Creosote

In the hot and seemingly barren expanses of the desert in inland Southern California, there is one plant that is seen to thrive, growing and expanding itself through cycles of drought and cold, for thousands of years. What would it be like to live a thousand years? The creosote, known in the local indigenous language as atakhul or the linnaeun marker Larrea tridentata, is an ancient creature, a plant which succeeds by cloning itself, allowing new replicas to sprout from its surroundings. Some plants, as can be found in the Coachella Valley of the Sonoran Desert west of the Colorado, have lived for nearly 10,000 years. Plants that have been breathing the dry air (usually at night when it is most moist) and soaking in the seasonal rains in this patch of landscape for a period longer than recorded human history. When the Spanish were first spotted by the local Cahuilla Indians with their ships and white-canvas sails exploring the coast of the now-extinct Lake Cahuilla (boats with “white clouds” sailing above them, as oral lore tells), the creosote of today was still there, drawing nutrients from the soil and providing medicinal aid to the native people. Further back, before the ancestors of Iceland landed in North America in the first century A.D., before Julius Caesar fell to his fate during the Ides of March, before a humble carpenter was sacrificed by the brutal power of an empire, the creosote bush of today remained, defining a California landscape before it was a state, a national outpost, a colony or even the gentle glimmer of imagination in the European mind. The creosote was still there, back in the beginning of the world, when the Cahuilla god Mukat had the Earth spun from darkness and void, raising the ground through earthquakes and tremors, materializing the immaterial world of the spirits, and providing for this land the creosote, atakhul, whose individual life and history matches that of collective human memory only when one stretches far back into the realm of myth.

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