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| Badwater Basin, Death Valley, Steve Brown 2022 |
If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull,
it is fierce and hostile and sullen. The
stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back if we live, and
we don’t know why.
--John
Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1957
Heat. It's not that I've never felt 102 degrees Fahrenheit before. A few years ago in Vegas, I felt what 105 degrees after midnight feels like. I once lived on the fifth floor, in an old building, in El Paso with only a small window-unit air conditioner during a summer that had ninety consecutive days over one hundred. Heat is something I know. A couple of years ago I experienced 117 degrees in Laughlin, Nevada. I know what heat is.
Still, I have never felt heat like the 102 degrees I felt Saturday, April 8, 2022 at Badwater Basin, Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level.
I'm not sure what made the heat so thick--definitely not the humidity--but wow, opening that car door and stepping out onto a parking lot that overlooked a salt flat before a gigantic mountain on the other side, and having the heat grab your head and yank your face towards its scorching mouth as it burps breath out of the hot bowels of hell itself---well, it kind of gets your attention.
We were amazed. Marci had her umbrella. I had my gleeful astonishment. I wondered, O I wondered, what it would feel like to be here on the Fourth of July. If 102 felt this otherworldly, what would 117 feel like here, deeper down on the thinnest crust anywhere on the continent? To be standing in a crack in the foundation of North America that is constantly ripping apart with big dreams of building a north-south running Mediterranean Sea someday was one of the most significant moments in my life.
Marci and I had been across Death Valley National Park twenty-five years earlier on our honeymoon. However, we'd come in from Beaty and went through Stovepipe Wells. Although the entire park is amazing, you have not truly experienced Death Valley until you've been to Badwater Basin. It, and getting there, are an essential part of experiencing the park, as is Dante's View.
Here we were, on this vast bed of salt in a heat so heavy it's indescribable, looking at a line of people holding umbrellas walking off into the distance and vanishing somewhere before Telescope Peak rises 11,331 feet above the valley floor. It was a scene from a rainy day in Paris placed on Mars. No, that doesn't quite work. The air was not thin, and the temperature definitely not cold. Perhaps there are no comparisons for Death Valley. Perhaps it is its own deep thing. There are, of course, other places below sea level on Planet Earth. But I have the sneaking suspicion, when you get that far out of the normal human experience, each place breaths its own deep, hot breath that says I am the only place like this. Don't go looking for anyone else. I am it. I will occupy your soul forever, and whether you live or die here, you will never, ever be the same.
Acutely aware through the sublimely blunt physicality of that message--it is dangerous to be out here--we did not wander far, but O how great it was to experience that heat and feel the pressure and see that soft, sodium light which softens a landscape that cannot be softened and is like no other.
I've seen a lot out west, been high in the Sierras, deep in the Redwoods, high on a cliff in a hard rain, looking out into the steely-gray ocean, but out on that salt flat, I simply had my mind blown.
I also became keenly aware that because of light and shadow, the world is beautiful everywhere, under all conditions. Climate change will not destroy our world--it will only destroy our capacity to live on it in style. Death Valley was suddenly one of my favorite spots on earth--stone bold gorgeous in its brutality--but it is not a place that sustains much. A world without much water can sustain the souls of a few nomadic wanderers, but it cannot sustain complex civilizations of inhabitants living cushy lives well-fed and artificially heated and cooled.
A lifeless earth would no doubt still be beautiful--any place that receives light is--it just would no longer be our home.
Environmentalism is spiritual, no doubt. It seeks to preserve beautiful, natural places. But most of all it is pragmatic. It is about us. Do we want a world that will continue to sustain us or do we not? Will we succeed or will we not? It's that basic. And the fear of not succeeding should keep us all awake at night. The fact that it doesn't just demonstrates how truly human we are.
One thing for sure, though, is we are all in this together--even the millions of species who have no say in the outcome. What we do impacts everything. We have become like God. We need to act as if we know the difference between good and evil. We need to grow up. I need to grow up and take on the responsibility that is mine. You probably need to do the same.
