March/April 1984 RAIN Page 19 ACCESS: Deserts Saguaros and sand dunes, barren reaches, aridity, distances that deceive, scrubby vegetation, openness, lizards and jackrabbits: jumbled images of the desert. Someone once asked a prominent environmentalist what natural area in the U.S. he'd sacrifice to the developers if he had to sacrifice some place, and he looked around—they were driving through Utah or Nevada—and said, "The desert." Then he thought a bit, looked around again, and decided the desert was too strange and beautiful to sacrifice. The desert is an ever-changing landscape of chimeras, packed with surprises. Those who live in the desert know its powers and know how to seduce beauty and lure knowledgefrom rocks and sand. These two books—both written by people who ventured in—give insight into the desert and desert dwellers. Venture into it and be amazed. There are wonders there. —TK Spectacular Vernacular; A new appreciation of traditional desert architecture, text by Jean-Louis Bourgeois, photographs by Carrollee Pelos, 1983,110 pp., $14.95 from: Peregrine Smith Books PO Box 667 Layton, UT 84041 Wind scoops, towers studded with fertility symbols, mud vaults and domes, and "sandcastles" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. The sculptured, sun-baked mud looks fragile to a waterworld person, but the mud structures are massive and imposing. Bourgeois invites you to suspend your cultural and climatic prejudices, to understand the fittingness of mud in the desert. Some 1.5 billion people use sun-dried mud in their shelter. There are religious places and dwelling places, and even pigeon towers (to catch pigeon droppings for Iranian farms), and all of them bespeak an understanding of climate and culture. Ornamentation abounds, from intricate mud tracery to deep-sculpted, shadow-playing facades. The beautiful photographs and the insightful, informative text divulge riches. Bourgeois writes with grace and understanding. He celebrates the ingenuity and aesthetic impulses of desert people, and he approaches these desert wonders as part of the continuing culture, not as artifacts or remnants of a long-ago life. Moreover, he gently explains that the homes are shelters from extremes of heat and cold, refuges from intense glare. We see desert windows as small and rare, but “we reason from the wrong sky. . . . Massive mud walls turn the house into a thermal, optical, and psychological fortress." These words and pictures on vernacular architecture in the desert are unlikely to be equaled. Tracks, by Robyn Davidson, 1980, 254 pp., $3.95 from; Pantheon Books 201 East 50th Street New York, NY 10022 Camels are witty. Robyn Davidson didn't know this when she arrived in Alice Springs and saw “the dry red parchment of the dead heart, god's majestic hidy-hole." She didn't know anything about camels and she didn't know anything about deserts when she arrived in the heart of the Australian desert, the outback. All she knew was that she had to walk across this desert. Images of the desert filled her dreams. Tracks chronicles what Robyn learned. She spent about two years in Alice Springs, learning what she had to know about deserts and camels so that she could walk the 1700 miles from there to the western seas. She put her heart and her soul into the learning and the journey, despite adversities, and her sensitivity to the land and its native people grew. She had always enjoyed the company of Aboriginal people, whom most Australians despised, and she saw this trip as an opportunity to visit them on their own lands, to get to know them better. She found an Aboriginal man to lead her through the sacred places near Pipalyatjara. The man exuded “strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect. And I wondered as we walked along, how the word 'primitive' with all its subtle and nasty connotations ever got to be associated with people like this . . . what was so outstanding in him jwas that] he was healthy, integrated, whole." The desert and the camels transformed her. The trip bristled with disasters, yet at the end she realized one clear fact: “The trip was easy." The two things she learned were “that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision." * , m ' fl ii? ' .'jiiliitllRitn, r r iin no nt i > ,H -i' From: Spectacular Vernacular
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz