today, what side will it show me today ?" If you get disappointed, don't blame the desert, blame your own lack of receptivity and sensibility.
I do not deny that the desert flower show after a rainy winter is a tremendously beautiful sight, but I do maintain that it can only be fully appreciated by somebody who has hiked many, many miles in dry desert when life just barely is hanging in there.
So let us go to the desert and be justly grateful for the surprises that it always offers instead of disappointed for what we expected but don't see.
Oct 1988 Erik Jonsson