THE SEASON OF 1917 



By the Director 



T! 



I HERE was nothing for it, apparently, 

 but to play mumblepeg until the second 

 alarm should sound. War had been 

 declared at last on the 11th of April; 

 but according to the supercilious stand- 

 ards of that early day we were hastily 

 lassed as ineligibles, heads of families 

 (seven and six, respectively), a boy 

 with a bum ear, and two youngsters 

 of fourteen; so we stole off, grumbling, 

 i lto the desert while civilization burned. 

 Lord! If the desert had been big enough 

 to house the whole human kind, with 

 plenty of 'sea-room' for each, there 

 would have been no fighting. For 

 envies and suspicion and lust for power 

 are born of fetid cities, of elbows worn 

 raw by human contacts, of social strata 

 ^ix layers deep, where some strutting 

 war-lord on top mistakes human heads 

 for paving bricks. If only, if only the 

 desert had been big enough! 



All great souls love the desert, 

 and manv a little soul comes to greatness 



AN AUDUBONNET (YOUNG WESTERN REDTAIL) i l_ r J 1 • lr 1 P, 



when he hnds himself alone with a low 

 horizon line. Without passing upon the status of the five souls who set out on 

 the 24th of April bound for Tuscon, Arizona, I violate no confidence in saying 

 that every one of them, from the "Chief" to the "Chiny cook" would like to 

 go again. Hardships there were, cruel suns and unending thorns, sandy stretches 

 which tested the endurance of a moderately powered motor, dust storms and 

 waterless camps, and between whiles an atmosphere of do Ice jar niente against 

 which the spirit had to struggle. But if there was an inferno of heat at middav, 

 there was an incomparable freshness in the early mornings. The thorn-thrust 

 was offset by the beauty and the sincerity of starkness utterly undisguised. A 

 welcome sense of escape from ancient repressions forever softened and gilded 

 the desert road. Yet the compelling vividness of a new now was forever belied 

 by a conviction that it had always been thus and would ever be just so. The 

 desert, you see, is subjective, a kindred state of mind. 



From the unctuous prosperity of the "orange belt," as typified by San 

 Bernardino and Redlands, we shot out, eastbound, through a blinding sand- 

 storm at Whitewater into the lee of the San Jacinto mountains, and so into the 

 pregnant desolation of the Colorado desert. At Indian wells, on the morning of 

 the 27th of April, we saw a migrating (?) Black Swift {Cypseloides niger borealis), 

 a rare sight at the lower levels. At another desert oasis, Fish Springs, we paused 

 to record a local horizon of fifty species before pressing on. The only notable was, 

 perhaps, the Baird Sandpiper (Pisobia bairdi), which was shot. But those of the 

 party who were not acquainted with the Desert Song Sparrow {Melospiza melodia 

 jallax) had a chance to marvel that the familiar brown elf of their childhood 

 should here have become bleached out almost to whiteness. 



From Niland to Yuma we traversed the coarse gravelly wash along the 

 southern flanks of the Chocolate Mountains. The mountains themselves are of 

 an incredible desolation, mere earth stuff. The writer once, on a winter day, 

 spent two hours threading one of their lower canyons, and the only living thing 

 he saw in that time was a fly. On another winter day, mild and beautiful, com- 

 parable in this respect to the best that summer could offer elsewhere, a half day's 



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