the way point

One of the last Joshua Trees I stopped for was keeping company with a road sign.

Both were tall, sun-faded, and oddly bent in the middle—as if the desert had twisted them into agreement. The sign warned of a winding road ahead, its painted black curves echoing the tree’s limbs in a way that felt accidental but deliberate.

Heading towards the exit, the trees started to gather in numbers, each one shaped like it had been sketched by a different hand. Some leaned toward the sun, others bent away from it, all of them accenting the pale sand like punctuation marks no one had bothered to decode.

This was the last place I lingered before following California State Route 62 West out of the park toward Palm Springs. The trees didn’t try to match or mirror each other, and maybe that’s why they stayed with me as the road unwound—crooked shapes standing where they pleased, perfectly at home in the land that made them.