Life is gaunt and spare in the desert, that's what old time desert rats like best about it.
They feel they cannot breathe properly without at least a cubic mile of unshared space about them.
Let another man or woman appear on the horizon and they begin to feel the urge to decamp, move on, climb to the pass,
investigate that purple range of barren hills beyond the gleaming salt flats,
find out what's going on in there, among those
shadowy valleys, those ragged battlements of broken-down rock.
Where, as they should know damn well, they'll find nothing but the same scattered dried-out brittlebrush,
the same fireplugs of barrel cactus with spines like fishhooks,
the same feral burros gaping at them from the ridgeline,
the same dun-colored rattler coiled beneath a limestone shelf, waiting its chance to strike.
Don't tread on me.
