Fiji has accommodations for every budget, but, for those with extra to spend, Dolphin Island is the ultimate dream getaway, offering complete privacy and luxury. Photo by Geoff Mason/Huka Retreats.

All I can figure is that Tom Hanks lost his glasses in the plane crash. In the movie Cast Away, he spends years, washed up and alone on a Pacific Island. He gets skinny, grows a beard, nearly goes insane, and ends up spending huge amounts of time talking to a volleyball.

“Oh, yeah, he was on that island right there,” Pilli tells me, indicating a rock tower just around the point. From on top of those rocks, if Hanks had his glasses on, he wouldn’t have had any trouble at all seeing the village where I’m about to sit down to a wonderful meal of fish cooked in coconut. He probably could have even seen the resort one more island over, bures, the traditional Fijian houses, lined up neatly against the shoreline and a bartender who serves the strongest rum punch I’ve ever had.

We’re in the Mamanucas, a chain of islands to the west of Fiji’s main port town of Nadi, on Viti Levu—one of only two of more than 300 islands in the country big enough to show up on most world maps. And it didn’t take getting into a plane crash to get here; actually, the ferry ran right on time and was really comfortable [see "Travel Tips: Fiji," March/April 2013].

The Mamanucas look like Hawaii before it was Hawaii. They look like the background of every painting Gauguin ever did of a tropical paradise: mountains rising out of the sea, no transition between water and flower-stuffed jungle except lines of powdered sugar beaches. Villages are hidden behind lines of sheltering coconut trees, pandanus, and stuff I’ll never learn the name of but has leaves the size of dinner plates.

I catch a boat over to a beach on the far side of the island from where most of the film was set, unload a picnic lunch and string a hammock under a thatched shelter—a good idea to be under cover, since every now and then from the jungle comes the crash of a coconut falling out of a tree, and that just isn’t something you want to be under.

My ride steers his boat away and for the first and so far only time in my entire life I have a beach completely to myself (well, except once in American Samoa, but that beach was haunted, so technically, I was sharing it with the ghosts) with no chance whatsoever of anyone coming by.

The sand stretches as smooth as a pool table, except for my footprints and some tiny, delicate shells, like a kind of cowrie that’s been Dalmatian spotted.

Let’s face it: If the Garden of Eden had resorts, it would have looked like Fiji.

Which is why Tom wasn’t the first Hollywood star to wash up on Fiji’s shores. Cameras and crews have been coming out here since at least 1932, when Edward Sutherland shot Mr. Robinson Crusoe. No, you probably won’t find that one on DVD. Better chance of seeing Burt Lancaster play His Majesty O’Keefe, a 1954 hit where he realizes it’s more fun to be happy than rich as he walks the streets of Suva, Fiji’s capital (on the other side of the same island as Nadi) despite the fact that the weather forecast never says anything but “rain.” Gregory Peck stood in Suva’s rain during the production of 1974’s The Dove.

But here’s where Hollywood got Fiji very, very wrong: What all the films have in common is that you have to work for paradise, getting there can’t ever come too easy. A little suffering to purify you for the experience, like stripping off the skin from a sunburn.

Tokoriki Island Resort is a secluded, lush getaway in the Mamanuca Islands of Fiji. Photo courtesy 8Hotels Tokoriki Islands and Resorts.

Yet just like getting to the Mamanucas on a nice, shiny ferry, I didn’t work at all to get here. Fiji is just three hours from Australia, or about 10 from Los Angeles. And the islands have resorts so luxe that the staff actually looks offended if you touch your own bag.

And being here is zero effort. Everybody speaks fluent English, even out in the villages, and they might well be the friendliest people on the entire planet. The only voices you’ll ever hear raised are the constant shouts of “Bula!” the all-purpose greeting and expression of joy.

Isn’t pure joy better for your soul than Hollywood trial and tribulation?

And I’m about to get a whole lot of joy, because the sun’s going down and it’s time for kava.

Kava is the glue that holds Fijian society together, and it was the one thing the missionaries weren’t able to change about the islands. Because the truth is, before the arrival of missionaries in the early 1840s, the Fijians were not exactly known as the nicest people around; in fact, most sailors went a very long way out of their way to avoid Fiji. At least one missionary ended up as soup. At the death of a chief, a passel of his wives would be strangled, so he wouldn’t have to die alone. The Fijians maintained a more or less constant state of war, but at the same time, you can see something deeper was going on, because their war clubs—ironically still the most popular souvenir in all the shops—are works of art, like it would be rude to bash someone in the head with a club that wasn’t as beautifully made as possible, intricately carved and decorated.

