"Elevation" (revisited)

[mnaz]

Elevation tricks are puzzling. Subtle rise and fall adds up to thousands of feet over great spans. Formations poke from the grade, and it's hard to judge if I sit higher; hard to discern horizontal. And what is distance? Cold, dry air clarifies high peaks. Each shape appears in great detail, and they seem quite close; an illusion magnified when framed by closer foothills, similar to backing from a window with gaze fixed on an outside object, which grows and fills the frame.

High peaks gave my desert away. At first it was boundless, then hands began to point at high peaks, those lofty landmarks up so high as to shrink horizons-- Navajo Mountain, Wheeler Peak, Steens Mountain; they all scrape stars. I realized, if I top-hopped a few of them in one direction I would be back in some sort of jungle, where silence has no currency. My boundless desert was better, before landmarks. Before seductive minerals too, though they gave me trails to the old diggings, into the heart of things.

It's hard to gauge elevation in the desert. Which is better? A view of the mesa, or a view from atop? Keep in mind, a little elevation goes a long way out here. A mesa top might be worth it, but why climb a mountain? Continued ascent past a certain point seems to yield diminished returns. Which is clearly my lazy lack of vision, but also a nod to the "bell curve of endeavor" in general. How high is enough? Whether terrain, or politics, or religion, even science. Anything. Where do you peak and start to slip down the back side of the curve, and the effort becomes more a dubious sporting event than anything else?

But I have to admit, that first moon shot was a revelation; that "Earthrise" photo when it first broke, shot from Apollo 8 in flight . . . Earth coming up over a cratered gray horizon. Now that was a summit photo to inspire reverent awe, even if clicked by a hardnosed pilot trying to beat the Russians. Earth as a thumb-sized blue marble in the black desert void, its fragility clearly captured. And now forgotten. Buried in the insane techno-avalanche ever since, filed in the vault as NASA image AS8-14-2383HR.

We don't ride moon shots anymore, but we're into low earth orbit; its breathless feel of space, yet on a tether. Pillow-soft hurricanes still feel too close, and space junk gathers-- killer screws loose from Sputnik with kinetic energies of a train. Amazing, the hardware that multiplies up there, and its sum total may one day disintegrate and collide, smash itself into bands of debris.

Until then, some of those satellites take pictures. Lots of pictures. And from that elevation, mountains are mere bumps. We have gone deserts onscreen, those places I went to not be seen. I can click and zoom to each ridge and valley, but they were more powerful when uncountable, when more than bumps on a cyber-grid. They might catch me out there. One day while clicking along some desert trail, I might see myself, staring up at the big space eye.

~~~~~~~~~~~
I went back to Vegas. Funny how I roam the desert until my orbit around Vegas decays, and I fall in, only to be ejected again. But Vegas was different this time. Bulldozers sat idle, and rows of half-built houses from the boom years whistled dry wind. The Beige Hole sat eerily still, mail slots jammed with foreclosure notices, all quiet except for the wild dogs and terrible teenage rituals. As Jack himself mused awhile ago when it all got started . . .
Who played this cruel joke
On bloke after bloke.
Packing like a rat
Across the desert flat?

What do we make of exhilarating peaks and calamitous canyons of economics? High atop one of the posh Vegas ghost towers, they put in a glass floor to remind you how far you could fall. It seems there was a Big Crash, and chill winds rattle a House of Cards after a crazed, drunken orgy of debt. We could be down to cowpokes beside empty sand-blasted suites reading trail verse, and somewhere out in ghost-burbs a screen would still flicker and analyze The Market, oblivious to its ruin.
Bless our Market.
Let it blow bubbles.
Bless the predators.
Bless sacred greed.
Amen.

Our holy pillar of faith. Subject to the usual wild extremes and abuse. The Capital Machine is a beast. It grinds and growls, wars and whores, keeps us in cars and beer, guns and bombers, the whole line from starter models to war machines. It leverages itself on itself, spellbinds with flash, has a cure for everything, replaces old religions with its own and plays the former against themselves. The Machine mass-produces weapons, shiny objects and landfills, a precocious crusader to finally set things right and make a gigantic profit at it. But I have no right to complain. About anything at all. That's part of the arrangement too.

Yet natural questions arise. How high can we go? How deep is the reservoir? Will the Machine burn through assets like a sprinter in a marathon? Strip the rock until it's some waste-hole out of a dystopian movie? . . . But now is no time to think small. Maximum extraction is truth. And if we took out the last two-bit stragglers, all curves would shoot up and get high. Except nature abhors a shooting curve. They used to climb steadily like the great prairie, but now they pitch wildly up and down like the jagged mountain west. It's crazy.

But we've had lower lows than the Beige Hole. The Rust Belt was worse, with its gothic, blackened ruins, hellfire crucibles under dirty snow, shot-out checkerboard panes and stark line houses on a steel-faced sky, where we made things in factories going south. The badlands leach afternoon color out in redrust country. I can sit and watch the mounds darken and morph to morose old mills, where wild dogs commit unspeakable acts in crumbling filth, and a soft diesel breeze blows.

After 1968, the human population doubled and technology erupted. You could fit Apollo 8's computer in a molecule . . . And numbers come at you in the Big Boom, in trillions and megatons. In sheer, numb, brutal magnitude. I remember an exhibit-- a portrait of Charlie Brown made of a hundred thousand packing peanuts, same as the number of parcels sent each hour in the U.S. This awful exhibit also had a Coke logo made of a hundred thousand cans, the same number tossed each few seconds, and it claimed that a million plastic bottles are tossed each minute, and that sixty thousand plastic bags are discarded every five seconds. And of course it showed what 28,000 42-gallon oil barrels look like, the amount of oil burned every two minutes on this long freedom road, and sweet Jesus, that can't be right.

[the mingo]

of course it's right - everything's right - nothing exists that ain't right - rhetorically of course i'm metaphorical but i use gloves for the actual transfer - these days got germs out there the size of sea lions ! enjoyed this ya ol' desert livin' dog fog you!

[mnaz]

Holy sheep dip, that's 233 barrels per second . . . And that's just the U.S.? Sweet Jesus! Mother of God! (Sometimes I talk like Hunter S Thompson, just for the hell of it.)

Truthfully, the second part here consists of "odds and ends" that I mixed into the original "Elevation" musings-- with a "high and low" theme to tie in. Not sure if it works all that well, but these are all "burning issues" with me, so what the hell . . .