Quartzsite and the Sonoran Winter

Quartzsite, Arizona has a permanent population of roughly twenty-four hundred people. In January it has, by most estimates, a million. The snowbirds arrive after Thanksgiving in RVs and travel trailers and converted school buses, and they park in the Bureau of Land Management desert surrounding the town and they stay until spring.

No hookups, no reservations, no monthly fee, just open desert, fourteen days at one site, then move a hundred feet and start the clock again. The federal land is free. The isolation is free.

The desert is reliably warm in the way that people who have spent their working lives in cold northern states find revelatory. The gem and mineral shows that have run here since the nineteen sixties draw dealers from across the continent. The swap meets sprawl for miles.

Quartzsite is the accidental capital of a particular American subculture: people who decided they were done paying rent in one place and started paying nothing in every place. The Sonoran Desert you are crossing is not the featureless wasteland it appears to be from seventy-five miles per hour. It is one of the most biodiverse deserts in North America, saguaro cactus, ocotillo, ironwood trees that live for over eight hundred years, a remarkable number of reptile species.

The Quechan people and the Cocopah people have lived in this desert corridor for thousands of years. Their territory centered on the lower Colorado River, which you crossed at the California-Arizona state line, and which once ran all the way to the Gulf of California. It no longer does.

Dams and irrigation diversions upstream have reduced the river to a trickle before it reaches Mexico. The Hi Jolly monument in the Quartzsite town cemetery marks the grave of Hadji Ali, the Syrian camel handler who came to the Sonoran Desert in eighteen fifty-six and never left. The desert has a way of doing that to people.