Random Notes from the Long Wander
Posted: October 18th, 2018, 2:39 pm
I took powerline trails into the open spaces-- ironic escape routes along power grids to get off the grid. I had them to myself; no one came to Nevada for Nevada, for its curved slopes more graceful than long wire droop. One of those trails fell to Death Valley's desolate moonscape, so I climbed the far side, past a collapsed adit where they'd planned to dig vast wealth from a destitute earth. Faith has no limits, I saw the ruins. Atop the rise was a tranquil playa and a big government sign: "Warning: Unexploded Ordnance." The desert remained dead-calm, my days spent in Eden's bright bliss as it was before shadows first stole across rock.
........I'd never seen anything like the Mojave's open sweeps. They curved. And I went into the great arcs. From each crest I'd see the far side's full vertical depth and far, feathery dreamlike forms. I wanted that dream, so I'd descend the arc toward its soft, detached promise, but the far side's depth would mysteriously compress as I descended, and feathery forms would lose their dreamlike feel one by one until I couldn't recognize what I'd sought as I climbed up the far slope, and I'd look back across the arc to see the same delicate fringe that I must have somehow missed when I went past.
........The great arcs were just as strange as the steep red cliffs; a vast, open, crazy, tilted and warped roundscape running toward fiery fringe outer limits. The arcs curved up long ramps, nearly to mountaintops at times, out where I imagined the Great Sky Artist once started to pile sand against ridges and smooth it in enormous, senseless curves-- the start of some new glorious act of sculpting before some unfortunate interruption. The great arcs swept over enormous spans of gentle rise and fall, in some places even rising into different climates, from dusted saltbush into disfigured junipers perched up high on the curve above burning depths.
........I slept in cheap rooms and my truck, in cut-rate motels and casinos. Funny how the desert doesn't change much from California to Nevada except for the gambling machines. They dulled the mystique when I came in from space to a clatter of bell-beep delirium, yet they fit a place with little sense of scale or reality. The machines were everywhere in Nevada, beside posh high roller parlors, out in the most rugged remote outposts, in grocery stores and gas stations, even sixty yards off the airplane at McCarran for godssake. Utah had its obsessions of order and Nevada had its cult of wager, but I seemed impervious to both.
........I liked Nevada for its open lack of scale, though the state is kown mostly for its lack of moralism, from its sludgy, iniquitous bordellos to its Byzantine megacasinos built to confuse your eye, addle your mind and take your money, somewhat like politics. I heard stories of wager-addicted souls losing their cars or even their kids in sketchy gambling grottoes, but moralism was always subjective as hell, as any glance at history proves, so keep the lights on.
........I liked the Gold Strike's Victorian gambling hall mock-up, sitting beside a state prison forty miles from Vegas, where I could check in for $19.95, not to screw around with crap odds but to reset things when running low. Just like Howard Hughes, who was so fond of Las Vegas that he once rented an entire floor of a gambling hotel and then failed to gamble, whereupon he was asked to leave the hotel, whereupon he bought the hotel.
........Sometimes I'd ride a squeaky elevator to the third floor at the Gold Strike, kick back with a whiskey-rocks and ponder a roundscape well-framed in the window. Nevada's true southern nature. The curves were even more mind-blowing when framed and magnified by a third floor window that couldn't possibly exist in most parallel universes. I bonded with this gaudy edifice in the open desert because its existence fascinated me. Each time I dropped into that bright basin I expected nothing but open scrub, that strange hotel nowhere to be seen, nothing but a past recurring dream, an extended illusion.
........I'd never seen anything like the Mojave's open sweeps. They curved. And I went into the great arcs. From each crest I'd see the far side's full vertical depth and far, feathery dreamlike forms. I wanted that dream, so I'd descend the arc toward its soft, detached promise, but the far side's depth would mysteriously compress as I descended, and feathery forms would lose their dreamlike feel one by one until I couldn't recognize what I'd sought as I climbed up the far slope, and I'd look back across the arc to see the same delicate fringe that I must have somehow missed when I went past.
........The great arcs were just as strange as the steep red cliffs; a vast, open, crazy, tilted and warped roundscape running toward fiery fringe outer limits. The arcs curved up long ramps, nearly to mountaintops at times, out where I imagined the Great Sky Artist once started to pile sand against ridges and smooth it in enormous, senseless curves-- the start of some new glorious act of sculpting before some unfortunate interruption. The great arcs swept over enormous spans of gentle rise and fall, in some places even rising into different climates, from dusted saltbush into disfigured junipers perched up high on the curve above burning depths.
........I slept in cheap rooms and my truck, in cut-rate motels and casinos. Funny how the desert doesn't change much from California to Nevada except for the gambling machines. They dulled the mystique when I came in from space to a clatter of bell-beep delirium, yet they fit a place with little sense of scale or reality. The machines were everywhere in Nevada, beside posh high roller parlors, out in the most rugged remote outposts, in grocery stores and gas stations, even sixty yards off the airplane at McCarran for godssake. Utah had its obsessions of order and Nevada had its cult of wager, but I seemed impervious to both.
........I liked Nevada for its open lack of scale, though the state is kown mostly for its lack of moralism, from its sludgy, iniquitous bordellos to its Byzantine megacasinos built to confuse your eye, addle your mind and take your money, somewhat like politics. I heard stories of wager-addicted souls losing their cars or even their kids in sketchy gambling grottoes, but moralism was always subjective as hell, as any glance at history proves, so keep the lights on.
........I liked the Gold Strike's Victorian gambling hall mock-up, sitting beside a state prison forty miles from Vegas, where I could check in for $19.95, not to screw around with crap odds but to reset things when running low. Just like Howard Hughes, who was so fond of Las Vegas that he once rented an entire floor of a gambling hotel and then failed to gamble, whereupon he was asked to leave the hotel, whereupon he bought the hotel.
........Sometimes I'd ride a squeaky elevator to the third floor at the Gold Strike, kick back with a whiskey-rocks and ponder a roundscape well-framed in the window. Nevada's true southern nature. The curves were even more mind-blowing when framed and magnified by a third floor window that couldn't possibly exist in most parallel universes. I bonded with this gaudy edifice in the open desert because its existence fascinated me. Each time I dropped into that bright basin I expected nothing but open scrub, that strange hotel nowhere to be seen, nothing but a past recurring dream, an extended illusion.