Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY The Life and Some Times of a Desert Dreamer

We planted ourselves on the altarlike pile of abandoned mine tailings and stared out toward the horizon where a chain of mountain ridges blurred finally into the mist of distance. Dave Griffiths stood motionless, as though trying to memorize the scene. Watching how hungrily his eyes devoured the aching distance, I began to understand. All day long, I'd been fitting puzzle pieces together in my mind as Griffiths coaxed his 4x4 over the century-old mining road winding into the Mohave Mountains just east of Lake Havasu City on the Colorado River. A year ago, Griffiths had it made. He worked in a Vancouver print shop, did a little contracting on the side, came home every night to his loving wife, played with his two young children, and journeyed to the beach whenever the mood struck him. At 35 he surfed along on the baby boomer dream of security, affluence, and ocean breezes. But something gnawed in the darkness, like termites in the foundation. For instance, he entertained an out-of-control passion for maps, even of places he never intended to visit. He also avidly pursued an odd sport dubbed "cornice skiing," a plunge down nearly vertical chunks of ice in some reckless effort to find something crucial he'd lost somewhere. Also he dreamed of the desert. Thirty years previously, Griffiths' father decided that he could make a fortune if he just bought a piece of desert and awaited the shivering hordes from the decaying rust belt. So he took his family on desert excursions, looking for the piece of land that would make him rich. He never found it. But his son acquired haunting memories of desert winds and horizons that went on forever, like the ocean with bumps. It all came to a head about a year ago, when Griffiths told his wife, Cindy, that he wanted to quit his job, sell their house, buy a house in the creosote barrens of Lake Havasu City, and invest their life savings in a jeep tour business. She tried to bring him to his senses. Then she packed up her life and children and moved with him to the seeming middle of nowhere, testament once again to the strange things people will do for love. Once she was a busy accountant. Now she keeps books for their struggling business and has formed a club for women whose husbands made them move to Lake Havasu City. There seems to be no lack of would-be members. Her husband has been at it for the past year, luring tourists away from Lake Havasu City, where tame carp congregate under a bridge stolen from nursery rhymes and the lakeside scene echoes with the roar of speedboats, the uproar of keg parties, and the sizzle of pale skin. Griffiths coaxes people out into an older, quieter world, like a desert evangelical. He's learned the location of every oil-pan-puncturing rock in the desert, every chuckwalla den, and every hidden seep. He kneels to photograph mystery flowers that sprout from this stony soil given even the faintest encouragement from a well-timed rain. He's picked out the old wagon trails along which straining mules hauled wooden wagons groaning with gold-laced rocks right up into the late 1920s. He recalls the miners who chipped and blasted tunnels that followed veins for a mile or more into the heart of the mountains, and drilled vertical shafts that plunged straight down for hundreds of feet. Most just eked out a living. Still they flocked to the harsh mountains, some drawn by that same formless urge for a view to the horizon.

We ambled along, stopping here and there to exclaim or puzzle. I stalked a roadrunner with my camera. We paused by patches of wildflowers, which had burst forth on every side in response to one of the wettest winters on record. We wondered what attracted a distant pivoting of vultures. We charted the elevational shifts in plants, marveling at the fine-tuning of adaptation in a land featuring 120° F. summers and years without rain. We wandered across a mound of chipped stone, probably left by generations of Indians fashioning spear points and arrowheads. We walked carefully across stretches of desert pavement, pebbles fitted securely together by wind and rain and bronzed by the sun after thousands of years in place. When we reached the mine shafts, we picked our way cautiously into the cool darkness, listening to the distant squeaking of bats. We dropped stones into a vertical shaft, listening to the distant echoes of the fall to the flooded bottom of the pit. Finally we stood on the tailings and stared wordlessly into the dim distance. We both felt it, standing there in a breeze scented with wildflowers and that elusive, pungent smell of the desert, like rocks cooking. I turned to look at him. He faced me, then gestured toward the horizon with a small shrug. Of course now Dave Griffiths dreams sometimes of the ocean. And he still can't resist a good topo map. But the black dotted lines on the smudged paper no longer fill him with that sinking feeling that he's somehow mislaid his life.