I stared straight at the sun as no
man could.
1.
We hit Beatty
after a two-hour drive in the bright sun with
our headlights on,
hanging inordinately long behind pokey vehicles, afraid to pass. By the
time we finish
unloading, it’s mid-evening and we need a restaurant, but disturbingly,
Death Valley Fire
Pit Barbecue and Happy Burro Chile
and Beer are
both boarded up,
so we walk fast (past a funny twelve-foot-tall metal clock, standing by
itself where we
suppose a railroad station used to be), finally spotting
a convenience store
on Main Street.
A muscular
gray-haired woman behind the counter
steers us away
from the Sourdough Café (“They gave me the worst sandwich I ever
ate in my
life”), so we settle for beers and pizza at KC’s
across the street,
and then return with a six-pack to the Death
Valley
Inn and RV
Park, and I go to sleep, nodding over
Dante’s
Paradiso.
We start
that first morning by walking around Beatty. Beatty’s the
kind of town
where everyone lives in a trailer home, with all their old vehicles parked in
the front yard.
(In one particular yard, there’s an ancient rusty contraption that seems to be
a road grader,
wheels sunk four inches deep in the yellow dirt—
a long (hitching?)
post in front—maybe designed to be attached to a team of horses or
mules.)
After an
hour or two or of searching for birds in the bushes that
line a scant
trickle that runs through town and turns out to be
the Amargosa River,
we take off in the Fiesta for
Death Valley.
I’m
a little embarrassed to admit that we end up staying three
days in Beatty—
crusty bruise on the foot of southern Nevada. We don’t
see many of
the Death Valley sights either—checking out the Harmony Borax Works
but never viewing
the sunrise from Zabriski Point, or navigating
the scenic loop called Artist’s drive,
or even taking
in Dante’s View—the breathtaking mountaintop overlook more
than 5000 feet
above the inferno of Death Valley. Not sure why we
aren’t more ambitious—
except I know I’m tired—negotiating a separation from my
stressful job working
for a medical device company in Minnesota.
Afternoon
of the third
day, I haul my clothes to the RV Laundromat, managed by an
old wrangler dude
living in a trailer next door with his three dogs.
Waiting out the
washing cycle, I read on at the Paradiso.
Beatrice has appeared already
in Canto I,
staring straight into the sun, and Dante, staring unceasingly into
her beautiful face,
floats up past the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars, to
his true home
in the Empyrean—divine source of all light and love. Beatrice
is very pedantic.
When Dante attempts to explain the dark markings on the moon as due to
different densities, she
rebukes him— “I am certain you shall see that your beliefs
are deeply steeped
in error” —and embarks on a three-page scholastic argument that makes
my noggin smart.
2.
Our
one mildly ambitious trip: first morning
in the Fiesta,
hurtling down 5000 feet of switchbacks—tense because of my phobia of
losing control going
fast downhill—braking to 15 miles per hour, then coasting to 45 and
braking again, Robin
impatient with me in the passenger seat.
We take
the left fork
toward the Furnace Creek Visitor Center,
road gradually leveling
in the midst of a blinding white stretching away
toward a few
black, rounded buttes to the west—
dry bones of horses,
mules, and foolish
men who concluded to drive across that sink, to be
found later under
a grease bush, head over knees, dead,
cat in a box
dead, horses dead in their halters, the wind
singing a funeral:
You’ve lived in heat, you’ve died in
heat, and now you’ve gone
to hell.
A
ranger at the Visitor Center gives us a little itinerary, so we drive a few
miles toward Bad
Water and pull into a parking lot marked Golden
Canyon.
A broad trail
goes up between wrinkled, mustard-colored mounds—air already close
and hot, 90-plus
in mid-March—lizards darting out from under our feet to hide
in narrow crannies
in the yellow rock.
Ascending, we encounter a number of groups
and pairs returning,
few having made it all the way to the Red Cathedral at the end
of the trail.
“Was it worth the hike?” we ask, the responses decidedly lukewarm—nothing
spectacular to report
about this Golden Canyon trail. Supposedly
there’s a vista
from the Red
Cathedral if you scramble a ways over the rocks, but it sounds dangerous,
and no one
seems to have had the energy to try it.
As we get higher, the canyon
narrows and the
air gets closer—my sandaled, borax-dusty feet trudging over rocks,
trying to avoid
gravelly stretches that make me have to kick pebbles out—finally
reaching a spot
where we duck to get under a red rock arch. The wall of
the Red Cathedral
is just fifty-odd yards farther up, but we stop here,
eat our left-over
sausage-and-jalapeño pizza from KC’s, and then
start back down—
the mid-afternoon sun catching the sides of the mustard-colored hills,
making a million
tiny silicate specs glitter in the sun—a transparency almost
of coral or
amber—a million starlike points of light, each shining
like a soul
that has floated up by ineluctable reverse-gravity karma grace to its own
immovable, foreknown place
under the unchanging eye of
God.
A few
yards farther down, the light shifts, and the hills
are mustard-colored
mounds again. It doesn’t take us long to walk back to the Fiesta and drive
along the white
sink and up the 5000 feet of switchbacks
home to Beatty.
