We were racing against the sun. It was just about to set by the time we made our way back to the western entrance of Joshua Tree National Park from the northern exit about a half hour drive away. We were at the end of a long day of driving and hiking inside the austere and majestic national park in southern California’s high desert, but the golden disk of a sun descending behind the Little San Bernadino Mountains was calling our names. We were headed back in.
The park ranger at the gate suggested the Minerva Hoyt Trailhead (named for the woman who championed the establishment of the park with FDR) just a short drive away where we could watch the setting sun paint the sky, even after it disappeared behind the mountains. We parked with a few others in a lot just off the road and stood amazed as the sky fluidly shifted between yellows, reds, oranges and pure golds. It was like watching a paintbrush held by an unseen hand sweep watercolors across the darkening sky, dragging graying clouds along for the ride. We were transfixed.
The air got chilly quickly after the sun set and Sue made her way back to the car while I wandered into the desert scrub, following a disappearing trail between the namesake trees as best as I could. “Stay on the trail and don’t go too far,” Sue called out, “and watch for rattlesnakes!” That brought me up short for a moment and I slowed my pace and glanced down, my ears pricked for any tell-tale rattles. I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing one in the wild, despite years of occasional hiking in the desert Southwest, but I’d seen the documentaries and didn’t want my first time to be in the dark. I took a few more steps on the trail and stopped.
The light and color and shadow astounded me right into a deep silence of awe. I inched forward, aligning the looming darkened outlines of the Joshua Trees against a sky Van Gogh could have painted. My heart opened, my eyes closed in a moment of prayer, and finally I could keep silent no longer. The classic hymn “How Great Thou Art” — learned some 60 years ago in a North St. Louis Sunday School — began to rumble inside me. I felt like Joshua himself leading the Israelites through the desert. For by at least one legend, that’s how the Yucca Palm, so named by the native communities like the Cahuilla, got its “Christian name.” Nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers saw the strange-looking trees with their Seussian arms and recalled the story of Joshua, his arms extended in either praise or, just as likely, pointing the Israelites toward the Promised Land. With those crazy arms pointing every which way, it’s no wonder they wandered for 40 years.
I could not help but sing. A hundred feet or more from the parking lot, the wind blowing against me and the light fading to black, I raised my arms and my voice and sang what no one but me and God would ever hear:
Then sings my soul,
My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art,
How great Thou art!
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