exile (revised . . .)

[mnaz]

Summer is coming on, and you will fulfill a vow to spend a whole day on the lake in late June. Bring swim trunks. Except the lake is a white-hot flat and it's a hundred-fifteen in the shade. But why? . . . Out of spite. One time in the damp pall of late June in Dark City you pictured a pointless desert trail in heat that demands submission, and vowed to go there. That's it really, your reason for exile. Or it was . . . Now it's the open prospects unfolding. Mesas, bluffs, peaks, and the great arcs. Curves and how they warp perception. From the edge of beige you can be there in no time, on free-roaming trails with no cattle fences, the one true gift of Vegas living. Sure, we have the usual military rope-offs, but mostly pure sculpture.

But sculpture is harder-edged when you penetrate it-- what's left of its dire rat and snake-infested ruins, and nagging thoughts of some psycho laying in wait if you went too far up the wrong canyon. And why must lakes perish? . . . The shore is golden pale overlain by smoke brown, and spent mines named in their finders' dry humor dot the slopes . . . Eden Mine, Wandering Boy Mine, Liberty Pit, Queen of the West, Total Wreck, Sphinx Glory Hole . . . And now comes the heat. You counted on wind, but wind is a trickle, so you place the truck across it-- ninety degrees to a hundred-fifteen and water jug too hot to taste, an act of futility. But it's a clean heat, unlike that swamp-thick green-belt heat.

You had imagined slow motion cognition at high noon, like drunken dust devils that can't wobble up the far slope, or some kind of trance, or even induced visions. But it remains a place where enough time spent unveils the pieces from which the mothership is built. Each canyon outline, formation and pebble literally pops out, piece by piece, from what was an indistinct dry ocean an hour before, though the lower strata can't stand still . . . No strange visions yet. Your own meltdown is more than anticipated. Desert air is dangerous. It wicks moisture from pores by stealth generally, but dry heat robs openly . . . you might not make the horizon on foot. The folly of your spite. This is no place to make a point. Seek shelter and show humility, recede like tiny, curled-up leaves on a creosote bush.

Hard to imagine any creature living in this fiery land. Maybe later, past summer's inferno. You spotted some yucca by the road in late April, their stalks cracked and dried. Was there ever much color here? But life, though sparse, is not absent from the blazing low arcs. Mostly underground now, or in the tenuous shade of terrain. Rodents and scorpions in their holes, and snakes and lizards beneath ledges. The noon sun would kill them. You hole up in your metal contraption too, though you could fry things on it . . . Only a vulture or two are out, flight-cooled over the worst of it. They trace unseen air streams, hover on thermals and circle in widening arcs, rising impossibly with few strokes, only a subtle rocking of black wings. A repulsive genius of efficient motion, soaring, watching. But at this hour, for what?

No creature would subject itself to this high noon beatdown with undue exertion except maybe the pupfish. You heard they still twitch and dart in shrinking pools of hot brack a few ridges west, which must be a weird nature legend. But you looked it up in Ned's book of animals . . . "Length, 2 - 3 inches. Females and non-breeding males are tan. Breeding males are iridescent blue and aggressively defend their territory into summer" . . . Right. Sex, here? You've seen this place from all angles, patient and dead, sun waste refuge. Ageless rock as it was before breath. Erosion or explosion, the epochs ignore you, but you had to see it firsthand.

Your perception slows, as you knew it would, drugged on silence and heat. Not wise to face them both at once. And as you slip into stasis a truck comes up from behind, out of nowhere, and you turn around. "What the . . .?" And blam! A dust devil ambush, no truck. You'll never get all the dust out of here . . . Sun lifts another tick and dust devils cease. Dead, killer heat. You grab a bottle from the cooler and write in a notebook that sticks to your arm, but it's no time for whiskey unless it could open another window. You'll see it through. A vow is a vow.

~

Summer is here. The desert's winter. You trade sculpture for air-cooled blight more often . . . Three days in the belly of the Whore of Babylon. They have discount liquor warehouses in that twisted kingdom for godssake, acres of booze . . . At first it's all cool relief and excitement. This time you'll catch the X-rated hypnotist at the Nugget, you swear. But as the air box drones the bare horizon starts to pull, and a sense of urgency hits. Sometimes the glow is too much and you shoot back into the furnace on a Trail of Lost Suburbs toward some jeep trail, a "shortcut." Which dies halfway up a fiery slope. And then a little boiled bourbon. You forgot ice, but only the weak of character would refuse hot sour mash at junctions betwixt trail and boulder, whiskey and nausea, a city of gold and freedom. There's a field of brown haze behind, and rumors of wild wealth beneath . . . Don't turn back.

Odd how you roam the desert until the orbit around Vegas decays and you fall in, only to be ejected again. Time to fly north for the winter . . . on 95 this time, to higher ground. You're moving too fast, but when ejected from Vegas it is generally with velocity, so settle in . . . Observe desert curves and their deception. Basins tilt, ridges rise and fall, and rise yet higher, eye level tricks from each crest. Horizon is always higher than it appeared, and six-thousand feet high looks a lot like three in the Sierra Nevada's starved rain shadow . . . A thousand miles of bare sweeps and a brothel every hundred miles. Rise and fall. Nevada breathing.

