The numerical names of groves, though, tend to stick despite their inaccuracy. Seventeen Palms has been called that since the late 1800s, when the eponymous palm count occurred. Later, in 1918, author J. Smeaton Chase camped at the spring and counted “six or eight” trees. Whether Smeaton was counting by moonlight and under the influence of strong drink may not be known, but by the 1940s, reputable sources reported twenty-five palms, some burned.
Today, by my count, twenty-nine palms grow in Seventeen Palms. One of the twenty-nine is really a snag, but it’s still standing, so I include it in my tally. I see why grove size is easy to misrepresent, given the numerous palm pups hiding under their parents’ skirts. Some counters have simply thrown up their hands and made estimates—or not even that. The town of Twentynine Palms, for instance, is said by local websites to have “too many palms to count.”
Too many palms. On a longer timeline, an overabundance of palms would have been apparent in the area. In Pliocene times, 3.5 million years ago, groves grew throughout the state park’s modern footprint, following the retreat of an inland ocean called the Imperial Sea. Fossilized wood specimens recently discovered in the region are dead ringers for today’s native Washingtonia. The trees belonged to an ancient flora on an old Colorado River delta that included ash, buckeye, cottonwood, willow, walnut, avocado, and bay laurel. Some of the plant species survive today, holdovers from the wetter floodplain, which had a fauna that included mammoths and early horses, now extinct. Low-lying streams running to tidal beaches of the day provided plenty of water for thirsty palms, with their fanned, evaporative foliage and barely buried, spreading roots.
Some sixty million years ago, Washingtonia lived as far north as Colorado and Wyoming. Today the native palm’s natural range doesn’t extend beyond southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico. California’s groves tend to cluster at springs along the San Andreas Fault Zone and its many associated smaller rifts. In the Anza-Borrego Desert, faults run northwest-southeast through the park and environs, continuing southward along the Salton Trough.
The faulting is part of seismic forces that separate Baja California from mainland Mexico. The mountains and badlands of the region, including Arroyo Salado, align with the trend of the San Andreas along the west coast of North America. On land, under the desert’s surface alluvium, water seeps from associated fractures in wet zones that support groves like Seventeen Palms. Trees may look like they’re in “the middle of nowhere,” but they’re really rooted in moist, hidden faults and fractures in creased hills. Sandy, sometimes-wet washes align with zones of seismicity and other fault-driven landforms.
Seventeen Palms, if it stands in the middle of anything, stands in the middle of geology.
CONTRARY TO LOCAL CUSTOM, I PLAN TO HIKE TO SEVENTEEN Palms. Most visitors don’t walk into Arroyo Salado. Most take all-wheel-drive vehicles down it, as we did at Christmas. The “corner” described by the docent at the visitor center is the intersection of the big, wide-open arroyo with a tributary canyon, in a confluence of sloping washes. The rugged, southeast corner of the park consists of gray, rumpled badlands that fall away toward the horizon. To the north, the snow-draped Santa Rosa Mountains rise between Borrego Springs and Palm Springs. At night, the glow of that bigger, better-known community glows beyond peaks that otherwise resemble black holes in a star-glazed sky.
Few visitors stop at Seventeen Palms. Drivers shoot on past, eyes glittering as if winning a rally. They pass even an alluring, tiny hillside grove called Five Palms, as impossible a cluster of trees as one can imagine. The motorists’ destination: Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area. Pods of grinning recreationists zoom into the arroyo on their way to the recreation area and zoom out on their way back.
The hiking is easy going except for the insistent tug of soft sand on my boots. It’s a lot like beach walking. Last night one of the season’s Pacific storms, driven by El Niño, scoured the arroyo clean of tire tracks and washed fans of light-gray sand over the older, darker channel bottom. Fresh rockfalls and calving cliffs have tumbled onto the road. The storm also closed Highway 101 near Santa Barbara with the mudslides and flooding perennial to the coast. This morning, in Borrego Springs, temporary signs standing in roadways warned of flooding. Knee-deep waters had filled certain streets the prior afternoon but had since receded. Spectacular, brown standing waves had come on with little warning and vanished just as fast. Events not to be missed, although they almost always are.
