The Great Divide

I've crossed a great divide. I feel it.

Moving across the country is what we all must do from time to time, I'm certain, to get a feel of the American scope, the enormity of this nation, and to remind ourselves that nice little lawns and suburban shopping centers make up a tiny part of the United States.

We don't own this place. We belong to it. It isn't crowded but huge and remarkably lonely in its spaciousness. It's anthropomorphic narcissism to assume our nation is what we see in our own gerbil cages. Getting out onto the American ground is humbling and sobering.

Long, long desert stretches. Wide prairies, horizon to horizon. A few clusters of folks here and there. This is a major chunk of the world, and shortly we may wake from our doze and discover that rats and mice and cockroaches have been plundering our wealth for their own aggrandizement. When that happens, when we compare the real physical breadth of our nation and its weight of resources, we'll be obliged to squash the rodentine corporations that are squirreling away our wealth.

Who are these piss-ant speculators, juggling numbers and derivatives and robbing pension funds? Well-dressed, self-congratulatory, puffed-up thieves. At some point it's going to be critical that we remember our grampas. They worked willingly within codes of self-restraint and ethical boundaries that were essential to their identity. They couldn't respect themselves without the codes. They would not look kindly on legislating ethics, morality and logic out of existence, a process that's ongoing in Washington.

Seeing the big-ness of this nation puts the money pests in perspective as embarrassingly trivial frauds. Isn't it time to get angry?

This is a wonderful land. It's easy to hear Woody Guthrie out here on the road. Get out in the big spaces and listen.

One expects a mighty ridgeback for the Continental Divide but I crossed it this afternoon on a flatland Interstate, I-10. Without the sign, announcing the geographic fact and the height, around 4500' above sea level, I wouldn't have noticed. But that sign struck a harmonic. It occurred to me that my life has crossed over into another watershed phase, and that I'm following the downslope gladly, looking forward to a natural return to family and closeness. Big medicine.

The land speaks to us. No doubt about. It can sound like Woody, or it can sound like a brief thundering rainstorm whacking the windshield as you drive the desert floor, or like wind over gravel at a rest stop. I don't know for certain what it's saying to me, yet, but the message is crucial, stirring, important. I must listen louder.

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself has been in the car too long. He's gone a bit woo-woo on us. He's wringing significance out of desert rocks and finding messages in rainstorms. But this is what he does. It's my job to keep him on-task and out of bogs. Perhaps it's his job to hear language in running water. From each, according to his ability . . . 

Elegance Without Lushness

It's easy to be trivial about the desert, ripping across it at a skimming rate in air-conditioned pods. But even from such a patrician perch, the size and scope and hammering heat of it intimidates.

Beside I-10 East, as the Subaru and the Dovekie and I ascended a pass in one of the mountain ranges that lie athwart the Great Southwestern Desert, an old gravel road appeared again and again. I realized that the Interstate engineers had followed one of the old stage and freight passes. On reflection, it was the natural thing to do. The Old Guys tried every pass and settled on the best crossing. I began to feature mule-drawn wagons on that scrolling, wayward track whenever it reappeared, and to notice that it took every possible advantage of topography and natural shape. The Old Guys had shovels and blasting powder and an eye for advantage. Damn, the trip across these mountains was epic, unthinkable in our cushioned lives. The West wasn't "won," it was endured.

But the mountain passes may have been the easy part. How to cross sixty miles of desert between ranges in Sonoran heat? 110°F at the rest stop. so hot that I almost fell back into the car when I opened the door and stepped out.

Wagons moved at the pace of a slow jogger – though I don't know a jogger who could manage a 10 K in heat like this – making twenty or thirty miles on a good day, camping in the cold, starry nights among the inquisitive sidewinders and scorpions. How could you carry enough water for yourself and the mules? Jolting over rocks, avoiding big creosote bushes, finding eroded edges into and out of the waddies, constant focus in brutal sunlight that had to erode focus.

I crossed one waddie named Palen Ditch out on the vast, flat, gravel platter of the Sonoran Desert. Suddenly I was treated to a rainstorm in the bright sunlight. It lasted exactly thirty seconds and didn't darken the road a whit.

I crossed a larger watercourse, the Hassayampa River, but it was not being used at the time for carrying water. Perfectly good river,  broad and deep, but no water. It was flanked by warnings against sudden dust storms that kick up quickly and reduce visibility to zero. I didn't experience one this crossing (yet) but this particular bit of local meteorology must have been plenty interesting from the seat of a freight wagon.

I enjoyed passing Sore Finger Road, plenty of Ditches (I'm not sure that having a ditch named for you is an honor or an official insult), and watching those giant Quixotic desert inhabitants, the high-tension electric towers, march across the planar land.

Desert colors are muted, though there are occasional gray-green bushes and stunted trees and saguaros. Like the old B&W cinema, however, the beauty is often in lighting rather than chroma. From the desert floor, the distant foothills have a horizontal hachure, a delicate texture seen at a low angle that resolves into parallel lines. At a distance, the creosote bushes resolve into a dot-stippling that shade the rugged hills. A joshua tree standing out among chollas and low bushes seems always like an event, and the saguaros, which top forty feet, are remarkable desert statements.

I remember reading a copy of an old letter at Death Valley National Park, commenting that some birds flew across the desert on their way to some bird rendezvous and simply dropped dead out of the sky from the heat. Understandable.

It would be terribly hard, but it would also be a thrilling challenge to ride with a few friends and some friendly mules across one of these desert stretches, to savor just how it felt, to camp out with a fire and a lot of snake repellant (I'm sure I can Google that), and to lie under the stars talking to the Old Guys.

I want to explore the desert at length if I can. It's spare and harsh and mysterious and elegant. Like Marlene Dietrich, but more gravel.

Braxinoso Speaks

Listen to him, as if. The desert requires lean young men who don't sweat much. Himself is an old fat man who sweats buckets at the least exertion. When we arrive in Florida, I'll nip at his heels a bit about losing weight. He needs to move fast with those boyos about.