666 on the Devil’s Golf Course
“What does the desert mean? It
means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone.”
Edward Abbey
“Minerals crystallize out of
solution as they reach their individual solubilities.”
Pamphlet about the geology of Death Valley
First we walked on sand. Lots of animal tracks up into the
dunes. After that, texture after texture as the salts changed. Salt like snow,
like the Arctic without cold. Then medallions—giant brittle plates that lifted
at the edges, six or eight inches off the ground, and threatened to break my
ankles if they cracked. Then, closer to the center, big structures, knobs and
jagged crystalline outcroppings. The main saltpan was sludge, muddy under the
crusted surface and so white in the relentless sun that my eyes hurt even
behind sunglasses. It was like walking on another planet. I had to keep
reminding myself: this is Earth. Out
the other side of the saltpan, the salt rings began again, stretching across
The Devil’s Golf Course towards the Black Mountains that divide the Amargosa
Valley from Death Valley itself. We walked nearly twenty miles, but I scarcely
felt it, and I’m not super fit by any stretch of the imagination. The
surroundings simply soaked up all my attention. The silence took me out of my
body, out of the world, and gave me utter calm.
The next day, after we’d broken our camp in Hanaupah Canyon
and were leaving the valley through Furnace Creek, I glanced at the odometer
that we’d set to zero at the start of
our trip. It said 666.
Canyonlands
We were on a dizzying, roughly hewn
trail that winds down into Labyrinth Canyon, at the heart of Canyonlands. I was
learning the names of the rock strata: Navajo sandstone, Kenyata foundation,
Wingate sandstone, Chilne formation. I recited them as we crawled down the
tortuous trail because it kept me from being scared to death. In the valley
below, quiet as the valley of death (before the six hundred), we found a single
signpost. Moab, 21 miles to the east. Hanksville, 34 miles west. Pinned to the
signpost was a sun-bleached flier: “Lost dog. Answers to Max.” The mystery of
how you could mislay a dog in that empty echoing wasteland has never been
satisfactorily cleared up for me. Max must have really despised his owners.
I sat on a rock in the silence and thought of the explorer
John Wesley Powell and his boatmen, sliding down the Colorado river in the
summer of 1869. Powell had a habit of scrambling up the canyon walls wherever
he could. From the top, he would catch a
glimpse of the surface of the country through which his boats travelled in
crevices sometimes a mile deep. “By now,” wrote Wallace Stegner, chronicler of
the journey in Beyond the Hundredth
Meridian, “they had left behind them all familiarity; the country was such
as none of them had ever seen. On the broken plains stretching away from
rimrock there was no vegetation, only worn rock and sand and the bizarre forms
of desert erosion; in the distance, the Roan Cliffs were pale azure, the flat
and tabular outlines of mesas and buttes were evenly bedded, colored like the
rainbow. It looked like unknown country…They named it Labyrinth Canyon.”
Great Basin
Waxing lyrical is hard to avoid when you sleep under the
stars in the Great Basin desert. You want everyone else to have the experience
too, and yet, paradoxically, you want nobody else to have the experience
because being out there alone is the
experience. After a day without any outside human contact, you begin to jealously
guard the solitude. A column of dust from a car five miles away begins to seem
like an outrageous intrusion. I’ve sat looking out over a vast empty landscape
and wondered was I still the same person who loves the London Underground and
thrives on the excitement of international airports. All those people, when there’s all this space. If, like Abbey said, the desert
will always be there, I think it’s possible to have the best of both worlds.
Desert Wildflowers
If the name of the game is survival, Skeletonweed gets the
gold. When the rain is over and there’s no more moisture to be found,
Skeletonweed turns into a brittle brown bush that breaks off and blows away.
It’s a small cousin of the more famous Tumbleweed, which, interestingly, is not
indigenous to the western states at all, but was introduced in the last century
from the Russian steppes. Some fleeing revolutionary must have got a seed stuck
to his dagger. Wildflower season in the desert is brief and not as dramatically
colourful as the flower books lead you to believe. There are splashes of
colour: red Desert Paintbush, tall yellow feathery Golden Prince’s Plumes, the
yellow knob heads of Basin Rayless Daisies. But the sand, rock, and shale are
all-pervading. It would take a flower population a thousand times denser to
make any visible impression on the landscape. The joy is in close observation.
