The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--9. Working Days 5. Viewing Devils Hole and Witnessing Reverence

Devil's Hole Pupfish, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown 2022

None of it is important or all of it is.

--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941

November 13, 2022.

"Is that it?" I asked my brother. We slowly eased past a pull-out off the gravel road and watched a few people walk up a jeep trail to a fenced-off area near the base of a brush-covered basalt hill.

"Probably," replied my brother.  

There was a blue park sign that said, "Where are the fish?" in crisp, cream colored print.  But I wasn't so sure this was the place.  There was no sign saying Devils Hole.  And the fenced-off area looked more like something that would surround a hazardous waste dump than a site in a national park, monument or wildlife refuge.  Where was the fancy wood sign?  The log fences?  The boardwalk or gravel trail? -- the type of things we'd just seen down at the visitor center.

We scanned the hillside.  There was a trail and a bridge with a brown handrail.  Maybe that was it.

Then I noticed up ahead, further down the road, the usual sign-grandeur that accompanies federal and state parks.  "That's it!"

I let off the brake.  Gavel moved under the weight of the tires with that familiar pop.  We were off towards our destination.

The problem was one of those signs we approached said, "Thank You for Visiting Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge," letting us know we were leaving.   The grand sign I'd seen was an entrance to the park rather than a trailhead.  Not our sign, not our place.  So, we turned around at the wide pull out that showcased the sign that looked very out of place on such a lonesome, rough road.  We headed back to where we'd seen the square of chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire.  We pulled in by the two cars.

Lloyd hopped out and put on his coat.  I weathered-up inside the car, then got out.  I knew a fierce cold wind awaited me.

And then we were off--walking down a jeep road blocked off by a gate that had a brown metal sign saying, "Official Use Only" and a paper sign taped to it saying, "Foot traffic welcome."  No little wood sign saying something like "Devil's Hole .5 miles."   No wood bench.  Nothing that would indicate this place being a national wildlife refuge, let alone Death Valley National Park, which I would later learn, it is.

Why this strange behavior from the national park system?  Why hide such a significant site in Death Valley National Park within the boundaries of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which has an incredibly impressive visitor center itself, and leave this most import square of parkland looking as inviting as a chemical waste dump?

The answer is reverence.

Reverence is a virtue, and as such, looks different moment to moment and place to place, depending on the circumstances, but always remains the same at its core.  Sometimes it looks like an altar of gold in a room that smells of burning incense.  Sometimes it's a pure white room with nothing but a small black polished stone in the center of it. When I was young, I learned it was a small child sitting in church with his arms folded waiting for the sacrament.  Older now, I also know it sometimes looks and sounds like a comedian lambasting a dictator while riling up room of gleeful disdainers to rolls of laughter aimed at their oppressor.  It also looks like a woman who won't give up her seat on the bus.  

Here, rightfully, it looked like a place you want to avoid and keep moving on to somewhere else. Here, as I would learn, reverence is everything, and I was about to partake in one of the most sacred moments in my life.

So, what is reverence?  

In Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff says, "Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control--God, truth, justice, nature, even death."  He continues, "The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all."  He finishes this thought by saying, "This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment".

I love that definition, but I would make one change--a much needed change for the twenty-first century.  I would scratch out the word "human," not because we aren't important, but because we already know we are important.  In addition to our fellow humans, it's other beings that we so often treat irreverently.

Reverence:  The capacity for awe, which as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow beings.

I think I would also leave off "flaws and all".  What we usually see as a flaw in others is really just a mirror brightly beaming back to us our inability to accept, let alone appreciate the is of the situation.  My identification of your flaws says more about me than it does about you.  Likewise, the role of the "big bad wolf" in European folklore says more about the society in which those stories developed than it says about wolves themselves.

So, here we were, at Devils Hole, a small square of Death Valley National Park inside Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge, facing a savage wind as we silently waited for three people to exit the barred cage bridge suspended over the hole.  I noticed all the panels and equipment bolted to the hillside.  It was not unlike waiting to peer into an open casket at a viewing or waiting for the casket to be lowered at the cemetery on a brutally cold day in February.   Except, here we were celebrating the miraculously still living rather than mourning the recently departed.

All but one of our fellow humans silently exited the viewing.  It was now our turn.  We walked out on the metal bridge and peered through the bars down at a black oblong spot deep down at the bottom of the hole in the stone.  Without prior knowledge, it would be difficult to even tell we were looking at water--so hard and flat and black it was from our view.  Yet, I could feel the significance of the moment.  We were at Devils Hole!  In that pool, there is a species of pretty, little blue fish about an inch long, the Devils Hole pupfish, which exists nowhere else on earth.  That pool, 10 feet wide by 40 feet in length, is their entire existence, and this fence, this cage, the solar panels and satellite equipment and gages anchored to the stone hillside were there to ensure those little jewels could continue their way of life.

Reverence is, in short, action based on respect for life.

Reverence for something so small and special is an incredibly large indicator of our human capacity to mirror the divine and, Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven.

The fact bombs were simultaneously raining down on Ukraine was a stark reminder of how terribly we fall short of following that command.  Yet, to be an eyewitness at our capacity to do good was still humbling.  To think people have dedicated their lives to preserving a fish that has no impact (other than spiritually) on them gives me hope.

In Calm Surrender:  Walking the Hard Road of Forgiveness, Kent Nerburn says the following of that particular virtue:

Forgiveness cannot be a disengaged, pastel emotion.  It is demanded in the bloodiest of human circumstances, and it must stand against the strongest winds of human rage and hate.  To be a real virtue, engaged with the world around us, it must be muscular, alive, and able to withstand the outrages and inequities of inhuman and inhumane acts.   It must be able to face the dark side of the human condition.  

I think the same can be said of humility.  The more brutal and inhospitable this world and the societies we've created become, the more we need a reverence that is muscular, alive, and able to withstand the outrages and iniquities of inhuman and inhumane acts.  

That is what we were witnessing here: reverence hell-bent on respecting and preserving "the least of these," and in so doing, respecting the big I Am, the source of everything.

That some in this world still have the fierce humility to try and save a species so small and fragile gives me hope.

Hope is what this book is all about.  Hope that we can save ourselves through humility and reverence to life as a whole.  Hope is not reality, but it is perhaps fuel for a spark to create enough energy to change a trajectory, and therefore, perhaps, an outcome.  

Reverence not only changes the world within the practitioner; it also has the very real potential of changing the world beyond the tidepool.

Awe is powerful.  To be astounded has the potential to absolutely change everything, if we will but let it.

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--8. Virgin River George

Cholla, Virgin River Gorge, Steve Brown 2022

1.

The sun blasted the east-facing, chunky walls of the Virgin River Gorge and threw blue shadows over a canyon so deep, narrow, and twisting that during the winter months there are some places the sun never reaches.

If you think such a place would be sacred to all who encountered it, and that we were either hiking on some trail through protected back country or driving lazily down some two-lane road with a 35 miles per hour speed limit in a state or national park, well, you are wrong.   

Like millions of others before us, we were powering though this magical place on an interstate, curving this way and that way, trying to get a glimpse of the amazing terrain above us without flying through a guardrail and into the Virgin River, which though small, drops 70 feet per mile, a rate ten times as steep as the Colorado River does through the Grand Canyon.

In 1973 this section of Interstate, the most expensive of its day, opened in a canyon no highway had known before to shave off about 30 minutes of drive time between St. George and Las Vegas.  What was lost in the trade cannot be measured in time or money.  A canyon to match the beauty and significance of Boquillas and Santa Elena Canyons of Big Bend National Park was reduced to a quick, exciting drive.  What should exist instead is a slow journey to be savored mile by mile.

