Death Valley

Coastal California doesn't have what could be properly called a winter. Unless you're a Californian and have never actually seen a snow shovel and don't understand why, if they're throwing salt on some road in Michigan, they don't add pepper. But climate change is changing climate expectations. This morning at the very moment NPR said it was 42° in New York, my windshield wipers were scraping against something hard and clear and much like the marbled glass in my bathroom window. Splintery transparent stuff which could be accumulated and packed into a frozen daiquiri or washed away by the sudsy fluid in my windshield wipers. Ice, of the sub-32° variety, which for those of us who reside in a 1950s Bay Area stucco apartment, built when insulation was barely a rumor, represents authentic cold.

Which is why Death Valley represents an authentic miracle. In, say, February you can stand there in the salt flats and gaze into the sand dunes and marvel at how much snow has accumulated on the Panamint Mountains and wonder why everyone doesn't get the message, which is that it's 79° and endlessly clear and sunny. And people are playing golf on what claims to be the nation's lowest course. And you feel so warm and so good that putting around grassy holes and hillocks actually seems like something you might like to do from your wheelchair. Or, after a couple of margaritas, from a gurney.

Taking your colon-cancer-stricken wife to Death Valley does raise eyebrows. Yes, there's the name. And there's the history...the sunbleached skeletons of lost prospectors...teams of 20 mule rib cages pulling wagon splinters through the sand...all victims of a geo-optical illusion. Clear air and heat-fuzzed thinking foreshorten the distance across the blazing valley to the Panamints. Even pith-helmeted British explorers, with both the Gobi and the Sahara under their intrepid belts, cannot eyeball that expanse of rock salt and basalt and come up with anything like a travel time. Which explains why successive generations of explorers and silent movie scouts and hedge fund managers have decided to nip across the whitened plains to check out the hills. And checked out altogether.

Marlou and I intend to check out of the Furnace Creek Inn on a particular Wednesday morning in March. California wildflower fanciers will tell you that in the wake of the autumn rains, Death Valley is going to burst into total bloom around then. We are going there for the Valley, not the Death. If there is a difference.

Our problem...although it may not be a problem at all...is how to incorporate in our everyday lives the specter of death. Marlou has had to face this reality afresh with her doctor's recent change in terminology. Incurable. Which can be said for diabetes and a host of no-cure, a.k.a., chronic diseases. Still, it's a scary word. So so I watch Marlou disassemble the Christmas manger scene on our dining room table, carved wooden figures representing mangers, wise men...and I wonder if she is thinking, "Will I do this again?" Or am I thinking this for her? Since Marlou's cancer has been stopped dead in its metastasizing tracks at least once...isn't this entirely reasonable to hope for, even expect, again...and again?

We don't know. What we do know is that death is not a taboo topic. Take death out of the valley, and you've still got the valley...of the shadow of death. Yea, though I walk. Death seems everywhere these days. In television plots and everyday jokes. Yet the more it surrounds us...the less deadly it seems.

My father was sitting at his desk as I, fidgeting like an eight-year-old, asked what he was doing. Filling in a death certificate. What's that? He told me. And while my father scratched away with his fountain pen, I swung my legs against an armchair, idly tracing splits and fissures in the red leather upholstery. Everything in his office was drying and cracking. That's what you get, my boy mind told me, for having all this heavy old weird stuff. The Persian carpet was fading, the Mahogany legs of his desk had tiny cracks...anyone four feet tall could see these things. Any kid raised near Palm Springs knew my dad's New York heirlooms weren't doing well in the desert air.

Where was the dead man, I asked. My father muttered and scratched away. Was he ever in this office? Yes, my dad said, sitting right in the chair where you are, just a few days ago. On his wall a framed etching depicted a painter, palette in one hand and brush in the other. The artist cocked an ear while in the background a Mephistophelean figure played a violin. He was hearing intimations of his own death, my father once explained. None of this made sense to an eight-year-old. The artist looked awfully perky, what with this ghoul behind him. Besides, he had his hands full with all this paint.

The picture seemed hokey. Today I would judge it cloyingly literal, heavily Germanic and pedantic. Though the best word remains "hokey." Maybe death itself is hokey in its flat-footed certainty. Death is what it is, however feared or dreaded, glorified or romanticized.

Which doesn't lessen the annual impact of my routine physical. I'm 61, after all, and an exam is bound to turn up something, sooner or later. And that something isn't going to signal the return of my hairline, or my waistline...nearing, as I am, the deadline. And even if we remove the "dead" from deadline and call it, say, the finish line....it's still a line, isn't it?

This morning, I had just had my physical, and it was time for the annual drawing of blood. Cholesterol levels, prostate screening, diabetes: go tell it on the blood analyzer. I had fasted, as instructed, and was prepared to follow up blood draining by meeting a friend for a cholesterol-boosting omelet in the shopping center next door. Surprising how many people get their blood drawn at 8 a.m. The 15-minute wait took forever, and finally a kindly Filipino guy was tapping my arm in search of a vein until he hit circulatory paydirt...not that I was looking. I never do. And just when he was over and done with it, he wasn't. I'd moved my arm, he said, starting the process afresh with more vein tapping and arm rubbing. My expectations had already propelled me halfway to breakfast. But the needle unsheathing and fist squeezing were under way, even with plenty of vials of my blood assembled in a plastic trophy rack. My imagined self was out the door and away, my real one still sitting in blood land with my attention drawn, like a moth to a flame, to the red snaking down the clear tubing. Some I've-got-to-get-away-from-here panic rose in my chest. Hurry, hurry. That I am a neuromuscular battle veteran mattered not a jot. Red-draining terror rising, chest-sinking collapse imminent.

"Are you okay, sir?"

"Oh, yes," I told the technician. I forced a smile. Why was my blood draining so slowly? What was wrong with me?

A sickening feeling, the edge of nausea, and a reminder of all such moments...from childhood illness through adult hospitalizations...and this was what Marlou has been experiencing every week for the last year and a half. She's had more blood drawn...more chemotherapy greyness...more surgical terrors...more procedures that don't proceed, but move backward...than I care to acknowledge.

"Okay, sir."

Out the door, up the elevator and omelet-bound, and yes, I was okay. Still feeling a little nauseated, but recovering by the second. And wondering, what is at the core of this? Psychologists say that humans never dream their own death. We seem to be able to terrify ourselves sufficiently with our own lives. So, there's no need to justify why Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" seems like the next book to read. And in the F shelves of the Menlo Park Library fiction section, there's a gap right after "Absalom, Absalom." I stare at this empty place in the Faulkner row, gazing on and on. I can see beyond the spines of books on this side to the white pages of books on the other. Funny how that is. Across the aisle, fiction gets into the Gs. And across from there, it's something else. But I'm here. And there are high walls on both sides. Walls of stacks and stacks of walls. And all I know is that in this instant I derive comfort from being here....in a canyon of soft folded things made of paper...which I may or may not have time to read...but where I do have time to hide.