The winds are 55 mph wild in the high desert, blasting off mesas, across chaparral and highways in great brown, dirt-laden gusts. Sandstorms spring up anywhere the land is open -- pretty much everywhere outside urban centers. I'd been driving through these desert darknesses for hours today in search of the types of opportunity a person needs when life has been throwing a few curvehalls. Feeling none too cheery, there I sat at a red light. The name of the road hanging from the arch that held the light was Gun Club. Wonder how many people have ended it all at the end of Gun Club? I thought, waiting. I caught sight of a dogeared city map hanging askew from the flap above. It immediately reminded me that this road called Gun Club terminates at a place called Donkey Canyon, which I have not yet seen. A quick turn and I'm bouncing along the washboard gravel straight for a line of old volcanoes to the west. As I follow first one dirt track, then another in an effort to move west without toppling into a gulch, I speculate on how Donkey Canyon came by its name. Was it once a place where disused longeared family pickup trucks of 100 years, 50 years ago banded together when no longer fed by their own familiar humans? My tape player sings, "Hey, Mr. Vaquero, put a handle on my pony for me/Teach me the mystery./Did they sing all day?/Did they dance all night?/Did they ride their spade bit ponies through the golden light?/Did they find true love?/Was it all a pack of lies?/Quien sabe, maybe it was paradise." Out here on the twisted, bumpy tracks through scruffy desert plants, the light is more brown than golden, filled with sand as it is. The wind rages through rabbitbrush, through bones of ancient sofas thrown willy-nilly, through the feathers of a dying dove in the middle of the road. It's about 33 degrees. A stench hits the nostrils as I pass an isolated dairy farm where cows in pens have pounded all growing things to dark muck. The smell comes from two scummy, dark settling ponds. But where is Donkey Canyon? Must get up a ways, to where I can just make out the stark shape of a dump truck against the cloudy sky. Bumping across a couple of washes, along more trash-catching tracks that would probably take me to somebody's isolated trailer in another ten miles if I cared to follow, I finally crest the volcano where the truck sits. A sign points south to the county landfill. In the truck I make out the form of a city worker, sleeping. His vehicle fills the turnout. I can tell that the view of Donkey Canyon to the north is spectacular -- if you like miles of brightly lighted chaparral with dark, cloud covered mountains in the background. Black lava protrudes from the soft green of the saltbush community. Somehow the landfill contents seems to be skittering out of its appointed graveyard as I bump along in search of another vantage point. Trash bags, bottles, bygone teddies, dolls and beer cans shake, rattle and roll between the soaptree yuccas. Additional baby landfills have sprung up at various low spots across the land, as though the desert dwellers were too plain lazy to drive the extra mile to the real landfill, too cheap to pay a buck to dump their rubbish properly. "Magpie," sings the guy on the tape. "You know the West ain't never gonna die just as long as you can fly... Ah, Magpie, you're a pretty bird./You just wanna be free./I am you, you are me." No magpies visible over Donkey Canyon. It is clear that the West may not be dead, but it sure is in trouble. If 50 years ago discarded donkeys wandered through this harsh land of scouring winds and little grass or water, the last five decades have certainly not improved the place. Across the rolling volcanic slopes lies the advance of the city of Albuquerque -- which is, by the way, planning to annex this emptiness any year now. To make way for more... what? Progress? Right now progress is indicated by a few stick corrals, none occupied, various trailer homes in the throes of decay, derelict vehicles that haven't seen a tire in 30 years. A flock of crows bobs up and down, playing in wind currents, settling around some dead thing on the ground, swooping and soaring again, forever restless. The odd raven croaks and barges through the crow flock, wedge-shaped tail clear among so many plain curved ones. Magpie's relatives, all. At the bottom of a gravel wash I venture into the fierce wind for a few minutes. I want to imagine what it was like to be a donkey making a living out here. My hair may be as grey as the donkeys', but my life view is not as patient as theirs. Out of respect to their memory, I want to pick up the miles of rubbish scarring their tawny resting place. I listen for the sound of mournful braying echoing down the years. "Hee haw!" I shout against the wind. The only return above that roar is the motor of a dirt bike. In my mind's eye, a line of donkeys comes over a hill. Ears wave, heads high, little ones tucked close by their mothers. As the wind whirls grey shapes in the air, the donkeys come close, then vanish in a trick of whirling dirt. Up on the crest, the city worker has wakened from his nap. Must have eaten something. A paper cup flies out the window. So donkeys came and went through this canyon here, just as we people come and go through one another's lives. Seldom any reason given, rarely any opportunity perceived to stop and say, "It is good that you were here" while the chance is before us. So it is with this land that some people call barren wasted desert. Badlands. We treat it like something we don't really want, and pretty soon it has gone on to become something else. "Jacquima to Freno/He's an old Amansador./Still hangin' on, just about gone/Like the California Condor./He's been down to the rodeo ground/Seen him on the movie screen./Sometimes I think he's like America./Only see him in your dreams." Emily copyright 1997, Emily Lee Phillips