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| Silence: Death Valley at Sunset, Steve Brown 2022 |
The most profound thing about Death Valley is the void. I don’t write that lightly. I have at least sampled its heat and know just how significant that is. However, I think as long as you don’t die there, absence is the vital ingredient the place provides the soul that few other places do.
One night on a recent trip revisiting the sacred place, Marci and I decided to drive from the Furnace Creek campground up to Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes to see what stars look like without there being any lights around. Soon after camp, it became clear we didn't need to drive that far. Yet, I did. The darkness sucked me in. We soon got to a place where, other than our headlights, we couldn't see anything in any direction. We were floating in a visual void. Road, rocks and rare brush popped into view out of the lightless abyss. We passed maybe two or three cars going the other direction along the way. It was strange and magical to not see the hot coals of man permanently camped on farms and towns somewhere across horizon. No lights, no nothing. Just darkness.
Visually, it was not quite so void as we approached Mesquite Flat. We could see the lights of Stovepipe Wells. Though not large, the small settlement destroyed the wonder of what living must have been like before man lit up his world, and in the process, forever shut out the natural light God gave us to read and tell stories about at night, an entire library closed to the imagination except by the most earnest of seekers.
We pulled into the parking lot to the sand dunes. Marci worried that our headlights might destroy someone's night photograph, as these dunes are sacred ground for such seekers of light, and of truth, and of beauty. I told her anyone serious about their photography would walk further out, anyway. There was only one other car, and the owner was getting out his equipment. We were good.
As we were here only to see, all we needed was a small flashlight, and we were off--out into that sea of cold sand on the night of February 16, 2023.
The sky was stunning, but probably not as stunning as it usually is. While still at camp, we noticed the thin clouds that were moving in and thickening up as they did. But we only had one night here, so we decided to go. As we live in a pretty rural area ourselves, I've actually seen many more spectacularly star-studded nights just walking around outside our home.
But what I hadn't experienced was absolute silence. No audible wind. No bird. No cricket. Nothing. Just absolute silence booming in our ears. It was stunning, otherworldly. Foreign and grand.
Death Valley is a cathedral where God needs no murals because His fingers have touched everything, and his fingerprints are visible everywhere. Yet, even more profound is His voice thundering through the absolute silence.
Though I felt that most profoundly that night out on the dunes, in Death Valley, that silence is ever-present everywhere. It is
what I felt when Marci and I stepped out onto a red rock rubble fan into 108
degrees, looking down towards Badwater Basin.
As hot as it was in the basement of the continent, it was even hotter
here, a few stairs up. It was probably
due to the light color of the salt flats below and the dark rock here, at the trailhead to Natural Bridge.
Yet, as
profound as that heat was, the silence and all that empty space said more. We need places that protect dark nights and
that silent void that reminds us that even after all we have created to
insulate us from reality, we are still quite small and connected to so much
more than we understand.
There
simply is nothing as rewarding as to stand in Death Valley at sunset and look
out across the pastel blue salt flats; the sodium sky, tinged tangerine; the
mountains violet; and to hear nothing, absolutely nothing, but the universe
breathing; the only thought in your head:
Damn. God. You are amazing.
Life without touching that somewhere in some-way is not fully living. Even if we don't get to personally touch it, it is important for our species that it is there for someone to touch, and to taste, and to remember. The darkness and silence of emptiness is the library of our soul. We may survive in a world without it, but we will not live. That takes something less and more than what we've constructed to insulate us from who we really are--naked and small in an astoundingly large, mostly empty, expanding universe, absolutely shocked to find here we are, knowing almost zero about anything. That reverence is the source of life. Realizing it was the moment and place where we got to our knees, built an altar, and turned to God, stunned by a beauty greater than us. Even if that alter is now only metaphorical, we still need it. We are built to worship something greater than ourselves. When we lose awe, we lose everything.
