A home in the wild, under the wind

Three nights ago I slept tentless in the desert. I slept despite a breeze, moving over my pad and bag, over my face exposed to the night. The moon came up bright, woke me at midnight, but the air had gone still and quiet, and I found my way back to my dreams. 

A day later, after a twelve-hour walk up the sandy ridge, everything changed. In the morning the trail wound through sandstone borders, spotted with wan desert shrubs, blasted by the glaring heat. By seven we were walking on a granitic ridge eight thousand feet above Palm Springs (the San Jacinto mountains) shoved and pushed this way and that by the fierce winds roaring up from the desert and meeting the winds from the Pacific. My buddy was feeling ill, and couldn't focus on finding a campsite. I led as we stumbled five minutes down the hillocky slope into a flatter calmer meadow. Young trees clumped into shelters. Pale green grass, a foot or more tall, hardly moved despite the blustering air, though the trunks of the young trees shook as the canopy of leaves above caught the wind. 

Here we pitched our little tents. I flattened a patch of sweet young meadowgrass under the orange plastic floor, guiltlessly. I cozied the high-tech pup-tent up to a clump of young trees. skipped the stakes, knotted the guy-lines to the trunks. The wind blew fiercely up on the ridge, but under the shelter of the trees, in the hollows, I could almost forget it.  

Inside my tent the branches and trunks threw crazy patterns on my walls. Outside the branches rustled and waved, but the tent rode with them, like a boat on a wave, and inside I slept, soundly for once. I had found my place. The buffeting was only the rough caresses of this wild world. 

[from inside the tent, the branches in the wind]