Of Pigs and Pups

"Pig."

This is what I say to myself even before hitting the keys for my afternoon writing session.  This particular epithet comes from the essential belief, looming like the mountains outside, that I have nothing to say and no ability to say it.  Which makes this the perfect way to kick off a bit of blog.

A pig is, after all, reputed to be a greedy guts.  And that's what I'm supposed to be now, it seems, wanting too much and worthy of vicious scorn.  Pig.

Then, there were certain issues around getting started.  These were entirely practical, having to do with what was and wasn't plugged into my laptop computer.  No input device.  Amputated, it was.  And since this desklet, the slick-topped darkwood table I have claimed for my own in the corner of the Furnace Creek Inn conference room, has had a dose too many of furniture polish, plugging things into the computer with one hand proves to be a clumsy, slippery and maddening test of patience.  But, my life being a test of patience, here I am.  It's 5 p.m. and Death Valley outside is living up to its name.

The temperature is probably in the low 90s.  Which is positively mild for these parts.  The bodily impact is discernible, though.  Humidity is naturally zero, and even in mild heat one drinks gallons of water and stops peeing.  Liquidity underlies the Death Valley experience.  Water or the lack of it or the hope for it and the ironic presence of it in saline, mineral sodden springs...that's what defines this place.

This morning's Visitor Center talk dealt with the slim human history of these parts.  On the bench next to me a couple from Belfast took it all in.  A hot day in Ulster is pushing 75°.  That's winter here.  With another 45°, plus or minus 120°, you've got July in Death Valley.  For now, in mid-March, things are only pleasantly warm, and the ranger is telling us about the gold-crazed wagon trains that believed they had found a shortcut to California.  Why not?  Time was of the essence, prospectors swarming over every inch of every piney creek in the Sierra Nevada.  If you wanted gold, you had to get there first.  So, through a low gap in the hills west of what is now Las Vegas, several enterprising families and their wagons and their oxen and their horses and their hopes made a right turn.

Thing is, it's quite a easy drive downhill from the high Nevada desert toward the...well, who could say?  Toward the easy flat route to the California mountains.  Surely that was the way they were headed.  Kind of a brutal shock to emerge at the end of the dry riverbed today called Furnace Creek...the name says it all...to a spot that is at sea level, and look straight across a narrow valley to a wall of 11,000-foot peaks.  The Panamint Mountains don't give up.  They march north and south and never get tired.  But you and the oxen would be pretty wiped out just then.  The choices could not be clearer.  Go straight, that's one option.  And the mountains aren't that far and one can see the promising makings of a snowcone, not to mention a couple of Christmas trees, only a few miles away.

Thus the strange optical illusion of Death Valley.  It must be the clarity of the air.  Who knows?  In any case, the place is about three times wider than it looks.  Furthermore, those attractive snowy white plains are actually ridges and spikes of salt, mile after mile of ankle twisting, axle breaking mineral deposits.  That way lies madness.  North?  Why not?  You might be lucky and find the low, sinuous pass that leads to the next arid, saline valley to the west.  Or you might not.  Better head south.  After all, it's downhill.  Certainly easier on the oxen.  Besides, that's the general direction Spaniard explorers took.  Sort of.  You're only off by a couple of mountain ranges.  Nevermind, the path leads downhill...and since you were at sea level at the valley's edge, now you're hundreds of feet below.  Where weather that was hot now breathes like an oven.  Hell hath no wrath.  No wonder the entire valley has titled its attractions with Hades-themed names like Devils Golf Course, Dante's View and Hell's Cornfield.

Manly, the brave young guy who rescued part of a wagon train stranded in Death Valley, waited 40 years before he could write about the experience.  I fully understand.  The ranger mentioned this near the end of his talk, and the thought stayed with me.  In his diary, Manly records now members of the starving, dehydrating, heat-crazed wagon train party began to disintegrate, physically and psychologically.  He set out with a few supplies, thinking he would be back in about 10 days.  But the nearest Spanish ranch was north of what is now Los Angeles, and it took him 26 days to make it back.  I could barely make it back to the car park, just thinking about all this.

Trauma.  Forty years.  What a thought.  Imagine being a pupfish.  There's not much else to imagine in and around Salt Creek.  Death Valley has a few springs, and this is one of them.  The salty water is undrinkable, which must have driven the wagon train masters around the bend.  But this doesn't deter the pupfish.  It's their world.  They have been here for eons, and if the tourists leave them alone, they've got a shot at more eons.  Their creek actually flows.  In places, the water is even two, maybe three inches deep.  This navigable stretch of Salt Creek is less than two miles long, but if you're a pupfish and one inch long, that's plenty.  Yes, it's a little lonely.  The mastodons, saber tooth tigers and giant sloths you once stared up at have long gone.  Now, the ice age lakes having dried up, this is all that's left.  You, one species of fly, the odd algae, an occasional fish-starved blue heron...and hundreds of tourists tromping past on eco-observing boardwalks.  At 12 noon the temperature was pushing 90°, and we were pushing off for the hotel.

The Furnace Creek Inn.  Old, by California standards, built around 1930.  How and by whom?  For me, these questions haunt every minute here, and rather pleasantly.  Look out certain windows and you notice the hotel is more or less carved out of a mountainside.  A hot spring feeds the swimming pool then, conducted in an artificial channel, feeds the palm grove, the few miraculous square meters of lawn...before being spirited off to some other purpose.  Not a drop is wasted.  I like the fact that the Inn with its old casement windows gives up around May.  Air conditioning becomes futile with the thermometer pushing 110°.  The place shuts down until October.  It's not happening.

Which brings me to my dream.  Marlou and I have both been dreaming here, intensely, night after night, all night.  I like to think that this has something to do with the natural environment.  The place is simply too old to keep the spirit of the outside out completely.  Or maybe it's the effect of being in a place built of real adobe bricks by the local Paiute Indians.  Whatever the cause, I dreamed about writing, my writing.  I dreamed about the book I keep working on, the one about my train trips 10 years ago.  "It's not happening," a voice said in the dream.  The book isn't happening, and I, the horrified dreamer, heard this loud and clear.  Except that dreams are rarely that clear.  That's what makes them dreams.

What's happening is that sometimes I sit down to write and to denounce myself as a "pig."  It's not the kindest sentiment.  But this habit of berating myself...well, at the moment, that's what's happening.  That's what was happening a few moments ago when I began all this.  And maybe that's the sort of happening that's not happening in my book.  Maybe that's why it's important to stay in the sort of desert hotel whose windows can be opened at night.  Air is what's happening.  And it's important to let the air in.  And let the night in.