But the missionaries, with that famed missionary perseverance, eventually stopped turning into soup and changed the entire local approach to life. Like they did across the tropics, the missionaries convinced people who lived in a hot, sweaty climate to wear clothes suitable for a New England winter. They stopped head bashing from being the sport of choice. And they built churches every 20 feet or so in most villages. When I walk through a Fijian village on a Sunday morning, hymns pour out of a half dozen chapels’ open windows.

But the missionaries couldn’t do anything about kava, and maybe one of the reasons why film crews love Fiji so much is that the national pastime is getting blitzed on kava every evening. Kava is made from the root of a kind of pepper plant. Grind the stuff up, mix it with water, and you get … well, a drink that both looks and tastes remarkably like mud. But mud that first makes your mouth go numb, and then, according to people who apparently have a much lower chemical tolerance than I do, instills you with a very relaxed, happy feeling. So relaxed that you might not want to move for several hours. Or, if you drink enough of it, several days.

Fabulous Fiji The Saturday Evening Post

Fiji is easily reached by Air Pacific, airpacific.com, which flies direct to Nadi from Los Angeles. They fly two-story 747s; if the plane isn’t too full, you can buy a full row of seats for yourself in the quiet upstairs for a few hundred extra bucks. Money well spent for the 10-hour flight.

Most resorts on Fiji will arrange your transport out from Nadi to the resort; the local airlines are Sun Air, fiji.to, and Turtle Airways, turtleairways.com. Very efficient ferry service is offered by South Sea Cruises, ssc.com.fj; they work with the resorts and offer Nadi to beach service to most major resort areas; from there, a resort boat will come out to take you the rest of the way if need be.

Fiji has accommodations for every budget, but the higher your budget, the happier you’ll be. A local guesthouse with meals might run $20/day. An ultra swank honeymoon-style spot can easily go $2,000/day. And there are plenty of options in between. The best place to start looking is on Fiji’s official website, fijime.com.

There are no bad islands in Fiji; it’s gorgeous from end to end. Whether you’re looking for a private getaway or a big party resort, you won’t have any trouble finding just what you’re after. The only warning is take it easy on the kava (you will be offered kava) until you know how it’s going to affect you.

Read more in “Paradise Found,” March/April 2013.

Travel Tips: Fiji The Saturday Evening Post

The Arizona desert is all sharp edges and oven heat and bad intentions. But a few basic guidelines can make it feel like home. Photo by Rob Zabrowski/Shutterstock.

The Nazis escaped right about where the coyote is watching my dog. My dog, a failure in most basic dog departments, hasn’t noticed the coyote yet, because she’s busy trying to figure out exactly what this rabbit-like smell is. In a minute, the rabbit will break out of the brush, unnoticed, and I’ll offer the dog a drink of water that she won’t take. She’s lived here all her life, but she’s never learned the desert rules.

1. Nothing matters more than water.

I know the rules backwards and forwards, because I grew up in the Arizona desert, this part of the Sonoran that looks like the set of every Western movie you’ve ever seen. Along with all the other kids in my Boy Scout troop, I was strangely smug that I could survive, no matter what. We knew how to dig into the cool sand to rest when the temperature hit 120 degrees. We could build distress signals visible clear to the horizon. We knew what to do about rattlesnake bites (cut parallel, not in an X shape). We knew that cholla spines are barbed, and you can’t pull them out, so you have to push them further in. We figured the stories about the spines working their way to your heart and killing you were probably a lie, but we did know for sure how to get water from barrel cactus pulp, how to build deadfall traps for kangaroo rats and lizards.

Okay, to be honest, we would have died quickly should we ever have needed to actually try these things. My friend Corrine and her Girl Scout troop, no doubt as self-assured as we were, got lost in the desert for three days, with no food but a five-pound bag of watermelon Jolly Rancher candies. “Another day, it would have been Lord of the Flies,” she said, “and a day after that, the desert would have been eating our bones.”

2. Even if you know the rules, the desert is bigger and stronger than you will ever be.

Back then, of course, there was more desert; when I was a kid, friends lived on the edge of town, where their only neighbor was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was already refusing to face the lights of the growing city. Today the town goes on for an hour past where we used to float in the pool and watch the bats, in bunches thick enough to be mistaken for rain clouds, come out at twilight.

Still, even though it’s shrinking fast, every year the desert takes its toll. Helicopters fly in for rescues; hikers dehydrate, fall from ledges, think their cell phones are going to get them out of trouble. It pays to remember …

3. Absolutely everything in the desert would like to kill you.

It’s all sharp edges and oven heat and bad intentions. True story: A guy got drunk and started shooting saguaros. These are the quintessential desert cactus, tall and thin, their arms reaching for the sky like they’re being held up by bandits. Saguaros can grow over 25 feet tall, have roots miles long; and if it has rained recently, their hollow bodies can hold two tons of water.

Guy shoots saguaro. Saguaro falls over and crushes guy. Everybody in the city applauds.

