Apocalypse Desert
Gila Bend is dry, desolate, forbidding country. It's also strangely alluring.
By Gregory McNamee

I'll say it at the outset: I like Gila Bend and its solar-desert environs, territory that most travelers hurtle across only because they're bound for Southern California.

It's dry, desolate, forbidding country. It's uninviting. It's scorchingly hot most of the year. Even the saguaros look like they'd rather be somewhere else. Before Interstate 8 was completed, crossing that stretch of the Sonoran Desert was no easy feat, and the desert took out its share of cars -- and travelers. Until recently, the outskirts of Gila Bend looked like God's own junkyard, with acre after acre of sunbleached autos providing a great wall between civilization and wilderness -- and the town billed itself as "the fan belt capital of the world." Even today, much of Gila Bend looks like a set built for a smashup Mad Max sequel. And what hasn't been abandoned to the elements has been bombed back to the stone age by the military, which uses a large swath of desert there as a gunnery range.

But I like it. One reason is that Gila Bend and environs is good snake country, and I like snakes. Years ago, way back in the '70s, when I was in college in Tucson, a fellow I knew from back home came out to visit and to shake a nasty heroin habit he had acquired on the streets of Washington. After he had suffered through withdrawal, we went for a walk out in the Crater Range south of Gila Bend (which I hope will one day be designated the centerpiece of Weird Shit National Monument), a stone-fanged, snaggled, altogether inhospitable, and altogether snaky patch of granite and dirt.

Terrified of reptiles, my friend spent most of the time scanning the ground ahead of his feet for evidence of rattlers. So intent was he on studying the suspect earth that he walked smack into a dead rattler that some wag had slung over a paloverde branch hanging over the trail. After a prolonged screaming fit, my poor friend headed home to D.C., swearing never again to step foot in the desert. The last I heard of him, all those years ago, he was back to mainlining, at a safe distance from the fanged horrors of Crotalus atrox.

The Gila Bend region is also good country for most other kinds of wildlife -- desert bighorn sheep, antelope, deer, coyotes, javelinas, Gila monsters and lizards.

The reason it's such a critter haven, strangely enough, is that for years the military has blown the hell out of the desert south and west of Gila Bend, a huge swath of countryside designated a few years ago as the Barry M. Goldwater Gunnery Range. Periodically the Air Force carpet-bombs it, the Marines strafe it, and the Army shells it, leaving a wake of detritus and destruction that only a scrap-metal dealer could love.

The military never announces this infernal visitation, of course, and you have to catch it by mere happenstance. This was the case for me back in the early winter of '89, when, heading across the western desert somewhere near Mohawk, I happened on a sortie of bombers, helicopters, and fighters blasting a few miles of sand dunes into submission. Just a few months later, those same aircraft would be obliterating other sand dunes in a desert far away. I suppose their little firestorm off I-8 was useful practice for the dirty work ahead.

Not many people live out this way. One who does, I hear, is an old college acquaintance of mine, famed in his day for prodigious experiments in altering reality. For obvious reasons, he must remain nameless, for his job, I'm told by another buddy from those times, is to observe and analyze the effects of the bombers' work from the safety of a bunker tucked into the desert hills somewhere northwest of Deadman's Gap. I have not been able to track him down, and I suspect that once you enter that kind of subterranean world, the last thing you'd want to do is come up to the surface to answer some pesky writer's questions about the meaning of it all.

In any event, the result of all this destruction is that the Gila Bend region is a haven for wildlife of all kinds. That may seem paradoxical, but it works this way: The bombing range is off limits to tourists without official clearance, and that official clearance is hard to come by. No humans means no cars, no shotguns, no dune buggies, no cross country motorcycles, no beersoaked offroaders. Which means that the local denizens are mostly unmolested by human intervention -- outside of the occasional rain of smart and dumb bombs. Ironically, the animals are thriving because of this circumstance. So in other words, up against the mightiest military machine in the world, wildlife has a better chance of survival than it does against the average citizen.

And so the territory around Gila Bend is good snake country, good whiptail country, good scorpion country -- and good country for the soul. Stay on the road, as the signs everywhere out there order you to do, and go out to have a look for yourself.

Stop for a big glass of iced tea and a chili burger at the Space Age Café, the town of Gila Bend's great mondo monument to the Sputnik era. Buy yourself a $5.95 Space Age gimme cap to ward off the harsh sun, and return to the bomb-splattered wilderness.

You may even decide to stay at the town's space motel. The local Best Western is a space lodge. I strongly reccommend that you stop by and visit at www.bestwesternspaceagelodge.com/