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.

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--16. In the Eternal Now

Garden Chair, Steve Brown 2023

I sit at my drafting table and look out my open sliding glass door into my garden.  It's late afternoon. Up front, the rose bush and peach tree up are heavy with shadow.  There is an old wooden chair with chipped red paint.  Yellow black-eyed Susans and violet cosmos beyond sway gently.  All of this is muted softly by the shade.  Then, just as the garden beds meet the gravel pathway, a cluster of sunflowers catches the evening light, isolated again by heavy shadow thrown behind.  Distant dogs bark.  Outside, the fountain gurgles.  Inside, the fridge hums.  Two worlds mingle.

I have lived my entire life in moments like this.   I've existed during a lot of other times as well.  But I have only truly lived in these jeweled vignettes.  When I look back on my life, these are the images and sounds I remember.  From the time I was five, I have known light and shadow is all I really needed.  This is my purpose.  Of that, I had no doubt.  I couldn't have expressed it.  But I knew it.  Being is its own reason to exist.  Moments are everything.  

I lost my way though.  Oh, how I lost it.  Because I listened to other voices.  Voices that were pragmatic and well-intended.  Cowardly voices from those who feared for my well-being because what they really feared for was their own well-being.  Fear ruled their lives, so it had to rule mine as well--because that's all they knew.  That's alright.  I get it.  I have my own fears that I probably push off on others as well.  However, the fear that there is a limited supply of happiness, that only a few can obtain it, and that life is a scramble to get your position and secure that income while you can--for me, that fear was not inborn.  It had to be taught.  Like so many I was taught to dream big as a child, and by the time I was eighteen, trade all that in for practicality.  Everything inside me resisted that there is anything more important in this life than just being, so I didn't negotiate the two worlds well.

I still don't.  I've learned there is a time to feed Mammon.  If you don't, like those who worried about me when I was younger feared, it can indeed devour you.  

But I already knew what was real for me when I was five.  It was out my backdoor, out my window, in my yard.  It didn't matter what door, what window, or what yard.  As long as there was light and shadow and reasonably clean air, I was in a moment, and I was born to spend an eternity there.  

I knew it on the Avenues of Salt Lake City, when on a way to my friend's house, I crouched down near the sidewalk to watch an ant move across a section of chipped concrete.  It must have been early morning.   The sun was low, and the ant moved across pebbles that were like boulders to him, and what drew me, what made me crouch down, were the great shadows thrown by these little bitty pebbles and this little bitty ant.  Amazing.  

I knew it on a cold winter's day on a ranch in Cache Valley when a hard slant of light ignited the rust on the hood of a dark green cattle truck otherwise buried in eighteen inches of crusty snow.  Glowing icicles dangled from mirrors, fenders and running board.  Damn, I knew it.  

I knew it in college, hiking high in Rocky Mountain National Park with a friend, when I saw two college girls sitting on a big boulder, squinting at the sun, golden light playing with thin strands of their hair and warming the front of their bare legs, honey skin dipping into these very rugged boots just above their ankles.  I was so shy then, even more than now.  Yet, I knew a moment when I saw it.  With a giant camcorder over my shoulder, I worked up the courage, walked up to them and said, "If you don't mind, can I film you sitting in the light like that?"  They were beautiful.  No doubt about it.  But what caught my attention was the squinting into the sun--that human desire to see the light touch an object and render it into something more, which in this case, was the ridge of a snowcapped peak.  Through their squinted eyes I could see their amazement, and I knew they were feeling that same awe looking at the ridge as I was feeling looking at them.  To be.  There is no question there.  To not be only arises when we lose focus of the fact we exist to be blown away.  When we are solid in our primary purpose, we are solid.  It's when we start worrying about what others think--how to make an impression, whether we're good enough, whether we have enough and are making our mark, fulfilling some notion of legacy--that we become lost.

When we stick to the moment--tune ourselves into whatever task is at hand, focus on the thing or person before us totally...  In those moments, everything is absolutely right--even if the person we're giving our attention to is sort of an ass.  Try it.  Next time someone is hassling you.  Step back.  Observe the scene.  What's happening outside the blinds.  The light on their face.  The way their lips are moving.  The expression in their eyes.  Don't react to it; just observe.  Your anger, your hate--at least for that moment--will be gone.  You will know better what they need.  