The saguaros here in the park are dying from car exhaust pollution; even so, this is an oasis, several hundred acres of desert in the middle of Phoenix. The zoo and the botanical garden are across the road. People jog here, do orienteering, take nude pictures of each other against the red rocks. Hawks swoop after ground squirrels—one once passed my car, grabbed a squirrel, and headed back into the air ahead of me in less time than it took me to realize I was driving more than 70 miles an hour.

7 Rules of the Arizona Desert The Saturday Evening Post

Around Phoenix

Stay near Camelback Mountain: in Scottsdale, that means the beautifully restored Valley Ho, hotelvalleyho.com, which is sort of like walking into the backdrop of a Frank Sinatra movie.

Right in Old Town Scottsdale is the best place to look for desert art: Navajo rugs and Hopi kachinas (ask before you buy, there are a lot of knockoffs) and turquoise jewelry.

A bit more expensive, but right at the foot of Camelback and one of the oldest hotels in Phoenix, the Royal Palms, royalpalmshotel.com, is pure old-style luxury, with incredible views of the mountain.

Either hotel puts you close to Papago Park, Phoenix’s central oasis. On the west side, it’s just park—wander and see what untouched desert is like. On the east side, it’s the zoo and the Desert Botanical Garden, dbg.org, a great place to see how lush the desert really can be.

If that doesn’t satisfy your interest in plants, head out to the
Boyce Thompson Arboretum, ag.arizona.edu/bta, on the edge of the Superstition Mountains.

And by the time you’ve headed out that far, a stop at Lost Dutchman State Park, azstateparks.com/parks/lodu, is the perfect place for a desert hike in the rugged, cliff-strewn mountains. Or take it easier by driving the Apache Trail, which is an old stagecoach road through the mountains. It’ll take all day to get back to town, but, especially in spring when the flowers are blooming, there’s no prettier drive in the state.

Away from Phoenix

Tucson has the Saguaro National Park, some of the most pristine, beautiful desert anywhere, chock full of its namesake cactus. Tucson is also home to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, desertmuseum.org, which is sort of a zoo, sort of a botanical garden, and a great place to see the best of the desert up close. For lodging, go for old and full of character at the downtown Hotel Congress, hotelcongress.com, a local institution since 1919. Or move upscale
and to the outskirts of town with the Westward Look Wyndham Grand, westwardlook.com, which has been around just as long. And at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains, the swank never gets in the way of the view.

Finally, the most famous patch of desert in Arizona is that big hole in the ground: the Grand Canyon. Not so many cacti—it’s high desert, a completely different kind of ecosystem—but most people are too busy watching the sun light the rim of the canyon like a lava lamp to care about the greenery anyway. Spend the night right at the edge, at the El Tovar, grandcanyonlodges.com/el-tovar-409.html, or head over to Cameron and stay at the Historic Trading Post, camerontradingpost.com. For the record, the much less developed North Rim of the canyon is way prettier than the South, but everybody visits the south side because it’s easier to get to. If you do go to the north side, check the weather: The North Rim closes in winter when there’s too much snow.

High desert or low, the desert rewards the patient: The longer you stay, the more you’ll see, and the richer you’ll find the landscape.

Where to Stay, What to See in Arizona The Saturday Evening Post

Show Stopper: View from the Kona side of the Big Island. Photo credit Kuma/Shutterstock.

I didn’t want to go to Hawaii the first time; I got coerced. Why go where everybody else goes? Why go to a cliché of ukuleles and leis? And then, of course, I found out the truth, so the 20 or 30 times I’ve returned have been entirely my idea. I start to feel it, a craving, like that hour before Thanksgiving dinner, and know it’s time to buy a plane ticket. Time to smell ti leaves and watch the skies for pueo, the local owl species.

But even after so many visits, what I mostly do is hang out on Oahu—eating kalua pig at the restaurant I love on the North Shore and letting my friends take me to overlooks that most tourists never see, the vast ocean spread out like a jigsaw, the waves the lines between puzzle pieces. Or the Big Island—losing myself in the volcanoes, looking for where the earth bleeds fire between patches of pahoehoe and a’a lava formations.

And so I make a simple resolve: to mix a trip of places I know and love with places I’ve never been. Ten days, four islands.

Which turns out to be like going to four entirely different worlds.

Moving from island to island in Hawaii is both surprisingly easy—inter-island flights leave about every 10 minutes—and a major pain in the butt if you don’t like to fly.

I don’t like to fly.

The original Polynesians moved around by boat, and for reasons of my own, I’ve spent the past five years looking at traditional canoes all around the Pacific. So I want water. The problem is, thanks to local politics and a relatively obscure law known as the Jones Act, Hawaii is without an inter-island ferry system. So that means a very, very small cruise ship run by InnerSea Discoveries: 100 feet, 25 other passengers, somebody else to do the cooking. I’m OK with that. And I’m really OK with an itinerary that puts me back on two islands I know well—the Big Island and Maui—and two I’ve never seen before, Lanai and Molokai.