As often is the case when atrocities to the landscape are committed in the name of interstates, the powers that be created a park here, the Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area.  Even so, all hikes in the canyon are accompanied by the sound of traffic.  Trails can give access to the wilderness.  They can't restore what has been removed from the wilderness experience forever by concrete rivers wild with the roar of traffic.  No matter how good looking your trail signs are, you can't squeeze an interstate into a narrow gorge and retain anything remotely resembling the wilds.

I'm glad, however, for the guilty attempt.  Having a park designated requires access, and so the park provides places to get off the freeway and picnic, camp, or hike, which would not otherwise be there.  I especially love the little campground.  Crime with guilt is better than crime with no guilt at all.  Half-hearted apologies are better than no apologies at all.  But how amazing that canyon must have been before they blasted an interstate through it.

2.

Twenty-five years ago, Marci and I went through here on our honeymoon, and I wrote about it--sort of:

I took my love and drove her down
to Mesquite through a heat deep
and white, walled-up against the last black
shadow of Virgin River Gorge, my head thick
with need. She spoke of Alabama mud
and the magnolia trees that bloom along Sestina Road.

The poem is a fictionalized account of our honeymoon.  Though beautiful, I now find it strange.  Marci is from the desert.  She knows nothing of Alabama mud and magnolia trees.  The woman along with me for the ride in that poem clearly is not her.  Why?

Some of that, I'm sure can be chalked up to the creative process.  I randomly picked words for the sestina form and created my first stanza, which to some degree, directed the rest of the poem.  Also, artistically, I would have been drawn to the contrast between the parched desert dirt and slick Alabama mud.  Even so, I now realize it was fear that made me write the poem somewhat distanced from reality.  I jumped into my marriage believing Marci couldn't love me for long.  25 years later, I'm very glad I did that.  Sometimes you have to take a risk and be more than you believe you can be.  I'd received so much rejection up to that point, I simply did not believe my marriage would last.  Fictionalizing the poem gave me some emotional distance, a road out, should things not work out.

There is a beauty and a yearning that comes through the writing when a writer isn't quite ready to name his subject, as when I wrote "Sestina Road".  There is nothing wrong with that.  That's the power behind Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  The first brave step to name a fear is a powerful one, cloaked though it is, in metaphor.

However, there is also something to be gained from writing clearly and simply without guise, what you see and name along the way--the blatant is of the experience.  Hopefully, what is gained is a solidity that cannot be denied.  As I mature as a writer, that is what I'm after:  the undeniable rock of reality beneath things, the is of the moment striped of artifice.

I pulled off the interstate to see where the bones of the earth uplifted and punctured the skin of our planet to rub the sky--as well as view the river sharp enough to slice through it all.  No story needs to be added.  Rock in sunlight is all a moment needs.

3.

The campground sits high above the Virgin River in a wider area of the canyon before everything funnels you towards the deep shadows and narrow spaces that is the gorge.  Here things are softer, more relaxed, which you would not know if you never left the interstate which focuses your eye only on what's ahead of you--that great gouge in the upheaval.

Here though, along this quiet, little loop, you notice smaller things, like sunlight behind the sharp needles of a cholla surrounded by small sunlit yellow flowers shaking in the morning wind.  You also notice the glisten of polished stones in the desert pavement and hear birds chirping somewhere down by the river.  You feel sunlight seep in deep to bone.  Life is good.  

Then you get back in the car and head back towards the interstate.  Death Valley pulls you forward.

Flowers, Virgin River George, Steve Brown 2022

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--8. Working Days 4: Polishing Lenses to Allow in More Light

Lens on Life, Steve Brown, 2016

I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment.  External reality has a way of being not so external after all.

--John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1961

When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we're all one
and life flows on within you and without you.

--George Harrison, "Within You Without You," 1967

I'm a good writer.  I'd be a better writer if I spent more time on revision.   Still, here's the difference between a writer and a nonwriter:

A nonwriter cares immensely about what they will say--so much so, often nothing ever gets on the page.  Nonwriters are guarded.  They want to know the world will be okay with what they have to say before they ever say it.  They worry about what their audience will think before any word ever hits the page.  If they are bold, they will make an outline to try and order their thoughts to make sure they are acceptable to the world before they really have even discovered if they have thoughts to share or not.  They want a clear plan before they precede.  Using that outline, and having a deadline, they may force something out, but being a child born out of fear, the work will be guarded, constrained, and have little to say.  It may fit in well with what is expected, meet whatever requirements caused its creation, but it will be too timid and too proper to offer the world much.

At the moment of creation, writers don't care much about what they write.  They just get something down and trust the process:  that, as you write, something good will come, and that through the revision and editing process, you will be able to make whatever comes better.  Writers are willing to be vulnerable, not because they want to, but because they know it's the only way.  Nothing memorable was ever written from an author who was holding back, trying to please the world.  

In fact, the best writers know their best writing doesn't come from them.  They accept the muse in an act of humility and know that they are not the source of genius and wisdom and beauty that sometimes arrives on the page while they write.  They have to know this because they know the bundling fools that they are themselves in real life.  They may not know where that golden sentence that just arrived came from, but they do know it wasn't them.  They've felt the awe of their hand being directed to say more than they know, or at least more than they knew they knew.  Real writing is a act of discovery, not merely a means of conveying what is already known.  That is where the energy is.  It can't be outlined, drafted, planned, built.  It must arrive organically, in it's own time and fashion.  However, it can be made even more powerful through revision.

As a novice in happiness, I'm beginning to understand that real living isn't very different from real writing.   It must come from a place of openness to whatever reality exists at that moment.  One can't cloister oneself from what is and live life fully simultaneously.  You often can't control what the world throws at you.  If you were born in a slum in Bangladesh, and if you haven't gotten out, and if it's an extra heavy monsoon season, you will not be happy there until you embrace the poverty and water that surround you.  And here's the thing most people don't know--you will not be happy even if you do get out and move someplace like Phoenix, Arizona.  You will take the slum and the rain with you.  It's impossible to run towards happiness.  Hopping on a jet, moving to a new city is a reset, a do-over, not a move forward.  Ripping up chapters in your book in anger is a reset, a do-over, not a move forward.  Dumping your spouse and marrying your mistress is a reset, a do-over, not a move forward.  Whatever you are running from will just run faster and catch up with you.

Likewise, if you were born high above the velvety smog in Manhattan in a luxurious loft of white leather, stainless steel and glass walls open to the world all around and below you, and conversations around the dinner table as cold as the glass curtain walls on Christmas morning, the nanny up bright and early to try and make you have a wonderful day even though Daddy is away on business and Mommy is passed out in bed and isn't likely to arise until two this afternoon.  If that is you, you will not be happy until you embrace the altitude, the luxury, your missing Daddy and your passed-out Mommy.  Your single-wide trailer on the windswept plains of Nebraska and your job as a waitress at the truck stop out on I-80 won't save you.  It's impossible to run towards happiness.  Hopping on a jet, moving to a new city is a reset, a do-over.  Ripping up chapters in your book in anger in ager is a reset, a do-over, not a move forward.  Dumping your spouse and marrying your mistress is a reset, a do-over, not a move forward.  Whatever you are running from will just run faster and catch up with you.

We cannot transcend what is, until we embrace it.  Yet, how we experience what is depends completely on the lens we use to view the world.  That lens is shaped (or misshaped) and polished (or chipped) by both our external and internal worlds.   The external storms are hard to control (though not impossible), but how we experience them is greatly determined by how we perceive them, and that has everything to do with polishing our lenses.

