"Elevation" (2nd revision)

[mnaz]

Note: I'm trying to get some ideas into the end of my long-running recounting of my long-running wander from 2001-07, and 2009-10. There's really just one chapter that I'm still not entirely satisfied with. William Least Heat-Moon, in his Blue Highways tale of the 14,000 mile journey he made around America in 4 months, gave me an idea. In his book, sometimes he just stopped to let his mind wander and his thoughts form, transform and come to expression-- which we read in the finished writing. Yet I'm pretty sure these thoughts were often fragments jotted down in a notebook to be fleshed out and expanded in the book's writing, once back home, wherever that ended up being. That's what life on the road is like: in motion, never finished. And yes, I did the same thing on my run-- or close enough. At times I had to "just get off the road," and let the mind go. Think and recharge. Sometimes drink a little too much. And write bad poems under a shade roof. Those sorta things ...

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In Beatty I duck into a room out of the Nevada roundscape, and sit down to reflect on those bright arcs. They aren't as steep and dramatic as Death Valley, and their elevation tricks are puzzling. Subtle rise and fall adds up to thousands of feet over great spans, and it's hard to tell if I sit higher than tips of rock jutting out of the slope. How do I project a flat sight line? And what is distance without reference? I see canyons and folds in great detail on the high peaks; they seem closer than they really are, an illusion magnified when framed by the much closer foothills.
______Those high peaks are towering markers. They shrink horizons and give my desert away. Surprisingly, only a few of them in any direction separate me from the world of Too Much of Everything, so I've stayed between them in space and scribbled notes on cheap spiral notepads, because I had to.
______I will stay awhile in Beatty, maybe go into the Bullfrog Hills to study the feathery arc in the west and try to imagine Shorty Harris riding through its glow on the way to his great gold find. Seen from the right hill, Rhyolite's boomtown ruins might frame the valley's round radiance in dark Stonehenge piers and headers, or reflect sunlight off jagged tops of wasted walls in charcoal shadows, depending on my elevation. I've been out on the curves, mesas, badlands, dust, light, wind, silence, burning sun, stars, quiet intensity, the great circle of rock and sky and danger of solitude. I need a roof for awhile.
______On Main Street I get a beer at a bar with fake timber beams and posts like an old mine tunnel, just me and the bartender, taciturn and tall, black moustache. Words are scarce, so I ask about the big nuke waste dump that the feds want to build near town. "More money and jobs," he says.
______Through the open door comes a whiff of diesel, flashing lights, "Breakfast $3.99," as a semi rumbles to the corner, huffs and growls, turns to roll out, grind through a hundred gears toward a distant city past sage and stars, another relentless rig on the lines and points, separated from its goal by the spaces between: my destination. But not now. I need a roof, to hole up and get out of the sun, to let my mind drift and pitch for awhile.

______Have you ever had a time when your mind needs to wander? Have you had the time? In my room the next day, I pull my notepads out of the road bag and look for decent riffs buried like little flecks of gold in my shambling scrawl full of sunburnt philosophy.
______"Another coating of dust. I'm happy".
______"I didn't realize I was already there".
______"Smashed insects on your windshield means you're moving too fast".
______"Street yields to road, yields to trail. You're not far enough out if you see signs."
______"Which is better? A view of the mesa, or view from the top?"
______Not a bad question. Remember, a little elevation goes a long way here. A mesa top might be worth it, but why would you climb a mountain? Ascent over a certain point seems to yield diminished returns-- an attitude that exposes my lazy lack of vision, but also a nod to the "bell curve of endeavor" in general, whether it's terrain, or politics, or religion. Or drinking. Or science. Anything. Where do returns peak and begin to slide on the back side, and the effort becomes more a dubious sporting event than anything else?
______"How high is enough?"
______But I admit, the first moon shot was a revelation; that "Earthrise" photo when it first broke in 1968, shot from Apollo 8 in flight; Earth rising over a crater-gray horizon. Now that was a summit photo to inspire reverent awe, even if taken by a hardnosed military pilot trying to beat the Russians; Earth seen as a thumb-sized blue marble life boat in the black void for the first time, its fragility captured. And then forgotten. Buried in the techno-avalanche ever since, locked up in a vault as NASA image AS8-14-2383HR.
______We don't ride moon shots now; we put stuff into earth orbit, where space junk gathers, like killer screws loose from old Sputniks at thirty-five thousand miles per hour with the kinetic energy of trucks. How long until all of this stuff mashes itself into one big debris band? How many satellites are up there, spying? They take a lot of pictures now. We have gone deserts onscreen, all those places I went to not be seen. We can scroll and zoom to any ridge or valley, but they were more powerful when uncountable, more than bent bumps in pixels on a screen. If the resolution gets sharp enough, then some day while clicking along some trail onscreen, I might see myself out there, looking at the sky, up into the Big Space Eye.