Berry Best: Kona is renowned for its spectacular coffee.

Traveling to the Big Island is always like going back to an old friend. Or maybe two friends, since the opposite halves of the island are so different: the wet, jungly Hilo side and the dry, almost stark Kona side, where about all that grows is coffee on very tiny plantations (two acres is a pretty big outfit) and flowers roughly the size of serving platters that seem to be there just for the fun of it.

My traveling companion, Daz, sees the convertible at the rental place, and I know we’ll be doing the Big Island topless. I was here last year; she hasn’t been since she was a teenager, but it takes no time at all to agree on what to do: Head south, towards the last thing Captain Cook saw. Stories vary, but we can be sure of this: There was a scuffle, and Cook came out on the wrong side of it. The man who had sailed more of the globe than anyone else had his final view of the world at the Big Island’s Kealakekua Bay. And when we get there, I think that’s not a bad last thing to see: an arc of cliffs protecting the land while spinner dolphins live up to their name, catching sunlight and turning their reflections into corkscrews, wild as Daz’s hair as we drive the highway with the top down.

A Different Hawaii The Saturday Evening Post

San Juan Capistrano Mission. Photo by Thomas Barrat.

San Juan Capistrano, founded more than 200 years ago, is one of the most visited missions on the El Camino Real. The original church is now mostly ruins.

If I’d had my own car, I don’t think I ever would have received the lesson. But my car was a couple thousand miles away, the rental people had upgraded me to an SUV, and now I was about to pay for lack of fuel economy by running out of gas in the middle of nowhere in a state I didn’t even know had a middle of nowhere.

Which was not exactly the day I’d had in mind.

I’d come to California a few days earlier to follow El Camino Real, the Royal Road, which links together a chain of 21 missions spread from San Diego to north of San Francisco. Built from the mid 1700s into the early 1800s, the missions were not just churches. They were ranches, military outposts, trading posts, schools, houses, dorms, entire towns: self-contained worlds all of their own, converting the Natives with one hand on the Bible and one hand on the gun.

And they were built to be roughly a day’s travel apart by horse and foot. By car, I’d figured, planning the trip at home, I could do the whole thing in five easy days.

Except now I’m about to run out of gas and get eaten by vultures near the end of day three. I’d left the last mission, San Miguel, more than 40 miles back. The nearest gas pump is maybe 30 miles ahead, and the low-fuel warning bell is bonging with increasing frequency. Oh, and dark is coming down fast.

I should have stayed in the quiet chapel of San Miguel and prayed a while longer.

San Miguel Arcángel. Photo by Anton Foltin.

The standard mission chapel is quite simple in its construction: a long, fairly low building, wide enough for two rows of pews and a center aisle. Most are dark inside, since adobe walls made the placement of windows somewhat tricky, and most are plain. This is a bit of a surprise, since before these California missions were going up, architects throughout Mexico and Spain were going wild with the churrigueresque style in which every square inch of every available surface is decorated with cherubs, angels, and whatever else the artisans felt like carving that day.

But apparently, that’s not what California needed. A few of the missions get a bit ornate—Dolores in San Francisco is elaborate enough to make your eyes hurt—but for the most part, these are the churches of people who work hard, people who don’t need the idea of God to overwhelm them in endless scrollwork and bleeding saints.

And a lot of work it was. California State Parks has taken over La Purísima Concepción, near Lompoc, and they’ve tried hard to show what the compounds were like in their prime, when populations were in the thousands and herds of cows and flocks of sheep ran over ranches that stretched past the curve of the earth. Among the restored outbuildings are a blacksmith shop, a kitchen, the priest’s quarters, the soldiers’ quarters (rather less luxurious than where the priests lived), and more. Everything needed to bring the local Chumash under the sway of the King of Spain.

The motivating force behind the California mission trail was Father Junípero Serra, a Franciscan monk, who came to the New World from Spain in 1749. Serra was one of those great men who don’t seem to exist anymore: Whether you needed a roof fixed or were in the mood to argue the finer points of St. Aquinas’ Summa, Serra was your guy. Unless of course you wanted to have any fun, because he was pretty much dead set against that. Biographers of Father Serra write that he believed “laughter was inconsistent with the terrible responsibilities of his probationary existence.” In other words, life is a dress rehearsal for the afterlife, so take it seriously. “Not a joke or a jovial action is recorded of him.” And just in case he was having too much fun having no fun, “he considered it his duty to inflict upon himself bitter pain. He often lashed himself with ropes, sometimes of wire.”

San Francisco de Asís, also known as Mission Dolores, is the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco.
Photo by Steve Heap.