That is where revision comes in.  A good writer polishes rough, opaque stones into jewels radiating with light by revising over and over again what is already on the page; likewise one good at living polishes rough, opaque stones into jewels radiating with light by revising over and over again what is their life.  The do-over's are small, calculated, and repetitive, slowly knocking off and smoothing over the blemishes, so that the beauty of what is intrinsic isn't lost in the process.  Constant, calculated revision is the only means to perfection.  No matter how many times we take a sledge hammer to our lives, we end up with the same pile of rubble on the floor.  Yet, it's astonishing how many people try that over and over again, actually trying to pummel themselves into some sort of nirvana through sledge-hammer do-over's:  it's my career that's making me unhappy, it's simply meaningless; no, it's my wife, she just doesn't understand me; it's my children, I love them, I just wasn't really cut out to be a father.  So, here comes the hammer--that move, that diet, that break-up, that meditation, that divorce, that new multi-level marketing scheme, some drastic change (any drastic change), that will at last make us happy.  But it never works until we realize it's slow, continual change that turns an ordinary man into Gandhi, until we realize, to quote Brandon Flowers (who is probably quoting someone else) "When the mountain comes back to life / It doesn't come from without / It comes from within".

I want to say more, but not yet.  Instead, here, I want to go back to the beginning, and do some revision.  I think for the time being, slowing down and tweaking what I've already said may be more effective than adding more to what already is:

The merely-existing care immensely about what they will experience--so much so, they never fully experience anything, even if they have jumped out of a plane or swam with sharks.  They are guarded.  They want to know the world will be okay with who they are before they know that for themselves.  They worry about what the world will think before they've done anything to be remembered by.  If they are bold, they will make an outline to try and order their lives to make sure their choices are acceptable to the world.  They want a clear plan before they precede.  Using that outline, and setting deadlines, they may force something productive out, but their dream being born out of fear will be guarded, constrained, and have little to offer them.  It may fit in well with what is expected, meet whatever requirements caused its creation, but it will be too timid and too proper to offer the dreamer much.  Even after having gained the admiration of the world, the merely-existing will simply continue to merely exist.

In the moment, those who truly live don't care much about what their reality is--although they do care immensely about what they do with that reality.  They just do and trust the process:  that, as you do, something good will come, and that through the revision and editing process, they will be able to make whatever comes better.  They are willing to be vulnerable, not because they want to, but because they know it's the only way.  No memorable life was ever written by an author who was holding back, trying to please the world.  

In fact, those who truly live know that the best in life doesn't come from them.  They accept the muse in an act of humility and know that they are not the source of genius and wisdom and beauty that sometimes arrives in their life.  They have to know this because they know the bundling fools that they are themselves.  They may not know where that golden light that just arrived came from, but they do know it wasn't them.  They've felt the awe of their life being directed to places where they can feel more than they feel, or at least more than they knew they could feel.  Real living is a act of discovery, not merely a means of safely reliving what is already known.  That is where the energy is.  It can't be outlined, drafted, planned, built.  It must arrive organically, in it's own time and fashion.  However, life can be made even more powerful through revision, by polishing your lenses to allow in more light.

I write to allow more time for the light that comes from living to sink in deep where I can feel its energy touch bone.

   

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--7. Light and Beauty

This thing fills me with pleasure.  I don't know why, I can see it in the smallest detail.  I find myself recalling it again and again, each time bringing more detail out of sunken memory, remembering brings the curious warm pleasure.

It was very early in the morning.  The eastern mountains were blue-black, but behind them the light stood up faintly colored at the mountain rims with a washed red, growing colder, greyer and darker as it went up and overhead until, at a place near the west, it merged with pure night.

--John Steinbeck, "Breakfast," The Long Valley, 1938

April 9, 2022

1.  Being in the News

Where you stand there is lawn, probably in a park.  You look towards a red brick building that has clean, white concrete arches and a thirty-degree pitched gabled roof.  The structure looks like any number of 1980s suburban churches in an any number of suburbs in the United States.  At first you assume that's where you are.  The spruce in the park suggest you're in a northern city, or perhaps a high western city, like Denver.  

Something is amiss, though.  Right in front of you is a tangled heap of  metal-something.  There are two incredibly sharp spikes sticking up near a lamp post that is unscathed.  Except for the hunk of tormented metal, all before you appears normal.  Yet, because the twisted, torn, steely corpse is there, nothing is normal.

For instance, the white SUV coming into your line of sight from the left would normally go unnoticed.  But it doesn't.  It appears to be a government vehicle.  It doesn't look American.  You're not sure why.  It heads towards the church-like building.

All of the sudden, you are in a building, flying low, about five feet above a concrete floor.  You are looking mostly down, as if you're Superman, swooping in to pick up a bracelet Lois Lane dropped unknowingly.  There are two chrome poles like you see in banks and government offices to keep people in line.  To the right, there are seven or eight large suitcases left by people packing for more than a weekend get-away.  You are probably in a bus or train station.  There's blood and what appears to be bits of flesh splattered about.  A crisp, clean light floods through glass-windowed stainless-steel doors as a car rushes by.  The way the light reflects off the polished concrete would be soothing, almost serene, if not for the blood and bits of flesh.

All of the sudden you're outside.  There's a young woman facing you.  Light touches her face, a soft shadow from a tree falling gently on her right cheek.  She squints at the sun, looking at you, smiling shyly.  The light sculpts her fine features and soft lips.  She speaks what must be Ukrainian.  Behind her is a wall of sandbags protecting a building.  You are not in Denver after all.

A woman's voice-over, translating for the woman, says, "I remember a really loud noise and there was something landing, shells or rockets.  Everyone hit the ground.  That's all, a nightmare.  Everything starts to burn.  Everyone was panicking".

You are now flying down a long, narrow hall in a hospital--too narrow to be an American one.  There is a woman in a wheel chair.  Her left shoe rest on the third white tile of a hall only four-tiles wide.  Polished stone along the bottom half of the wall opposite of her picks up her reflection up to her neck.  There is a heap of clothes beside her, as if someone quickly grabbed what she'd need for an overnight stay without having time to pack.  There is a glass and stainless steel door open to the left.  White light gently disperses from another room.  The media voice says, "The strike killed at least fifty people, with many more still wounded in the hospital."

2.  Grappling

What is there to comprehend?  One man with power can do a lot evil?  Life is short; live it while you can?   Life is unpredictable; why have dreams, why have plans?

Maybe what is most important is to simply notice light still shines magnificently even on train-station floors splattered with bits of flesh and blood; that shadows still caress a young woman's face as she squints towards the sun and smiles shyly towards a camera even after the trauma of being bombed in a train station; or simply that a park hosting a metal-something that must have fallen unpredictably from the sky after some enormous blast can still feel normal enough in sunlight to be mistaken for a park familiar to you, wherever you are.

Maybe surviving sanely through hard times comes down to something as simple as noticing light and beauty always, no matter what fear is driving through your veins like the panicked innocent fleeing before the cold, calculating eye of a powerful madman sitting all alone at the far end of table determined to conquer the world because he knows not who he himself is. 

3.  Narrative  

The deep darkness of the basement made my world shallow.  I knew there had to be a wall very close.  But blackness is all I saw.  I carefully crawled over Marci, lowered my feet to the floor.  Once standing, I slowly moved my hands around until I found the dresser.  I somehow not only located my phone but also turned on its light and found my pants.  

I made my way to the door, opened it.  The hallway was bathed in a soft, defused light coming through the bathroom window.    The bathroom was deep with a large frosted window at far end, a corrugated metal window-well slightly visible through the white thinness. I emptied my bladder.

