To the Valley

My college friend Jill used to complain of her mother's verbal ineptness.  Particularly galling was her mom's way of confounding and misappropriating common sayings and aphorisms. 

"Oh, Jill, you know your dad.  In one ear and gone tomorrow."

"Mom, do you ever listen to yourself?"

Her mother didn't listen to anyone.

"A rolling stone is worth two in the bush."

"Mom, it's a bird."

"A rolling bird?  I don't think so, honey."

Thing is, Jill's mother had a point.  Life has a way of inflating truisms beyond their reasonable proportion and mixing banalities with profundities.  Take a stopped clock.  It's bad luck.  You should throw it over your left shoulder.  When actually, you should worry about it.  You really should.

My watch stopped at 5:45 on the afternoon Marlou and I were getting ready for our quick jaunt to Death Valley.  A portent, I jokingly told her.  Actually, I didn't really see the joke.  But I wanted to pretend.  I wanted to make believe that Marlou and I, one chemotherapy-blasted cancer patient and one aging quadriplegic, can jaunt anywhere but our local espresso hangout.  Which, these days, isn't always that quick.  And, speaking for myself, isn't always that jaunty.

Still, the way to reduce the stress of crossing the Sierras in the snowy winter, then driving hundreds of miles through the high desert, is not to drive at all.  It's to fly to Las Vegas, rent a van with a wheelchair lift and head for the Furnace Creek Inn.  A little trouble with a low battery in my personal van, but a quick call to the Auto Club had fixed that days before.  There was nothing stopping us now.

We were up and off at the right hour, cruising down the motorway to San Jose Alirport, a modest 20 minutes away...when something nervous and fussy and anxious had me looking at the dashboard.  Awfully high on the temperature gauge.  Is it always like this?  Better have Marlou turn on the heat and cool down the engine.  No effect.  The needle was sliding past the H in hot.  I tried slowing down.  The needle dropped a hair.  Then it started climbing.

Why now?  Why, God?  Why at this moment?  And why at the moment when we are finally preparing to park in the familiar asphalt opposite US Airways...must we discover that the parking has been sucked into a huge construction hole.  We have to drive around the airport's internal road one more time and leave the van at the other terminal.  No, Marlou says, she's going to be stuck with loads of luggage, schlepping it herself.  So we drive back to US Airways, steam now pouring out of what's left of the radiator, automotive death flashing before my eyes.  I am livid.  With Marlou, with the situation.  And now I am driving a third circuit about the airport.

A wing and a prayer, I tell myself, sometimes that's all we need.  I go through the usual quadriplegic comedy routine trying to wrestle the electronic entrance gate at the parking structure.  The disabled car spaces are entirely filled.  I see some promising taillights flashing into action.  I also see another disabled driver with the same thing in mind.  Adrenaline and testosterone pumping, I back up, reversing my massive Ford in his direction.  He gets the idea.  I slide into the space.  The van's engine is hissing and steaming and smelling of burning antifreeze.  Never mind.  I am parked, and within seconds I am hurtling toward one of the airport shuttles.  The latter is a model of wheelchair accessibility.  I roll on board for the 60-second ride to, you guessed it, US Airways.

A couple of hours later Marlou and I are driing through western Nevada, eying saline vistas, crusted mountains, broken-pottery ridges.  Moonscape beauty.  At least Las Vegas is behind us.  The hyper-stimulating airport with slot machines clanging next to the luggage carousels was bad enough.  The desolate miles of cheap condo developments shoving aside the tumbleweeds...saddening.  And, finally, here we were pulling over in front of a cheap wild-west-themed casino in Pahrump, Nevada, half way to Death Valley.  I hadn't spoken for the last hour.

We talked it through.  Marlou didn't know about the inter-terminal bus at San Jose Airport.  She imagined dragging two suitcases, one laptop computer and a book bag through half a mile of construction.  I listened to this, incredulous.  What a bleak world she inhabits, I thought.  Almost as bleak as mine.  In which my wife doesn't care about me and my about-to-explode van...abandoning me so I can face my mechanical breakdown alone on some airport road.

We are a little too used to being alone, both of us.  In times of crisis, the tendency is to take care of things on our own.  But now, that's not possible.  We have to take care of each other.  There really isn't any other choice.

Nevada highways straightening, turning, leading to the sky.  The earth and its washes and outcroppings and slopes began to twist into the most preposterous shapes.  Just as the colliding Pacific and continental plates did, one subducting, the other upthrusting, over the last several hundred million years...causing more geological mayhem and geographic confusion in this one spot than anyone could ever comprehend.  Death Valley. 

There is snow on the Panamint Mountains.  From the hotel lobby, I stare long and hard at the mysterious whiteness on the peaks.  If a big tidal wave hit California, we would now be under 200 feet of water.  The mountains are more than 11,000 feet high.  It's a little more extreme than my desert birthplace, but not much.  The sand dunes and salt flats below, pines and glaciers just above.  The desert is a harsh place, and we have come to this expensive lodge to be cozy.  But we can be cozy anywhere.  It's the contrast between softness and harshness that we seek.  And today we've found both.