Even on a winter hike, the sun shows no mercy. Hat and dark glasses are de rigueur any time of year. Generous, fresh sand lobes catch the sunlight with a granitic gleam. Features that I’m sure I’d have overlooked by car attract my eye. Phainopeplas, black desert birds with jay-like topknots, whistle and fly from branch to branch in the scant scrub. Blossoms of coyote tracks surround pockets of mud that remain from the storm. Creosote waxes pungent in the growing heat. How many birds’ nests do I see among the branches of mesquite and smoke trees? More than I’d have thought possible given the lack of water.
Two vehicles that passed me at the beginning of my hike roar through the other way, one chasing the other, both drivers beaming as if shooting easy prey.
THESE DAYS I SUSPECT THAT THE VACATIONS OF MY YOUTH were as much benefit to my parents, who planned and carried them out, as they were to us kids who went along for the ride. The Anza-Borrego Desert, with its fascinating, prickly plant life and packs of keening coyotes, soothes the soul I never know aches until I get back there. My parents must have needed this place, too—their enthusiasm didn’t flag for making return trips, with a bunch of four grade-schoolers. They’d pull us out of classes days early so we could make the long drive down two states, much slower going back then, and still enjoy a full week away.
Our teachers loaded us down with extra assignments, but it barely mattered. That additional work just meant after-breakfast sessions at campsite picnic tables with my father overseeing math problems on the order of 4 + 5 = 9 and 3 + 10 = 13. Those easy additions have their eerie equivalents today in computer authentication tests that ask whether I’m human. In those days I never doubted that I was, with or without the homework.
Each time we arrived in Borrego Springs, I breathed a sigh of relief to see that it hadn’t changed. Somehow I’d inherited my parents’ wish that it never become Palm Springs. The town stayed small, with the same familiar grocery stores and cafés. And why shouldn’t it? It had everything we dreamed of and more: the always-alluring hikes or drives to the skirted groves up Palm, Coyote, and Hellhole Canyons; nighttime campfire programs where good-natured rangers led us in amusing songs about cactus-human interactions and views of the Milky Way; the swimming pool at the old Palms Resort, with its vending machine full of Fantas and Hires and its jukebox of hits like “Ahab the Arab” and “Venus in Blue Jeans.”
Even as kids we wanted to always find desert bighorn sheep, roadrunners, century plants in bloom, lost mines, and new barrel cactus that appeared the size of bowling balls following rainstorms that wet the desert floor. The California fan palm remained the icon of it all—that native, prehistoric holdover that managed to be exotic in appearance. How sweet that it represented wetter times right where it stood.
Always, always, we feared the day that our home away from home would be lost. After all, hadn’t many places in California gone under the developer’s knife? We had a sense that the limiting factor to growth was water, but even back then we’d seen that barrier overcome through elaborate plumbing all over the West. Later, when Las Vegas became an international destination resort even without an unlimited aquifer, and Palm Springs went from ten golf courses to more than 124, then it was certain that Borrego Springs would transmogrify. How could the town stay tiny, located as it was beside a wilderness park where palm trees and desert bighorn sheep were the draw and resorts were also dying for change?
TODAY MY MOTHER HAS BEEN GONE THIRTY YEARS; MY FATHER has reached ninety-five. Just this year he lost his second wife, to whom he was married twenty-nine years. Until he was eighty, he kept the Borrego Springs tradition going—he was the one who issued invitations for annual family peregrinations there. He switched our seasonal trips to winter holidays, turning what might’ve been dreaded seasonal obligations to longed-for reunions. When he remarried, his new wife became the latest desert devotee. She embraced the campfires, star walks, and day hikes to the oases. When she left