The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 66: Rhyolite, Nevada and a Life-Transforming Question

Cook Bank Building, Rhyolite, Nevada, Steve Brown 2026 

9:06 a.m.

I sit on a bench across from the old Cook Bank Building in Rhyolite, Nevada.  Once a grand monument to the sums of money that could be made in a Nevada boomtown, it's now a Parthenon to the past and a stark concrete reminder of the temporal nature of civilization.  There is a set of steps that now goes nowhere, and the once luxurious interior is completely hollowed out by only 118 years of existence, way less than the span of two lifetimes.    Once something no longer receives care, it quickly crumbles.  A wooden structure that is loved and maintained, like Kondo at Hōryū-ji in Japan, can last over 1,300 years, while a concrete building abandoned can crumble in shockingly little time.  Once there is no lifeforce within or without attending to something, it quickly returns to the dust from which it comes.  Even more important than how durable something is intrinsically is how durable is the love that maintains it.  Recognizing this should completely change our lives.  I just realized that now, writing this.  I will do my best to make this new personal knowledge have the impact that it should.  Everything we do should be prefaced with this question:  Am I giving this person, this animal, this plant, this project, this task the attention and love that fosters the will to grow and flourish, or am I giving it the neglect that fosters the desire to return to the dust from which it came?  Although I just realized that myself, I'm positive just asking that one question before every act would completely change life as we know it.  

It even works with something you want to die, like hate or fear or anxiety.  Starve it of attention and it will disintegrate.  Feed it your obsession and it will flourish.  

To get the world we want, we must feed those things we want to flourish and starve those things we wish to vanish.  Attention and neglect are the center of all things.  If things fall apart and the center will not hold, as William Butler Yeats wrote, it is not the nature of things, but rather the nature of our love.  You might say you can't love someone enough to make them immortal.  That may or may not be true.  Christ might have done exactly that.  But without a doubt, you can love someone enough to make them want to live through at least this one day, and you can love them again that same way tomorrow.  And you can do the same with your dog, your cat, your goldfish, your fern, your dreams, and most important of all, yourself.  

Am I giving this the attention and love that fosters growth or the neglect that fosters death?

I did not have this realization sitting on a bench across from the old Cook Bank Building in Rhyolite, Nevada at 9:06 a.m.  I had it now, writing in this moment.  But that wouldn't have happened if I didn't sit on that bench in Rhyolite and fully absorb that moment in time.  And it wouldn't have happened if I didn't sit in this moment now and revisit that moment then as if it were the present.  If I didn't give these nows the attention they deserve, that thought would not have come to me at this moment and perhaps not ever.  And if I do not give this singular sentence the daily attention it deserves--Am I giving this the attention and love that fosters growth or the neglect that fosters death?--it will have very little impact on my life.  But if I do, it cannot be anything other than transformative.  

Now gives us that if we let the moment work for us.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 65: Death Valley and the Space Between the Sounds

Writing Studio, Death Valley, Steve Brown 2026

1.

Furnace Creek Campground, 5:02 a.m.

I woke up at 4:45 and many times before that.  Somehow, I still managed to get six hours of sleep.  Outside the tent, I head over to the restroom in the soft shades of gray.  Camping turns the smallest necessity into ritual.  Everything becomes significant.  The short path to the restroom runs between two clusters of struggling mesquite trees that standout significantly even in the low light because of the chalky soil.  You know shade is needed badly when the park service purposefully locates a campground in a wash.  Yesterday afternoon I came to love these broad, low trees as they blocked the day's most intense rays.  

However, this morning it is slightly chilly even with my hoodie.  These tree-heaps that grow like clumps of prairie grass bent over after rain are pleasant to look upon in the low light.  After just one night, I am already at home in this place.  I'm not sure why but nowhere touches my soul like here.  I can't imagine my life without these few short visits to this valley.  It's strange, but it almost feels like I came into this world for these exact moments.  Perhaps that is why, even with global warming, some travel is good.  How do you find your place in the world if you never leave home?  Staying put is good most the time.  You can find beauty absolutely anywhere.  Every neighborhood is a visual paradise with the right eyes.  Yet, I absolutely know my life would not be the same if I never came to Death Valley.  It is my place.  Mine.  I have no clue why.  Our souls know more than we do.  But now that I've been here, it is deep within me, always.  Part of me wonders if this place was intrinsic to me even before my first breath.  Maybe we each select our journey through this life before we are born.  