I made my way back into the bedroom and read from Cannery Row by flashlight.  Then I texted my friend Marsh who had recently lost his wife.  Oddly, I went on about how great life is:

Hey, just thought I'd check in and see how you're doing.  Marci and I are in St. George at her brother's house, headed to California to redo our honeymoon trip almost 25 years later.  Today we go to Death Valley and stay tonight at a B & B called the Shady Lady that used to be a brothel.  Yesterday, on my home from work, it was a gorgeous day, and when I got to town, some high school girl wearing shorts was getting something out of her car, and the way the sun hit her legs was so amazing, and even though I'm getting to be an old man, I thought, "Damn, that's beautiful."  On Wednesday I had it confirmed that I do have kidney disease.  When we get back from vacation, I'll have a biopsy.  Hopefully, that will help them know why so they can provide the best treatment.  Here's what I know for sure:  it's important to feel what you feel and to not lose sight of how beautiful life is in the process.  Life is so ridiculously rich with things to see and do and feel.  Numbness is one of those experiences.  It's necessary to feel numb sometimes, but if that's where you're at, don't stay there longer than you need to.  Life is waiting for you to get out your camera.  Have a great day.

Marsh is very patient because he still considers me a friend.  I don't think I'd normally be that insensitive.  Who wants to hear how great life is a couple months after losing your wife?  But, I just couldn't help it.  I  had good news that refused to stay rolled up and tied with a rubber band.  I felt compelled to stand on a high wall and yell, "Live!--no matter what, live!"

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--6. Working Days 3: Are We Human or Are We Denser?

Denser,  acrylic on canvas, 10 1/2" x 14", Steve Brown  2022

Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor calcium.  He is all these, but he is much more, so much more...

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

American Gothic

They stand there
before their American wood
home waiting to be captured
in pigment

real for the children
and grandchildren.

Not to be made immortal.
No.  Heavens no. Not that.
Leave that for those with stars
in their Broadway eyes
Or lubricated political mouths
slipping into smiles of greasy ease
at the county fair
prior to later deception 

at the county courthouse.

No. They’ll just stand there proper
for a proper picture, unaware
galaxies of light spiral
spectacularly inside them pulsating
against the cold stoic glass
of their eyes,

universes within universes

waiting.

--Steve Brown 2022

Although Branden Flowers of the Killers (whose music I love) is probably the only person to have ever asked, "Are we human / or are we dancer?," the most fundamental question for humanity has always been, and always will be, "Are we human, or are we denser?"     In other words, are we mere flesh and bone, or does this mortal packaging contain something more?  Whichever side of the argument you favor, that is the essential question for every person to have ever lived:  Am I merely flesh and bone or will I continue to exist after I'm dead?

I once was unhappily positive that the answer to that question was a solid "No, I will not continue after my heart stops beating".  I thought I was being brave in accepting an obvious reality--that we each are bright sparks in what for each of us will be an eternal night after our individual light goes out.  Of course, as we won't comprehend that eternal night when dead, it doesn't really matter.  Or, so I tried to convince myself, unsuccessfully.  The truth is knowing whether or not I will continue after this life has always been my utmost concern.  Everything else has been a distraction.  I don't think it was ever so much a fear of my own demise as just wanting there to be a purpose behind we are.

Over time, I have realized the material evidence is pretty equal for both sides of the argument, which is as it should be.  That leaves freedom of choice at the center of all things, even something as primal as defining the nature of reality itself.  If there was absolute evidence on either side, would faith really be a virtue?   Would agency really exist?  God would not be a choice if He could be scientifically proven.  Likewise, atheism would not be a choice if one could prove there's no intelligent design behind everything.  Our inability to prove the meaning of life ultimately gives life its meaning.

Perhaps you don't quite believe just how free the choice really is.   Here's a short thought experiment, which, although I know everyone has done it at one time or another, tends to get pushed away because we don't like the uncertainty that is at the heart of our agency.  Here's a reminder:

In *A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson does a wonderful job in trying to take us back to that magic moment, the birth of everything.  Being the honest investigator that he is, he admits from the get-go, it is simply impossible to imagine our origin because the infinite scale of things.  Yet, he gets as close to accomplishing that goal as probably anyone has.  He starts at the small end of things:

No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.  It is just way too small.

A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing.  Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years.  So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.

He then sets the stage for the big bang:

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of these protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small it would make a proton look enormous.  Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of  matter.  Excellent.  You are ready to start a universe.

I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe.  If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials.  In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is--every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation--and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all.  It is known as a singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang.  Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle.  Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity it is no where.  When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness.  The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

As mind-boggling as all that is, it can't compare with the tortuous thought that unravels from two simple questions:  1) What preceded that first moment? and 2) Who or what lit the fuse?  What made that immensely compressed dot of all-matter unfold into the universe we now see?  What was that initial cause that led ultimately to the effect known as I.

Using only science as his guide, Bill Bryson can't take you there.   Nor can anyone else.  Thus the need for the concept of God.  God explains the unexplainable.

Or so you think.  But say there is a God--and I must confess here, I know there is one, but not through my intellect.  It still doesn't solve the problem.  So, we have this infinitely dense speck of matter just waiting for some omniscient being to say Let there be light!  And he does, because he can, he is after all, the great I am.  But wait, how did he get there?   Who created him?  You, of course can say his father, but what then?

See the problem?   See why you are totally free to believe whatever you want to believe.  Agency is our birthright built into that most fundamental of all questions, stated so eloquently by an old professor of mine, Dr. Emory Estes:  I, why?  /  Why I?  

I want to ask an even more basic question:  

Why do humans even have a concept of a soul?  Why do we believe we continue after we die?

Thinking as the humans that we are, there are what at first seem like obvious answers that satisfy the material view of the universe.  We don't want to accept our own end.  We don't want to be separated forever from loved ones.  So, we invented the idea of the soul so that we could continue forever.

Although, at first, those answers seem to work from a materialist perspective, I don't think they hold up when consciously viewing ourselves as simply links in the food chain--eating and reproducing machines that also function as meals for larger carnivores.

Why does a cow need to conceptualize either mortality or eternity in order live, begat, and become steak?   Likewise, if we are just part of evolution, why do we?   Under such conditions, why would our brains evolve in such a way as to conceptualize a notion of a soul?  There's more important ways for the brain to grow when our only function is to pass on our genes.  If anything, the idea of a soul hampers a system built on survival of the fittest because it lifts the mind out of the realm of instinct, where all my thoughts automatically serve propagating the dominance of my genes, to a realm where I'm morally responsible for the well being of not only myself but others too, including genetic competitors, even other species.  The development of the idea of a soul may indeed be good for the species, and I believe it is, but it's nothing like how a mind should work in a system based solely on passing on one's genetic material.   

To me there is no biological for reason for a brain to either comprehend death or to dream up a free pass around it.

For me, now, the mere fact that man has asked that most fundamental of all questions, "I, why? / Why I?" suggest we are not only human, we are denser.

The fact that we can intellectually choose "To be" or "not to be" suggests to me we are more than our biology.  Mold does not decide its own fate, and even if scientists someday find out it does, that still won't answer my question:  How does conceptualizing a soul prosper the human as an animal species?  

I can't come up with an answer.

However, if we are indeed more than flesh and bone, the concept of a soul becomes essential to our identity because it is our identity.  Our body and our brain are just the technology we use to get around in this mortal realm.  Our soul knows its own source, and so, since the beginning of time, all cultures have had some concept of the eternal and everlasting.  All creation myths begin not with a beginning, but rather, an organizing of what already was, a continuation of something prior, souls moving from one realm to another, rather than magically popping into existence from nothing.