______More questions.
______"How high or low is any variable constant?"
______How high is any point in space that curves due to the effects of mass? How high are you on a wide-open roundscape between mountainsides? You really can't tell; you only revel in its wild, warped curvaceous universe.
______We went from flat earth to curved space, yet history wants its ramrod linearity. But why my contempt for history? Why my scorn for religion? Predictable, after the world's latest death wish hit too close to home on the morning after I left home to find a new home. I wrote about it. At first I tried to understand by watching cable news on a motel TV. God help me. I took it personally. The world's seven billion others had conspired against me. A ridiculous state of mind.
______I expected the bomb-sniff dogs and alarmism, but not the surge in religious fervor I saw when passing through towns. People had to get religion in a hurry, and spoke as if a God War was on. They spoke openly of the End. Some of the longtime faithful, like Michael, spoke about it with an unnerving serenity.
______"How high can it all escalate?"
______I grew up with The End, with fire-breathing preachers and street corner wailers with painted cardboard signs, with nuke missiles holstered in holes on the prairie, and always someone going on about the End, which never came, but came damn close. Yet the sum of everything approaching overload must come to some sort of end, right? Maybe even history's demise.
______Beatty's town library, on its dusty lot, is packed into a geodesic dome, with gabled wings poking out in four directions. Inside the dome I arrange for screen time, and stumble onto Terrence McKenna's ideas on the Net. Oddly, our corner of cosmos is stacking complexity on complexity at an ever faster rate, which defies thermodynamics and the universe in general, so how long can this go on? Velocity and noise builds exponentially to the End, but End of what? Some sort of singularity, where the curves of science, tech, religion and the spiritual all start to converge and intersect, and history is history.
______And I keep reading my own scrawl.
______"Those who know history repeat its mistakes".
______"History took a wrong turn thousands of years ago and kept going".
______"People are slaves to symbols; only the perceived purity of the symbol matters".
______"The Age of Classics is over, into echo oceans, layers of sedimentary, metamorphic sound laid down, compressed, faulted, uplifted, the bloom and blend of gathering souls passing through. At a thrift store I found a Marley tape for a dime, and Tom Clancy's 'Sum of All Fears' in the next bin. The sum of all noise".
______"Sixteenth century Spanish missions in New Mexico erode faster than the rock they sit on, where they once converted locals to the Word, at times at swordpoint. A little history goes a long way on now oceans dotted with then".

______But that was yesterday. Today a clear desert sunrise in my window centered in a wall of smudge-gray imitation wood grain gets me stirring again. I write for awhile--morning is best-- then walk to Main Street for the $3.99 grease and eggs special at the old Exchange Club casino.

[saw]

well written with lush detail, with lots of intriguing questions that beg for answers, like trying to understand the vastness of the universe itself....and what can be a better capture of your experiences than simply copying your notes....that's as real as it gets....sans the spin we writers like to use.....thoughts from those moments captured like Polaroid pictures....

[mnaz]

Thanks saw. I'm kind of getting something like the "best of both worlds"--- both the raw notes, and my writer's spin on them--- in the form/guise of my mind wandering off from those notes, "prompted" by them, expanding on them or going off on tangents in the process (if I can pull it off) ...

Beatty needs a bit more descriptive flavor here. I'm adding that in.

[mnaz]

Also, quick note: Since some of the pieces I post here (like this one) are part of a larger story, some parts may lack context, standing alone. Like Shorty Harris, for example. I picked up history as I wandered the desert, and was intrigued by old burro prospectors (like Shorty) of the late 19th/early 20th century, and by the surprising number of "lost mine" legends-- both of which the chapter before this one gets into. (Shorty's gold find launched the Bullfrog Mining District's gold rush in the hills next to Beatty.)