the nevada chapter (again) ...

[mnaz]

As you get deeper into the high desert dubbed-out roots drift quietly from the tape deck and fill the expanse. Reverb ripples over bare rock and lays out the land, bathes it in echo and fade, ricochets off slopes. Ride it past a craggy rise across the great divide, dubscape blown open and transfigured. It's not the bouncy reggae you hear at Beach Casino, with little props in pink drinks, but dubrock laid bare, its heat, grit and dust. Children wandering the desert. The rootsman on a big beat earth . . . In the beginning was rock, and vibrations of rock, the rolling big bass rumbling, and verily reverb careens through the valley of the shadow of dusk, a dark edge of sunshine, and you can't place yourself in space, on the face of the deep.

Scratch Perry and King Tubby created dubscape in the hard neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica forty years ago, using improvised spare parts. Scratch had a beat-up four-track board, far behind the 16-track rigs of the day, but he wrung every last ounce of overdubbed effects out of that board. Scratch and Tubby created dubrock, yet they were so different. Tubby was a deconstructionist who broke down rhythms into raw elements, while Scratch was weirder, mixing in crashes and old movie bits, even mooing cows slowed to a groan of angst. Or was that Watty Burnett's baritone voice through a tin foil tube? And Scratch's rituals matched the eccentric fullness of his sound. He blessed his tapes with sensi smoke as they recorded, and later in other ways, including blood and whiskey. He even buried tapes in the dirt.

Both Tubby and Scratch conjured the far side, a way-out pulse riding bedrock rhythms. It coalesced out of smoke like the sun, sea and sand emerged from cosmic wasteland, an improbable, defiant act of creation. The conjurers rarely slowed down rhythms beneath the shimmer and haze; yet you swear they must be slowed, the effects of echo and fade so transforming. And the metaphor is strong on Nevada's countless rock echoes riding deep basin and range rhythms. The music connected with the land.

Few lyrics are spared in dubscape, and you steal them . . . "O-pen up the gate" . . . To space and light. But in reality you can't know the rootsman's struggles, his faith tested by barren deserts and affirmed by a longer view. Yet you know reverence, from the first bright riffs at the edge of trees to Augustus Pablo's somber minor-key melodica meditations as they haunt a darkening mountainside. The far east sound, far east of west. It carries off to unpaintable twilight, a subdued echo emptied in far canyons. At the heart of it, breaking bondage, setting out . . . And when echo fades, Nevada becomes silent immensity.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When you come in from space it's odd how gambling machines dull the mystique. Nevada's big quirk. You trade immensity for a discord of bell-beep delirium, slightly unhinged, a sort of warped carnival. Yet even these insidious machines fit this land with no firm sense of scale nor reality, only the naked big beat earth. And it's a slow beat. A single measure could take hours, or eras. But when you zoom in it's funny how every station is staked in gambling, from posh high roller dens to the remotest outposts. Machines are everywhere, in grocery stores, gas stations, even fifty feet off the plane for godssake, blip beep . . . And so be it. Utah has its religion of order, and Nevada its cult of wager, and so far you're impervious to both.

In Nevada a lack of moralism intoxicates as well as lack of scale, the whole gamut, from sludgy dens of neon iniquity to labyrinthine megacasinos built to confuse the eye, addle the mind, take your money and degrade your soul. Much like politics . . . But there is electric possibility here, and morals were always subjective as hell, as any glance at history proves. So keep the lights on. The garish temples make sense after a slog through glare and rare yucca bursts.

You are partial to the Gold Strike, which sits forty miles shy of Vegas beside a state prison. You can check into its scruffy maroon-trim tower and Victorian gambling hall mock-up for 19 dollars on a weekday, ride a squeaky elevator up to the fourth floor, kick back with a whiskey-rocks and consider the great arc framed in your window. You check in not to flirt with crap odds, but to reset and restock when camping loses steam
.
Of course if everyone did this the garish temples would wither and scatter to the four corners of wind. They say Howard Hughes, in his baffling obsession with Las Vegas, once rented an entire floor of a gambling hotel and proceeded not to gamble, whereupon he was asked to leave, whereupon he bought the hotel. But gambling is rampant now. People go hundreds of thousands into debt every day. Drunken celebs and "day traders" flush fortunes in their casinos . . . It's electric possibility. The great arc in your window. A lightning strike three floors down. But Nevada has nothing to do with flashing lights, so head out again.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It was a calm, clear winter. You slept in your truck, holed up in cheap rooms for a hundred a week, haunted cheap B-casinos and took hundreds of photos in the clarity of low-angle light. But now spring is raging on the land. Wind is blasting sixty knots and dust rolling in. The gas station flag is stretched flat and boiling, and wires are turning loops. Your neighbor is mowing a patch of gravel with a gas-powered weed-whacker. It's springtime in Nevada, and you rent an old trailer near an old diner and casino combo, a blink-and-miss truck stop, but it has dollar drafts at the bar and a library packed into another trailer up the hill, open three, maybe four days a week, try the door. A bug-eyed woman with a ponytail named Raylene tends the books. She is about sixty and doesn't trust the government.