But it makes no sense to race space, so you turn off near the Bonnie Claire site and stray beside a dry lake-- contours of nothing but the far side. And then a sip of whiskey and lunch on the tailgate, as two chestnut mustangs watch from the next rise and lend astonishing color and scale to the drab, get-lost badlands. You were sure your noise would dispatch them, but they held fast . . . Majestic spirits, still as rock until a flick of tail. How to possibly reckon their majesty in this scarcity? Their utter stillness? Wild horses live to be in motion . . . They seem a supernatural fluke, a manifestation. Old warriors standing against heat and glare.

Did you happen onto an old battleground? You've heard stories of such places, where proud, ragged ghosts make their rounds and touch off whirlwinds from the next rise with a flick. Places where many psyches glimpsed their last flash of earth, and for some even the lowliest patch of dirt, which took on irrational importance in the intensity, was set to a great light, and after-images may linger . . . But it's hard to imagine any particular spot as haunted in the desert's free expanse, where even star fields are much clearer and accessible. Too many places to explore.

The warrior mustangs watch. You've met wild horses before, but never so dead still. On a trail to the Delamar site, eight of them ambled before your truck, amused by the struggle and whine of your machine. They turned and watched at times, and pretended clumsiness until bolting over rock and ravine with cinematic agility . . . Wild burros live out here too, descendants of old prospectors' pack animals. With their low, gray build they don't stand out but blend in, and seem to appear out of nowhere like ghosts when you're preoccupied with changing faces of rock and sky. They seem a better fit for this great sparseness, less theatrical . . . And the highway is safely distant over the hardpan. You stare vacantly into temples of isolation and motion mania begins to subside.

~

But why? There really is no good explanation for the desert's pull, though a few grizzled vets have tried. Like Ed Abbey, who knew these places, and who and what lives here, and how to survive it on foot or on your belly. A man who railed against paved roads into nature's heart, lest we stab nature in the heart. He had a theory, though incomplete, of spaces that tug at us: ocean, mountain and desert. But of the three, why desert? . . . Well, ocean pulls most strongly at its shore; beyond that it is a medium of tedium. And the weather is often bad on a high mountaintop, and the trip rushed. Get there and get back. No time to ponder the view, savor the triumph. Nowhere to go but down. But the desert's uncluttered run promises journey and destination at each point. Well it promises something . . . and as Ed noted, if you like horses they're not of much use on a mountainside, or a blue ocean.

A few ridges west he tasted acid in Death Valley and saw the shock and rapture of living earth. Saw the mountain rim as a mile-high mass of pink lungs "breathing at me for chrissake," and saw the stars in a viscous dance. As he wrote: "God is the Great Night Spider, and Cassiopeia was a silver blue firefly snared alive in quilted folds of the cobweb sky." Even space was ensnared. Yet one might see deeper into the cosmic scatter if not for unfortunate side affects-- in Ed's case shrinking to a tiny pilot in the eyesockets of a giant robot, and joints grinding like glass. He fought the trip, then satirized it-- not against any one vignette you suspect, but the brazen short cut of it all. No short cut to wisdom, he concluded.

~

As you look back to the haunted rise, you notice the mustangs are gone . . . So you close the tailgate and grind along the far side. An hour passes, maybe two, and the junction comes into view. You see the snaking boxes again, and hear a faint, lumbering shift and whine, as truckers gear down for the grade. You should go back; there is still time. You risk the fever again, but you need that road. Only a few miles more.

A fine ramp lies in sight, and rumor has it there's a trail to the top. So you look both ways and gun it, but which mile marker? Between centerline and earth, in that precarious zone, let the truckers pass. You squint and peer for a thin scrawl to the west, but everything is farther than it should be. At last you see it, into its own vacant logic. And then a perilous U-turn and plunge from paved grade. Quite a departure. Centerline was a space-time artery, and now, space. You start across a flat studded with Mojave yucca, and it's hard to express the possibility of a new path to the outer rim.

As the slope rises more steeply your coordinates simply rotate on the arc. The snaking boxes recede and crawl more slowly until out of range, where they never existed, and you can't tell if you're climbing until ridges flow out in lustrous waves. No sound, no scale. Indeterminate space compressed to a point of now. But it won't fool you like before. As boundless as it seems, it may all be crossed by encyclopedic armies of doctrine, and the bully pulpit will bully. No place to hide in the billions of light years. They say you made some sort of deal when you came in, based on the position of everything in space, and thus, no purity of free will. But you'll simulate it for now.

[creativesoul]

this is so esquite- i feel the place with the voyage- it is brillant- the robbing of the pores! loved it-- peace

[mnaz]

thanks, creativesoul. yeah, i dig this one too ....