You've filled a ten pound bag of life with a hundred pounds of things-to-do. It's only December 3 and already you want to scream every time you hear Alvin and the Chipmunks or What Child is This? As you step into the neighborhood supermarket to pick up a roasted chicken for the dinner that is now an hour late, you have a deep spiritual moment. You can suddenly see that the aisles of holiday junk in front of you are just that - shoddy plastic fool's gold sparkling junk. Grown women and men are standing in front of cheap make-up sets and team-logoed beer coolers and arcane devices that can make your cooking easy. They seem to be considering these objects with the consideration normally given holy relics.
It's only December 3. You clutch the handles of your grocery cart and mutter: "Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life here."
Here is Antidote 3. For those of you who haven't been following these posts...I give few material gifts for this Holyday. Our planet is already exhausted. Here is a gift that cost me nothing and took nothing from the earth. I offer the treasure of moving over wild ground, of the writing that comes from Place. Beginning December 1 and finishing on Solstice, December 21, I'll post dispatches of my time in the Western deserts and canyons. If they take you away from whatever is pressing on your soul, the desert, canyons and I will celebrate.
Antidote 3:
Maggie pulled onto a rocky point. Late afternoon light threw blue shadows over desert the sheen of pewter, over a tangle of tracks, solitary creosote, and raw red boulders. Maggie crouched on the basalt. It was perfectly still, heat waves rippling up from a distant ridgeline. .
She heard a crunch on gravel. A beige van pulled up, two sea kayaks on top. A couple climbed out. ”God,” the woman said, “God, this is a moonscape.”
“No,” Maggie whispered. Not a moonscape. It was home. Harsh, scarred and utterly unto itself. A dirty yellow cloud floated over the power plant to the west, Creosote metastasizing below it, where it was midnight in broad daylight, where a bunch of people she might never see again were dealing hands, frying bacon, making change and, earning in two days what this couple might spend on dinner.
She understood why tourists had to re-define the desert. You could visit a moonscape, be amused, uneasy, bored, afraid. You might think you owed the place nothing.
Beer bottle shards lay at Maggie’s feet. Amber. Green. “Name this,” she thought and pressed her finger on one. The pain cleared her anger.
A video camera whirred. “Let’s go,” the guy said. “We’re due in Santa Barbara by ten.”
Maggie shaded her eyes against a sun starting to go faint gold above the far mountains. She looked out over the old mining roads, dune buggy tracks, a lone dust-devil swirling up from the desert floor carrying specks of mica, dried grass, mesquite pods and Taco Bell boxes. There was nowhere she would rather be. ---Going Through Ghosts, University of Nevada Press, 2010
note: Creosote is a little Colorado River gambling town in my newest novel. It is also: http://www.parkfilms.com/creosote_black.html Post photo is from this site.
