"on the playa"

[mnaz]

(revised, yet again) ....

You went west again to Nevada, past some dust farms onto a brilliant playa on a straightaway like you've never seen, where a Utah State Trooper came like a cruise missile demon out of poetic light with a radar gun across your bow-- 71 miles an hour. Six over. He spun a heated U-turn in your rear view on that fine two-lane beam, pulled you over and handed you a warning, and you vowed never to set foot in Utah again.

You can't pin down the playa like that, the expanding plane. You shall exhale in its presence. So you went west again into the heartland, a language of massive rock facades and spasms of dust in alleys of oblivion, where color recedes until you are the only color, bold and vivid on empty sweeps as you vanish into the same.

And now Gerlach, Nevada (pop. 200) appears over a rise, a little green blot under a granite wall, as glow grows in the windshield. Gerlach has a post office, a motel, a gas pump, a few bars and poker machines. Bruno's place is the hub, and it's run by a man with a thick Italian accent and neatly-buzzed white hair named Giovanni. He came here from the old country after the war and got a job at the mine, and now he owns most of the town. He is shrewd and funny, into his eighties, and swears a lot when telling his best stories.

But why this particular corner of sage? Because it sits on the energized plane-- the Black Rock Desert, bed of ancient Lake Lahontan, which at its Pleistocene height covered ten thousand miles from Reno to Oregon. It is named for a black butte that juts into bright infinitude, once a dreaded landmark for pioneers on the Applegate-Lassen Trail, rimmed by Granite Range in the west, pale with scrawny juniper, and by the Selenites in the east, darker and starker, a waterless fjord to a waterless sea, as glow grows.

~ ~ ~
On the playa is majestic deprivation, a new art medium. There is no scale at all. A car on the horizon turns out to be a rock. And no sign of life nor sound either, except heady whiffs of thin air, and silent intensity in the interval, still as cracks in the clay, a lull to wreck your ears. The most elemental baseline of creation, unmatched. But what about the ocean? No, too much slosh. Or moon? Too many craters.

You saw a blue lake on the playa as you approached. It is June and ninety degrees, but freak rains came last week and you saw green accents in the glow, so you talked yourself into that lake, which faded to white as you closed in. You saw trucks making dust, but they're only dust devils . . . No, one of them is a truck, a slender plume sent from a black object. But when you got here you found only scattered rocks and dust whirling off to nowhere.

The playa is flat blue on white to the north, and unreadable nebulae to the east. It makes no sense and seems about right. You get out and walk toward scattered rocks as the truck recedes, at first to a toy, then a bit of driftwood, and then a rock-sized dot, which might get confusing. But you keep going, past more rocks. You came here here to leave the grid, and there's no choice but to keep going; only a patter of soles on clay separates you from ringing silence. Even the fickle air stops to watch. And don't worry about getting back. Your truck is one of a cluster of rocks behind the other clusters. You'll know it when you see it.

On the playa: radiant cognitive deficit. It could mean fatal error, or the poetics of passage. If you made the far side you could travel inward, a vague gravity that pulls in restless or damaged spirits, but how far is the rim? How unforgiving is the land? It's why even the toughest bastards on horseback write poetry. They run a few cows, not sure how. Root for a stray to get loose in peace and light. But in high country it can change quickly, to malevolent sky on bright sage, and a blackened rim over the battlefield. Mountains can't thwart every storm up that high. It comes quickly, cover your head. But on the playa it all shoots by. Rain sifts from billowed bellies in vain, in dissipated shrouds.

[Unk]

ran a lot of two lane black top in Nevada, for some reason I remember the nights more than the days, I think it was the fear factor, that makes those memories more vivid, and the awe factor too, what is that line between the two or are they two in the same.

almost cried this was so god dam good
thank you for a "good ride" as levi used to say

[Doreen Peri]

almost cried this was so god dam good
thank you for a "good ride" as levi used to say

damn, not dam.

How many screen names do you have now? just curious

[stilltrucking]

thank you
I need all the help I can get with this compulsive scribbling of mine
how about
so got damn good
so none can accuse me of blasphemy.

my eyes started to water, really.

trying to remember who it was maybe westie, who called mnaz "da bomb'

and that is a good thing I think she meant.

[mnaz]

thanks jack.

i love this part of the trip. a lot of times it was just the next ridge after the next ridge, but sometimes there was that lost, energized plane ...