The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--17. Rhyolyte, Nevada

Rhyolite, Nevada, Steve Brown 2022

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Marci and I stand before stark, stripped concrete and peer through squares of void, ghosts of windows long shattered, of frames of wood stripped away by time, and I stare into the eternal blue.  A frozen bull-whip wind lashes against me regularly and reminds me that forever is experienced one piercing moment at a time.  This is Rhyolite today.  Bitingly real.  Light pure.  Wind bold.  An experience so raw and intense you want to run back to the car and blast the heater but know you shouldn't.

This is what I've got to get down.  The pure light of now that we are rapidly replacing with air thick with the skeletons of the cells of trees, the living sap of life cinderized and sent soaring to smudge the atmosphere and infiltrate our lungs, us constantly breathing in death because we won't do what it takes to put out the fire that consumes our shared home, so caught in our addiction to fossil fuels that we don't make changes that wouldn't even require much sacrifice, if we'd only work together as a whole.

Marci and I walk down the one gravel street among the bones of Rhyolite, Nevada.  It's incredibly cold.  That isn't rare in April in the desert, when warm and cold fronts have always battled, summer eventually winning with its brutal heat.  Also, not historically unusual is that molten blue sky, to use the words of Emily Dickenson.  But in the past ten years, I've witnessed those days of intensely sharp light dwindle at an alarming rate as the west that I've always known quickly slips aways--days so clear and crisp, it once wasn't uncommon to see a hundred miles or more.

But on this cold, bright day in Rhyolite, it is instead the smoke-filled skies that seem like a dream.  This intensity of light feels so permanent, I'm transported back to the west I knew when I was a child.  I remember walking to school in the winter.  I walked north on a street lined with bony elms lit up sharp by the morning sun.  Houses were far apart, but with the long, dry yellow rye, the orchards, and the barns, the western horizon was invisible except at the cross streets.  There the world opened up.  In incredibly sharp detail, I could see the black lava spills just beyond Flowwell; the warm, low Cricket Mountains bathed in sun; and the lit-up cliffs Notch Peak, some seventy miles away.  It was like this every single clear day.  It was all I knew.  I didn't think there was any other reality.  The world was crisp and detailed.  I could see light hit the side of a white clapboard house five miles away.

Walking this gravel lane with my lady now feels the same.  I am exuberant, though cold.

I'm not sure if we'll ever get back to clean skies, but the solutions are there.  What's missing is a united, optimistic sense of purpose.   That feels farther beyond our reach than ever before.  These are dismal days, even in Rhyolite, Nevada, on an intensely bright morning, as we're headed towards the coast, that turbulent zone, spraying and spewing life.

Fear is what's tearing humanity apart.  Designed fear, crafted fear, orchestrated fear.  All because it is more profitable for some to have us worry over the wrong things than have us deal with what's real.   

It is all driven by one lie, a lie the designers of fear believe for themselves:  that there is a limited supply of happiness, and that to get it, we must scramble to the top and be rich in things--things that insulate and protect us and set us high above all that is terrifyingly real around us--big, glossy screens or nifty handheld screens to project a virtual life so real we never have to look reality in the eyes ever again, so long as we can afford the newest and brightest gadget.

But to keep us hooked on that glossy screen, the manufactures of greed must keep us in the matrix and disconnect us from reality as much as they can.    

Here, now.  Whether that moment is in Rhyolite, Nevada on a bitterly cold, clear morning, or one standard sweltering moment under the toxic skies of Ahmedabad, India.  When we stay grounded in a moment and what's real beneath our feet and before us, we care about everything that touches us.  Nothing is separate.  This air I breath needs protection.  This woman crouched in fear in the alley with her two children on the brink of starvation is too real to separate from my own emotions--too difficult to write off as other.

I don't know if there are any solutions beyond divine intervention, which I do believe in.  The earth, like all things, might just need to run its course, the prophesies of ages becoming achingly real moment by moment.  But this I do know--that if there is a solution, it will only be found as we enter that moment of what is real and those imagined separations between us and what's around us dissipate in the intense light of now, us naked and human, no longer sheltered by our addictions--one world either transforming our destiny together or one world burning together.  I also know a God of goodness and truth and light would desire us to attempt to enter that moment together regardless of what the ultimate outcome will be.   Believing the world will end in wickedness is not an excuse for becoming wicked.  Believing the world will end in fire is not an excuse for hastening its demise.

All we have is now, this moment.  Whether that moment be in the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada; burning Kyiv, Ukraine; or the walled-in Gaza Strip.  Tide pools seemingly worlds away are connected by one ocean.  We name what separates us, but the names we give things are constructs, not reality.  What unifies us is what is real--whether we acknowledge that fact, or whether we spend our days each before our own little screen escaping the ever-present reality of here and now.

Now, Marci and I stand up at the north end of Rhyolite across the gravel lane from the train station.  I stare at an old Union Pacific caboose without wheels set down on the earth amongst chunks of white stone--bleached, broken hills behind below a cobalt sky.  The sun here feels warm and good, the wind somewhat blocked by wood ruin before me.  I love the streaks and stains of time.  The Romantics had it right--there is something holy in ruins, something divine in the dilapidated.  They speak not only of the passing of time, but of the process of time, of once new things growing old and breaking down, of the eternal marching forward instant by instant.  They speak of something greater and grander than our human ambitions and dreams but not separate from them either, humanity and nature melting back together over time.  They speak of truth:  of missteps, of fragility, of nature's way of correcting whatever we do wrong over time, and that what we think of as solid, permanent, and separate is but an illusion, that we are actually just earth and sky--forever marching into the eternities together, one standard moment after another.