In the Genesis account, creation begins with God declaring Let there be light.  Yet, prior to that, "the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep."  In fact, God seems to be examining the matter reflectively before beginning his work:  "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters".  It is as if He needed to comprehend what already was before he could light the spark to create all that is.  

Also, after Adam and Eve transgress, which is an important act, bringing light unto them, he says, "Behold, the man is become of as one of us, to know good and evil...".  If there was only God in the beginning there would be no "waters" for the spirit of God to move upon, and there would be no "us" for man to become like, only a single, lonely "I".

Like in other creation myths, Genesis is not the start of things, but rather an organizing or perhaps reorganizing of what already was, just as Zeus didn't start things for the Greeks. 

Admittedly evolution makes any concept of any god more personal than the clock-maker god (that simply sets things in motion and then watches from a safe distance) difficult to comprehend.  If we are made in the image of the Gods, and like the Gods, we know the difference between good and evil, at what point did we become human enough to be "like" the Gods in that long journey from single cell organism floating in the sea to man kneeling at the alter before his maker?  And to not believe in evolution at this point is absurd.  We breed dogs, grow tissue, clone sheep, etc., all based on the basic genetic principles of evolution.  At this point, it's like refusing to believe in gravity when we sling-shot spacecraft precisely from planet to planet using that force for our benefit.

Perhaps that is why John Steinbeck, who definitely believed in spirits, found it difficult to believe in a personalized God.  In Log from the Sea of Cortez, he writes the following:

Why do we dread to think of ourselves as a species?   Can it be that we are afraid what we might find?  That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask?  This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

Many years ago--I believe it was 1996--I had a dream where I asked Christ this question:  "How can I believe in a personal God when I know evolution is real?"

He in turn answered me with a stern but loving rhetorical question: "How dare you think you can know the nature of a system you are part of better than I, the one who created it?"

When I woke up and thought about it, I had two images come to mind.  The first was of a fish in a fish tank.  The fish can know and understand his tank fairly well through observance.  He might even be able to tell the waterfall and bubbler are providing him with the oxygen he needs to live.  He can even know a little beyond his fish tank.  He can see us out there walking around.  He might be able to hear the TV in the next room.  He might even notice there's a wire connecting his waterfall and bubbler to a socket in the wall.  However, it is impossible for him, in his little closed system, to comprehend the power plant miles away, let alone the coal, or fauna that lived millions of years ago, that was buried and compressed under tremendous pressure and now fuels his little world.  

Likewise, we as mortals will never fully understand a system we are part of.   Our inability to prove God exists scientifically doesn't void his existence anymore than the fish's inability to conceptualize the plants that died millions of years ago that fuel his world voids their existence.  

The next image that came to me was a square building divided into four equally sized rooms placed on a cliff above the ocean.  Each room has one window looking out in a different direction and a door to each adjoining room.  The inhabitant in each room looks out and sees something different.  One may look out and say the world is a steep hill covered by windblown trees.  The other may say, No, it's a lush green pasture, and one may say, No, it's water and sky as far as the one can see, while yet another says, No, it's mostly a parking lot made of asphalt.  The inhabitants fight and bicker over the nature of the universe through the intercom without ever bothering to check out the views in the other rooms simply by walking through the doors available to them.

Likewise, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, and Christian, not to mention the Atheist, are all looking out a unique window and seeing something real without realizing they are missing out on a more complete reality by each refusing to leave their comfortable little windows.

In the early twentieth century fear kept us from fully accepting ourselves as but one species among many creations.  That fear had deadly consequences for so much of our fellow biological brothers and sisters in other species, and ultimately, could still bring about our own demise.

Yet, I wonder if now our fear of being more than our biology is doing the same thing?

Why do we dread to think of ourselves as more than our biology?   Can it be that we are afraid what we might find?  That human divine potential would be a great responsibility to carry, and that our perceived limitations might prove to be a mask?   Is our refusal to accept we might be more than our biology an easy way out of divinely given responsibilities--to know good from evil--and act morally accordingly?

 

Why does this matter?  And why does it belong in this book?

Things are going to get tuff.   Of this, I am sure.  This book is not simply about drawing attention to the problems of climate change.  The time to do that has long passed, and plenty of people already warned us.  We simply didn't listen.  Still, there are nonbelievers out there.  I will do my best to convince them that the world isn't flat and that climate change is real.

However, this book is also about how to thrive spiritually, mentally, physically and socially during hard times.  It's about embracing now on its own terms, head-on, and with joy, no matter what reality now dishes out.

For me, that can't be done, without each of us knowing on a gut level where we belong in the universe.

So, I'm not trying to change any world-views here.   If you are a happy atheist, and that belief will serve you well in hard times, carry on, I wish you well.  

However, if you are an unhappy atheist, like I once was, bravely accepting what to you feel like is a dreadful world view simply because you think all the evidence points in that direction, then this chapter is for you.  I was bullied intellectually into believing a lie:  that all the evidence supported one side of the argument, that all one could do in a world where everything is nada y pues nada  is find a clean well-lighted place and wait out the storm, which isn't really a storm at all, but a constant swirling of meaningless activity day after day, year after year, eon after eon.  That that is the only intellectually honest way to conceive a universe is complete bullshit.  I was lied to.  I listened and gave up my own agency and gave up my religion in the process.

There are thousands and thousands of recorded near-death experiences.  In some ways they contradict.  I don't think there's any way to prove any one religion is true based on them.  If you research them for that purpose, you'll be sorely disappointed.  Whatever you believe, you will come across an account that contradicts your belief.  However, all these stories of life beyond the veil have more in common than contradictions.   Of course, as of right now, they are only testimonies.  There is no direct way to verify that the reports are true.  But science uses perception data all the time when hard evidence isn't available.  The social sciences wouldn't exist without people's perceptions.  Your doctor doesn't discount your headache until he can run a brain scan.

So, if you felt that same pressure I did--that you can't be an intelligent person and believe in God also, and gave in, or feel you must give in now, then, Yes, this book is for you.  I want to shake out the universe in all its glitter and glory in a way that makes you see your individual spark is never, ever snuffed out and that joy is our birthright under every condition. 

Joy free from circumstance.  I guess that is my ultimate theme.  How to get to, and stay in, a place where we transcend the reality of the moment (which is in constant flux anyway) and enjoy reality on its own terms.  How do I get to a place where I am fundamentally the same attending the wedding of my child as I am sitting at the bottom of a muddy trench, facing enemy fire?  I do believe rare individuals get to that place.  I believe Gandhi almost did.  I want to get there too, or at least as close as I possibly can.  I think that's all I've ever wanted, which made navigating everyday life sometimes difficult.  I didn't want the college degree, the important job, the wealth, the security, the fame that most people yearn for.  Parts of me did, but the dream wasn't sustainable because because part of me knew I was fronting.   All I have really ever wanted is to be is me--purely, securely me--fully connected to, and present in, whatever reality I find myself living.  I know it's kind of vein, but really all I've ever wanted to be is a little I am.  I don't want the responsibility or glory of being the big I am, but I do want to know His nature and to be as close to Him in my nature as I can be in my own way.

That is not a bad desire at end of the world--if that is what we are experiencing.  It's also not a bad desire if this strange time is just a big hiccup, and after a while, things return to normal.

That is why this chapter is here.  I assume you are at least a little like me, and want to feel calm during the storm.  I want to convince you that there is peace in any circumstance so that you can access it when you need it most.  Of course, I want to convince myself of the same.  Any honest preacher will admit knowing and doubting are bound together forever, and that a simple flip of the coin can turn one's outlook upside down in a moment, and that the real audience for every sermon is the self.  We think and write not what others need most, but what we need most ourselves.  