I seldom remember to do this, but when I do, it does work.  It has to.  You cannot observe something closely and not become part of it.  As a teenager, we often call that connection love.  I observe she has cute little freckles on the side of her nose and I'm in love.  What I really am is connected.  That that feels so powerful that I label it love is okay.  Connection is why we're here.  

Light is essential.  I have a pot of vincas hanging from a wrought-iron chandelier from Mexico that I turned into a planter.  Right now, those blossoms are on fire.  For me, the joy I see looking at that is what matters.  Why would I let so much in my life steal that away from me?  I do, but not as much as I used to.   I am slowly learning.  Long gone are the big addictions.  The alcohol, the pornography.  Now it is the smaller distractions.  Mostly laziness, numbness, and petty distractions that keep me from being me.

I write to remember what I knew so long ago:  I live in this moment only.  I exist elsewhere.  I have to.  We all have to.  The world nags at us.  It has to.  There are bills to pay.  Mouths to feed.  We must give that beast it's due.  It will not die.  But it doesn't need near as much of our lives as we willingly feed it.  It asks for a tiny bit of us, and we rush into its gaping mouth, yelling "Devour me!"  So, it does.

As a teacher, even at the high school level, I will occasionally have a student come up to tell someone stole their pencil.  I hand them a pencil and give the best advice I know:  "Do you really want to reduce your life to a pencil?"

I don't always follow my advice.  I often reduce my life to feeling I need to teach someone a lesson or express my sense of injustice at them cutting in line, but when I do, I'm not truly in the moment, and I may be existing, but I'm clearly not living because who wants to spend their life reacting to crap that doesn't matter when life is swirling gloriously all around you?

Yet, we do.  We give huge amounts of our lives away to the great nada, or in other words, our stupid egos trying to insulate us from the vitality of existence.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--16. The Shady Lady

The Shady Lady Bed & Breakfast 2022

The last light of day hung over the jagged western horizon as we climbed up the steep rock-rubble incline north of Beatty Junction on the hottest day I've ever experienced in April.  Topping out at 108 degrees in one place near Badwater Basin, it was the hottest I've ever felt even though I have been in 117-degree heat before.  There is just something uniquely dense about Death Valley heat.  It felt good to have the sun go down, but I kept the air conditioner going even while going up the great incline.  

Alluvial fans in Death Valley are truly profound--steep, wide and strewn with chunks of rock from the size of cows down to pebbles, but nothing too rounded.  No, not here.  This is a brutally beautiful landscape, and everything is hard-edged, even the pebbles.  This is the land of drums and cymbals and clanky bells that also can be oddly soft and pastel, the way Ravel's "Balero" begins soft and pastel from the beat of drums.

Our headlights ate up the rocks and very occasional weed or brush in the eerie lightless silence as the last green edge of day on the horizon was swallowed by night.  By the time we entered Daylight Pass, daylight was but a myth slinking off into the depths of subconsciousness before being snuffed out by the ever-present blackness of now.

And the wind picked up.  Oh, how it whipped up--as hard-edged as the landscape itself.  The road, before strait as an arrow up the incline, now bent one way, then the other, as our headlights scooped in the edges of mountains on one side and the edge of a wash-ravine on the other.

It was amazing, but we were tired.  Oh, so tired.

Eventually, we topped Daylight Pass and the small town of Beatty appeared suddenly below us.  I don't remember the drive down really, but from subsequent trips, I know it's not far.

I do remember standing outside at a small gas station in a fierce wind, getting cold.  Oh, how quickly the weather changed.

Down the street, lit up by Casino lights, palm trees whipped wildly in the voodoo night.

* * * * *

The thirty-minute drive up U.S. 95 to the Shady Lady Bed and Breakfast seemed an eternity.  I wasn't sure how well-marked the former brothel was, and I was afraid I was going to miss it or had.  Because of a weak signal, GPS wasn't updating our location.  We floated around in the deep Nevada darkness, the wind whipping dust and debris across the path of our headlights, searching for our bed for the night.

At last, Marci saw it up ahead to the right.  I put on my blinker and worried about the car that was fast approaching behind us because our turn was not much more than a spill of gravel that led us on the rutted path to our destination.

The place had great reviews, but I was beginning to question my research.

At last, we pulled up, headlights shining on a picket fence.  The wind was cold and fierce.  The branches of the trees whipped around as big swooshes of wind swept in from the desert audibly significant.  I unpacked the backseat of our car, hoping the wind would not remove the doors.  We each had a suitcase.  I would have to come back for the cooler.

