"Mirage"

[mnaz]

-- re-imagining some of the images I played with last summer...

Black rock Country sits lower than most of Nevada’s high desert, more bleak and dry, mountains a little more worn down from time rain, though rain itself hardly touches down. Root for a rebel, root for a cloud. Too many times it tries to touch down, turned away in dissipated shrouds. When rain comes it is clumsy with vengeance. Yet they still run a few cows, not sure how. You can picture her on one of those desert gone-scapes, on a cloud. She sees far peaks; they seem so far yet trouble comes. Root for one of the strays to get loose, lost in the next valley or two, picked up by the next road. You can only make it so far.

On the playa you have small rocks the size of boulders. You have no sense of anything, only blinding span. It’s unhealthy. The air is too thin, climate too dry, corridors too long and burnt, prospects too wide and fruitless, a blank sheet with bumps on the edge, belly up to black spiked constellations. What if you had to make a living in pure quiet? Quiet doth not a living make, but noise. You find little noise in the desert, conclude no living is being made. Most of it is expired cattle country. If you go into the highlands weather can change quickly, malevolent sky on backlit amber, blackened ridge to rim the battlefield. It can’t thwart every storm up that high. It comes quickly, no time to run, cover your head.

You remember a stretch where it came together, then a trick of geology, some two thousand feet, sent you back into the valley to regroup. You can take that hill! You could see a hundred miles past the end of your nose, your prose. You hate landmarks. It was better with no landmarks. They get a little pompous in their pointing, in telling tales and sticking up so high, they shrink the horizon and that ain’t right. It was better when the desert had no landmarks, or water or silver and gold for that matter. Seems an endless problem of extraction, distraction. They give too much away, where sage waves crash on the shore of burnt buttes, undistinguished, unglamorous, into some magic get-lost badlands. If you spot a chestnut mustang in a vale he lends color and scale. Magnificent color. Healthy and muscular. Feral horses are mind-bending. How could they survive badlands so majestically?

Tale of a compound mirage: On Kumiva Valley floor, under the Blue Wing Mountains, I approach a deep blue lake—an image strong enough to overrule rational thought for miles. I see a lake, not a mirage. My blue lake slowly, stubbornly recedes to white, leaving room for speculation at each point. Perhaps rare late-season rain filled part of the playa. Now I see vehicles making dust on the playa. No, only dust devils. Closer now. No, one of them must be a truck—slender plume sent up from a black object. Closer. No, it was a dust devil. The black object is a rock, no longer so absurdly showcased. It was never what it seemed, soil underneath, ridges and heat waves. It was beautiful, intoxicating.

[Steve Plonk]

I remember being out in Nevada, the summer of 1972, and seeing
Lake Tahoe and stopping to eat at a little fish camp before hitchhiking
Onward to the desert.. I got picked up by an interesting couple of fellers
Whom I've written about in Litkicks in a piece entitled, I believe, "Where the Buffalo Roam". Both of these guys are now dead-- one in an unknown grave, and one whose cremains were shot out of a cannon on his own property.

I was really amazed at how the sound of the driving caddy echoed through the canyons and even out in the flats if we were near the mountains. I believe Nevada must be the most echoing place in the West to me...
Mirages are common and they appear on the road even more frequently.
Whole lakes appear out of nowhere.

I got a ride from Truckee, CA to Lovelock, NV and they took their time driving while stopping several times for a drink and smoke and get snacks. The fellers were in no hurry and I really wasn't either...They let me off at a big sign in Lovelock which said
"Biggest Brothel in the State of Nevada" or words to that effect. I was amazed at the advertising. They availed themselves of the festivities and I availed myself of a great place to get rides out from...If it wasn't for those two fellers, I wouldn't have gotten my second ride, which took me all the way to Wyoming. I would've probably died of thirst or something.
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink", all the water was alkali
so you couldn't drink from many of the waterholes. So may the folks in the red and chrome caddy rest easy in heaven...

[mnaz]

great recollection, reflection, Steve. There's something about the basin and range, the wide open lack of scale, the grace of it, the lack of fences, massive stretches of non-private land, the deep quiet, the pure, arid light. Nevada has inspired most of my writing, for better or worse. Thanks.

[saw]

Nevada is so vast, i'm sure marlyand would fit in there dozens of times over...i too was traveling through there in the 70's, remember reading that the population was 500,000 people then, less than the city I was visiting from......it put things in perspective.......love to read the Edward Abbey stuff about the desert.......a magic place, unforgiving and extraordinary........well done