But the man got stuff done. He founded the first nine missions on El Camino Real, from San Diego de Alcalá in 1769, to as far north as San Francisco de Asís, just a bit west of the Bay, in 1776. Before he died in 1784, he had run a total of 15 more, some on the trail, some not, as far south as Baja. Even today, the Museum of the City of San Francisco says his missions “were the first settlements of civilized man in California.” Which opens up certain problems of interpretation, Native history vs. European history, etc., but that’s not the point of this article.

At the mission in Carmel, which Serra had founded in 1771, there is a glass case near the altar. Inside the glass case lie some very old pieces of wood, the remains of Father Serra’s coffin. Sooner or later, the man is going to be made a saint—he was beatified in 1988—and when he is, this tiny, very beautiful mission by the sea is going to be even more a site of pilgrimage than it is now. “We get about 300,000 people a year,” I’m told, as I buy my ticket. Make him a saint, and I figure that number will double.

But it’s quiet right now. I stop in the courtyard, try to imagine the place as it was when an outpost on the edge of the world. Can’t do it; I’m too aware of the very expensive suburb that now surrounds the mission, the distant sound of traffic. Call it a failure of either faith or imagination. I’m not sure which.

A sign by the doorway of the chapel points out that San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo, the mission’s full name, is in an earthquake zone, and adobe doesn’t always hold up so well in earthquakes, especially not 300-year-old adobe. I watch a couple people read the sign, peek in, then walk around to the small graveyard at the side of the church, where the graves are outlined in abalone shells the size of dinner plates, their nacreous colors catching the afternoon light and throwing it back at the church like incense.

Inside, the pew creaks, just a little, when I sit down. And that’s about the only sound I hear until I stand up again, an hour or so later, hesitant to get back in the car and back on the road. But I have more missions to see.

In all, El Camino Real stretches about 600 miles. As a practical matter, for the modern pilgrim, this means a whole lot of driving along Highway 101. By the end of the second day, I’d developed a routine. Leave one mission, set the GPS for next, never forgetting a quick prayer to Saint Christopher, because if the GPS fails, I’m going to need all the saintly intervention I can get. Drive through traffic. Repeat. But then, somewhere north of Santa Bárbara, I leave what I think of as California­—a very long line of cars surrounded by pink roofs—and enter something entirely different. An emptier world, one moving at a slower pace. One where the missions still fit.

Santa Bárbara, or Queen of the Missions, was completely rebuilt after an earthquake destroyed it in 1925. Photo by Linda Armstrong.

I get to three or four missions a day; each has its own unique moment of beauty. The gigantic tree in the courtyard of the mission at Santa Barbara. The smell of incense at San Buenaventura, when I walked into the chapel right after a funeral. It was the only time I went into a mission while it was being used, and for just a moment, it was as if the missions were still holding their communities together.

Over the centuries, some of the missions have become the center of towns. San Luis Obispo is huge, and, unlike the usual long, low building, is airy and L-shaped. Others, like Santa Inés, are so far off the beaten track that if the mission trail did not create a track of its own, they would have slipped completely from history. And still others, like Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, are threatening to return to the elements: The old adobe walls have melted from two centuries of rain, surviving only as stubs, like broken teeth.

I don’t see any swallows flying around San Juan Capistrano, which, of all the missions, is the one that’s most figured out how to make tourism work for it. The highest admission price, the biggest gift shop, and signs that point out the best place to watch swallows—when there are swallows to watch. And that’s the only reason most people come here, or have even heard of the place, swallows flapping back on the same day each year.

With the actual old church at Capistrano nothing but a ruin, the mission has consecrated a small chapel for prayers: And here, it’s the usual long, low box of a room, two cramped aisles of pews. But there’s also the most elaborate altar of any of the missions, and the racks of burning candles make the gold reredos glisten as if wet with new rain.

It is after visiting San Miguel Arcángel—founded in 1797 and now the most complete original chapel—that I find myself in trouble. The chapel is so beautiful, so peaceful, not another person inside, that I linger maybe a bit too long. And when I finally leave, I discover that my plan—buy gas near here before going on to San Antonio—was a bad one. No gas stations. Okay, fine. Map shows a town down the road, they’ll have gas.

Except they don’t. “We like it that way,” says the man in the lone business in the town of … well, I can’t exactly tell where I am, because what I thought was a town on the map was really just a crossroads, and the GPS kind of gave up in disgust a half hour ago. “But the military base might sell you a few gallons.”

The air outside smells like onions, like farms. Back when the missions were first built, all of California was this empty.

What we forget, rolling along so easily in our cars—what I’m about to remember as my car sucks the last fumes out of the gas tank before the military base really does take pity on me and sells me enough fuel to get to the next mission and the next town—is that it wasn’t long ago, not long at all, when the world was a much bigger place, a place where you needed to know there was something familiar at the end of the day. A star to point yourself toward.