Big Bend has a similar hold on me as does Canyon de Chelly.  Although not quite as strong here, there is a view near the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend that upon my first arrival I swore I'd seen it before.  My brother, more scientifically minded than myself, has tried to convince me many times that I probably saw it in a photograph when I was very young.  But I don't believe that is the source of my connection.  The Deja vu was so intense.  I don't know why I knew that place before I saw it, but I know I did.  Though fuzzy around the edges, that distant meeting with those cliffs is as real as the pressure under my fingertips as I type this sentence.   There are connections the conscious mind can't make that are real indeed.  That doesn't mean nothing is solid, measurable, or quantifiable.  It just means our lenses are limited.  There's real, and then there's the bedrock beneath real.  Santa Elena Canyon, Death Valley, and Canyon del Muerto set off sparks and ignite some part of me I know but don't know, understand but don't understand.  

Canyon del Muerto in Canyon de Chelly National Monument might be explainable spiritually.  In Marci's family it is said that when Kit Carson's army burned up the dwellings and orchards in the Chinle Valley, and her ancestors fled into the canyon for safety, Marci's great-great grandmother was hidden in a tree as a baby for safe keeping and survived several days until she could be retrieved.  If that hadn't happened, Marci wouldn't be here today.  It makes sense to me that if that oral story is true that I might have witnessed it myself previous to my birth given how important Marci is to me now.  My brother, of course, also points out we visited Canyon de Chelly when I was five, and I might remember it from then.  I probably do.  But I don't think that alone would give me such a strong feeling of connection.

It is significant to me that the three natural holy places I've encountered in my life so far are places of exposed rock.  I love the bones of the earth.  Deserts reveal much to me.  I can't fathom getting through this life without spending a night at Furnace Creek campground.  I was born to be here and write this paragraph.  This is more real than any job I've had even though I love teaching.  How often do we spend our time focused on what our soul knows we were meant to do?  I have come to believe we all came here with set agendas, and that we often when we feel lost and disconnected it is because we are spending our time doing everything else except what matters most to us.  I intend to spend less and less time away from who I am.  

And so, I'm headed off to Zabriskie Point to watch the sun rise.

2.  Furnace Creek Campground, 7:03 a.m.

It was a slow, magnificent unveiling of the valley with light and color moving down the mountains, across the valley, and finally to the badlands that are Zabriskie Point.  The wind was cold and brutal, but it was well worth it.

Here at camp, the sun is already warm enough that I have taken off my sweater to feel the warm rays directly on my skin.  It's wonderful, but as it is only a little after seven and already 59 degrees, it will be a warm one.  81 is the forecasted high today and 86 tomorrow.

I will have to drive to Beaty today to buy some shorts as I left my suitcase with all my clothes at home, and all I have to wear are long, black pants, which are not ideal for here, the hottest place on earth.

3.  Roadside, 7:44 a.m.

I sit in a fold out chair at the north end of the salt flat.  Except when a car passes, which is seldom, there is no sound.  If I were farther from the road there would be nothing auditory, absolutely nothing.  

Beyond the gravel of the highway, there are chunky baseball-sized rocks of various colors--orange, green, white, blue--pastel-grayed versions of those hues, but still not colors you associate with stone.  They are normalized a little by the scattered salt brush and thin, yellow blooming weeds.  Then, beyond that is the bright white flat, and farther back, the red and gray basalt mountains.

This to me is life.  Everything else is just a means to get to moments like this.  A gentle breeze, almost no thought, and timeless space.  

I'm startled by a fly-buzz.  Even that is noisy here.

I fold up my chair, my movable writing studio, and get back in the car.  When I get home and write this thing out, pacing will be important to capture time, place and space.  A vehicle covers so much distance in not much time.  It blurs together what should be separated and unique.  Landscapes change quickly in the 21st century because we no longer move at natural speeds.  A good book could capture that speed.  Another good book could capture the space between things.  

