The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--14. Dante's View

Dante's View, Death Valley National Park, November 2022 Steve Brown 

Bare-bone, rock-solid beauty.  That's what Death Valley is.  Stunning silence.  Earth.   Sky.  Distance.  Nowhere are all these attributes taken together as a whole more profoundly than from Dante's View.

It's a long way around to stand 5,575 feet directly above Badwater Basin.  In fact, you must travel 37.6 miles, which takes forty-nine minutes, to stand a few miles to the southeast of where you started.  Such a journey would be ridiculous if the park was flat.  But, of course, it's not.  Death Valley National Park is anything but horizontal.  Out of many places in the park that make that oh so apparent, Dante's View is perhaps the most spectacular.  Only Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park has given me an equal sense of the grandeur of stone and distance and depth combined, and I've been to the Grand Canyon a few times.  

To stand at Dante's View is to begin to comprehend the vastness of time through the pores of your skin.  There's just something about being there in that silence and looking down on that long rip in earth that lets you know you are a part of something so much more than your individual self.  Other than love, it is perhaps the greatest feeling one can know.  It's so perfect and pure and has nothing to do with you, or grocery lists, or shopping malls.  You are an eternity away (it seems) from interstate freeways and smog-blotched urban skylines.  It is a world void almost entirely of us.  

I've got nothing against humanity, but for some reason it is important for the human soul to know more than our own fowl, nesting grounds--to feel the great sweep of creation beyond our chaotic dens of electric light, mechanical noise, and polluted air.  We need to touch the bedrock reality that was us before we stuffed our nests with our own crap.

That is the purity we get to glimpse at Death Valley.  

Marci at Dante's View, April 2022 Steve Brown

Almost, of course.  That hot day in April when Marci and I made our ascent, the sky didn't look quite right.  It could have been dust, but I don't think so.  We have altered our sense of distance, even in the most remote spaces, because we have altered the air we breathe.  Smog is everywhere.  It extends so far beyond the limits our cities.  Except on rare days, it is almost impossible to take in stone and space in natural light.

Out west, that is an unspeakable loss.  It is perhaps something we can regain though.  It won't come easily because of the massive annual fires we've caused through global warming, but with electric vehicles, it is possible that some day we may know our sacred places again in their natural light.

I don't know if that will ever be so, but I do know it's worth voting for.  Quality of light could and should be a political issue.  It affects how we physically observe our word.  And it is foolish to believe our mental vision is disconnected from our physical vision.  A well-trained mind knows happiness ultimately comes from within, but there is a reason our holy houses isolate us from the chaos and clutter of the manmade world outside.  Pure environments are a necessity for the human soul.  We have created a world that filters out the divine.  It's getting harder and harder to know who we are because there are fewer and fewer opportunities to stand in holy places.  As a species, we need to know what light looks like untainted by smog.  If we lose that knowledge, we will have lost far more than we will ever know.  We may survive.  But there is no way we will ever be alright again.  

Light is everything.