The wind swooped in again as I tried to open the gate, the trees swinging their leafy loads in big, black shadowy swooshes shattering the calm light cast on the stone pathway leading to a well-lit porch partially enclosed in exotic wrought iron.  I was afraid no one would be awake.  We were much later than we had anticipated.

I can't remember if I rang, nocked, or if the door behind the screen door was already open.  Once in, a light was on over the front desk that subtly lit a Victorian sitting room off to the left.  Here I was, standing in a house of prostitution on a wickedly wild night with my wife.  Nevada.

Sort of.  Gone were the prostitutes.  Gone were the lonely men trying fill giant holes in their souls or escape the unescapable bland pressure of ordinary life.  In short, gone were the men trying to escape themselves.

Instead, a pleasant lady in her early sixties wearing Bermuda shorts checked us in.  I apologized for us being so late.  She said it was no bother and that people often came in late after long, adventurous days in the park.  She apologized that the themed rooms where the ladies had once done their work were all taken.  All that were left were the private residential rooms.  I said we didn't care, and we didn't.

There was a time when I was mesmerized by Nevada's neon wild west outlaw culture.  I spent my summers as a youth in Reno.  I loved the lights igniting Virginia Street.  I loved the billboards of the showgirls at Harrah's all lined up in leotards kicking out powerful legs in unison, feathers high, sparky outfits hugging the edges of voluptuous thighs.  I liked the mystique of Mustang Ranch--the hushed tones my fellow Mormon friends whispered about the evil that went on there and the money the owner made by selling out his soul to the devil.  I loved the bells and whistles of the casinos--the sound of coins tumbling into metal trays.  I loved the smoky air and sound piano music coming out of the small lounges off to the side of the great expanses of slot machines on acres of gaudy red and black carpet.  I was a kid, so all of this I viewed from a distance, walking to the bowling alley at the MGM Grand, which only made it more intriguing, more intoxicating.

But somewhere along the line, I changed.  Marci and I stay in Vegas frequently, but it is not a destination of choice.  Usually, it is the halfway point to the coast.  Sometimes, in the dead of winter, we go there simply because it's warm.  I still love an evening of listening to free music in one of those little lounges off to the side of the casino, and I love the fountain of the Bellagio, especially when "Time to Say Goodbye" by Andre Bocelli and Sarah Brightman accompanies the thundering waters, but overall Vegas bores me.  And though I once was very drawn to the outlier culture of strip clubs and whorehouses, and in my mind, said things like, "A society that allows for that is actually far healthier than one where it occurs in secrecy, unregulated," I am now too aware of the misery sex industry causes to be drawn to the wild west nostalgia that in no way has ever matched reality.  I have deeply felt the void that draws people to the night, so there's no judgement there.  And in my college years, I spent enough time in topless bars to know the women who work there are real--just regular people trying to make a living.  But the thick, sticky dread that hangs in the air is just as real.  The dark side isn't exotic--just dank and miserable.  Dens of addiction destroy people's lives.

So, unlike in the past, I hadn't been seeking out a place like The Shady Lady as a cool, unique Nevada experience--to get a taste of the underbelly without really entering it.  That would have been me twenty years ago.  What I had been searching for was somewhere affordable to stay.  The campgrounds in Death Valley were booked up and a Motel 6 in Las Vegas was $160 per night.  I could not wrap my head around paying that much money for lodging that reminded me of my life when I was poor and lived in apartments that weren't much different than budget motels.  So, I thought I might find a bed and breakfast.  And I did.  Great reviews.  Out in the desert.  Not too far from Death Valley.  Perfect.  The Shady Lady.

We were guided through the main kitchen by our host, and then down a long hallway that bent somewhere in the middle.  Eventually, it opened into another living room and kitchen.  We were told we could use the fridge and stove if we needed to and that there were grills out back.  This was the former dormitories for the girls.  We were taken to a small, clean room with a double bed, a couple of nightstands, a bathroom, and not much else.  We were tired and it was perfect.

I would make a couple more trips to the car, unload the coolers, and put the blue buddies in the freezer.  As I unpacked the cooler, I talked to a man who had a thick Australian accent.  He was the brother of the woman who owned the place.  He was pleasant and very interesting, but I was far too tired to collect, let alone, remember his name.

