Oh Sun. Oh dictator. Your harsh rule imposed upon Death Valley’s landscape in scorched-earth oppression, yet you can’t stifle the inspirative power of a cool Spring rain whispered to the dormant roots of the downtrodden. You can’t hold down the heat-beaten green from a fugitive show of defiance in the face of your hot, dry regime. There’s hope, there is that. Surely, if whoever named this place “Death” had arrived in springtime, a week after a welcome drizzle, perhaps “Hope” would have sprouted vital from her soul and stuck through time instead of the implied hopelessness of death.

No, I suspect she arrived in the summer heat, none but mirages, dried pools, and alkali to reflect on her poor timing. And I imagine a man was involved in this morbid christening amidst the inequities of an equally oppressive relationship. Yes, a man doling out his sparse affection as oft as the blue desert sky threats of rain. A man whose temper flares too hot to even walk quickly through. This was a big mistake, she’d think, to come here now.

It’s the animals that suffered hardest at first, the horses and the burrow, all that weight they bore through the heat. And that’s when he clinched his fist and hit her, when that first horse died, and when for the first time the name “Death” seemed befitting of this valley’s bleak topography. Hope is so nice to think about but casts no such shadow as death…at least there you may find a shady relief from this cursed circumstance. Hope, always lying beyond the next hill or in the strong smells of damp sage on the downslope wind that tells of a distant mountain shower, it keeps you going, oh yes, it does that…but you’re still in the fire, still in amongst the coals. Maybe…just maybe…

Just as the Spring rain portends a riot of the green, a lack thereof, for the ill-equipped, portends but one thing.