Elaine Campbell

After several years in New York theatrics, I decided to learn what the “civilian” world was like, and enrolled at New York University to study psychology and literature. Upon my prior life, I never looked back.

Then it was career time, and I engaged in several, being a substitute teacher at day-care centers in Brooklyn, having various and sundry jobs to make ends meet, and a lengthy tenure at a New York book publishing firm.

My real life began when I eventually returned to my roots and found L.A. to be not the same city that I left. I moved to a rural area of the Colorado Desert and began a ten year adventure of marvels, for I shared my home and my life with an assortment of desert birds, animals, rodents and plants on an intimate basis. Windstorms became a welcome drama, and flashfloods exciting if viewed from the comfort of indoors.

My evening visitors included raccoon and coyote. Round-the-clock ones were jackrabbit, cottontail, the Gambel’s quail with (in the spring) their covey, desert tortoise slowly making its way across the desert floor, and the roadrunner, so adept at hiding its young that it is rare to see one until it is full-grown.

Plants included the formidable Cholla with needle-sharp spines, Prickly Pear (the most short-lived of all cacti, its life span rarely exceeding 20 years), the Mesquite, which looks like an unpruned peach tree, and one of my favorites, the Palo Verde, whose trunk, every leaf, every limb, twig and thorn is apple green. I must also mention the Creosote which has a pungent oily scent and was used for medicinal purposes by the Desert Cahuilla Indians. I once boiled a small branch in water to cure a cold. It worked!

I also shared my home domestically with a dog, a cat, a guinea pig, a hamster and a rat. It has been my good fortune to know all these.

Though I now live in a residential area adjacent to Palm Springs, I make frequent visits back to my old home and believe one day in the not too distant future I will return with my chinchilla, Danny Boy, my Senegal parrot, Tyler, and an assortment of dogs and cats who might find it to their liking.