"Mirage"
Posted: December 27th, 2009, 7:03 pm
-- re-imagining some of the images I played with last summer...
Black rock Country sits lower than most of Nevada’s high desert, more bleak and dry, mountains a little more worn down from time rain, though rain itself hardly touches down. Root for a rebel, root for a cloud. Too many times it tries to touch down, turned away in dissipated shrouds. When rain comes it is clumsy with vengeance. Yet they still run a few cows, not sure how. You can picture her on one of those desert gone-scapes, on a cloud. She sees far peaks; they seem so far yet trouble comes. Root for one of the strays to get loose, lost in the next valley or two, picked up by the next road. You can only make it so far.
On the playa you have small rocks the size of boulders. You have no sense of anything, only blinding span. It’s unhealthy. The air is too thin, climate too dry, corridors too long and burnt, prospects too wide and fruitless, a blank sheet with bumps on the edge, belly up to black spiked constellations. What if you had to make a living in pure quiet? Quiet doth not a living make, but noise. You find little noise in the desert, conclude no living is being made. Most of it is expired cattle country. If you go into the highlands weather can change quickly, malevolent sky on backlit amber, blackened ridge to rim the battlefield. It can’t thwart every storm up that high. It comes quickly, no time to run, cover your head.
You remember a stretch where it came together, then a trick of geology, some two thousand feet, sent you back into the valley to regroup. You can take that hill! You could see a hundred miles past the end of your nose, your prose. You hate landmarks. It was better with no landmarks. They get a little pompous in their pointing, in telling tales and sticking up so high, they shrink the horizon and that ain’t right. It was better when the desert had no landmarks, or water or silver and gold for that matter. Seems an endless problem of extraction, distraction. They give too much away, where sage waves crash on the shore of burnt buttes, undistinguished, unglamorous, into some magic get-lost badlands. If you spot a chestnut mustang in a vale he lends color and scale. Magnificent color. Healthy and muscular. Feral horses are mind-bending. How could they survive badlands so majestically?
Tale of a compound mirage: On Kumiva Valley floor, under the Blue Wing Mountains, I approach a deep blue lake—an image strong enough to overrule rational thought for miles. I see a lake, not a mirage. My blue lake slowly, stubbornly recedes to white, leaving room for speculation at each point. Perhaps rare late-season rain filled part of the playa. Now I see vehicles making dust on the playa. No, only dust devils. Closer now. No, one of them must be a truck—slender plume sent up from a black object. Closer. No, it was a dust devil. The black object is a rock, no longer so absurdly showcased. It was never what it seemed, soil underneath, ridges and heat waves. It was beautiful, intoxicating.
Black rock Country sits lower than most of Nevada’s high desert, more bleak and dry, mountains a little more worn down from time rain, though rain itself hardly touches down. Root for a rebel, root for a cloud. Too many times it tries to touch down, turned away in dissipated shrouds. When rain comes it is clumsy with vengeance. Yet they still run a few cows, not sure how. You can picture her on one of those desert gone-scapes, on a cloud. She sees far peaks; they seem so far yet trouble comes. Root for one of the strays to get loose, lost in the next valley or two, picked up by the next road. You can only make it so far.
On the playa you have small rocks the size of boulders. You have no sense of anything, only blinding span. It’s unhealthy. The air is too thin, climate too dry, corridors too long and burnt, prospects too wide and fruitless, a blank sheet with bumps on the edge, belly up to black spiked constellations. What if you had to make a living in pure quiet? Quiet doth not a living make, but noise. You find little noise in the desert, conclude no living is being made. Most of it is expired cattle country. If you go into the highlands weather can change quickly, malevolent sky on backlit amber, blackened ridge to rim the battlefield. It can’t thwart every storm up that high. It comes quickly, no time to run, cover your head.
You remember a stretch where it came together, then a trick of geology, some two thousand feet, sent you back into the valley to regroup. You can take that hill! You could see a hundred miles past the end of your nose, your prose. You hate landmarks. It was better with no landmarks. They get a little pompous in their pointing, in telling tales and sticking up so high, they shrink the horizon and that ain’t right. It was better when the desert had no landmarks, or water or silver and gold for that matter. Seems an endless problem of extraction, distraction. They give too much away, where sage waves crash on the shore of burnt buttes, undistinguished, unglamorous, into some magic get-lost badlands. If you spot a chestnut mustang in a vale he lends color and scale. Magnificent color. Healthy and muscular. Feral horses are mind-bending. How could they survive badlands so majestically?
Tale of a compound mirage: On Kumiva Valley floor, under the Blue Wing Mountains, I approach a deep blue lake—an image strong enough to overrule rational thought for miles. I see a lake, not a mirage. My blue lake slowly, stubbornly recedes to white, leaving room for speculation at each point. Perhaps rare late-season rain filled part of the playa. Now I see vehicles making dust on the playa. No, only dust devils. Closer now. No, one of them must be a truck—slender plume sent up from a black object. Closer. No, it was a dust devil. The black object is a rock, no longer so absurdly showcased. It was never what it seemed, soil underneath, ridges and heat waves. It was beautiful, intoxicating.