Your trailer is more than you hoped for: vintage 1971 snap-on wood grain with tobacco accents. The ceiling is drooped and stained in places, the parquet tiles are buckled and carpet is damp in the back room from recent Biblical rains. The whole thing leans a bit to the west, but you're a lucky man . . . The only constant so far is wind. It punishes your shelter and psyche, a roar of wind on tin. Sheet metal creaks and snaps, windows whistle and the west wall lifts a bit in the worst jackhammer blasts . . . all background noise by now. The furnace is dead, which shouldn't matter, but the once-blazing Mojave is now a wind-ravaged icebox in the midst of a long spring freeze.

There was one windless morning, seven AM or so under your blanket mountain. The trailer groaned and leaned over a bit more, then a knock on the door and you stumbled out to open it. And Wilford Brimley in a ten-gallon hat asked if you had a shotgun for sale; you'll swear to it. Actually there were two quiet mornings. On the other one a rhythmic scrape and thud woke you at five A.M. Your neighbor was laying concrete block outside your window. Real hands-on folks.

You noticed, the library has a shelf for Nevada stuff only. Raylene says each library in Nevada has a section like this. So you dig into the prose, stories of lost fortune, tall tales and spiritual oddities. In one story a pottery artist driving to California noticed Nevada's silent immense and somehow persuaded his family to turn off pavement into emptiness. Where they found some useful clay. And a ghost town to haunt. Why mess with California if you have other options? But it wasn't as simple as you think, raising children sixty miles from the nearest school, the nearest anything. And at one point a big mining corporation came back to the old nearby mine and tried to run off the ghost town inhabitants.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In Nevada you should feel wholly astray and wonder why you never thought of it before, and piece together a history of hardship at the old sites, of broken prospects and camps, of trying to make a long-shot pay. By contrast, the air-conditioned burbs of Vegas are an affront; nothing should feel that comfortable here . . . You found a crude brochure at a motel in Fallon, showing the state carved into sections: "Pioneer Territory, Pony Express Territory," et cetera. Campaigns long ago given up. The Pony Express mail route is high legend, although it ran for only two years. Now it's an imaginary etching across peace on earth, getting at the heart of it.

Salt Wells on US 50 is a good place to go astray, whether you visit the roadhouse or not. The trail did a slow fade off-course from the map. You wanted the next basin east, so you veered onto a rutted path, only to dead-end on a salt flat. Can't make the road go where you want. So you poured a splash of bourbon. Brain food . . . In time you spied a narrow path up from the shore and squeezed through, maybe fifty yards, arrested by the apparition of an engraved wood sign painted park service brown . . . "Pony Express Trail, 1860-61." But there was no trail, only rock and sand. A week later you concluded this sign couldn't possibly exist.

In Nevada, set out to unnamed space. Give it a name. You might spot an outpost, a tiny green blot dwarfed under a bare rock mural, a fluke, same as the mural's fluid projections of scale in rare air that turns bare ridges into rough sketches unreal in appearance, where mountains grow and shrink, seem to pass in and out of virtual states according to light play.

Head toward an outpost and it holds you off, sends a dust devil out to check your progress. How far do you follow the road? Other paths, left and right, will lure you in; you could go anywhere in the corrugations and fringe, into backlit canyons that no one will see. Scenes responsible for a spontaneous dull ocher end of the earth poem you fudged awhile ago.

On a dull ocher rise
lies the end of the earth.
No one knows what lies beyond.
You camped within sight of it,
caked in silt and salt smile.

[mnaz]

i think my forays to the far side work better in context, in reaction to the times, part of a more complete story rather than a chapter pulled and posted here and there .... i have a lot of notes, photos and experience from the days, weeks (and couple of years) in the direct aftermath of the "9/11" horror, when i'd just set out on a long journey, which i've collected and cobbled together in the years since . . . .

[creativesoul]

like that

[mnaz]

it was quite a trip ....