Tree, Life

“Joshua trees were actually cut down in order to make new roads.”

Fuck us. In every hole, even the ones not fucked by any but those with peculiar destinies: fuck us. Fuck us dry and dusty as the scrubby soil those ugly glories grow in. Oh, they are alien creatures! Tarantulas, with shaggy legs, reeling back from the mushroom clouds that gave birth to the high desert. The Mojave is not ancient; that is a lie. The nuclear tests brought the desert over from another place in 1949. A window opened. The Joshua come from that place.

The scientists tell us that the Joshua tree is not a tree at all, but a yucca plant. We can ignore the scientists, just as we do when they tell us we have broken the sky. Joshuas are freaky trees. Africa’s got dozens of mutant trees, and South America’s packed with ’em, but America has very few strange and spectacular megaflora. There are the massive sequoia of the Northwest and the venomous Dragonberry elms of Maine, but the Joshua tree is your bull goose American freakazoid plant, and they don’t travel well. You can probably keep ’em alive in a fancy arboretum, but it would cost a lot. They’re finicky, and so Joshua trees only grow in the Joshua Tree Desert. It’s like how Elvis lived on Elvis Presley Avenue.

However, the Joshua tree made a fatal decision in choosing to exist between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In retrospect, the species would have picked a much more out-of-the-way spot to grow, because we laid a highway straight down the middle of their territory and poisoned ’em with our Chevys and sometimes we get out of the car to chop a couple down. Bad call, Josh.

So you must remember that we deserve it, all of us, when the time comes. That one of us was capable of this indicts us all. We’re all of us culpable as though we held the chainsaw. Humanity is wrong and twisted and Jesus look how much effort we put into being assholes.

All of you are on your own. I am now a walrus.