The Desert is Heartbreaker

With students being able to take classes remotely, the Gull Magazine sent reporter Abby Utley safely out into the field to connect with the strangest people she could find.

In her inaugural expedition, Abby chose to go out West. Was her inquiry a success? We’ll leave it up to you to decide.

Wake up, shower, get dressed, feed cat, feed self, go to work. This was one’s desert dweller’s morning routine. She really took to it, never forgetting one step. Little did she know that her day-to-day pleasures were cloaked in lies.

Sally Bench has lived in the Coachella Valley for 15 years. “Well, my soul has been here much longer,” she says, “I’ve been wandering these sacred grounds for centuries. I know every nook and cranny of this joint.” Her experience in the desert is vast, as she’s tried her luck in growing a variety of different fruits, trapping rats that live off half-eaten cans of cat food, inhabiting a cave for two years, and getting married to not one, but TWO coyotes. “The first one ended up being a jackass…but Maury,” she says “Maury is the spike to my cactus. Everytime I’m with him I hear Lin Manuel Miranda chanting ‘Love is Love.’”

Like the yearlong dry heat, life in the valley doesn’t change much. Routines go on interrupted. Per her mantra “I will overcome my enemies,” Sally spends each morning punching a cardboard representation of Kristen Stewart, who never responded to her Twilight fan letters in 2007 (she spent her following 43rd birthday in a pool of her own tears). Throughout the day, Maury will usually howl once for belly rubs and twice for more beer. Sally doesn’t mind though, because she knows at the end of the day she will be able to snuggle up to him in her onesie made of lizard skin with roughness reserved only for “tough motherfuckers who break teeth every year,” She went on to tell her bear fighting story for the third time.

“I’m sure some of your cute little readers want to know how I keep my skin so flawless out here,” Mrs. Bench said, “I just wield the sun in my bare ass hands and smear the energy on my face.”

When asked if anything exciting has happened in Mrs. Bench’s last 30 years in the desert, Bench recounted the story of how she and Maury set out into the desert to find her beloved Maniac. Maniac was the one who held Sally’s hair when she threw up Fireball, the one who walked her down the aisle at her wedding, the one who showed her the best falafel joint in Southern California, the one who told Sally about the birds and the bees. Not to mention how much the community leans on her when they need strength and guidance. Maniac, the golden cat. Where could she be? Surely she couldn’t be lost in the desert? All alone?

After ten weeks on the road with just a compass, Sally and Maury returned home with their hopes at an all time low. Sally couldn’t even touch her falafel sandwich. Every time she looked at it she heard Maniac meowing for extra tahini sauce. But when she got back home, the most recent paper’s headline read Neighborhood Cat Turns Out To Be Dense Tumbleweed. “My mind had turned a tumbleweed into a cat on account of all the psychedelics I do,” Sally said, “but he was still the best damn cat I’ve ever had.”

Two years later, the Coachella Valley desert region became a major oasis, with green grass, hot springs, and palm trees, Sally cried, and cried, and cried. Despite her grief, the legend of Maniac still remains “in the heart of damn near every individual in this joint.”