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.
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 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.
Born Into Another Tide Pool, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown 2023
The one-eyed man watched them go, and then he went
through the iron shed to his shack behind.
It was dark inside. He felt his
way to the mattress on the floor, and he stretched out and cried in his bed,
and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his
loneliness.
--John Steinbeck, The
Grapes of Wrath, 1939
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We are on the tracks as a train pulls into a station.It’s messy.Garbage and old shoes.A man in
front of us crosses, wearing a dirty beige shirt, grungy brown slacks and a
backpack.The blue and white diesel
locomotive looms large behind him.On
the left people crowd the platform to go somewhere.Who knows where?They do, of course.Thousands and thousands of lives connected to
these tracks in some way.For a man in a
relatively clean yellow shirt, black pants and sandals the stopped train is a
chance to step out onto the tracks to gather a useful piece of trash.He also has a thin plastic bag and something
new in it.You can almost make out the
writing, but not quite.It appears to be
packaged food.He is not totally
destitute.Yet, whatever is on the
tracks is still valuable enough to him that he steps out to pick it up.
There’s a smaller crowd of people on the other side of the
tracks, and a government official in green uniform walks towards them.They stand unworried about the train or the official.Why do they stand there?Clearly the train is not for them.Who knows?Other than the fact that there is time.When there is no work, there is always time.The smog is so thick that the electrical
poles along the track quickly fade to fuzzy while still appearing large
compared to the people in the foreground.The air visibly has odor and taste.
Grappling
This is one standard moment in Ahmedabad, India, but it could
be any number of moments in oh so many places around the world.Life for most of humanity does not involve
cool, airy shopping malls; tree-lined suburban streets; or even quaint gravel
farm roads lined with lush grass, oak groves, white rail fences, blue ponds,
and big red barns.
There is a God.I
knew that.Then I didn’t.Then I did.I think I can never deny that knowledge again.I have felt it directly.I’ve been taken to my knees in humble
gratitude by a great power and wept with joy because the spirit was so strong,
obvious and real.
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Now we are on a railway passing bright colored
concrete-block houses—greens and pinks and blues—with corrugated roofs covered
with rugs and tarps line the tracks.Homemade
ladders go from the ground to second-story dwellings, some of which have openings
facing the track.One home is hot pink
with a freshly painted green, screen door.They must be rich in comparison to those around them.
Grappling
Relative seems to be the word for our world, yet we think in
absolutes.I think in absolutes.Good/Evil.God/Satan.Pristine/Vandalized.Natural/Urban.First world/Third world.Problems/Solutions.
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Same tracks.Same
city.Delhi.Gone is the concrete block.The good solid angles.Now it’s lumber, stucco, plywood, anything
that can be found.Gone are the
corrugated metal roofs.Now, it’s plywood
loaded with plastic, carpets, anything to keep out the rain.Things slope and slant and sway.
Grappling
These are not outings—the sloping, the slanting, the
swaying, the dripping ceilings, the flooded dirt floors, the rivers along the
tracks, the constant passing trains.
These are lives, thousands of lives, millions of lives—the
sloping, the slanting, the swaying, the dripping ceilings, the flooded dirt
floors, the rivers along the tracks, the constant passing trains.
Still, I believe I have felt God’s voice.Sometimes profoundly.Usually in gentle promptings.
Why?Doesn’t He have
better things to do with his time?
Once, in my darkest hour, drunk, I cursed the God I no
longer believed in over and over for the life he’d given me as I staggered up
Mesa Street in El Paso in the rain as I screamed at passing cars, “I want to
die, I want to die, do you hear me, I want to die!”The next morning, I just had this calm wash
over me as these very real words were planted in my brain:Just go home and start over again.