* * * * *  

I woke to the sound of peacocks.  Soft morning light poured through the curtains.  I remember seeing a white peacock sitting on a sunlit high, wooden fence.  I can't remember if that was from our room or some other window I looked out after I got out of the shower and began to wander about.

I do remember how the sunlight bathed the back of the pure white bird in yellow light.  I remember how much I wanted to get outside to see the grounds and desert beyond.  I pulled on my hoodie as I knew it would be cold.  

A warm yellow light poured through the glass on the kitchen door and onto the cupboards.  I decided that was the easiest way out without disturbing other guests.  Outside the sun rose over some very ordinary dry Nevada mountains--low, and even in the blue morning shadows, yellow with the hair of cheat grass, they slowly marched southward to Mexico, or northward to Canada, depending how you looked at it.  I decided it was all the same--those low mountains frozen mid-step in time.

Timeless.  Once you get out Vegas and Reno, that's what Nevada is.  And that's what I love about it.  It never changes.  Just over the border from the county I live in Utah sits a small casino.  I grew up passing it on the way back and forth to Reno.  Later, in college, I stopped there many times for dinner while out exploring that great emptiness called Nevada.  And I still stop there once or twice a year, and in all that time, from the mid 70's until now, that little casino and cafe have changed very little.  Although they did add on a bigger dining hall, the only real changes to the place are the silencing of the dropping coins with the newer slot machines and the replacement of long sedans and muscle cars with the various auto styles throughout the years.  Other than that, walking in there hasn't changed since I was ten.  

That is not unique in Nevada.  Austin, Eureka, Tonopah, Ely.  They pretty much stand still in time--just like the mountains.

Although the nights at The Shady Lady are now very different, outback, in the morning light, the view across the desert I'm sure hasn't changed.

That is why I seek Nevada.  That immortal time that stands tall with forever long mountain chains that seem to be marching to Canada or Mexico, but in fact, at least on the human scale of time, are marching nowhere at all.

I think most people want to get somewhere.  Perhaps that has been my biggest problem in life.  I just want to stand on a dry lakebed in Nevada and witness time not moving at all.  Maybe that isn't even a problem.  Are we here to do?  Or are we here to be?  Probably a little of both, but I stand with the trees that are simply satisfied standing in place absorbing the sunlight and growing inside.

I do want adventure.  But all the adventures I seek take me to a place where I can simply stand and absorb the sun.  The Shady Lady is now such a place.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--15. Working Days 8: Fires & Floods

Halfway Hill Fire from Dry Creek, July 8, 2022, Steve Brown

Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize.

--Lester R. Brown

The muddy water whirled along the bank sides and over crept up the banks until at last it spilled over... Then from the tents, from the crowded barns, groups of sodden men went out, their clothes sopping rags, their shoes muddy pulp.  They splashed out through the water, to the towns, to the country stores, to the relief offices, to beg for food, to cringe and beg for food, to be for relief, to try to steal, to lie.

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

April 29, 2023

Today is a big day in my average life.  I am a gardener, and the heat is on.  It's been a long, wet winter, the wettest we've ever had in Utah since records have been kept.  We received more than twice our average snowfall.  And spring is finally here.  Today it will reach 79 degrees.  I woke up at 4:30, itching to get out into the soil.

Yet, I know the warm weather isn't necessarily a good thing.  Last summer much of the Pavant Range burned.  Although we weren't evacuated, there was the very real possibility our home might become part of the inferno.  We were busy getting ready for a wedding until we weren't.  Fire took over our lives.  It had to.  In one afternoon, everyone's focus instantly changed.  I went from worrying about whether the yard would be ready for the wedding to wondering instead if all around me would be ash in a matter of hours.

There is an odd calm that sets in when you realize you might lose everything.  You switch from the low-level frenzy that rules so much of our lives--always rushing to meet the next deadline (work, social, or self-imposed) to doing whatever needs to be done in the moment and letting go of any expectations of the outcome.  To expect things to go a certain way with a fire outside your door would be foolish, so you just do.  So, I rushed around, packed up what could be hastily packed up and put in the car, took photos of everything else for insurance purposes, and then went outside to watch the world burn.  Up at my mom's house, they did the same thing, as did everyone else in town.  Lawn chairs lined a good portion of 500 South.  There were oo's and awes.   Despite the undercurrent of dread, the movie was the biggest, brightest, awe-inspiring, suck-your-whole-heart-and-stole-out-of-you production any of us had ever seen.  Until the moment you combust into flames, fire feels more like a seducer than a foe.  With every stand of trees that explodes, you want to cry for you know what has been lost, yet you anxiously wait for that next burst of orange because for that moment you have become the fire, and its life is your life, and for both of you to carry on, you must be fed.  All you want is to be dazzled no matter what the cost.  Or at least part of you does.

