Hold the Enlightenment (16 page)

In Black Rock country, there are few road signs pointing the way (I counted four in seven days) and many, many gravel roads running in every which direction. Some of these roads are simply a pair of ruts running through the sage, and you think, “This is a cruel joke and certainly not the road indicated on the map.” But it is.

A traveler in the Black Rock needs a compass and a good map from the Bureau of Land Management. Maps of Nevada, purchased in gas stations, are useless, and only include roads that skirt the desert. There are other maps, topo maps, that one might use, but
the road signs have been erected by the BLM, and what the BLM calls Steven’s Camp might be labeled Grassy Knob on some other map. What one map calls Table Mesa, another might call Rocky Butte. On those startling occasions when one sights a sign, it will have been erected by the BLM, which does not care what anyone else calls a certain rocky butte. To them, it’s Table Mountain.

You travel into this spare, barely inhabited expanse of sage, sand flats, and bare, volcanic hills with food for two weeks, with water—fourteen gallons in my case—with extra gas, and a plethora of spare tires.

I lacked only the rubber plethora, so that when my right rear tire began to sound like a helicopter landing in the distance, I thought: Well, goodness, won’t this be a jolly adventure.

Actually, I thought nothing of the sort. I thought: “I am going to find a man named B. F. Goodrich and beat him to death with a tire iron.”

An adventure is never an adventure when it’s happening. Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and an adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquillity. This is the definition I’d recently spouted to several hundred people who’d actually paid to hear me speak. I had attributed the basic underlying quote to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Someone pointed out that, in fact, it was the gushy Romantic poet William Wordsworth who said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

So I was wrong. So what? Does that make it any less true? Adventure and poetry share a certain process.

I mean, William Wordsworth takes a walk and sees a bunch of flowers, okay? The poem doesn’t spring to mind spontaneously. He goes home and thinks about it. In the fullness of time and during the doldrums of tranquillity, this little ramble in the Lake Country becomes a poem.

What was it that happened back there the other day? William Wordsworth thinks. Well, I took a walk. No, actually I wandered. I was wandering. Why? Well, because I felt quite alone in the world. Just so. I was lonely. I wandered lonely … as … as what? As a rock? Oh, heavens no. Rocks are lonely enough, one imagines, but
they don’t wander. So, once again: I wandered lonely as a … a bug. A bug? Unfortunate thought, that. Perhaps the wind? Very nearly there, but a bit too fast, actually. How about a cloud? Why, yes, a cloud. Clouds generally move quite slowly, and they do so in a properly ethereal fashion. I wandered lonely as a cloud. Jolly good!

Wordsworth went home and flopped down on the sofa with a six-pack and bag of chips. He lay there for about a week (For
oft when on my couch I lie / in vacant or in pensive mood
), and thought about how some lakeside flowers lifted his spirits one forlorn and dreary day (
They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude: / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils
).

My own peculiar situation had not yet begun to ferment into anything resembling poetry. At this point, a mere thirty-two miles from the nearest town, I lacked the necessary tranquillity and was experiencing only emotional discomfort.

There was no one on the road, and no one likely to be coming along anytime soon, which is why one needs food and water for two weeks in Black Rock country. I maneuvered the truck about in such a way that the tire in question was positioned in the late afternoon shade, then opened both of the doors to the wind in order to keep the cab cool. It worked. When the tire had been successfully changed, it wasn’t much more than 110 degrees inside, quite pleasant, really, and, as I sat there sweating, it occurred to me that something was dreadfully, terribly wrong. The big BLM map, which had been spread out on the passenger’s seat, was gone. Blown away. Probably wafting on the wind, winging its merry way to Reno, more than a hundred miles to the southwest. I was, at that point, experiencing a deepening and as yet unfermented adventure.

Presently, I found myself out in the sage-littered hills running around in a poetically futile series of unavailing and ever-widening circles. But, of course, the map was gone, and I was intensely annoyed, and not very tranquil, and wished that there was someone with me who might be blamed for what had happened.

“You left the doors open and the map out? In this wind? You nincompoop! We could die out here without a map.”

