A Tent at the Oasis

Her people had mansions. Lawns, private woods, a French tutor. Then Elizabeth Crozer met a military ambulance driver at a friend's wedding. Bill Campbell went back to the Italian front, and mustard gas burned his lungs. She married him anyway, in nineteen twenty, against her family, and believed she'd been cut off. His health kept failing. A Pasadena doctor named Luckie had been sending gassed veterans to Twentynine Palms for the dry air, and housing was scarce out there. So in nineteen twenty-five, a woman raised on private woods pitched a tent at the Oasis of Mara, and Bill began to mend. Her father passed the next year. The man she thought had cut her off had set up a trust to keep her for life. Gathering firewood, she started picking up arrowheads. An old prospector, Bill McHaney, came by camp telling stories, and she took notes. Then she noticed the old camps sat beside water that wasn't there anymore. One summer a dry wash ran forty-eight hours, and it changed the ground so much she could hardly find her own trail. Sites follow vanished water, she said, and most of the field wasn't ready for it. Lake Tahoe took Bill in June of nineteen forty-four. She sold the house and moved away. The park says the rest of it plainly, and so will I. The Campbells didn't consult Native communities about their studies, or about what they carried off. They moved science forward "at the expense of living Native communities." What they carried off sat in park garage bays until nineteen ninety-three. She wrote a memoir, came back to see it published, and stayed the rest of her life. She called it The Desert Was Home. I believe her. People could have said the same at the Oasis of Mara a long while before that tent went up.