journey to a jumping mountain (revised)

[mnaz]

Mountains jump in Nevada. Literally. They lie still for millennia, build up stress and jump in one terrible instant on faults between mountain and basin. A peculiar rumor you heard. Dwell in the far recesses of open rock long enough and you pick up these sort of tall tales . . . So you're sitting on a campstool one evening, counting ravens or clouds, writing a disposable manifesto under the influence of silent immense, as the mighty ridge darkens from a wave of tan and taupe to more distinct forms of brown, from sorrel to puce and everything between. Then a sudden rumble of deep energy-- a booming locomotive at shocking speed, as the base unzips and fissures approach and spill your drink.

A sixteen foot gap opened in the scrub between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley for more than twenty miles in 1915 according to reliable sources. Not epic as these things go, though fearsome enough in a random hundred-year window on rock time. You learned this while camped in a ranch cabin on the Oregon border-- which you heard about at another outpost down the road-- "There's no sign, just knock on the door" . . . And as you settled in, to the sound of restless cattle and quail, you grabbed a copy of Basin and Range-- John McPhee's geologically-rigorous tribute to the Great Basin, and when you read about the sixteen foot gap you had to go see this thing.

So you turned southwest toward Reno on the Humboldt River Basin, a long trek over a wasteland of dry lakes and dust devils, and traces of fragile green here and there. One of a few noteworthy rivers in this dry and mighty kingdom, which despite their promise, never make it out of here. They coalesce lazily if at all for most of the year from far-flung streams with names like Burnt Creek that may or may not flow in the green-flecked notches of bare peaks, and then gurgle a few hundred miles at best, only to expire in some bright, dusty sump, blocked by myriad granite walls in the west from their ocean return . . . Four lanes of divided highway to nowhere. To Lovelock, Nevada. At the end of the Humboldt's doomed run, where the California Trail split up. Follow the Carson or Truckee Rivers from there, both of which meet a similar fate, and try your luck.

Lovelock has a McDonald's, but not much of an economy. The Humboldt, before it dies in the desert, and a few of its offshoot canals sustain a patchwork of dirt farms, a few dirt cheap motels and a casino or two in disrepair. But they say a new prison is coming, with plenty of jobs. Good for them. The incarceration industry to the rescue . . . You got a room for 21 dollars with a rattling fan, and conversed with the owner in the parking lot. He looked skyward and spoke of celestial eras, of things in transition to the final scene, things overwhelming in scope and scale. He shared his faith, and you thanked him. You should have more faith.

The next day you drove over West Humboldt Range and made the long trek across Buena Vista Valley's shining sea, and you saw no one. Okay, maybe one pickup truck, but that's it. You anticipated a long grind, off the main ranching road, and possibly a long hike. But to your astonishment you could see the sixteen foot gap from the east slope of Stillwater Range, across the basin-- this obscure myth of geology you had to come see for yourself, yet doubted you could actually verify on your impulsive fool's trek once you arrived-- right there, a long, thin scar, off to even greater oblivion. McPhee told the truth.

But how is such a thing possible? . . . They say the crust here is a series of tilting behemoths on deep fractures, agitated by the white-hot mantle beneath-- the rock engine. The whole thing is pushing up, and sinister cauldron-springs boil through the margins and cracks . . . And mountains jump. As they have for eight million years. Mere tykes on the rock clock. Not even a decent foothill on the lead faults-- scarps are still too fresh, in a severely battered way. The peaks rise about as fast as wind and water dismantle them, about an inch per century. So Tobin Range gained a twenty thousand year reprieve when it spilled your drink.

But those are pointless numbers, aren't they? The type geologists rattle off, mainly to keep us a blip on their chart. It is too easy to play the meaningless time game . . . A hundred years of human insanity. Six thousand years of fuzzy history. Two hundred thousand years of prehistory. Eight thousand thousand year old toddler mountains jumping. And on from there, deeper into the echo chamber. They say when Oquirhh Range jumped it lifted the remains of sixty million year old "ancestral mountains." A wholly inappropriate denigration. No way to describe mountains, for godssake.

And while this sort of time madness is a relatively new science, we chased a space conundrum for centuries . . . You, a speck on a sage sweep, itself a fleck on a rock circling a star, itself a speck on the span to that star, itself a speck on the span to the next nearest star, itself a particle of galaxy, in turn a particle of near cosmos, in turn a particle of far universe, and all less than a particle of infinity as you zoom out. And what is beyond that? Yes, we all try the space riddle at some point . . . It's funny how earth time is not unlike cosmic time. So they say. Yet earth space is but a particle of cosmic particles. Like that solar system scale model in sixth grade: earth is a marble, and the sun is out thousands of feet, twenty feet high. And sun is one ordinary star. Galaxies finish off the riddle, innumerable suns immune to pathetic description.

But that is an old brain quirk from way back. Don't take it so literally. Everything exists in infinity and coexists with it. Similar to how "that which cannot be divided" coexists with the infinity of you, or so you imagine . . . Oh jeez not again, the oldest Zen trick in the book-- everything and nothing from a point on both. Time, space and origin. Common riddles by now, doodled and dwelled on by too many brains.

Farther south mountains don’t jump but sink into their own waste, and weather down closer to eye level, on playful, deadly roundscapes and searing washes where the dregs collect and fry, where rogue seers with wild eyes railed against idolatry and foretold of cities in ruins, of dead land and dust, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, the sum of voices, layer on layer compressed and lifted, the forever cycle of rock being wasted and reborn. So they say.