According to sources that range from the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce website to National Geographic explorers, Death Valley has a stark history:
"In 1849 emigrants bound for California's gold fields strayed into the 120-mile long basin, enduring a two-month ordeal of 'hunger and thirst and an awful silence.' One of the last to leave looked down from a mountain at the narrow valley and said, 'Good-bye, Death Valley.' "
Earthquakes, volcanoes, lakes and floods have shaped the rugged terrain of this 3.3 million acre national park established in 1994 (actually a National Monument since 1933).
Knowing that this valley records for its extremes, I pull my down jacket hood up over my hatted head. The sun is setting over the monochromatic sandstone hills and dusk's freezing temperatures roll off the glowing peaks to settle into the canyon where my tent is set up for the night. The highs will be in the 40's and 50's, maybe into the 60's now that it is winter. But the night temperatures will quickly drop. The summer would be unbearable with its temperatures reaching into the triple digits. At Furnace Creek and the Park Visitor Center, a sign informed of the 134 degree high reached in 1913. With an average of less than two inches of rainfall a year, the dry, parched landscape sucks what it can out of whatever it can. Today, it is me. Having made sure every bottle I have was filled at the Visitor Center earlier,
I guzzle down more water.
It has the lowest elevation in the Western Hemisphere at Badwater (282 feet below sea level) where salt flats crust the 200 square miles of crushed lava gravel that spreads across the valley between the Inyo and Panamint Mountains to the west, and the Grapevine, Funeral and Black Mountains to the east.
Winter may hold life back, I don't know. Supposedly there are animals that call this desolate place home: 37 reptile species, 6 kinds of amphibians, 58 species of mammals, 347 species of birds, and then 1,000 species of plants.
Too cold for me to stargaze in the middle of the desert night, and to watch for nuzzled murmurs, I only saw daytime birds bravely showing themselves in the earlier light. But supposedly, as night falls, Death Valley's elusive populations of bobcats, kit foxes, and rodents pad out into the star-jammed night. And perhaps, above on steep mountain slopes, desert bighorn sheep forage among Joshua trees, scrubby junipers, and pines. Stark night quiet muffles any padded sounds slowly searching the sands for sustenance. Down-bagged for a long night, my lonely nose, freshened by the threat of dry frost, wards off windy desires for infiltration. I settle under the silent, starry blanket shifting to the side for the bright desert moon's soliloquy.
Adventures Below the Sea
Some paved roads line the valley for those not brave enough to ride the washboarded dirt roads into the backcountry of the Park.
From the end of the Ubehebe Crater, the road turns right through this side valley and pushes back at my vehicle. Between five and ten miles an hour, I snail my truck over the relentless washboarded dirt roads with the hope of my old truck staying in tact. We bounce along, jostle to the left and then right towards the tiny shoulder packed with deeper sand. 4WD is the only way on these roads, and then there is the patience. 27 miles to the "Racetrack" and then the same back again within uncaring hours.
When the cold rain leaves a frosty residue, and the wind blows strong across the playa, tossed rocks residing on the cracked salt pan "race". Smaller rocks must move faster than the larger ones, I imagine, in this race, not of brawn, but of lightness. Tracks dug into the salt belly centimeters into the flat. Distances seduce visitors across the cracked pan to view the timeless race far down the laughing valley. |
Mules
From 1883 to 1889, wagon teams hauled powdery white borax from mines since fallen to ruin, an enterprise that spread word of Death Valley's striking landscapes, deep solitude, and crystalline air.
Harmony Borax Works was one of Death Valley's first operations of processing Borax. Mining for gold produced few fortunes and borax became the "White Gold" that profited most. Borates, or salt minerals, had deposited in ancient lake beds, then eroded and lifted onto the Furnace Creek Badlands where they recrystallized as borax.
The "Twenty Mule Train" logo marketed borax to housewives, blacksmiths, potters, meatpackers and morticians for decades.
Chroma Blush
Rising above the valley floor and nestled up into the Black Mountains, mudstone hills and canyons, tinted from millions of years of heat and water chemically altered mineral ash, flaunt, like a parading peacock, colors formed from iron, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium. Red hematite and green chlorite seep from the sandy mounds to shift with the changing desert light in the Artist's Palette that bursts free from the valley's salty monochrome.
Golf?
Salt crystals, razor sharp, jag across the southern valley in an ever shifting dance with nature. These salt pinnacles expand and contract with rain, wind and heat. As sparse flash floods renew the salt pan, new salts are deposited across the spires in this phenomenon known at the Devil's Golf Course. Expecting green circles with flagged hole-in-ones, I try to embrace some dreamed ghoulish form with a long golf club smacking salty pinnacles around the valley, but, alas, can't quite hold that image. Just seems to be a vast, cutting crust covered in salt.
Natural Bridge:
The Major Arcana Death Card #13 in the Tarot rarely has anything to do with physical death, and as a reader of the Tarot, I never interpret it in that way. Death happens continually, at many levels and not just in the physical realm. Each moment, we die to the present so the future can unfold from our deepest fears and transform us into an evolved state of being—the proverbial Phoenix from the ashes.
Caked salt sucks the inflammation from overused joints that have continuously pulled at the familiarity of history clouding the preset sun. Cemented stances guilt the pillars of any overview available and shame us to hide behind stories long told. But minerals ooze from monochrome, sand hues crack open old crust. Over three million acres here hold the scepter of forced change. Lakes dried. Rock exploded. Sand duned. Canyons spread.
