7 April 2006, Death Valley CA

South from Bishop through the Owens Valley to Lone Pine. Somewhere around Independence saw a flock of what must have been at least a thousand snow geese in a holding pattern, so high up they seemed to be suspended in midair. They revolved and shifted like a cluster of stars. As I passed beneath them hundreds were peeling off into gigantic wedges and heading northwards. Incredible.

Coffee in LP and then east past Owens Lake, now dry and being mined for something, salt or borax. Low pass into Panamint Valley over the tail of the Whites or Inyos, I forget which are the more southern. The road cuts through wide bands of color down into the valley, from dark red to pink and black. Bits of what looks like uneroded Bishop tuff. But nothing compares to the eastern faces of the Panamint and then Amargosa ranges, which would defy the vocabulary even of Turner. Add to this sere and muted beauty the wildflowers, mostly gone and mostly yellow, that I passed driving south past the Badwater basin. Nowhere near the splendor of last year, says someone at the station, but sublime enough for me.

Drove about ten miles on bumpy dirt, gravel, and scree roads to find this windy and rocky spot on the slopes of the Panamints, a huge fan of debris washed or fallen loose from the mountains above me. Lovely view, though. I had thoughts of doing some biking tomorrow but the delay in Truckee encourages me to leave for Zion.

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I am tempted not to admit that the sight of those wildflowers living in this landscape almost brought me to tears. No doubt I am a little overwrought these days, and feeling the pain of leaving. Mere sentimentalism, surely, the height of what Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy.

(The wind has knocked down my tent. I weighted its corpse down with stones and hope to resurrect the thing if the wind dies down. I may have to sleep in the car now, which I was tempted to do anyway once I discovered that all my driving only led me further into the rocks and wind.)

Strike those parentheses. This aids my case. The wildflowers do not feel the wind, of course: that would be the pathetic fallacy. They feel none of their extreme conditions, they do not feel the shortness of their lives, or the seeming futility of what is their equivalent of love. The clouds do not rage, the sun does not beat down. Things are what they are, and what Ruskin cautions us against is reading our own emotions (and I would add, concerns) into things that do not possess them. But here is my answer to the charge of patheticism. First, that even if flowers can’t feel the harshness of this place, I can. And second, that even though flowers cannot feel the wind they can respond to it. They do so very slowly, but they do so completely, by changing their forms. In other words, their response is not conscious; it is not even active. The environment did this to them, by killing off the ones that couldn’t survive (I would be one of them, I fear, if not for my car and several gallons of gas, or people within a half a day’s walk). Yet their nature expresses something about the nature of this place, and the nature of this thing called life that I share with them. And that is precisely it. It is my frailty that I feel out here. To see such beauty in the midst of what would kill me is something of a sign. I know how those flowers got to be so beautiful.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 7April2006 )