More and more in this life I am looking for the space between.  I think my brother Lloyd has always done that.  When we were kids, I would often catch him staring into space, and I would ask him what he was doing, and he wouldn't be able to tell me because on some level he had vanished into a moment.  That is now my goal in life, to vanish into moments, to savor details, to slow down time by focusing on light and textures, to be rather than do.  The doing is inevitable anyway.  We think.  We move.  We do.  We are distracted, pushed always to accomplish something.  And that's okay.  I'm not trying to slip out of life or responsibility.  I'm just trying to slow down enough to notice I'm actually living.  It seems absurd, but most of the time we're so caught up in the world inside our head, always worrying about the next item on the to-do list, that we actually seldom savor what it means to be alive.

Even here, one of the quietest, least inhabited places on earth by plants or animals, a fly buzzes by. And what I do here is no more or less significant that what he or she does.  We are objects in space and together we are experiencing sunlight and sound together, separated by our own senses, yet living this moment as one.  The fly could drop dead.  I could drop dead.  The valley would remain unchanged.  But at this instant simply because we are here, we are part of it.  

That realization, whenever and wherever I have it--to me that is what living is all about.  The other stuff is good.  Nothing wrong with a good bowl of cereal in cold milk.  Nice, warm socks on a cold morning feel great.  Careers, a little extra money to buy good things or go cool places.  Those are all awesome.  But for some reason that isn't life to me.  It's extra. Only friends and loved ones match the importance of now.

This is real:  Connecting to a fly.  Silence.  No-thought.  Just being.  That's where I truly live.

We spend so much time hung up in the notes of life that we don't notice that the real music is in the space between the sounds, and that notes just provide boundaries so that for a minute we can slip into the infinite.  All those daily tasks are not the point of living.  They just frame infinity into digestible bits for mankind.  But if you're not noticing the objects on your desk in sunlight while wading through that stack of papers, you're missing out on a lot of what life has to offer.  And that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with accomplishing anything today.    In terms of happiness, the real accomplishment may just be slowing down enough to notice the space between the accomplishments.  

Once we find grace in the void, we begin to encounter grace in everything.  All glitters God.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 64: Death Valley and Deep Peace Revisited

Looking East from Furnace Creek Campground, Steve Brown 2026

Furnace Creek Campground, Death Valley National Park

I have come here again to watch shadows lengthen and shorten and lengthen again in the near silence as I write the ending chapters to this book.  It has been a four-year journey and much has happened since writing the first paragraph.  The world was in turmoil then.  Joe Biden was president.  Russia had invaded Ukraine.  I firmly believed Ukraine would fall within six months.  It didn't.  

The world is in much more turmoil now.  Donald Trump is president again.  United States attacked Somalia and then Yemen and Iraq. Israel invaded Palestine.  United States participated.  ICE invaded Minneapolis and other cities.  United States attacked Venezuela. United States and Israel attacked Iran.  Israel also attacked Lebanon, Syria, Quatar, and Yemen.  

I have had my own turmoil, most of it in my own mind, luckily with little lasting impact outside that gray matter.  It could have been otherwise.  And yet, I am closer to personal peace than ever before, and soft silence takes up more of each of my days.  I pray that the world will move in that same direction.  It is the only sane move.  I know it works on an individual basis because I have felt the shift.  I am still somewhat crazy, an easy victim to my own ego, but much less so than before.  I believe what is possible on a small scale is achievable on a grand one as well.  If that shift happens, it will happen when nations turn inward with persistent kindness and work on their own egos, asking, "How are we adding to the chaos?"  

Peace cannot be found any other way, individually or collectively.   It begins with kind determination to alter oneself in a manner that makes it possible to integrate into the whole.  It's a huge shift in thinking.  We are so used to battling to be supreme, but there is no way for supremacy-thinking not to lead to war.  You cannot compete for peace.  You cannot win peace at all.  You unfold into it by letting go of the need to be separate and superior.  Peace is a process of integration into something greater than yourself.  It's not about giving up identity, but rather recognizing layers of identity within the whole.  A cell within you is still a cell and part of you simultaneously.  I can be myself, part of my family, part of my community, a citizen of my nation, and a citizen of the world, and part of God's handiwork all simultaneously.  That seems obvious.  Yet, we think and behave as if it is not.  Our go-to identity is always one of separation, especially now.  Much of the nation believes it is unpatriotic to be a world citizen.  How can we be anything else?  We are part of Earth's biomass.  Collectively, this planet is our tidepool.    We are one.  

It is 7:02 p.m.  The badlands east of camp are lit up with the last direct light of the day, highlighting the green and yellow striped and blotched eroded soil.  South of Zabriskie Point, deep shadows cut into the mountains.  I have come here to sit in silence and write.