The slower you walk, the more the colours show themselves. The cacti flowers
are my favourites. Prickly pear, yellow and pink, waxlike petals; scarlet
Claret Cup cactus. And receiving my personal Medal of Honor for survival
against the odds is the Joshua tree. Fertilized only by the yucca moth, whose
only source of food is pollen from Joshua flowers, tree and moth lock each
other in perfect symbiosis. Sex in nature: so simple, so safe.
Inside the Moment
Long distance runners and short sharp-shooters like
racquetball players are always talking about endorphin highs, so I’m going to
wheel out my wilderness camping equivalent. My endorphin rush is that feeling
that wells up in me as I put the miles between my car and the highway, and the
desert closes quietly around me. It’s the warm gritty wind on my skin, the
comfortable dustiness of old shorts and a singlet, and what I like to think of
as the desert state of mind. Time slows. There are no plans, you live inside
the moment. An ant crossing your foot as you sit drinking coffee is an event. And
places like Lunar Lake, Nevada, exist just for you to discover, spend an
astonishing couple of days in, and leave as you found them.
On Lunar Lake there are no wildflowers. No trees, no shrubs,
not even any grass. I found a single dead bush hanging on in the middle of the
dried lake bed when I ran out there, the ground a consistency of soft dry mud,
crumbling like curry powder, perfectly kind to my bare feet. I could run with
my eyes closed. I ran backwards for a while, trying to override the internal conditioning
to check over my shoulder for obstacles. There were no obstacles. Back at camp,
lying out on my air mattress with a cold beer, I watched the playa turn purple
first, before sunset, then dark pink. After the sun set, it turned dark silver.
We took photos, but it could not be captured. That night there was a full moon.
Lunar Lake shimmered like a bridal veil. It was bittersweet breaking camp the
next morning to return to civilization. We saw a coyote, clearly identifiable
through the glasses, loping and stopping to forage and loping on. Then, as we
drove out past the Easy Chair volcanic crater, a badger scrambled awkwardly up
the bank at the side of the road, unmistakable when he looked back at us, with
the white stripe down his forehead. He waddled off into the sagebrush where I
saw his white stripe flash for a second, then he was gone.
Coming home from the desert along Interstate 80 through the
ugly Sacramento valley, there is always a reluctant shift back to “real” life.
Soon, it will matter again where the house key is, whether your clothes are
clean, which friends you haven’t called in a while. Life crowds back in where
there was space, and life is too fast. The best thing about the wilderness is
how it reminds you that nothing, nothing, nothing on earth matters enough to be
miserable or anxious over. Lying in a tent with the stars out around me and the
immense silence behind the small sounds of the wind in the creosote bushes, or
the squeak of dry twigs, or the scuttle of something, I know there is always
the wilderness, where life is levelled. The difficulty is remembering during
the in-between parts what it’s like to be out there; what the canyon walls look
like with the sun setting on them; the whorls of dead juniper; the feel of
walking on slickrock; the quiet, filled with all the noises that belong there.
How the tables turn: everything that looks worthless at home becomes valuable.
A waterbottle, a small camping stove, a flashlight. And things that seem
important back in our lives (a
wallet full of green notes and cards) are
worthless, get stuffed down the bottom of the bag, of no use, no value because
they can’t dig or light or wash or warm.
“Wilderness is not a luxury,” wrote Edward Abbey, laureate
of the desert, in Desert Solitaire,
“but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and
good bread. A civilization which destroys what little is left of the wild, the
spare, the original is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the
principle of civilization itself.”
I remember an April afternoon years ago,
scrambling out over slickrock and sandstone boulders to Panorama Point, some
forty miles along red sand road from Highway 24 in central Utah. I stood up
there in the whipping wind, looking at the 360-degree view. Below me was the
Maze, a labyrinth of switchback canyons falling away in layers. To the north,
the La Sal mountains; to the south, the Henrys; to the east, the Abajos.
Mountain range after mountain range, canyon upon canyon. It felt like the end
of the world, and at the same time, like the origin, an original landscape
without trace of human presence. I stayed there a long time just looking, and
the rest of the world slowly receded, unimportant. I knew I would revisit that
place in memory, and that the memory would fade and grow indistinct. But I was
there, in that moment, and it was worth everything.