Another part is anchored to hell with a good sturdy chain of dread.

But the one thing you aren't is frenzied.  The experience is too far out of the norm to be connected with any emotion you feel in daily life.  You are free from the petty worries you allow to rule most of your days.  There is no clock, no calendar, no deadlines, very little sleep--only fire.

Next came the flood.  Or a small taste of what a flood does.  My brother, with a lot of help from Marci's family and me, had worked for weeks at preparing the small, oak and maple filled canyon that runs through our property for the wedding of our son Rio and his fiancé Eden.  We trimmed trees, cleared fallen branches, widened a trail, and raked and mowed an area around a gorgeous Rocky Mountain Juniper that they had picked out as the visual alter of the ceremony.  It looked gorgeous.

But we were worried.  The county had let us know that a fire increases the amount of water run-off from a mountain thunderstorm by five times.  An extremely rare one-inch super soaker becomes five-inch catastrophic event.   That wasn't likely, but some flooding was.  We were in the midst of the worst drought in 1200 years, yet our prayers for rain had changed.  They became very specific--Please Lord bring us rain, but please, please give it to us in small doses.  No longer did we yearn for the heavens to let loose.  

In the midst of the push to be ready for the wedding, I found out a life-celebration for my former boss and mentor, the poet and publisher Bobby Byrd, who had passed away a couple of months before, was taking place in El Paso.  He was just way too important to me to not go.  Like so many others, I loved the man.  So, just a few days before the wedding, Marci and I dropped everything and headed to the border.

The monsoon season had been very good for the drought-ravaged Southwest.  New Mexico was lush.  Even the sagebrush took on a darker luxurious green than the normal pale blue-gray tint.  And between the sage, long blades of dark, almost black, grass swayed in the unusually moist breeze.  We hit several downpours that thundered on our roof, the wipers slapping madly to keep the highway visible.  Small waterfalls rushed down the grassy road banks, and little rivers galloped along the roadside, bucking and bouncing joyfully along the way.  

It was awesome to see.  But we kept saying things like, "I sure hope it isn't doing this at home."  And then we got a phone call from Lloyd.  It had done exactly that.  Not much rain had actually fallen at Dry Creek, but up on the mountain, a cloud had let go.

My brother said the flood sounded like a freight train.  A torrent of ash, mud and debris came charging down, gouging the creek bed in places to twice its depth, and in other places twice its width, and spilling over the banks in one place and spreading a layer of black-ashy-mud a couple inches thick all over the ground.  

As luck would have it, the particular place it spilled over was exactly where Lloyd and the rest of the family had spent so much time prepping for the wedding.  On the phone, my brother was optimistic.  We were not.  But so much had happened, I didn't really care.  I was on my way to celebrate a man who was like a father to me, and that fact together with the gloriously lush landscape out the window was all that really seemed to matter.  Rio was getting married.  Spending his life with Eden was all that really mattered to him--whether he knew that or not.  The wedding would take place, and it would be great no matter what happened.  It's not the day that counts, but the years that follow.

Although we worried about another flood right up until the wedding ended and everyone moved to higher ground, all went well that day with only a sprinkle falling.  Summer ended, winter came, and we received record amounts of snow over that charred terrain now so prone to flooding even under the best of conditions.

These are our days.  This story is not unique to my family and me, except perhaps, that so far everything has turned out well.  That so often is not the case.  Environmental catastrophe has become a common part of life.  Almost nightly, we see entire towns wiped out by tornados, fires, or floods.  Not everyone's lives quickly return to normal.

