More Outpost Notes...
Posted: May 16th, 2005, 5:00 pm
Travel is fueled by will. The warrior class wants to come home just as its next generation invents a new far-flung campaign. People travel the most isolated and silent roads with high purpose; always in supplication to a higher power. The specifics of passage hardly matter.
I met a stubborn, silver-haired lady in a Death Valley bar, in a town which was once a good idea. Her truck broke down on the highway about nine miles south and nine years ago. She can't stand the place. She hates the baked-on dust and poker machines, except for that royal flush last summer. She still has her truck and two other derelict cars acquired for a song, yet no way to make it back across the Oregon line. I couldn't figure it. Neither could she.
I met a reverend from Montana at a decrepit motel on U.S. 93, where the canyon bends westward. He wore sweat pants and a Disney World tee-shirt, and he had no vehicle except for the Lord, as noted on his business card.... "Hitchhiking for Jesus". I was fresh off the trail, coated in a layer of grime and buzz when he popped out of the next room. He had harsh words for the local Baptist church, which apparently did not share his enthusiasm for Jesus-based transport via thumb. "I am one of them", he reiterated several times.
He had an open-minded approach to nudity for a man of the clergy, judging by his book of Polaroids.... not to imply anything sinister. He happened to grow up a close friend of a famous recording artist. She wrote a song about him.... they were always very close.... But it was his mastery of travel through will which impressed me. He had sermon dates in Oregon and Idaho within the week, though mired deep inside Nevada without a car.... irrational courage equal to faith.
I have my own passage of will.... my own mind trap.... a solace of empty space.... the back roads and trails. Some of them are barely passable without a dose of conviction, or bourbon. There is a lone prickly pear cactus out on the south basin road with top-floated petals of violet-pink, centered squarely in a baked gray volcanic field of strewn perma-glare. I walked for a while but could not find another. I recalled a lone Joshua tree I had seen on a high crag, up against an evergreen regiment, or another, much too low on the slope, lost in depths of chalk and useless heat. I am told that there is nothing out there in the spare glow. The trails dispute that notion.
But some of them dive into canyons and washes. I am not a canyon dweller by nature. I run on wide-angle solar fuel. I want to see more of the mosaic.... the whole tectonic nightmare disguised as basin and range peace.... the off-scale violence and sheer fault blocks, passed off as a soft visage of hard rock spine. None of it can touch me because I am a fraction of an instant.... invisible to the earth time clock. And I am under no delusion that I can tap into the epochs by mere touch of their upended strata.
A logic born of utter flatness must amount to perspective deficit.... no chance to catch a view from the hills. I put myself up against the hard corrugations and haze as a hopeless underdog. Nevada has little to do with a wager and flash of light. Rather, it is a high kingdom of dry sage perfume, leached minerals and beaten rock. There is a steep dropoff at its southern point, where dust-borne depressions are known to assume forms of a cloud, through which unexplained points of rock project unreasonably.... scenes which would be unrecognizable in next morning's clarity.... scenes not to be taken too seriously.
Nevada is best understood by attempting to cross one of its unnamed basins toward the nearest outpost.... a tiny cluster of green, engulfed in a pallette of tan and spotted topaz scrub, which will hold you off for awhile and send dust devils out to check on your progress. These are the reaches of unseen space which are responsible for a spontaneous dull ocher end of the earth poem which I fudged quite some time ago....
On a spare dusk horizon
lies a dull ocher rise,
which is the end of the earth.
No one knows what lies beyond,
for there is no profit in the trip.
I camped within sight of it,
caked in salt and silt smile,
swindled by a quiet light,
reborn in quiet dissipation
of pointless anticipation.
And so it goes.
I met a stubborn, silver-haired lady in a Death Valley bar, in a town which was once a good idea. Her truck broke down on the highway about nine miles south and nine years ago. She can't stand the place. She hates the baked-on dust and poker machines, except for that royal flush last summer. She still has her truck and two other derelict cars acquired for a song, yet no way to make it back across the Oregon line. I couldn't figure it. Neither could she.
I met a reverend from Montana at a decrepit motel on U.S. 93, where the canyon bends westward. He wore sweat pants and a Disney World tee-shirt, and he had no vehicle except for the Lord, as noted on his business card.... "Hitchhiking for Jesus". I was fresh off the trail, coated in a layer of grime and buzz when he popped out of the next room. He had harsh words for the local Baptist church, which apparently did not share his enthusiasm for Jesus-based transport via thumb. "I am one of them", he reiterated several times.
He had an open-minded approach to nudity for a man of the clergy, judging by his book of Polaroids.... not to imply anything sinister. He happened to grow up a close friend of a famous recording artist. She wrote a song about him.... they were always very close.... But it was his mastery of travel through will which impressed me. He had sermon dates in Oregon and Idaho within the week, though mired deep inside Nevada without a car.... irrational courage equal to faith.
I have my own passage of will.... my own mind trap.... a solace of empty space.... the back roads and trails. Some of them are barely passable without a dose of conviction, or bourbon. There is a lone prickly pear cactus out on the south basin road with top-floated petals of violet-pink, centered squarely in a baked gray volcanic field of strewn perma-glare. I walked for a while but could not find another. I recalled a lone Joshua tree I had seen on a high crag, up against an evergreen regiment, or another, much too low on the slope, lost in depths of chalk and useless heat. I am told that there is nothing out there in the spare glow. The trails dispute that notion.
But some of them dive into canyons and washes. I am not a canyon dweller by nature. I run on wide-angle solar fuel. I want to see more of the mosaic.... the whole tectonic nightmare disguised as basin and range peace.... the off-scale violence and sheer fault blocks, passed off as a soft visage of hard rock spine. None of it can touch me because I am a fraction of an instant.... invisible to the earth time clock. And I am under no delusion that I can tap into the epochs by mere touch of their upended strata.
A logic born of utter flatness must amount to perspective deficit.... no chance to catch a view from the hills. I put myself up against the hard corrugations and haze as a hopeless underdog. Nevada has little to do with a wager and flash of light. Rather, it is a high kingdom of dry sage perfume, leached minerals and beaten rock. There is a steep dropoff at its southern point, where dust-borne depressions are known to assume forms of a cloud, through which unexplained points of rock project unreasonably.... scenes which would be unrecognizable in next morning's clarity.... scenes not to be taken too seriously.
Nevada is best understood by attempting to cross one of its unnamed basins toward the nearest outpost.... a tiny cluster of green, engulfed in a pallette of tan and spotted topaz scrub, which will hold you off for awhile and send dust devils out to check on your progress. These are the reaches of unseen space which are responsible for a spontaneous dull ocher end of the earth poem which I fudged quite some time ago....
On a spare dusk horizon
lies a dull ocher rise,
which is the end of the earth.
No one knows what lies beyond,
for there is no profit in the trip.
I camped within sight of it,
caked in salt and silt smile,
swindled by a quiet light,
reborn in quiet dissipation
of pointless anticipation.
And so it goes.
