Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert here in the beautiful high desert.

Red, blue, black, silver, making sweet sounds on the radio and another storm on the way.

Sometimes people come out here and look around At the substandard housing

And the miles of vacant retail buildings

And the enormous, hideous Walmart

And the inexplicable number of cars.

A lot of cars from Arizona and Texas pumping out great clouds of noxious smoke.

While puttering down the fast lane at 25 miles per hour.

And the people say, what's so beautiful about that?

And I say, well, nothing, nothing at all. It's hideous. It's an outrage. It's gruesome.

And then, as I'm walking away, almost running, really, sometimes they catch up and ask,

so where's the beautiful part?

Where is the beautiful part anyway?

Well, you can start by walking about a mile past the last parking lot or dirt road or residential car parts dump or informal halfway house or accidental pit bull breeding farm.

And keep going in the direction of the difficult terrain.

The hills and the mountains and the great boulders, not the hills covered in radio transmission towers.

Radio relay towers lead me to my baby.

And toward the ones with nothing up there at all, nothing made by the hands of men.

Nothing up there but more boulders, more spiky yucca trees that slash your arms.

Junipers and Joshua trees up to the craggy peak where the stately pinions stand proud.

Keep going that way.

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