I remember when I wrote my first poem.  I was probably ten.  I had been looking through a photography book of New Mexico that belonged to my brother.  He used it as a visual source for his paintings.  I was looking at an old, weathered church in a ghost town.  I don't remember where it was.  I do remember the sky was heavy and gray, and it looked as if the clouds would dump their load any moment, all at once.  Something in that picture made me want to reach for language to record that visual experience even though the picture was right in front of me.  I asked Mom for piece of paper and wrote my first poem.  It wasn't an idea that first drove me to words.  It was capturing the now in that photograph.  It seems silly, as that moment had already been captured.  But I really don't think it was.  A world captured in pixels, a world captured in pigment, and a world captured in words all hold some part of that place, but none of them grasp the complete essence of it.  Only being there does that, and even then, only if one is still and emptied of thought.  And yet each attempt to record place through a particular medium brings something unique to it precisely because of the mode of translation.  Place recorded in writing automatically becomes space and sound also, a slow or quick unfolding in the mind, controlled by the pacing that comes through when the writer steps back and allows space and sound to unfold naturally.  I was meant to do that.  That is one of the reasons why I am here on earth.  To feel and share place through words.  That is what made me write my first poem.  I didn't want to share a thought.  I didn't want to share my own feelings.  I wanted to become transparent and translate the awesome sense of space and temperature and texture of that scene through the specific medium of words.  I have come to realize my first impulse with words were authentically me.  I don't desire to communicate through images; I desire to get out of the way and let the sights and sounds speak for themselves through words and the space around them.

Here at camp, the natural silence is frequently broken by RVs circling, looking for sites.  This is due to the time of day.  But in between the passing vehicles, the only sounds are the soft hoot of an owl and soft crunch of footsteps on gravel.

This book contains a few ideas, none of which are mine, and none of which are new.  Thematically, it is centered around Steinbeck's realization that either all of it matters or none of it matters.   But if this book only restates what has already been well-said then I have failed.  I have never had a new thought in my life.  Every concept I live by is borrowed from someone else.  In sixth grade I essentially discovered plate tectonics while looking at a map on the wall during reading time.  Athough the realization that all the continents fit together was new to me, it certainly was not new to the world.  I am not a discoverer.  I am an exister.  And when I am my true self, I exist very well.  I always knew that when I was young.  I didn't want to do anything.  I just wanted to be.  But that didn't get me any attention from those around me, so I came up with big dreams and shared those instead.  I'd be an architect.  That came from an honest place.  I did and still do love structures.  But it lost its authenticity the moment I moved the realization that light on stone is breath-taking to the declaration I'd be a famous architect.  My true essence is about becoming that invisible eyeball Emerson wrote about so eloquently.  Taking in the majesty of light hitting stone comes naturally true me.    I may have easily translated that into a career as an architect, but I only would be doing so authentically had it remained about the light and the stone and not me.  

Others may do.  That may be authentic to who they are.  But I exist.  That is my primary purpose, when I'm most at home, emptied out and witnessing the majesty of life all around me.  When I do that well, I never wonder if my life has meaning.  I know my purpose.  To be.  So, if this book works at all, and I hope it does, it will not be because it teaches anything.  It will because it shares well the only thing I know how to share--how to sit in a place and be.  

Here, in this valley, camp is the big city, where noise and lights break up the eternal silence.  But you don't have to travel far to hear the thundering of nothing.  I live in the fourth most rural region in the country with a population density of less than two people per square mile.  My house sits with one other residence on ninety acres, so as far as human noise goes, I could find more peace stepping out my backdoor than in this this campground.

However, Death Valley isn't just about the absence of human noise.  Often it is about the absence of sound period.  It is the most silent place I have been, and that void makes any little twitter or hoot or skuttle shockingly beautiful.  The silence makes you hear sound like never before.  Death Valley is the sound of silence, and on a moonless night, the deep darkness turns on every light above.  Peace is here.  Deep peace.

The only thing that gets more extreme is the heat.  Right now, though, it is pleasant, real pleasant with the moon taking on significance now that the sun has set.  It is almost full, which, in a way, is too bad as this place gets so dark you can't see your own hand.  Marci and I got to experience that on a visit in 2023.  Who knows, maybe the moonlight in its own way will be just as magical.