We need to tackle the problems--of that there is no doubt.  If we don't, more and more of our lives will be devoured annually by what were once-in-a-century events.  In Steinbeck's time, floods mainly inundated and consumed the poor whose lives were relegated to the mining camps and flood plains, unprotected from the elements by sturdy homes and reinforced riverbanks.  Global warming has upped the ante.  Nobody is insulated from environmental catastrophe anymore.  And climate change is too large to be dealt with one person at a time.  Individual actions like recycling or riding a bike to work might feel good, and if possible, one certainly should make those choices, but because your efforts don't necessarily translate into your neighbor doing the same thing, any real solutions must happen collectively.  What we really need are politicians committed to doing what's right for humanity in the long run rather than seeking short-term political success pandering to corporations and constituents who put short term profit and comfort ahead of long-term sustainability.  We need laws to govern how our electricity is produced, what cars we can and cannot drive on our highways, and what we may and may not plant in our yards.  Not only must we be willing to vote for and support politicians willing to make those hard decisions, but we also need to demand that those are the only politicians who stay successfully in office more than one term.  There is no other way.  We simply cannot change the trajectory of global warming with societies continuing to function as they are.  We need collective action on a grand scale.  We need to be willing to sacrifice together for the future the way we did during World War II.

Yet, we still have our small individual lives that unfold one day at a time.  That's where things get difficult.  I can change all I want, but if only I change, when it comes to climate change, everything remains the same--a bullet train headed towards the collapse of not only humanity but life as we know it.

In the meantime, I have my own life, and the lives of everyone important to me.  We need joy.  We need to do.  We need to be.  Lives need to be lived.  Vacations need to happen; families need to gather.  Life can't just stop until we have the collective willpower to change our collective destiny.  There is no future without hope.

Here's what I think needs to happen.  If you aren't ready to go completely green now, cling to the carbon-producing vice you enjoy most, that makes you feel most alive--whether that be a fuel-guzzling 4x4, jetting around the world to exotic destinations, taking a cruise, or getting a fountain drink in a giant Styrofoam cup daily, and do it with joy, but swear to yourself that in every other aspect of your life, you will do whatever it takes to cut down your own carbon footprint, and then follow through with that.

Then, promise yourself, that the moment someone proposes banning your particular treasured vice, you will support that measure against your own interest for the greater good of not only humanity but all of the species around you.

Back in the 1980s, it became apparent to me driving without a seatbelt was just simply stupid.  Yet, I would forget to buckle-up more often than I would remember.  Then something miraculous happened.  They outlawed driving without a seatbelt.  Somehow the threat of getting a ticket was enough to push my brain to remember to buckle-up my seatbelt until it became habit.  Now, I buckle-up without ever thinking about it.  I never pull out of my driveway unbuckled.  Was that law really an infringement on my freedom?  I don't think so.  It gave me greater freedom to stay alive amongst the crush of metal.

This is what freedom is all about:  the right to think, express, and worship as you choose--to be who you are at your core and express that freely.  It's not about the right to crap on someone else's lawn or in the park or playground.  We can save humanity and all life on the planet without infringing on everyone's basic rights to be.  We should all be willing to give up everything except those basic rights in order to live without the fear of being swallowed up in the next record-breaking storm, flood, or fire--that next once-in-a-1000-years-event that happened last just four years ago and is now happening again.

For most people, there is very little freedom when displaced and desperate due to environmental catastrophe.  Most will do whatever it takes to survive and feed their families.  Choice is reduced to instinct.  Freedom is a luxury.  It is bought not only through the sacrifices of democratic participation, but also through the collective efforts of a society to protect individuals through the power of the whole, for individuals to be willing to give up something dear to them for the greater good.  There is no freedom when every man acts on his own only for his own good.  There is only anarchy, fear and suffering.  

There will be no freedom if we do not collectively work together to solve climate change.  There will only be each individual against the world.  If we want freedom, we must collectively fight for a sustainable future.  When economic systems collapse, so do social ones.  Most individuals will do anything to provide basic necessities for their families and themselves.  Freedom is but a dream on the doorstep of starvation except for the rare Buddha, Christ or Dali Lama who know and have trained the spirit to rule the mind, and the mind to rule the body.  For everyone else, there is no freedom before extinction.

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.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--13. Working Days 7: We Are Built to Do Good

Love Surrounds Hate, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 9", Steve Brown 2023

I woke up this morning from a dream. I was in high school.  I don't remember all the details, but I do remember this:  I'd fallen into a group of young, radical intellectuals.  They didn't fit in, but they didn't care.  They were too busy thinking and doing to care about anything less than solving all of the world's problems.  