When there is no one to blame but yourself, solitude is not bliss.

…

In the words of the immortal Steppenwolf song, I was out looking for adventure in whatever came my way. I had started the search in the Black Rock Desert proper, called the playa. It is the bed of the ancient Lake Lahontan, flat as a billiard table, seventy miles long and up to twenty miles wide. The playa occupies over one thousand square miles and is sometimes called the flattest place on earth. In 1848, emigrants on their way to the California goldfields made camp near Double Hot Springs, at the far eastern edge of the playa, a major stop on what is called the Applegate-Lassen Trail.

A wide track enters the sand near the town of Gerlach and runs north and east, toward the black rock that gives the desert its name. In the winter, an inch of water sometimes covers the playa, and people trying to drive the desert have buried their vehicles to the axles in greasy silt then died of exposure, frozen to death out in the middle of the flattest place on earth.

In 1997, a British racing team, driving a car powered by a pair of jets, broke both the sound barrier and the world land-speed record—763.053 miles per hour—on the playa. My own drive across the sands was just a bit slower, and I dutifully kept to the established track, as per the usual BLM instructions. Dust devils danced in the distance, sometimes tracking miles across the plain to rock my half-ton truck with an audible thump, like a wrecking ball in a velvet glove. In those instances, sandstorms obscured the view briefly, then opened up to cloudless skies and terrifying monotony. Heat rose up off the scorched sand so that the flat and featureless plain ahead shimmered in rising waves, like an animated fun-house mirror.

Mirages glittered to the north. They covered the inane vacuity of the playa with mirrorlike blue waters, cool and calm as a child’s dream, and they retreated before my advance, moving ever into the distance, like the rainbow’s end. There were a half dozen of these lakes and they swam in the field of my parched and cracked-lipped vision like a series of especially vivid hallucinations. But mirages are not hallucinations; everyone sees them, and they are only a trick of refractive light. Emigrants, moving across the desert to the
California goldfields, wrote in their diaries that their oxen, dying of thirst, were “driven mad” by these deceptions of luminosity.

The black rock itself sits at the southern foot of the Black Rock mountain range. It is a limestone formation, several hundred feet high at a guess and much darker than the brownish-orange mountains rising above it. From the playa, the rock looks like a burned and fallen cake set on a rusted iron woodstove. Above the rock, and to the north, the entire range is ridged with terraces formed by the receding banks of the late Lake Lanhontan as it slowly sank away into sand over a period of fourteen thousand years or so.

The Double Hot Springs is set just above the sand, in a field of salt grass and sage. I camped there for three days in a solitude that was a little like bliss, only hotter. The springs are set in oblong bowls perhaps twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and about ten feet apart. The one to the east is larger, deeper, and small bubbles rise out of its emerald-black depths. Dragonflies cruise the slowly simmering pool. The one to the west is clear and cornflower blue because the underlying rocks are light in color. They form a sloping funnel that dives under an overhanging ledge and appears to plunge deep into the earth. It looked precisely like the kind of sump I had often seen while exploring caves, and every time I looked at it I had the disturbing sense of the earth turned inside out. It was always a slight embarrassment, as if I had walked in on someone naked doing something I didn’t want to know about.

Ralph Waldo Emerson met William Wordsworth on a trip to England in the early 1830s. It is my entirely unfounded contention that Emerson talked about emotion recollected in tranquillity with Wordsworth, who blithely snitched the line. The proposition is self-evident. Proof is not at issue here, only exoneration.

Ralph Waldo, I also found in my research, wrote an essay containing the dictum that “Nature punishes any neglect of prudence.” After changing the tire outside Gerlach, it occurred to me that if I wanted to experience a lot more adventure, or even write a poem, it would be wise, if not actually necessary, to neglect prudence. That would lead to discomfort and strong emotion, to be examined in tranquillity, provided I survived the experience.

And so, my decision made, I drove off into the desert, with no spare tire and only a schematic map—“not drawn to scale”—in an old BLM brochure I had found in the Gerlach gas station the last time I had my tire fixed there, which was yesterday. Yes, sir, I would just drive out into the desert, with no spare tire, and no map, looking for Waldo. Actually, I was looking for the emigrant trail through High Rock Canyon, driving a route I dimly recalled from the long-gone BLM map.

