Delirious Ramblings

The View from a Quiet Place

The View from a Quiet Place, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, May 2012

When I reached the top of the great mountain an ancient bristlecone pine waited there. We stood together in silence, the tree and I, feeling the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the air. Confused by the stillness I asked it what year it was. It could only stare back, unable to comprehend the question. The great circle of time had been revolving very slowly around that quiet place since the birth of the mountain, each day mostly the same as the previous, each year, decade, and century much like the one before. I wondered, did the trees there even know that the Ice had gone, perhaps never to return?

Abandoned Car

Old Car, Flagstaff, Az, March 2012

Somewhere south of Flagstaff I found the shell of an old car - a classic Volkswagon beetle - stripped and abandoned in the woods for years. I approached it, wondering what it was doing out there in the forest, who had left it there and what it might've witnessed over the years. Under the blanket of snow a few patches of sanded-to-the-metal paint and primer gray bondo hinted at someone's failed restoration plans, the muted clues to a bygone disappointment.

What combination of hopes and dreams and life's little tragedies colluded to bring the old car to that place? How does a car - even just the shell of a car - become so worthless that the best option is to leave it in the woods like so much trash? Maybe it was something as dramatic as thieves looking to dispose of the carcass after gutting it of all its saleable parts. Perhaps it was as simple and as heartbreaking as a divorce or an eviction notice or a lost job or just plain laziness. It's hard to say.

After taking a few photographs I skirted around the car, not wishing to disturb the memories lurking within any more than I already had. The car belonged to the trees and the silent snow now and I would leave it to them.

Holding up the Moon

Holding up the Moon, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

I was walking around the mountain lost in the fescue when I looked up and noticed that the moon had alighted in the branches of an old pine snag. As I watched pale Luna settle into her roost the sun took flight behind me.

Where Green Stones Flow Like Water

The River of Green Stones, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

I'm knee deep in last year's snow, working my way slowly along the face of the mountain when I finally see light ahead through the thick spruce and bristlecone pine forest. I head for it, hoping to see the sun. When I break free of the crusty snow and gloom I find myself on the banks of a river of green lichen and gray lava.

I wade out into it, mindful of the rollers and tippy flat plates, and look upstream. The great river of rock extends upwards for a million years. Downstream is the same. It is a raging torrent frozen in time, the rumblings and stirrings of earth paused in mid flow. Around me I can feel the trembling potential energy in the ancient rocks, all that repressed gravity waiting these many millennia.

 

The River of Green Stones, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

They say the San Francisco Peaks are extinct, that they've been asleep for a quarter million years or so and unlikely to ever reawaken. Extinct. Dormant. I guess that's technically true as far as geologists and science is concerned, but standing there in the middle of the frozen jumble of stone with the ancient lava rapids roaring in my ears, somehow it doesn't feel true.

I poke at one of the lichen covered boulders with the carbide point of one of my snowshoe poles. It moves imperceptibly, tips ever so slightly. I hear it grate softly against its mates. I can't help but think about Aron Ralston and his 127 hours.

A little unnerved I stand and work my way across the expanse of rocks quickly and carefully. I let out a little sigh of relief when I reach the other side, having safely forded the river.

No, it doesn't feel true at all. Dormant my ass, this damned mountain is alive.

Leroux Sunrise

San Francisco Peaks, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

Sunrise is still a half hour away when I leave my truck and hike uphill into the forest, angling northeast across the feet of the San Francisco Peaks. The previous night's stillborn snowstorm is dragging a powerful cold front behind it and a biting wind is pushing down from the heights of the mountain. The treetops are swaying wildly back and forth disconcertingly. The gusts are at the upper range of comfort and I think seriously about packing it in, turning around, heading back down the mountain. It's risky being here at this time, dangerous even, but I decide to push on.

The woods are in a strange, apprehensive mood that I haven't felt here before. I find myself pausing often to listen and peer through the gloom, watching for movement behind fallen logs or shapes among the boulders. There is nothing, yet I can't help but wonder about skinny, winter-starved mountain lions and cranky, insomniac black bears.

