Thornton Rocks

Thornton Willis pulls off the 1-15 onto Bailey Road, an undistinguished exit in the rough desert mountains forty miles past Baker with it’s Fresh Alien Jerky store and the tallest thermometer in the world. It had read 115 degrees. A roadside sign had indicated only 18 miles before he’d pass the vast array of blinding solar collectors and reach the state line wilderness of the proliferating Primm, Nevada casinos less than a half hour this side of the dazzle of Las Vegas. The prospect of driving though all that makes his head ache, his body stiff and sore. He longs to get through to the quiet. Thornton follows the meager dirt road up into the bare rock hills until he can’t see the freeway any more.

He gets out of his car into the heat, and sits down on a rock, after covering the burning surface with a towel from the car. It’s better than the roadside rest area before Baker where the cars were many and the crows at the trash cans deafening. The effects of the sun are curious, he thinks, watching the huge surrounding boulders turn into the dancing worlds of Van Gogh, Klimt, or Pollock. He can almost see caravans of Salvador Dali’s hallucinogenic elephants walking by with their long legs thinning into mere wisps without ever touching down. Thornton thinks of how Dali placed St. Anthony, naked and burnt by the sun, down to one knee, resisting the temptation of those flying elephants carrying palaces, voluptuous women, and all manner of enticements on their backs.

Thornton thinks of his friend John who spends months in the mountains, and when he comes down and returns to the slurb that is Los Angeles, John enters what is to him a desert. And his other friend Maud who lives near Joshua Tree in the Mojave. To her—the one he visits today—the vistas, the sunrises, the storms, the lizards and rocks, the pulsing stars in the night desert sky bear the riches of the universe. And how Thornton himself some mornings lays on his bed facing morning and nothing pulls him up, while today the same bed could not hold him down.

Kendall Johnson