By Cyndi Goddard
Silver Solas Award-winner in the Travel and the Environment category
In March 2023 on a solo road trip through the high Mojave Desert, I heard Bono’s voice. It was soft and lilting, his manner thoughtful as he responded to the hosts of the podcast my personal DJ — Spotify — had spun up for me. It was a prescient selection, given that I was headed to the national park named for the plant Bono had made into an international icon. To U2 fans, the story of how the singer came to name the band’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree is legendary.
In December 1986 during a photoshoot in the American Southwest, Bono learned that the Joshua tree got its name from Mormons crossing the desert. Upon hearing that the tree’s outstretched limbs reminded the Mormons of the Old Testament prophet with his arms raised in supplication, Bono decided to name the band’s latest album The Joshua Tree.
When the record was released in March 1987, the back sleeve featured a black-and-white photograph of the band standing before a lone, twisted Joshua tree in a barren desert. The album sold over 25 million copies worldwide, catapulting the band to international stardom and embedding the desert plant in our communal consciousness.
Hearing Bono speak took me back to November 1987, to the impromptu concert U2 staged one Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco’s Financial District. Propelled by rumor and the sound of music bouncing off high-rise towers, a crowd of over 20,000 poured into Justin Herman Plaza, I among them. We were united by, ignited by, the gift of the unexpected. There must have been some pushing as we pressed into the plaza, but I do not remember it that way. I remember the crowd moving as one, energy spiraling up to meet the music, as if we, all of us, were suspended in a moment of perfect synchrony.
I had forgotten that day. In the thirty-six years since, I had become a mother, loved and lost a cherished partner and moved from the city to a small town surrounded by redwoods where I learned to hold my joys and grief in the grace of nature.
“Play The Joshua Tree,” I said. Spotify obliged and my small car was filled with the anger and the ache of an era. There were songs that spoke of loss and emptiness, open spaces and longing.
Although I felt the sense of isolation and a bareness in the music, around me I was seeing life and renewal. Spring was arriving in the High Mojave.
That winter had brought unprecedented freezes and floods, tree-toppling winds and snow at elevations that had been dry for decades. The conditions that caused chaos for humans and human-built things brought relief to a land that had gone too long with too little precipitation, too few freezes. These conditions were exactly what the Joshua trees needed to bloom.
The haunting “With or Without You” took me through the line at the gate to Joshua Tree National Park. A few miles into the park I lost cell and Spotify coverage but by then I was fully focused on the otherworldly landscape of Lost Horse Valley and its wealth of Joshua trees. Seeing the tall, majestic trees spread across the valley like foot soldiers on the march, my internal soundtrack switched from the melodies of U2 to Ravel’s “Bolero,” with its driving, martial cadence.
I learned later that the largest Joshua trees in the national park are over forty feet tall and are thought to be more than one hundred fifty years old, and that the trees I was looking at were the Yucca brevifolia, which is a separate species from the eastern Yucca jaegeriana.
I had planned a hike to Lost Horse Mine for another day. I had not yet done my research, had not bought the books, studied the maps nor talked to the park rangers. That afternoon was to have been a recon mission but I found I could not stay passively inside my car. I had to get out into the desert landscape, to see the trees and their white clumped blossoms close up. As I climbed a mound of rocks that appeared to have been stacked by a giant, I knew little about the unique biology of the surrounding Joshua trees.
I did not know, for instance, that the plant is not, in fact, a tree. It is a monocot, a member of the asparagus family and closely related to the agave. Since they are not true trees, even the tallest Joshua trees do not form rings as they grow, which means that the only way to estimate a particular plant’s age is by its size.
I did not yet appreciate how fortunate I was to be among so many blooming trees. The Joshua only flowers in specific conditions and it only branches after it flowers. The tall stalks with their iconic uplifted limbs high on the trunk were a testament to warm, rainless winters.
Standing on the towering jumbo rocks, looking out over the valley, I was seeing a brigade that had come of age during drought.
The story that Bono learned was not the only legend about the Mormons in the California desert. Some say it was not Joshua in his guise as prophet that the Mormons saw, but Joshua when he was the warrior leading an invading army.