Every hour or so, I got out of the truck and examined my tires. The gravel road was strewn with obsidian chips, sharp as scalpels. You could perform heart surgery with some of the stones on the road to High Rock Canyon. Happily, the various tracks I chose did not go anywhere near the canyon, but dumped me out in Cedarville, California, at the far-northwest corner of Black Rock country. It was a Saturday, and the BLM office there was closed. I drove another twenty-five miles to Alturas, to buy a new tire and a topo map at the sporting goods store.

The topo included sites I didn’t recall from the BLM map, including the ominous-sounding Massacre Ranch, which is on Massacre Creek, near Massacre Lake. My BLM brochure stated that local ranchers are not in the business of providing food, water, or gasoline to stranded travelers. Still, the ranch covered a lot of territory, and I tried to imagine what a Massacre Ranch buckaroo might look like while I drove over a road layered with surgical instruments. He would be a lean man, on horseback, wearing a black hat and a white hockey mask. Instead of a rifle, he would be carrying a chainsaw in his scabbard.

Not far from the Massacre Ranch, there is a place called Hanging Rock Canyon. Several families were camped nearby. I said hello and I wandered up into the mouth of the narrow canyon. The rock wall towered eighty feet overhead but looked strangely hollowed, like a domed cave room, and once again I had a sense of the earth turned inside out and naked.

In contrast, a small river ran through the valley floor, and in the well-watered shade, there were dozens of giant aspen trees growing among wild roses and waist-high stands of silver sage. The
water in the stream was clear and cool and six inches deep. It was running slowly and sounded like a fountain in a backyard birdbath. A freshening breeze murmured through the trees and the sounds were like a symphony of life after the silence of the playa. It was a place I could think about, lying on the couch. Maybe write a poem.

When I got back to my truck, several people were gathered about, staring at it.

“Did you know your right rear tire is flat?” one of the men asked.

He advised me to go back to Alturas, past the Massacre Ranch, to get another tire. “I was out here last year and my car wouldn’t start,” he said. “We waited six days before someone came along.”

“Look,” I said, “I had a flat yesterday, one the day before, and now one today. What are the odds that I’ll get another one?”

“One hundred percent,” the fellow said.

But I went off in search of High Rock Canyon anyway, neglecting prudence once again, and driving on progressively smaller tracks through the sage for several hours. At one point, I topped a fairly steep ridge and was almost startled to see another vehicle, a battered old pickup, coming my way. In these situations, the uphill vehicle has the right of way, and I pulled off the road into the sage. The truck had Nevada plates and was pulling a horse trailer. The driver was wearing a white cowboy hat of the type called a silver belly. The name sprang to mind because the cowboy was not wearing a shirt. This was more than just a little strange. I have lived in the mountain West for over twenty years and have never seen a cowboy take off his shirt except to wash. They don’t even roll up their sleeves.

As the truck passed, I could, from my position, look directly down into the cab. The driver wasn’t wearing any pants either. He glanced over at me, touched a forefinger to the brim of his hat, and smiled briefly, as if to say, “Howdy, pilgrim.” He did not seem to be at all disturbed by the encounter and drove off into the distance at about 10 miles an hour. Was this the stuff of poetry? Frankly, it was not something I wanted to lie on the couch and contemplate.
(And then my heart with wonder quakèd / Because the guy was bareass naked.)

The image of the Naked Cowboy pulling a horse trailer over the
naked earth troubled my mind as the sun began bleeding to death in the west. There was a lake below, shining silver in the dying light. I thought it was Summit Lake, at the head of High Rock Canyon. Unfortunately, it was not to my south, as it should have been. I turned on my dome light and studied the map. The only place where I could be looking north at a lake was two miles from the Massacre Ranch. It was, of course, Massacre Lake. Coyotes yipped and howled very near to the truck, and I spent a sleepless night camped in the cab, listening to the gentle sigh of the breeze and wondering whether it was the air escaping from my tires.