 

Leroux Sunrise, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

Sunrise approaches and I step out of the relative shelter of the trees into the vacuum of the old Leroux burn where I can look up at the mountains. It is good to be out of the murkiness, although in the open the windchill is very low -- single digits at most -- and my fingers ache and burn and go numb as I ready my camera.

When the austere January dawn finally breaks upon the mountain it is thin and cold and beautiful.

Is there any better way to spend a Sunday morning?

Trees in the Key of LED

Weeks ago I heard a rumor that in the city to the south there was a place where for ten dollars you can watch binary trees flicker and glow in all the moods of heatless neon. It seemed an obvious falsehood, the demented whisperings of television journalists and late-night commercials. Glowing trees! Puuuleeaase! But still, such talk often contains a kernel of truth so like tardy magi we undertook a post-Christmas journey to see for ourselves.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

When we arrived at the Mecca of light we discovered that others had also made the pilgrimage and that just a hundred feet from the gates they’d created a kind of purgatory for themselves. We waited an eternity in lines of lines and queues of queues, shuffling our feet and muttering dark oaths and incantations under our breath. When at last we reached the gatekeeper we swapped hard cash for printed tickets and were ushered inside where all the rumors were proven true and more.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

Inside were the great wondrous trees of fever dreams and James Cameron movies, their trunks and limbs sheathed in shimmering digital radiance and coursing with kilowatts of unseen power. Vast networks of chaotic branches arched high overhead, outlined in red and green and blue light. As I stood rapt beneath them they flickered and danced and sang the song of the body electric against the starless night sky.

Jesus H. Christ, imagine the electric bill, I thought.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

At the feet of the great scintillated trees a crazy carnival of vendors sprouted like mushrooms. The pungent odor of movie theater popcorn and cotton candy mixed with the earthy smell of elephant dung. Children ran and swarmed like flies, wildly waving glowing lightsabers above their heads. Bored camels waited in a pen, slowly shifting their weight from one side to the other while parents opened their wallets and wriggling kids were hoisted up on their tall humped backs.

Many years ago on the other side of the world I'd watched similar camels dash across a lonely desert highway, their brown bulks floating weightless across the sand, barely touching the ground. Men dressed in robes and checkered keffiyehs had run after them, playing at a sort of tag that had been going on since time immemorial. My companion and I waved at them, but the desert tribesmen didn't trust our uniforms or our M-16 rifles or our odd ideologies and simply ran faster, prompting the camels to race ahead even farther.

I looked at the camels in their glowing fluorescent corral and wondered if they remembered the desert - their desert. When the last visitors were gone and the lights finally turned out, did the electric camels dream of sand and open vistas of shimmering heat?

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

When we’d circumnavigated the Lite-Brite world and found ourselves back at the beginning I noticed the waxing crescent moon floating overhead. It hung there in the blackness heavy and grinning with meaning. Whoever had placed it there had precisely matched it to the real lunar cycle, even positioned it so it would be visible in the western sky where the real moon would be setting this late December. Perhaps it was only a random coincidence, the workings of pure chance, but in that alignment I thought I smelled the logic of purpose.

 

Waxing Crescent Moon, December 2011

Around us the children laughed and adults snapped final blurry pictures with their camera phones and remarked at how beautiful the lights had been. Beyond the facade of high technology luminescence and carny commercialism the extravaganza of LED trees had perhaps tickled some lost genetic memory: we knew the glowing trees were beautiful and to be appreciated, that the lights were important, that there was something special and powerful going on in that place. I suspect few (if any) of us understood exactly what.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

As we left I wondered what an eighteenth century Navajo medicine man would've thought of the flickering trees and their high-tech spectacle. Would he have marvelled at them as we did? Would he have feared them and their digital song of electricity? Or would he have simply shrugged and said that trees always glowed like that and that we were blind to think otherwise?

Total Eclipse of the Moon

Total Eclipse of the Moon, Flagstaff, AZ, December 2011

It's eight degrees Fahrenheit in the deserted soccer field and my face and ears are frozen. I lean against the steel trunk of a street light to steady my shivering hands enough to take a few photographs. Beneath the sound of big rigs jamming gears on the interstate a mile away I can hear the muted buzzing of the sodium vapor light glowing above.