Father Serra saw all this space as a clean slate—never mind the people already living there—and thought, yes, I can do something with that. I can do something that lasts, that matters. I can make something beautiful.

And so he started building missions. A place to rest from work. A chance to touch something bigger than even the vast emptiness of the landscape.

I light a candle of thanks in San Antonio, throw a little extra light on the world, climb in the car to the sound of screeching chickens. The mission waits for its next visitor.

The Mission Trail The Saturday Evening Post

Yet a lifetime in the Southwest has taught me that the truth of the arid landscape is something much different. The best deserts hide their secrets under cactuses and boulders, and only offer them up to people who know the magic phrase: “Yeah. I have time to stay a while.”

Joshua Tree National Park—first set aside as a monument by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, but not gaining national park status until 1994—encloses 794,000 acres of one of the very best deserts. Two of the best deserts, in fact, because in valleys between six ranges of mountains the park holds both the lowland Colorado Desert and the high desert of the Mojave, which is cooler (peak highs around 105 instead of 115) and a little wetter (up to eight inches of rain a year as opposed to five). The east side of the park slants down toward the Colorado River while the west side leans toward a coast that is only a few hours’ drive away.

And although the two deserts are geologically unalike—completely different in their plants and ecology—in either one, the first glance seems one of utter hostility: mountains shaped like jawbones of filed teeth, plants with needles that can penetrate leather boots, and animals with poison bites.

But the wise traveler stops to look closer. And then the landscape comes alive with more than 900 species of flowering plants: gold poppy, gray ambonia, desert trumpet, aster, the wooly daisy, and wide, blue Canterbury bells. “And we’re still finding more,” says Joe Zarki, the park’s chief of interpretation. Seventy-five species of butterfly flit their shadows over tarantulas, and species of shrimp swim upside down in small pools caught in the crooks of folded mountains. In the lower Colorado Desert, spiders spin morning webs between the barbs of cholla (called “jumping cactus” for good reason); in the Mojave, desert night lizards perfect the art of being invisible under the fallen bark of Joshua trees. Deserts are landscapes for the miniaturist.

In the rugged desert environs, Bill Keys once built a life for his family at Desert Queen Ranch where the stamp mill and ramshackle family home still stand. Photo by Ralph Nordstrom.

Deep in the heart of the Mojave, I get out of my truck on the park’s Geology Tour Road, a dirt track that skirts the Hexie Mountains. The cooling engine is the only sound, until I start to hear the bumblebees gathering nectar from late blooms and the slow hiss of wind through the reaching branches of the Joshua trees themselves. The air smells like warm rocks. Maybe three hours east of Los Angeles, not another person in sight, I turn a full circle, arms outstretched to the sun.

Stepping around the long, silver spines of a devil’s cactus, I climb some rocks that look like petrified stale bread. Joshua Tree is a paradise for rock climbers who have set hundreds of routes on these odd, beige formations. I once came to watch my wife climb; she was 60 feet up a sheer cliff when a woman stopped and got out of her car to gawk. “Do you think she’s okay?” she asked. “Oh, if you could see her face,” I replied, “you’d see the dopiest smile right now.”

I’m not as ambitious as my wife. I only scramble up 20 feet or so. In a crevice of sand, lizard tracks scratch a pattern I can’t read. A patch of rock goldenbush seems to grow without roots, offering pinhead yellow flowers to the bees that wander by. A hummingbird, breast iridescent in the creosote air, buzzes me and moves on. When I look out at the view to the horizon, at the Joshua trees in full bloom, at the red-tipped ocotillo, the world suddenly becomes too big in a glance. Turkey vultures casting shadows over quartz veins laced through the giant boulders seem to have no trouble taking it all in, though.

The first time my wife and I came to this park a dozen or so years ago we didn’t know what a Joshua tree looked like. We thought we were just looking at big yuccas until we thought to check the cover of U2’s album The Joshua Tree. (“We still get a lot of people coming because of that,” says a park official.) And in a way, that’s what the park’s signature plant is—a big yucca. Named by early pioneers who saw the tree’s branches as the arms of Joshua pointing the way—thirst and hope are powerful persuaders—the Joshua tree is also an ecosystem all its own. Yucca brevifolia shelters orioles and owls; kestrels rest in the branches from hunting trips; and Loggerhead Shrikes stab lizards on the spines, letting the meat ripen. On spring nights, Yucca moths pollinate the trees’ flowers, which look like popcorn bouquets.

Cholla Cactus Garden showcases the lush-looking plant with bristles that “jump” onto unwary passersby. Photo by Ralph Nordstrom.

The animals knew from the beginning what it took people a while to learn. “Anybody who lived out here had to meet the landscape on its own terms,” says Zarki. “You have to reckon with the fact that the desert only offers so much.”