That doesn't mean every lesson is a lesson in hypocrisy.  It doesn't mean every financial adviser struggles with his or her own finances, or that every preacher is a closet atheist.  No, it doesn't mean that at all.  But any honest financial adviser does know after a couple of bad choices, or just a string of bad luck, if he isn't careful, he could easily find himself spiraling out of control, doing everything opposite to everything he advises, trying to right his world in a moment of panic at the possibility of losing it all.  And the same holds true for the preacher.

I have the agency to chose who I want to be at this moment.  I write to remember my choice at this given moment--always.

I am human.  I am also denser.  Galaxies of light and potential spiral around inside me, waiting to get out, to add their light to the universe that surrounds.  I will behave accordingly. And when I behave accordingly, I give others permission to do the same.

Likewise, when I cower in fear and shame and disbelief, my world closes in and darkness surrounds me, and others pick up on that energy, feel it, absorb it, and believe they must do the same.

I write to keep the light stronger than the darkness so that I don't miss the beauty surrounding me. That is what this book must be about or I have failed completely.   

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--5. The First Day

Late afternoon light in early April from our front walk

Friday, April 8, 2022.   

The sun was about to rise.  A thin pink cloud hovered above the juniper-blobbed ridge across Chalk Creek, not far beyond the gnarled oaks in the field.  It was a typical morning in early April, just slightly warmer than the ever-changing normal, 34 degrees according to my phone.  The green spring grasses were slowly taking on individuality out of the grayness that precedes the day's first direct light.  I walked down our front walk, and under the grapevine that was still bony and bare, but with a few buds breaking into tiny tendrils of green.  I clicked my key fob and unlocked the car door and got in.  There was dew but no frost, which was good, or I would have been late to work.   

Although it wasn't long ago, it's hard to remember now how consumed I was with death then.  I didn't fear dying.  I'd read enough life after death experiences to be convinced that I would continue after my heart stopped beating, my mind stopped ticking, and my blood ran cold.  But I worried constantly about how best to say goodbye, and how best to make sure my loved ones could carry on with this life after I was gone.  I worried about Marci.  Each moment was sacred.  There was not a second I felt should be wasted.  Everything was under the lens and needed to be examined.  Time slowed down and sped up simultaneously.  I felt great joy and gratitude for the life I'd been given, great nostalgia for the past, and great pain at the thought of saying goodbye to the simplest of things, not to mention family.  I teared up easily--in gratitude and in sorrow.  I noticed everything.  I was alive.  Facing death will do that to you.  

So, of course, the drive to work was spectacular.  Every drive was.  Every moment was.   It was the first day of our journey to California, which wouldn't bring much.  We wouldn't get far.  We wouldn't leave until after school, and we'd only travel as far as St. George.  Still, I was excited as a kid on Christmas morning.  

* * * * *

After school, on the drive home, everything seemed to blaze in the golden afternoon light, especially the alfalfa fields of McCormick green with new, young clumps of spritely growth.  I may have stopped the car, taken a picture.

In town, heading up canyon road, I saw a car door open.  There was a girl, probably in high school, perhaps college, wearing shorts, getting something out of her car, and the sunlight hit her legs, glazing them gold.  I wanted to stop the car, take a picture, but of course that would seem creepy, and  because there truly are creepy people in the world, we cannot live our lives as we should.  In a perfect world I would have done just that: stopped the car;  got out and said, "Hold it right there.  You look amazing in the light.  You make me remember what it was like to be young, to be so far from death, to have life unfolding before me like the fields of Kansas stretching to the horizon.  May I take your picture?"  And in a world without pedophiles, rapists and murderers, such a gesture would be taken for what it was, an appreciation of the beauty of life and nothing more.

Yet, even in such a perfect world, I think we'd still need walls around us, emotional safety zones, circles of protection.  Mortals  just aren't that free.   There is a fear built into us that keeps us from fully connecting to life.  People want to be beautiful, just not too beautiful.  People want to be talented, just not too talented.  People want to connect with others, just not too much.  We are all islands, fortified by fear, letting only a few into our inner circles.

Yet, part of us knows that connection is there, and yearns to live a life uninhibited by petty fears.  That is what art is for--to transcend the distance between who we are and who we want to be, between this flawed mortal world and the perfect world to come.  In art, in a story, you do stop that car, and you do take that picture, and you transcend the limitations of this life, and for a moment, live perfectly.  In literature, you do that as the writer, but you also do that as the reader.  Art captures moments of perfection, even if the subject is painful, simply because it allows us to view life without the blinders we wear as a means of self-protection.  Art makes the viewer naked and vulnerable before the world, and allows us to experience things we are afraid to experience on our own.  We all yearn for that, not because we yearn for tragedy, for pain, for sorrow, but because we yearn to be free from fear of pain, free from fear of sorrow, and ultimately free from fear of death itself.

We yearn for a world where we can stop and tell someone they are beautiful and not be misunderstood.  We yearn for a world if not free from war, at least a world where we can be in a trench, dead comrades all around, and not be afraid to look death in the eye, and say, Come take me if you wish;  I have no fear;  I will live each second of this life right up to the moment I die, and then I will live then too, you miserable, selfish beast.  I exist and I simply refuse to not carry on.  Being is my destiny.

* * * * *

Packing can undo the most sacred of moods.  And so it did that day.  My seize-the-day euphoria ended in the rush to get out the door, as Marci and I told each other what still needed to be done, and each bristled with resentment at having one more thing to do before getting in that car and heading down the road.

Normally we fight while packing up to leave.  It's our routine.  Yet, we didn't do that.  Perhaps, we were both too aware that our time together might be very limited.  So, we stifled the usual snide comments.  Still, it was not a joyous process.  Getting out the door on time never is.

And then we were off to California--or at least St. George.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 4. Working Days 2: Scale and Immensity

At noon in the desert a panting lizard

waited for history, its elbows tense,

watching the curve of a particular road

as if something might happen.

--William Stafford, "At the Bomb Testing Site," 1966

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going.  And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Deadpool, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

YouTube

A stocky male YouTuber wearing a black t-shirt and black athletic shorts walks across a big, cracked, clay bed of evaporated lake, his wide black sneakers landing on little island mesas of earth encircled by rifts and ruptures.  The camera is low, right above the mosaic of mud, the host's head out of the picture frame, dry desert ridges behind him.  He walks out of the scene as he says, "It's 104 degrees out here.  It's not a cool afternoon on Lake Mead."  

The camera briefly tilts down, showing the lakebed shattered by the heat of the sun like a windshield meeting a good sized stone.

Mind Wandering

If the scale were much larger, each rupture in the clay could hold groves of cottonwood at the bottom of moist dark canyons, where animal trails would wind through soft sand arroyos beneath the great shadowed cliffs, and where occasionally a human trail would lead to a series of ladders that, if climbed, would take one on top of hard flat mesas to pueblos and villages and missions and cathedrals that overlook corn fields below--magical places with names like Acoma, the sky city.

In a world like that, the impact of such a large quantity of shoe suddenly dropping from the sky would be astonishing enough for the plot of a B-grade movie.  Or, if real, it would have far-enough reaching consequences to send a Fox-news host with furrowed eyebrows and a dumb, questioning look to ask, "But isn't science supposed to be skeptical?" 

Shocked, the data guy he's interviewing would ask, "Didn't you watch the footage?  It's on every network but yours."

"What is footage anyway?" would ask the Fox News host.  "How do we even know it's real?   Doesn't every news story have a slant to it?  How can you sit there in your cloistered, liberal, elite world and claim to know what's real?"  

