roundscape (revised)

[mnaz]

(from road notes, written in 2001-02)

Your approach is wrong. The road is where you land. There is no way to judge any town properly since the since the populace went mad. So it is written . . . you will go down, rest on a ledge and reach into a pocket for grains of exploded cosmos broken loose from pitted stars, and vow to stay until the closest one beats religion from you, and then move again. You followed the powerlines out from Vegas because you had to see where the juice came from, crackling on fluid sweeps of God's scorched earth. And you followed a rise from Death Valley past a fallen adit, where great wealth would be extracted from a poor slope. Faith knows no boundaries. And atop the rise you found a tranquil playa, and government sign: "Warning, unexploded ordinance."

Vegas was a flash burned in your eyelid. You blinked. No way to figure it, or the great arcs outside, graceful and stripped, deceptive as the Strip. Dry oceans encircle and isolate Vegas-- feed its high-watt farce, escapism. Southeast to Sonora, northeast to steep canyons, southwest to the Mojave, and north to the Great Basin . . . they are different states of mind. Sonoran expanse is flatter, rumpled by low crags, watered by monsoons and thick with palo verde and saguaro cactus silhouettes too human-- you're being watched. And steep cliffs are an old Saturday cartoon. You won't seek either place for now. The Great Basin is where quiet attains the next level-- deeply remote mountain ranges and dry lake universes. Your destination, but it may take awhile. You are captivated by the great arcs of Mojave.

From a crest the earth drops away, and faint shapes blend into the far side. You see the full depth of the arc; its dreamlike state. You want the dream, so you follow the arc. With some effort you could reach its detached promise. So you descend the arc and the far side strangely compresses, and faint shapes slowly release their hold on a dream state until, on rising up the far slope you can't tell what you sought, and you look back for clues, to the same delicate fringe you must have missed as you passed by . . . And you're easily swayed to adopt a Creator here. Picture the inspired author of it all scoop up dirt and smooth it in a long curve against a ridge-- the start of a defining masterwork before some unfortunate interruption. Likely one of his petulant children.

Death Valley is maximum roundscape, the heart of it-- prodigious, elegant sweeps. A scene every bit as nonsensical as steep red cliffs. You're convinced you could live there beside an unknown spring, where you'd rarely make it down-- due to elegant sweeps. Left to sunburnt philosophy. Lately you run on wide-angle fuel. You want a dry ocean, if within sight of the next new slope-- can't catch a view from a flat earth. Nor from a road that dives too deeply into a canyon-- might lose the thread. And you refuse to jam far slopes through narrow slots of truth. Pick up the sculpture instead. Raw shape is unsurpassed in the desert, though at times illusory over great spans. But accessible from most any point, unlike the evergray forest.

The great arcs are a strange subset of shape-- they bend space and twist you into their own warped logic, and it seems forever to the steeper fringe forms that drew you in to begin with, but don't ignore the curves. On the last one you found a lone beavertail cactus in bloom. Lush violet petals on a sheet of baked glare. You looked everywhere but couldn't find another. The naked slopes and ridges look and feel more ageless than anything seen before, coming out of the human crush, but rock tappers insist this scene is young on the timeless rock saga-- a few million years at best, which might explain its playful excesses.

The arcs shape much of lower Nevada and the Mojave, and some of Nevada's arcs rival Death Valley. You turned to look back on the slope to Goodsprings, and the far side was a preposterous ramp, nearly to the next summit; a senseless scene . . . As you go south, mountains recede into the arcs, hotter and flatter, where ghost ridges hover atop boiling lakes of heat and odd nubs of moon rock poke through the slopes. Scenes not to be taken too seriously . . . Not much left of mountains in the low desert at places like Lake Havasu, on the Arizona-California border, where locals wear tee shirts that say: "I survived a 128 in the shade." You met your parents there one time, on the lam from Dark City too. We caught a one-man country band at the Ramada Inn and drank two pitchers of beer. Mom and Dad always hated beer. It must be the fine arid light. Lucid madness. We sang the words.
"A man of means, by no means."
"King of the road."

At the Comet Motel on old 66 you savored neon rust-- alternative medicine to experiment with. Across the road sat a ghost motel nailed in split Nixon plywood, a '59 Comet hulk, blown dust and grass skeletons in fissured asphalt . . . You sipped a thoughtful bourbon. Time passed. Neon rust provided literary inspiration, but you couldn't find a pen. Checked the road bag, under the seats-- nothing. And you made a point to pack a big bag of pens for such an occasion . . . The road is a careless church of wander, and it stole your cheap pens. But it brings fine arid light, so make your peace. One more thoughtful bourbon . . . and you found the Bible in a drawer. How many road addicts have the Gideons saved? Genesis after Exodus. And beside the Bible was a pen, which you set to paper-- mostly gibberish the next morning. The window is short, so don't lose your cheap pens.