From my vantage point I could relate to that version of the tale. The trees, like Joshua’s warriors, went on and on, marching into the distance, past the rolling hills, beyond the horizon, through history, to a time before humans set foot upon the desert.
Before miners used its limbs as fuel for steam engines, before settlers built fences and corrals from its trunks, the native Cahuilla worked the plant’s leaves into baskets and consumed its flowers and seeds. They called it hunuvat chiy’a and humwichawa.
Humans are not the only animals to feed on the Joshua tree. It is a keystone species. Its branches and leaves create cooler, moister microclimates that shelter desert wildlife from the summer heat. Its fallen leaves provide homes for animals like the desert night lizard. Animals and insects eat its flowers, seeds and fruit. Dozens of bird species nest in its leaves, as do the black beetle and yucca moth. Each of these creatures either feeds or feeds upon others, creating a food web that encompasses the entire desert.
And that web depends upon a relationship unique in the natural world — that between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth. The yucca moth is the Joshua tree’s only pollinator, and the moth lays her eggs only on the blossoms of the Joshua tree, and the seeds of the Joshua tree fruit are the only food source of the yucca moth’s caterpillars.
Like the Joshua tree, the yucca moth is unique. Unlike other pollinating insects that have long tongues, the yucca moth does not. Instead, it has tentacle-like fronds around its mouth. While almost all pollination is accidental, the yucca moth’s is quite purposeful.
The female moth, after mating with the male on the Joshua tree’s blossoms, collects the pollen from the flower’s anthers and shapes it into a large lump, which she carries under her chin, held in place by those tentacle-fronds. She flies to other Joshua trees, searching for a blossom in the right stage and that has no other eggs. Only when she locates such a plant does she lay her eggs on the flower’s seeds. She then goes to the stigma and carefully deposits some of the pollen from under her chin. This ensures that there will be enough fruit to feed her larvae.
Without the yucca moth pollinating it, the Joshua tree would never bear fruit. Without the Joshua tree’s flowers, the moth could not reproduce.
The two different species of Joshua trees are pollinated by two distinct yucca moths. Tegeticula synthetica pollinates the western Joshua and T. antithetica the eastern one. The physiological differences between the two moths precisely match the differences in the blossoms of the two Joshua trees. The distance between the blossoms’ stigma and ovule is the same as the difference in body size of the moths. I find the precision of this breathtaking. Scientists call it “symbiosis” and point to it as an example of co-evolution.
As my knowledge of the life cycle of the Joshua tree deepened, my internal soundtrack evolved from the raw ache of U2’s desert songs through Ravel’s militant surge to the complexity of a Tchaikovsky pas de deux. The synchronicity between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth is as awe-inspiring as the greatest ballet. The two are as intimately bound as dancers held aloft by their partners, each dependent on the strength and timing of the other.
This intricate web of connectedness requires not only insect and plant, but weather and climate, just as a ballet needs composers, choreographers and dancers.
I left Lost Horse Valley before nightfall so did not glimpse the flutter of moths around the heavy white blossoms of the Joshua trees. I had to imagine the partners locked in their dance, moving to a melody only they could feel, the pace quickening and the moths responding, adapting, improvising, reaching for each other, their bodies trembling as they strained to remain in sync in an ever-hotter, drier, more crowded world.
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Cyndi Goddard’s travel adventures include six months sailing a 37-foot racer-cruiser from San Francisco Bay down the west coast of Mexico to Acapulco, a trip she chronicled in Sail, Cruising World, Sailing, Latitude 38 and regional sailing publications. In addition to sailing, Cyndi scuba dives, runs a small business consulting firm, practices yoga and kayaks. She has bungee jumped in Costa Rica, paddled Lago di Garda, Italy, explored wrecks and reefs in the Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean, saluted the sun from a dock in Puerto Rico, and presented forecasts at board meetings. She has attended the Community of Writers summer workshop twice, as well as The Writers Hotel, Kauai and Book Passage Mystery writers conferences. She is a member of Left Coast Writers, Sisters in Crime, and Mystery Writers of