Desert of the Heart

By Dick Dorworth

Desert of the Heart: Sojourn in a Community of Solitudes. By Karen Chamberlain. Ghost Road Press, 2006. $17.95. ISBN 0-9771272-4-9.

 

“There are deserts in every life, and the desert must be depicted if we are to give a fair and complete idea of the country.”

–Andre Maurois

 

Karen Chamberlain is a Colorado-based poet/writer whose well-crafted work has long been respected and cherished in small circles that continue to expand. Karen is well known to Mountain Gazette readers, having served as its poetry editor for the first five years of its resurrection. Her book, Desert of the Heart, is an astonishingly well written and beautiful memoir. Since its publication in 2006, it is showing signs of becoming an American classic. Like Walden, Desert Solitaire and Sand County Almanac, Desert of the Heart is an important narrative about the earth’s present situation. The only one of them written by a woman, it is a natural history of a person, the environment and ecology of a place, and of that history’s unending connection to all people in every place and time.

One definition of natural history is that it is “…an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and physics and even meteorology.” While Chamberlain is a poet/writer flesh-and-pumping-blood woman, not a cold-fact-laden scientist, her depiction of the four and a half years she spent as the sole caregiver of Horsethief Ranch, an isolated oasis in the Utah desert, is the natural history of an American Odyssey of spirit and heart. Like every oasis, every human heart and the only earth we will ever have a chance to care for, those elements are both fragile and enduring and as related as cause and effect.

Desert of the Heart is a study of the interconnection of living things (some of them already dead in the corporeal/material realm but alive and present in others) in a stark environment that to the caring eye and intelligent effort of its author seems as lush and life-sustaining as the Garden of Eden. Horsethief Ranch and what Chamberlain experienced, accomplished, learned and left behind are all brought back to us in the form of stunningly beautiful, soulful prose.

Chamberlain did what nearly every person of spirit and imagination dreams of doing without ever doing it: she ran away from home. She ran not to retreat from the world and its illusions but to embrace its primordial realities. She sold her condo and left a comfortable life of friends, culture and social involvement in Aspen, Colorado, which epitomizes the apex of modern materialism and success according to western values. Without directly posing the question, Chamberlain answers the question of why she would exchange Aspen for Horsethief, where there was no electricity, no phone and no neighbors. She also reveals the personal costs and rewards of her story.

And what a story it is. It includes love, sorrow, death by loco weed, suicide, laughter, a (barely) harmless sexually addicted fool, fear, joy, unlikely friends, wise friends, new friends and old ones, and the space and time to think, write, experience and evolve.

Her companions are her dog, Koa, her horses, occasional and usually but not always welcome human visitors, a wild landscape – and solitude. Her immediate world is an oasis used by humans for centuries, nursed by her hands, effort and skills into a desert garden unencumbered by material signposts. She falls in love with an eccentric, reclusive man as wary of relationship as she is of a lack of what she terms “unmolested landscape.” That man’s love, enmeshed with extended doses of solitude and daily and nightly encounters with unmolested landscape bring Chamberlain closer to what Buddhism terms Bodhichitta, “awakened mind.” Close enough that she is able to write of encountering a bighorn ram only ten yards away: “The ram stood still as a statue, head high, legs poised, gazing at us with neither fear nor arrogance nor interest. His presence, his wildness, his life defined in his own mysterious terms, was so overwhelming that he made everything else disappear, including ourselves.”

Chamberlain began writing the book during her second year at the ranch, and completed it after she left Horsethief. It is a stopover on the journey of life to treasure, and it speaks to us all.