There is a long pause in which the world holds its breath before the last smokey sliver of the moon slips behind shadow. For a moment I am conscious of the tickings of vast clockworks and the mathematics of spheres and light. I glance around me at the slumbering houses and condominiums bordering the field.

"Hey!" I want to scream at the shuttered windows. "Where the hell is everybody? Wake up, this is really important! You people should be seeing this!"

But the shout never escapes my lips and the feeling of having glimpsed the workings of the universe fades. I sigh and put my camera in my pocket. 

The sun will be rising soon and it's just another day.

A Wilderness of Spheres

Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, November 2011

The trail is long and steep and it unravels slowly through a forest of soughing pinyon pine and shaggy bark juniper, skirting past red-rock buttes until it deposits us at the creek bottom. Like many of Arizona's backcountry rivers this time of year there is no water, only a wilderness of polished river stones and encroaching thickets of arizona ash and sycamore. It is still fall at this low elevation and the trees' leaves glow a brilliant yellow. They are releasing back some of the summer sun before packing it in for the winter. I think it is their way of giving thanks for a growing season well spent.

 

 Sycamore Creek, Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, November 2011

 We drop our packs and eat lunch among the stones. Afterwards we split up: he up some nameless side canyon, me downstream among the ankle-busters. The sycamores beckon me south and I explore the river course, slowly resolving my way around and over boulders, stepping carefully, aware of shifting centers of gravity and balance points, feeling the soles of my boots gripping the rock. It is an interesting sensation and I revel in its  bright, shining immediacy, its ability to cut through all the left-brain crap of human consciousness and force one into the present.

 

Sycamore Creek, Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, November 2011

I try to internalize the workings of the river basin, the sound of the wind in the pinyons above, the warmth of the sun, the feel of bones pivoting on ligament and of wondrous balance. I will use the memories of this place as an antidote to the deadly monotony of civilized life. When I am next trapped in traffic with a boom-car rumbling in the adjacent lane I'll hold these stones up as a talismanic shield.

Later I meet up with my hiking partner. I ask him what he saw in the side canyon and he is mysteriously reticent, offering scant clues. I should know better than to ask such things.

 

Sycamore Creek, Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, November 2011

On the way out with the light getting low in the west we meet a woman with a very large dog. She is searching for a missing hiker, gone for a month now, presumed lost in the backcountry. She shows us a photograph of a smiling man. He could be anybody, any one of the many hikers I routinely meet on trails. We haven't seen him (or anyone else for that matter) and she moves on, possessed of a grim and hopeless kind of determination.

Shades of Gray

Trees and Fog, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, November 2011

Despite the rainy, gloomy weather I force myself out of the house and onto the Peaks. As the sun rises invisible behind gray clouds I explore the south face of the mountain, hoping to find a path that will grant snowshoe access to the high steeps of Agassiz and Fremont peaks. Instead I discover a plethora of strange, pathless routes leading into the deep folds and wrinkles of the mountain, all of them filled with gray, drifting shapes and wandering ghosts.

 

Trees and Fog, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, November 2011

Surrounded by thick forest and fog I glance back and see a figure standing motionless in the trees below me, just beyond the edge of the mist. I raise my hand in greeting, wondering who it could be this far up on the mountain. The fog retreats and the figure morphs into a log.

Ah, the mountain is playing tricks with my imagination. Sometimes she does that.

 

Trees and Fog, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, November 2011

I stop near 10,000 feet, having found the path I was looking for into the upper reaches. My legs, unused to climbing in snow, inform me that I should turn back. I can hear the mournful wail of the wind high above and a part of me yearns to continue on, to test the limits of my early season endurance, to walk among the bristlecones. For a long moment I stand there in the gently falling snow, listening to the sound of the mountain breathing. Finally I turn and descend, heading back to my truck parked far below.

A Paradox of Liars

I ask for training and for my sins my employer ships me off to Las Vegas for a tech conference where, car-less, I spend five days in a very large, very clean, very expensive hotel listening to smart people lecture on all the latest trends in software development. The air conditioned conference rooms are full of 30 and 40 year-old programmers (mostly men, but there are a few women, too) who listen intently through countless powerpoints and screens of computer code.

