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.