You drift back into Nevada . . . At Glendale, in a pleasant heat pit gulch, the motel is a low-slung affair with loud blue carpet. You can forget cosmic neon rust out here. And after grease and gasoline at the cafe next door you go deeper into the frontier, or so you imagine. Into Meadow Valley Wash, which is neither meadow nor valley. Maybe upstream. But here it is hard desert, not a trickle. And yet the wide corridor of crumble-dry ledges deep enough to expose red rock suggests big erosion, and you wonder, could this be the next great canyon? . . . You met a man once who said there is no way erosion alone could make a grand canyon, not in this climate. He was an obstinate sort, quite certain of his theory.
"But the climate was different then."
"It's crazy to think a stream could do that."
"But we're talking crazy time spans."
"Nah, there had to be a rift open up."
"A rift? How do you know?"
"The earth is expanding."
"Well yes, in places, but . . ."
"It happened more quickly than they say."
"But rock is two billion years old at the bottom."
"Yeah, all exposed when it opened up."
"And I don't believe in those billions."

So your lowly wash may indeed sit at the inception of greatness if expansion plays its cards right. Red rock thrust up and cracked open over there, but still diving under the desert here. Yet check back in a few eons-- or sooner. Yes, it's good to knock rock time's infinity down closer to our own glimpse, even if strata are untouchable, but it can't be that simple, right? . . . And these are the mind trails that get you through the badlands, your lazy geo-imaginings. The shape of each new scene, how it feels. And it's true, amid bare cliffs and mountains in your luxury of quiet, you might miss the pre-ancient violence and erosion that made it all, deaf to the old west ambush sites that settled or unsettled the land, the contentious outer skin of rock.

But you're forty miles out, and theory only takes you so far. Worry about dust and survival. Other pivotal theories come into question, like where is your point of no return? They built tracks along this road to the end of earth for some good reason, washed out in places. Lately you approach things from the wrong side, in the wrong way, but sometimes you need to gut it out . . . So you grind up-wash in your noise box, and it would make much more sense on a horse. Yet your pony struggles onto a flat as the canyon walls close in-- the schoolhouse at Elgin and remains of an apple orchard. And not far beyond is pavement, and a canyon filled with the bright tips of vivid orange and red manifestations-- as close to the great canyon as you'll come on this stretch of quiet, in this eon.

Pavement reached in the desert is both a triumph and shock, and comes with a price-- the next town. At Caliente you meet a preacher in sweat pants at a shabby motel where 93 bends west. He talks excitedly and offers you his card-- "Hiking for Jesus." And he has harsh words for the local Baptist Church, which doesn't share his zeal for Jesus-based travel via thumb. "I am one of them," he insists. You are fresh off the trail, coated in grime when he pops out of the next room. And later he knocks on the door, and for some reason you open it . . . For a man of the cloth he has an open-minded take on nudity, and shares his album of naked polaroids of a famous music artist. They grew up together. She wrote a song about him, and he gripes about her famous boyfriend. And you know what he wants. Stuck in Nevada with no car and sermon dates at hand in Oregon, he asks for a ride.

But what is wrong with Nevada? The land of eternal tan. For most passing through it means lead foot to pedal, pulled on by the next range, but move faster only to face distance-- the road may have you at its mercy. You can't see a picture at that speed, and each realm has a picture . . . Two-lane blacktop has its problems. Too fast. What does it look like from the thin etchings? From every angle? A foolish, tricky question. You can't get to it all, only more of it, but motion works against communion, so how to balance it? . . . You stop on an old mining offshoot and peel away layers of scene, where trails wander into hills and light and silence take hold. Space and sculpture. Gentle rise and fall, and steeper forms at the margins. A suspension of hours. You made it here. Now see if you can adjust your speed.

[the mingo]

Fuck! What a read
Thx Mark !

[mnaz]

thanks, mingo. i'll have to re-do the meadow valley wash parts-- that was a "composite sketch"-- i did travel "the summit" road, but not much of the wash itself, except the lower (southern) section (in a different trip)-- so i kind of made up the part between "the crossing" and north to elgin.

i may have to "re-route" this part of literary trip, starting at the south end of the wash (where all the red rock is), and north (about 80 miles) to caliente--- which might mean i have to lose the mormon mountains references-- but that's okay-- more direct focus on the red rock musin's, which is fine...

thanks for reading...

[mnaz]

there. that's better.

not perfect, but alright...