 

We all smile and nod as if we understand what the presenters are saying. I watch my fellow software engineers closely and realize that, like me, they're all scared shitless by what's happening in the tech industry. We dutifully jot down snippets of code or Internet URLs into our laptops and iPads, but inside we're all wondering if the mobile Internet tsunami that's approaching will be the wave that finally washes us up onto the beach of greying irrelevance.

On the second day I bust out of the mega-hotel's sterile compressed air environment onto the Las Vegas strip in search of the sun and something beautiful to point my camera at. I photograph some of the buildings, walk the sidewalks, and try to wrap my head around this very strange place the gods of capitalism have built in the desert.

 

I see some homeless guys sitting on a pedestrian overpass. They wear enigmatic expressions on their faces and hold crude cardboard signs in their laps. "Need money for my kids" or "Unemployed - please help. God bless you." Shunned away from the others is another man holding a sign reading "I won't lie to you. I just need to get a whore."

I look at them and slowly realize that I've happened upon a tragic logic puzzle: which of the men is the real liar? Which, if any, of the men is deserving of a few dollars? There has to be some profound statement in this arrangement, some penetrating insight into the human condition, but the noise of the traffic is too distracting for subtle thinking and I walk on, feeling guilty - and a little stupid - that I couldn't see the solution.

The next morning I see a man dressed in jogging attire talking animatedly with something inside one of the ubiquitous garbage cans. I assume he is talking on a bluetooth headset to someone who is not present. But then I notice that his sweatpants are soiled and he is obviously not a tourist out for an early jog. When he departs I consider looking inside the trash can to see who (or what) he was speaking with, but chicken out. Perhaps it was the Las Vegas version of Oscar the Grouch, someone best left alone.

 

Farther along I notice that the walkway is covered with what looks like leaves. Groundskeepers from nearby hotels glide along on humming sweepers, swirling and pushing the leaves this way and that. They leave long slimy trails behind them like giant snails. When I get closer I discover that it is not leaves they are sweeping up, but rather playing-card sized advertisements for escort services. On the tiny squares of cardboard are printed pornographic pictures and telephone numbers: asians, barely legal, big tits, small tits. I resist the insane urge to shuffle and kick my feet through the cards, as I did just a week prior in the freshly fallen aspen leaves of the Kachina Peaks Wilderness.

Later I sip Starbucks coffee and eat a banana that I paid way too much for. In this drought-stricken land I stand near acres of water, complete with fountains that jet into the air every few minutes across the surface in sequence. The jets of water dance and whirl across the man-made lake, culminating in a big finale with all the spouts shooting water up into the air together. I think they filmed a scene from Ocean's 11 here, but I'm not sure. The lone mallard duck bobbing along the edge of the water is no help. Apparently he is not a George Clooney fan.

 

A woman dressed in a sharp suit with a name tag from one of the nearby mega-hotels stomps by. She screams "I AM NOT UNREASONABLE I AM NOT UNREASONABLE I AM NOT UNREASONABLE!!!!" into her cell phone. I look at the mallard and he rolls his eyes.

It's dark and huge mega-hotels covered with neon and glass tower above me. Crowds of tourists speaking Japanese and German and French and even some English pack the sidewalks. They all have camera phones, which they use incessantly. I take a few photographs of the glowing buildings against the twilight, practicing motion blur techniques with the moving traffic. I feel like I've stepped into the dystopic movie Blade Runner.

 

Three of us from the conference meet at a mexican restaurant for drinks and dinner. It is our last night in Vegas and the conference is over; tomorrow we head home. A trio of mariachis play a quirky cover of the Eagles' "Hotel California" and I watch the 30-something waitress working the tables. When she thinks no one is looking her perky smile fades and is replaced by a look of infinite weariness. She is unbearably beautiful.

 

It has been a long week and the beer hits me hard, buzzing its way straight to my brain.

And then, sitting there in the noise and hustle of the restaurant it comes to me: The homeless men on the bridge were playing at a variant of the Liar's Paradox, and thus, there was no solution to their little game at all.