Page 10 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Now that Nora was properly caffeinated, and no less hesitant to return home and see what had left those footprints, she decided to hit the library to kill some time and see what she could find.
The library was a cooled trailer stacked with secondhand books and humming computers. The librarian was a quiet man with tortoiseshell glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. He greeted her with a nod. “We get researchers out here a lot. Bigfoot, UFOs, ley lines. You name it.”
Nora scanned old newspapers on the dusty microfiche, finding plenty: missing hikers, mysterious lights, massive tracks that no one could identify. A conspiracy theorist’s dream. As the articles became more recent, a name jumped out at her. Dr. Orin Vale.
DESERT SUN BULLETIN
June 1985
“The Yucca Man: Desert Myth or Military Menace?”
For decades, residents of Southern California’s high desert have whispered about a creature that roams the washes and canyons between Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. Known locally as the Yucca Man, the figure is described as towering, upright, and cloaked in coarse hair—something between a man, a bear, and a shadow.
While many dismiss it as folklore or heatstroke-induced hallucination, some of the most compelling reports come not from eccentrics or cryptid hunters, but from the military itself.
In 1971, a Marine on guard duty at the edge of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms reported being approached by a massive, silent figure with glowing red eyes. He claimed it moved unnaturally fast and radiated intense heat. After blacking out, he was found unconscious by a fellow patrol. According to unofficial sources, the barrel of his service rifle had been bent nearly in half.
Over the years, the creature has earned a litany of nicknames:
The Mojave Bigfoot. The Borrego Sandman. The Sierra Highway Devil.
In older Indigenous oral traditions, figures known as Takwis—“hairy devils”—were said to test travelers’ resolve, appearing in liminal places at moments of transformation or weakness.
Asked about the phenomenon, local cultural anthropologist Dr. Orin Vale offered this:
“The desert is full of stories people try to rationalize. But the truth is, something’s been walking this land longer than our maps have marked it. You don’t have to believe it to respect it.”
Skeptics point to dehydration, high magnetic fields near quartz outcroppings, and the brain’s tendency to seek patterns in chaos. But longtime locals insist the pattern has already been drawn.
“The desert doesn’t invent things,” Vale added. “It remembers. We’re the forgetful ones.”
HIGH DESERT RECORD
August 1992
“Search for Missing Hiker Rekindles Yucca Man Tales”
Dr. Orin Vale, a local cultural anthropologist and longtime resident of the high desert, stands at the edge of the wash where the search party last saw footprints. “Out here, stories have a way of sticking around,” he says, his voice low but thoughtful. “The Yucca Man… he’s part of the land’s memory, whether you believe in him or not.”
He shifts his gaze to the horizon, quiet for a moment. “I’m not saying he took that hiker,” he adds carefully. “But sometimes the desert keeps its secrets, and sometimes those secrets look a lot like an old legend come to life.”
Each article that bore her grandfather’s name whispered a different version of the same truth: the desert was alive, and it didn’t forget.
She read his words carefully, tracing them like a map through time.
“The desert remembers everything,” he said in one.
“Sometimes the land doesn’t ask—it claims,” in another.
“We think we’re alone out here. We’re not.”
But it wasn’t just the desert he was talking about. Nora could see that now. She recognized the rhythm of his phrasing, the echo of the old stories he used to tell her as a child, about spirits in the stone, about how the land could listen if you were quiet enough.
“The land doesn’t belong to us,” he wrote in an opinion piece. “It’s not property. It’s kin.”
It wasn’t superstition. It was his own kind of science. A reverence too big for data.
Nora closed her eyes, feeling her chest tighten. Her grandfather’s beliefs weren’t just old desert superstition. They were part of who he was. And maybe, she thought, they were part of her too.