Lunch was a busy time--a working time, a swap-meet of ideas, a time to jot down notes, to make to-do lists, to laugh and argue and laugh again, before everyone went their separate ways to do their part in changing the world.  

I remember walking home with a girl after school.   I didn't think she was much to look at.  She certainly was not someone I was physically attracted to.  But I just couldn't stop looking at her as she went on and on about this new idea she had--her joy and her laughter and her absolute certainty she would do something positive with her life.  Her eyes glowed with hope and promise and a healthy anger towards a humanity starving itself of its own potential through glutenous greed.  I remember thinking, I think I could love you far more than the prettiest girl of my imagination.  And I remember thinking, and the most beautiful thing is that you don't care.  You may let me in, you may really let me in, give me your whole soul, but you don't need me because you know who you are.  I wanted to be like that.  And I thought I could.  More importantly, I thought I should want to be like that.

A vague goal formed in my mind--I would tire myself out living a life attempting to do good.  I knew, just from watching her, that one thought, I can do good, had the potential to change everything--if not for the world, certainly for myself.  I realized if I clung to that, even in my most trying hours, I was free from the boredom, restlessness, yearning, and self-loathing that plagues most of humanity.

Most of humanity simply has the wrong primary goal.  The vast majority of people yearn to fit in more than anything else in this world.  Even the flamboyant, the jet-set, the rockstars, who on the surface may seem like rebels--what most of them need more than anything else is the accolades of men. Yet, none of their fame seems to fill this giant hole they have.  They overdose; they have affairs; they commit suicide.  Nothing seems to sustain them.  

This is because we are built to do, to become, to be.  Like God.  Divine purpose has nothing to do with fitting in, nor with standing-out.  It has everything to do with losing yourself in the service of others in your own unique way.  That service can take on numerous forms.    A chef is a servant.  An artist is a servant.  A mechanic, a dentist, a politician--they are all servants.  A mother is definitely a servant.  A father should be a servant.  A waiter is a servant.  That person at the drive-thru window has more potential to impact humanity than almost anyone.  It's not so much what you do, but rather how you do it that matters.  There's a catch though.  It needs to be your unique, divine purpose.  A concert pianist will never be happy handing out sacks of burgers at a drive-through window, no matter how kind she is.  Likewise, if handing out joy to total strangers is your gift, crunching numbers at a desk in the back room is probably not going to bring you joy, no matter how wealthy you become.  You may be the reason people line up at that drive-thru window.  If so, you might as well own your own burger joint, but you will want to hire someone who touches the divine through numbers to be your accountant, so you can be at that window greeting people.  We each have unique ways to serve humanity.  It is very unlikely you will find yours by trying to fit in, or even by trying to stand out.  No, it's the quiet, individual moments when life sings through your whole soul that are the key--and then stopping, recognizing, and naming those moments.  When you've done that, you can then ask yourself, Okay, now how do I share this joy mankind?  How do I make this my life?  If you do this, you will be reasonably happy no matter how successful you are in the eyes of the world.  As far as happiness goes, it's not how much impact you make on the world, but rather how focused you are on becoming who you are at the core that matters.  Are you fulfilling your spiritual genetic code?  Happiness is ultimately about how you use your time.

My soul sings through a silent horizon, through open spaces, when distance is stunningly clear through clean air.  It is a deep, intrinsic need for me.  I recognize I cannot be happy without such places.  I know I am not the only one.  I will dedicate the rest of my life in claiming that need--not only for myself, but for others.  I will tire myself defending the right to experience raw, untainted nature, where the mind is open, and like a well-watered plant greedy for sun, we thrive to become.  

If I remember this, I will be happy regardless of what life tosses my way.   If I do not, I will suffer the same fate as most my fellow human beings--a life of boredom, of restlessness, of constant yearning and purchasing, a life spent trying to fill some nameless void at the center of one's soul--that emptiness that is meant to be named, that must be named, in order to find joy beyond circumstance.

I pray this day that I remember to do good--especially in my own unique divinely appointed way.  I pray the same for all sentient beings.  A world of fulfilled individuals is a world without hate, dictators, war, or starvation.  A happy man wants the world to experience joy.  A miserable man wants to burn the world down--one person at a time, or if he has the power, entire civilizations at a time.  When we do good, we do our small part in lowering the temperature of a heated world waiting to explode.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--12. The Death Valley Vital Void

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.