At such times, there may be sadness and reluctance, but also relief and a sense of completion. The layers of time pig pile until the initial no longer can speak. Now cast adrift, clothed only in the stark dry of a flattened seabed of memory, caught in the headlights of sweeping change, stripped bones bleached from the heat, there are no hiding places. Each canyon wash offers no refuge from the wind blowing sand into one's eyes. Trail-less peaks offer no guided path into what needs to become. Water lurks under forgotten springs for the thirst of those desperate enough to crawl with hope across the playas. This place is the reminder that those who lose hope, those who have given up on trust, will die a slow elemental death.
And so, in this place devoid of verdancy, the veil becomes thin in order to expose the forgotten truths and miraged lies. Night chills the bone under the twinkling panoply of laughing stars. This desolation will laugh last, and without compassion, under the umbrella of thickened silence. "Stay awake," I hear whispered from this salty plane.
Desert Soliloquy 1
Down from a population of ten, three residents now hold this town in check. From the short history of the booming activity of the Pacific Coast Borax Company workers having resided in the Death Valley Junction dormitory that side saddled the Amargosa Hotel, to the hey days of desert hotel high life, the 1960's birthed a desert bloom of creativity unknown to this middle-of-nowhere town. Cracking through the desert crust, the chrysalis opened into a desert rose never seen before. Marta Becket, chance and a 1967 flat tire convened on a deserted social hall degrading near a junction of roads bisecting the Nevada, California border.
Tired of the New York City dance life in Radio City Music Hall and Broadway, the actress, dancer, choreographer, and painter rented the recreation hall, then known as Corkhill Hall, and began repairs. A previous session with a fortune teller had left her lingering and watching for a large letter "A", and the "A" in Amargosa Hotel bore down on her.
She changed the hall name to the Amargosa Opera House, performed her first show in the winter of 1968 to an audience of 12, and in 1970, journalists from National Geographic discovered Becket doing a performance at the Opera House without an audience. Their profile led to an international interest in Becket and her theater. She began performing to visitors from around the world, including such notables as Ray Bradbury and Red Skelton, who became a frequent visitor and ongoing friend. Room number 22 is in his honor.
Meet Marta:
In room number 2, I slept soundly, and if orbs floated over the bed, I never stirred. The tinkling drips of water in the sink and tub warded off the freezing of aging pipes, and the ongoing hum of the tiny room heater lullabied any curious ghostly hanky-panky.
Becket performed on the Opera House stage until she turned 88 in 2013. Not long after, retired Oakland ballet dancer Jenna McClintock relocated to Death Valley Junction to perform a solo, one-woman show from Becket's own repertoire for ballet and pantomime as well as her own choreographed creations.
McClintock, at age six, while traveling with her family in Death Valley, was able to attend a performance of Becket's in 1982. Little McClintock left so utterly "mesmerized" by Becket's performance that she soon enrolled in a ballet academy, eventually performing professionally for 25 years, both regionally and nationally. Encouraged by Becket herself, McClintock undertook an extended residency and series of performances until May 2016.
According to the office staff, preparations are being made for a Red Skelton impersonator with shows starting in February 2017. Marta, now 92, still attends every performance. Mid-week, no performances are held, but $5 insures a private tour of the Opera House and the Becket story. For free: the viewing of Todd Robinson's 2003 Emmy award winning documentary about Becket and her desert soliloquy: "Amargosa (2000)"
Do we really need an audience? What makes art a way of life? Or life a work of art?
Marta Becket performed on stage to empty seats until she painted murals of a 16th century audience that celebrated her art with her. Until...passers by started to stop in for the weekly performances. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of her life, she immersed herself in her art for the sake of art. Would it have mattered if she had never acquired a following, by chance or not? If art is not experienced, isn't it still art? Wasn't she still balanced on ballet toes, leg muscles steadying a turn, back arched in sculptural posture against the backdrop of vaudevillian choreography?
In this second year of travel, I am learning to let go of the perspective that requires me to play to the audience. My words still slink across the page, my images still emerge from the lens, my humility still reaches into the essence of creation and offers up the singular breath I call my own. Aesthetics of what is beautiful expression can only have one initial voice singing — one birthed moment. And so, in these moments of wonder, my hands and my thoughts slice through the ghosts of past laurels.
I have often wondered what this world would be like if each and every one of us danced a soliloquy in the middle of a monochrome. What hues would percolate up through the forgotten and the parched? Would the canyons laugh? Would the salt soften? From those undeniable birthing rooms, would we all create worlds that we passionately crave to experience? We, ourselves, individually, are the audience in witness of naked passion—isn't this enough?
In Goodsprings, Nevada, just outside of Jean, exists the Pioneer Saloon. We walk in for a hearty cowboy breakfast in this infamous establishment hugging the main road since 1913. In this corner of four states marking a piece of history in the Wild West, both real and Hollywood, the walls are lined in framed photographs and news clippings. Our bandana-necked, cowboy hat wearing server tells us about the history of movies filmed here in the Saloon. On the TV screen high on the back wall, a black and while Gable/Lombard film rolls. Framed versions of Clark Gable and Carol Lombard line the opposite wall in a tribute to their love affair and time spent at the Pioneer. In 1942, Lombard boarded a plane out of Las Vegas after a tour performing for the troops. Because of blackouts, the plane flew off course and crashed—no one survived. After only two years of actual marriage, Gable drank himself down in the Pioneer waiting for news about the crash, never to be the same again.
http://www.pioneersaloon.info/