"I can claim it's real because my wife, mother in-law, and three children were at mass when that giant shoe came down and ended my world."

YouTube

The head of the YouTuber is seen for the first time against an almost solid blue sky holding a single white cloud.  He wears a cap and has a goatee and appears to be Mexican or Native American.  He says, "I'm going to continue cruising around areas of the lake today, seeing exactly how low the water's gotten.  This was all under water a year ago.  It's rough right now.  It really is.  The cracks in the ground go down about a foot and a half, and there's fish down in the cracks.  It's crazy."

 Grappling

The rate at which Lake Mead is dropping is surreal.  We've had a lot of the bizarrely accurate facts to deal with lately:  the whole COVID experience, the attempted coup in Washington, riots across the nation, Russia's invasion of Ukraine,  and just this week, watching the supreme court casually unravel the constitution.   Normal only remains normal when things are stable enough to establish trend lines. Normal never dictates that things will proceed as usual.  Normal only suggests it, based on past data.

Upheaval does happen.  I have always wondered what it would have been like to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at the moment ancient Lake Bonneville, which once covered western Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada and Oregon, emptied most of her 19, 691 square miles of lake, over 900 feet deep in places, in a Biblical-sized torrent that discharged 15 million cubic feet of water per second (compared to Niagara Falls, which discharges 100,000 cubic feet per second).  Oh, how the earth must have shook!   

Facts can be astonishing.  Lake Mead has dropped 140 feet since 2000.  That's the height of a fourteen-story building.  At its lowest level since being filled in the 1930's, the reservoir is nearing dead pool status, when the water level is so low it can no longer flow down stream.  The combined reservoirs of the Colorado River are at 50% capacity.  If it gets to the point where California no-longer receives the river's waters, we will be at that moment when metaphorically a giant shoe drops from the sky and we can't wrap our heads around the new reality.  Statistically speaking, some animals had to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at such a moment--when the roar in their ears and the chaos before their eyes could not be comprehended based on previous experience.  

We may be approaching such moment.  Humans may soon observe the last drop of water from the Colorado River flow into the last orange grove California to receive it.

If you think that won't be a big deal, you know even less about economics than I do, and nothing about how much California is a part of your life, no matter where you live, especially if it's within the United States.

YouTube

Lake Mead--cool blue rippled water before sandy beach and a gravel ridge blotched by occasional brush.  It could be any western reservoir on any given year unless one notices that the top of the ridge is actually the former shoreline.  Then the houseboat on the beach, tiny in comparison, takes on significance and provides scale to just how much the lake has dropped.

Grappling  

980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley there is a flat line that runs along the Wasatch Mountains called "The Bench".  It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville.  Many homes are built on this flat and have sliding glass doors that open onto back patios that look over the valley below, and in the evening, the gloriously red Great Salt Lake at sunset. Prime real estate with prime views.     

This too may be a moment in time, a moment of brilliance, before the lake, like the setting sun, is gone.  If something is not done very soon, it is quite likely there will soon be a Utah without a Great Salt Lake.  Hard to comprehend.

Worlds change, big and small, without participants realizing they were once at the flute-end of consequences.

When the big shoe of reality drops from the sky and lands on your tiny village, no amount of propaganda techniques from a news network dislodged from reality will alter the scale and immensity of the new normal impacting you. 

YouTube

This fish here, on its side, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay, it's dead rotted eye staring up at an overzealous sun, warns us of the scale and immensity of the loss we face.

Our YouTuber asks, "Why didn't the fish just swim to deeper water?"

He then pans around.  "This little inlet closed, and the fish's world became a dead pool."  

The waters were deep and cool.  Life was good.  The waters lowered.  Life wasn't as good.  Things became crowded.  Still life was busy.  Other fish to catch.  Things to devour.  Sex to have.  Offspring to be born.  Life went on.  The problem was ignored.

Fish swam in and out through an ever narrowing channel between the pool and lake.  One day the channel's water was too low.  Perhaps there was panic.  Perhaps there wasn't.  

Regardless, the dead pool became the new reality.

Now, there is a fish, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay.  Its dead, rotted eye stares up that an overzealous sun.

There is a shoreline 980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley called "The Bench".  It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville.  It speaks of a world that once was, now gone.

Unless we act quickly, the Great Salt Lake will be gone, as will Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and whatever forest is nearest to your back door.

The western United States has not witnessed drought like our current one in 1200 years.  It is believed that one ended the Anasazi civilization.   If that isn't a giant shoe dropping from the sky to wake us up to our new reality, what is?

There is skeptical.  And then there is stupid.  Climate change is real.  It is that big shoe. 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 3. Where I Was When I First Encountered John Steinbeck

A huge red transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant.  The vertical exhaust pipe muttered softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel-blue smoke hovered over its end.  It was a new truck, shining and red, and in twelve-inch letters on its sides--OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY.  Its double tires were new, and a brass padlock stood straight out from the hasp on the big back doors.  Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening.  A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens.  Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lovely waitress.  He talked the smart ladies language of the roadsides to her.  "I seen him about three months ago.  He had an operation.  Cut somepin out. I forget what."  And she--"Doesn't seem no longer ago than a week I seen him myself.  Looked fine then.  He's a nice sort of a guy when he ain't stinko."  Now and then flies roared at the screen door.  The coffee machines squirted steam, and the waitress, without looking, reached behind her and shut it off.

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

 

There's a fly in the window

A dog in the yard

An a year since I saw you

There's a trunk in the corner

I keep all my letters

My bills and demands I keep too

Well I can't help thinking

About the times

You were a wife of mine

You aimed to please me

Cooked black-eyed peas-me

Made elderberry wine

-- Elton John and Bernie Taupin, "Elderberry Wine," 1972

American Wood

I feel like weevil eating the corncob,

an axe to American wood.

All I would is America

As something more than puritanism.

All I would is the farmhouse to be home

where Daddy doesn't slap Mommy around,

where Daddy doesn't plough Bobby into the ground.

I feel like a chainsaw to the church house

bleeding American wood.

All I would is America

where Christianity is Christian,

where Bibles aren't bashing souls to the ground,

where peace isn't silent at night,

violence a common sound.

--Steve Brown, 1989

Pahvant Valley from Cedar Mountain Road, 
acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

Sunday, June 5, 2022, 6:17 a.m.

The sun peaks over a large juniper covered hill, sending light rays fanning out before sodium-colored clouds.  A rare, humid day, the air smells moist, almost coastal.  Birds chirp, cluck and squawk.  In front of me, a two-wire electrical fence separates this gravel pull-out just off Cedar Mountain Road from the rock, rabbit brush, and snakeweed that transition down slope into fields of rye and alfalfa.   A long chalky-white road drops into the scene at a diagonal, sloping down what was once a sandbar of ancient Lake Bonneville to the farms.   Angus blot the pale green fields in clumps of black blobs.  Elms do the same at a larger scale in dark green.  These are my pastures of heaven, my Salinas, my long valley, only this one is some seventy miles across.  

I have known this place so long that I don't know where I stop and it begins.  That is how it should be for a writer, perhaps for everyone.  No matter where we wander, we need a Zion, a holy land, a place that is distinctly us.  It gives us a sense of being, a voice so intrinsic to who we are, it cannot be taken away.  If I were strapped in an electrical chair on the other side of the world waiting for my execution, my last moments would quite likely be here in this valley, and though I might be urinating myself in terror, there would be a calm, steady part of me that says, I can do this; I can do hard things.  That steadiness is rooted here.