And for those who learned the lesson, the desert could be a surprisingly gentle place. In a tiny bowl canyon in the northwest edge of the park, the Keys family ranched, farmed, and mined the area for more than 50 years. Digging 25 feet or more to hit water, using equipment abandoned by those who could not find a way to water the desert into Eden and so fled for cooler climes, the Keys raised their kids here, accepting any guest who walked by. The family patriarch, Bill, even appeared in a couple Disney movies. The ranch, now open for tours, shows the way to survive in the desert—waste nothing and pay attention to the details.

On a small basis, the park simply absorbs human impact; when the people leave, the mines cave in and dirt blows over their trails. But now, with more than a half-million visitors a year, that impact lingers. Air quality is an increasing issue as the cities and agriculture draw closer. Coyotes prowl campgrounds, and increased trash has created a boom in the raven population, which has, in turn, brought a crisis to the tortoise population (because ravens enjoy nothing more than some tortoise for dessert).

But I tend to think this is all temporary. Time works differently in the desert, and with all the time in the world I watch a trail of ants working a low hill and see the curved track a snake took towards shade. Early in the morning the white petals of a ghost flower glisten with dew, and at night the sky is deeper by hundreds of light years to what I’m used to seeing.

“When I first came, this all looked dead to me,” says Jenn Schramm, a ranger in the park. “And now I see all kinds of stuff.” The very best deserts, I think, teach you how to look. It just takes a little time.

Glorious Desert The Saturday Evening Post

Winter storms knocked down trees a hundred feet tall, eight feet in diameter at the base. Already lichen, shelf-fungus, and flowers the size of pinheads punctuate these fallen logs. A dozen kinds of fern twirl around scatters of bark, and soon entire new glades will be springing up. In my acoustically sensitive state, I wonder, what is the sound of leaves stretching very far to find open sunshine?

The Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park in the northwest corner of Washington state—if Washington is shaped like a mitten, the park’s at the tip of the thumb—is my first stop on a listening tour. I’m hoping that if I pay close enough attention, I’ll learn what the world sounds like when it’s only talking to itself.

I need that, because modern life bludgeons us with sound. Cheap car stereos have more amplification than the Beatles used at Shea Stadium. Thanks to the endless hiss of traffic, 6 a.m. lawnmowers, the clang of construction, that annoying cell phone jangle, we live inside noise. Even when we think we’re in a silent place, we’re not. Tests show that if you ask relaxed people in this country to hum, the note they’ll most likely produce is a B natural—the same as the electricity roaring through the wires everywhere surrounding us.

A silence-seeker savors the unparalleled quiet of the Olympic National Park. Photo courtesy Edward Readicker-Henderson.

And in the quietest place in the continental United States, no matter how determined I am not to make a sound, my heartbeat thrums in my ears, almost drowning out the birdsong. I shift my weight, inadvertently bump my walking stick; it falls, clattering against a tree trunk like a wind-up drumming monkey before it finally comes to rest in a patch of moss.

In 1995, Gordon Hempton, an Emmy-winning natural sounds recording artist who was recovering from a bout of temporary deafness and horrified by the noise around him, chose this tiny spot of land in the Hoh Rainforest—47º 51.959N, 123º 52.221W, to be exact—and declared it a sanctuary of quiet. The One Square Inch project was born.

Gordon’s idea is simple, lovely, hopeful: Just as waves ripple out from a dropped pebble in a pond, silence will radiate from a spot that’s kept beautifully still. “One Square Inch is exactly that, an inch I’m defending from noise,” he says at the trailhead, looking over the three of us—me and two young women, a soaking-wet trio of sound pilgrims. “And can one square inch of quiet manage a thousand square miles around it? So far, every indication is that it can.”

Along the three-mile hike in, we stop for slugs, for snails the color of beach sand, for snakes sure they’re doing a remarkable impression of tree roots. The Hoh River, cloudy with glacial silt, parallels us, turning gravity into music, the ever-downhill rush to the ocean.

Then, as we cross a low ridge, the entire soundscape changes. The river drops away, and this tiny valley, Mt. Tom Meadow, seems to hold quiet like a whispering secret. With a meter the size of a paperback book, Gordon checks noise levels. The forest—wind, trees, river, two or three unseen birds calling from the underbrush—comes in at 27 A-weighted decibels (dBA) about half as loud as normal conversation level. Or, to put it more simply, the ringing in my ears is the loudest thing I hear.

We cross under a tree shaped like an upside down wishbone, tramp through mud that grabs at my boots, and then into the deeper forest along an old elk trail. And there, without any fanfare but a tiny marker placed there by Gordon himself, is the Inch.

