Pressed Flowers: Bat Country Green

In Pahrump, Nevada, the line would degrade in the telling, picking up beer foam, bad breath and change for the rubber machine, but I’ll say it plain here: I almost came off the road near Lucerne Valley for the sake of a bush.

That is, a creosote bush, Larrea tridentata, and just off Highway 247 as it runs east towards Joshua Tree. A low-lying, ill-favoured thing, offering no shade and, on that day, no fruit or flower, at first it looks like several shrubs failing to make a circle. King Clone, however, is a single genetic individual, estimated to be approximately 11,700 years old, making it one of the oldest living organisms on the planet.

We are used to ascribing miraculous powers to objects of beauty. Poets understand that the crowns of redwoods are closer to heaven than earth. But here was a ring of black-green scrub that scoffs at grandeur. And its comrades: glare and sand, about seventy feet at its widest point.

Rain had crossed the basin without touching down. You could see it out there, dragging its laundry through the air and giving the hardpan nothing. But the creosote had caught enough of it. Moisture wakes the tar-sweet smell from its resinous leaves – the smell that gave the bush its name.

Its stems carry another kind of resin, secreted by a scale insect: lac, a hard little varnish that softens with heat and sets again as glue, strong enough to fasten stone arrowheads to their shafts.

King Clone has been widening here since the end of the last Ice Age. Its centre died long ago. That is how it lives. The old wood fails inward while the edge keeps moving out, at a pace beneath God’s notice. It holds on by the rim of itself.

I left around dusk, on my way to Barstow, and saw one bat – most likely a California myotis, not an induced vision. I saw a sidewinder too and, in soppy tribute, put on R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People.