It is in the giant shoe-shape of Pahvant Butte, an old cinder cone that rose form the depths of ancient Lake Bonneville 18,000 year ago, forming an island.  It remains an island even though the waters receded long ago.

It is in the pale pink face of sunlit Notch Peak, which boasts the largest limestone cliff in the United States and some of the oldest trees on earth--the gnarled, hunkered-down, waiting for eternity bristlecone, the great preppers of the world, almost as timeless as stone itself, adapting to whatever the climate throws their way.

 And then there is Swasey Peak, a little to the north, gnarled briefly with twisting shadows showcasing canyons and ravines in the morning before fading to pastel blue-gray for the day.

This is where I belong.  It is a big place with few inhabitants, less than two people per square mile.  There aren't many trees either, except on the mountains to the east, and those we're losing quickly.  There isn't much water--and what there is, is vanishing at an astonishing rate.  We've already lost Clear Lake, a spring-fed oasis and bird refuge.  It is now dry but for a short season in the spring.

Yet, this place could remain spiritually much the same if we could just keep our skies.  Distance is the language here, and distance is beholden to clean, eternal skies, which are all but gone.

The poet John Clare went crazy when the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s fenced off his wild places and shut down forever his connection with his own long valley.  I believe I have it within me to be stronger than him, but I get it.  Everything I am, everything I write, is because of here.

I may not be able to do much, but I need to do what I can to protect my tide pool, even if that means trying to change the entire world in the process, even if that means failing miserably.  I'm not a pessimist, but I am a realist.  From this pin-point in time, the data does paint a pretty bleak picture.  Adaption will be inevitable if insanity is to be avoided, but resiliency also comes from putting up a good fight.

Pahvant Valley, here I am, listening to your birdsong, ready to give you my everything.  If I end up in an insane asylum, so be it.  At least you will know someone cared enough about your grand skies to not let them slip silently away unnoted.

But then, again, I don't think I really ever had a choice in writing this book.  It was built for the future long ago when I first encountered John Steinbeck, a voice I knew way back then I needed like birdsong.  Only, unlike with birds, I was drawn to the particulars, the cadence of each and every image, the spark of each and every sound joined simply with and  one "and," and then another, until a whole was achieved most spectacularly through sounds and images connected like strands of DNA--the fabric of America.

I heard and felt the same grasp of Americana, ironically, through the music and lyrics of British songwriters Elton John and Bernie Taupin, something I labeled getting down the grain of American wood.  It was people, landscape, the mythic general through very local particulars that I was after.  I felt like I needed to be a sort of farmer harvesting America through words, an idea captured magnificently in the lyrics of Taupin, although in his very English sounding lyrics to "Lady, What's Tomorrow":

Look up little brother

Can you see the clover

No, not over there

A little bit left and over there

Can you see the lilac tree

the lily pond, the skylark's song

The open air where no one cares

where branches live and die out there

Lady, what's tomorrow?
Will it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?

Spring Break 1989.  Terlingua, Texas

I sit in an all but empty café in Terlingua, Texas.  Ceiling fans spin gently overhead.  Across from me sits Karen, her brown eyes beaming behind almost round spectacles, a thin smile on her lips.  The light is behind her, flooding in through tinted windows from the stark, stark desert beyond, backlighting and softening her already fine features.  Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and I love the shape of her ears, almost perfect half moons.  Small strands of brown hair are picked up by the stirring of the fans, tossed around in the light.

We talk.  It comes so easily, which is not normal for me, especially around women.  It seems like a dream.  I'm tired, oh so tired, but in a good way, floating around, released from all the anxieties I know so well as myself.  We have been hiking in heat.  I am drained and happy.  We eat tacos and drink a Blue Sky Soda each from a can.

Karin explains symbiotic relationships, like those between plants and animals in lichen, and talks about M.C. Escher, how he's her favorite artist because he captures so well those connections that keep life bound together in strange and meaningful ways, like us.

There has been the usual classic rock playing softly in the background, and I haven't really been listening.  I know them all anyway.  "Magic Bus" by the Who.  "I'm Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band) by The Moody Blues.  "Elenore" by The Turtles.

Then, all the sudden, something I don't know.  Distant.  Real.  I guess it's country, but not the country I know.  It sounds like this place.  This diner off the beaten path pounded by relentless heat and stark, stark light beating life down to the essentials, to points and needles and harsh, harsh shit.

But it would be just as real in Kansas or Ohio.

"This is amazing.  Who is this?"

It's not unreasonable to think Karen will know.  She seems to know something about everything.  It's clear Germany educates their youth far better than America.  A biology major, she knows all my architectural heroes, like Le Corbusier and Mies ven der Rohe.

"Patsy Cline."

"Wow.  What is it?  It sounds so American."

"'Crazy,' of course," she says in her cute German accent, and then starts singing to point out the obvious reason for the title.

"Now this, this is what I'd like my poems to do."

"Do what?"

"Whatever this is.  The bedrock.  America.  Humanity.  This diner.  This place.  There's got to be a way to get that down."

She smiles that thin-lipped graceful smile.  Her eyes beam through those smart, almost round, but not quite-round spectacles.

September 1989.  Arlington, Texas    

It's late.  The window is cracked open, the A.C. going.  The hope, I guess, is that it will either be cooler inside or outside, and one way or the other, there will be relief.

I don't mind.  I like the sounds.  The sounds outside of occasional talking, especially if it's girls.  There is just something in their voices.  I like the yellow light from my desk lamp too.  And these new almost all-nighters trying to keep up on the readings for Dr. Estes's class.  Slow, inept readers probably should not switch majors from architecture to literature.  But, that's exactly what I've done.  

I mark up my books in hot pink or lime-green highlighter.  No code, no pattern.  Just something to note the important passages, which always ends up being eighty percent of the book.

I've just read about the grey and red country in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of The Grapes of Wrath, and already my old electric typewriter that my mom gave me is clacking away, the separate key arms flinging up towards the page, getting stuck together now and then. 

We had been to the red country, Utah not Oklahoma, the hot walls with junipers dotted along the top, just under the dry blue sky, acid film etched with cat-claw clouds.

Now we were in the gray country, Utah not Oklahoma.  We crossed into the basin on the new section of I-70, met I-15 and headed north.  Thirty miles past Cove Fort, the town of Meadow was thrown out the back window, the blue-gray flat-topped oak and pine mountain above it.  Ahead, was the long, dry, rye valley, bleached to white.  So, the gray country was white.  I was home in July, as always; July at home was white, as always.

I pause my typing.  This Steinbeck guy.  He's like no other.  But if he is, well, he's like Patsy.  Both have something I want.  No, need.  There's something fundamental here that the world is missing.

A thought rhymes.  A line from Cindy Lauper slips in.  The night doesn't end; there is no end.  Until it does.  I look up and see light coming in through the window. 

"Shit, how am I going to function tomorrow today?"

For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor calcium.  He is all these, but he is much more, so much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Sunday, June 5, 2022

I knew then if I ever had anything to say in my writing it would not be connected to Dallas, that big, giant spinning cobweb of interstates, subdivisions, glass-box office towers, boggy rivers, malls and cottonfields, I'd so embraced in place of home.

No, it'd be the wide, dry valley I'd been raised in and once couldn't wait to get away from--dirt as deep in my soul as the Elton John songs my brother played in the little house on First West as I watched the corn outside the open kitchen window late summer evenings sway under the blue light of the moon as the crickets chirped and the big, old straggly elm cast shadows across the old white shed.

Get it down before it's gone forever.   What else is there to do?   

Can you see the lilac tree

the lily pond, the skylark's song

The open air where no one cares

where branches live and die out there

Lady, what's tomorrow?
Will it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?