We scatter, each staking out a bit of territory, each listening eagerly, and just as eagerly hoping to hear very little. What does true silence sound like? At first, there is only the soft noises of the three other people, all boots and Gore-tex, all trying hard not to move, not to breathe loudly, but then the longer I sit, the more I hear. The river rumbles the bass line of the landscape’s music. Birds provide the treble. A woodpecker offers percussion while I watch a translucent spider, no bigger than a match-head, work a triangular fern leaf, and mosquitoes, one of nature’s only drone sounds, zero in on my exposed skin. My breathing stills, my heartbeat slows, and I feel as if I am unfolding, becoming a part of the quietest spot in the United States.

Then the noise comes. “A big fat airplane!” in the disappointed words of a fellow hiker. The plane more than doubled the ambient sound of the Inch, and we reacted to it as a threat: drawing in, tracking the source of the sound, hunching down for cover until the last traces of engine noise finally died away and the landscape’s quiet slowly reasserted itself.

I wonder what we lose when we lose the last bit of country where our sounds—motors and electricity and the unnatural twist of sound through plastic—don’t reach, and we have no respite at all. Surely that would be a failure of national imagination, a blight on that great American dream of room for everything.

Everything, it seems, but the perfect quiet of nature.

When I leave the Inch I think about what I’ve heard in the only place where I’ve ever been that the works of man weren’t always in some way a dominant sound: rain; the river muffled by distance; wind striking notes on trees with leaves, trees with needles, or the dead-end sound of it crashing against one of the giant Sitka spruce trunks. Although the line of sight in the forest is almost nothing—every view is blocked by old-growth—I hear at distances I’m simply not accustomed to, hearing too many things I can’t identify. I’m sure that was an owl a mile or so off, but I can’t begin to name the other half-dozen species of birds that chirped and hooted and harrumphed. We have somehow turned into strictly visual creatures, forgetting that animals define their home by knowing its every sound.

But maybe even worse than the airplane is the simple fact that the entire time I was at the Inch, trying to listen to the world, what I really heard were the noises inside my own head. “When you’re in a really quiet place,” Gordon had said, “it forces you to see who you are.” Apparently who I am is someone whose mind resembles nothing so much as a bunch of clowns at a pie fight, a scene of constant noise and bustle, thoughts spewing like whipped cream.

Purple lupine frame spectacular views of the Olympic Mountain range.

Maybe my next stop, Rialto Beach, will help. Olympic National Park includes not only the mountainous interior, but also nearly the entire Pacific coastline of the state of Washington, fronting more than 3,000 square miles of open sea. Rialto is, according to Gordon, “the most musical beach in the world,” and the ocean always soothes.

From the Hoh to Rialto is less than 50 miles, but in what seems to be a recurring pattern, I make half a dozen wrong turns and get very lost. Finally, on the western edge of the continent, I am there. In front of me, a line of driftwood, from small branches to entire tree trunks, shields waves from the inland world. The dominant note is a low-pitch hum, almost industrial and constant, like a factory very far off running impossibly large machines. Wave patterns overlay the hum: three small waves followed by a larger wave that comes nearly to where my feet are dug into the sand. Finally, a sound almost too fragile for me to pick up until I’ve sat and listened for more than an hour: the purr of water pulling back over rocks like a particularly delicate wind chime.

“There’s nothing you need to learn about listening,” Gordon had said. “We’re all animals. We all know how. We’re all good listeners when we’re at our most natural.” I think about times when I have been utterly entranced by sound: listening to a musician practice a Bach suite, cello echoing; the roo-roo bark my dog makes when she’s indignant; wind howling across Iceland. And my favorite sound of all, the nearly complete silence of the woman I love sleeping.

“To listen for something is one of the worst things a person can do,” Gordon had continued. “Just open up.” And it’s true; in all of those moments, every highlight of sound I can recall from my past, I wasn’t listening, I was simply there, and that was enough.

A gull flies overhead, low enough that the thump of its wings alone seems strong enough to keep it aloft. Never mind the aerodynamics, flight must have started with this sound, the sheer muscle of wind in feather.

And taking that as a sign of hope, I head to Hurricane Ridge, about 50 miles as the crow flies northeast of Rialto but three times that distance by car. Just past Port Angeles the road turns its back on the ocean and into a different season; from the sea to the ridge the car climbs over 5,000 feet, and the temperature drops 20 degrees.

When at last I get out of the car and walk onto the ridge, a landscape covered with alpine plants only inches tall, the sound is what I hope birds experience, wind unimpeded and on its own errands occasionally deigning to come to earth and lift a raven into the air.

I don’t listen for any of it. I hike to where I see nothing but the bruise blue of distant mountains and simply hear. At least for a little while. Longer than yesterday. Longer than the day before. And that’s a hopeful thing because what the world is telling me in these sounds is that any time I remember to pay attention it will be there, singing to itself and to anybody else who wants to listen.

Searching for Silence The Saturday Evening Post