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There are people under the eaves, people in very small
yards, very small courtyards.Some seem
private.Others seem like places of
commerce, here in the makeshift cities along Delhi’s tracks.They go by so quickly.Yet, people are talking, laughing, exchanging
goods and services.There are families.Children.They do not seem excessively happy, but neither do they seem to be
drowning in sorrow.I hear
laughter.No wailing.Wailing seems reserved for war and death and
the overly rich when they suddenly lose everything to volatile economics.
Grappling
There have been other times I felt I really needed God, and
he seemed to be nowhere.As hard as I
tried to access him—nothing.
Why that is, I’m not sure.I assume it is because we are each here to learn, and He is the great
teacher.He knows when we need to
struggle in order to grow, and He knows when He needs to step in and coach us
along.He knows how much we can handle
and how much we cannot.He knows the
difference between when we are acting like spoiled children throwing tantrums, and
when we are sincerely breaking inside—especially when we don’t know the
difference ourselves.
Perhaps.
Why does joy and sorrow seem so vital to feel no matter our
circumstances?We seem to find laughter
and misery equally in penthouses or in slums.Poverty brings disease and death almost constantly.But children still have laughter.Families still gather.Humanity, except during war, does not seem to
sink to a rabid state of self-survival.
And misery finds its way quite easily into the most
luxurious of estates.Pills and suicide often
seem the pleasure of those who should feel most satisfied.
I wonder if God planned and knows which courses we signed up
for before we came to earth, which lessons, no matter how hard, we must endure,
because we individually (and perhaps collectively) chose them in the
pre-existence?
Or, I wonder, is the world we are born into just a roll of
the dice?
I know there is a God.I have felt his presence too strongly to ever deny again.Yet, I’ve got to be honest, I look out on a
world with such uneven comfort, choice, and opportunity, and I do wonder how
anybody can need to learn so much they need to go through that.And why them?Not me?And why can the internet
going down destroy my day while in India children can laugh and smile while
playing on a playground of floating garbage?How can some families cling together through joy and sorrow housed in
shacks along the railroad tracks (and how can they even know joy under
those conditions?) while in another place, a father shoots himself because he
lost everything in the stock-market?
And why should anyone ever have to go through rape, physical
abuse, or even severe emotional abuse or loneliness, let alone war and starvation?What type of God sets up a world like that?
I can only come up with two answers.Either everything in life is luck (good and
bad), and nothing has meaning—random occurrences based on where you are and who
or what surrounds you.Or, life is a
great big university, and we signed up for the courses we wanted before we
came, and now ultimately every minute is a choice on how to respond to the
curriculum we ourselves chose and continue to choose through our actions.I’ve got to be honest— my logical mind says
the former option is more likely.The
problem is I’ve felt the presence of a God that says otherwise.
That is a problem.On some level, I think it is actually easier to live in a world where
everything is random.In such a world
there’s no reason to try and understand anything.To do so would be foolish.But to know that there is a grand design,
that there is so much we don’t know, and yet know that is exactly what we
signed up for when we decided to come here and learn—Well, now every moment
matters.We aren’t off the hook for
anything, unless through the mercy and grace of the master Himself.All of the sudden, meaning is everywhere, and nothing
can be taken for granted.Worst of all,
we know we might have exams that we don’t feel confident passing.
Still, I think I prefer a life that has purpose.Although, it really doesn’t matter what I
prefer.I have felt God’s presence.I know he lives.I’m enrolled in purpose whether I like it or
not.
Sometimes though God seems so far away.And I’m
not sure why I’m here.To feel that way
is a luxury though.I’m all too aware I
wasn’t born into a life along the tracks.What am I going to do knowing that?
Perhaps this book is that—what I’m supposed to do with my
life knowing I wasn’t born in a hut along the tracks.Or perhaps writing it is just ritual to keep
reality from becoming all too real.Either way, I must write it.I
cannot be one of those people who don't see what they don’t want to see.Through ritual or directly—in some manner, I
must record and deal with the world as it is, and in some way try to
make it a better place.
If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull,
it is fierce and hostile and sullen. The
stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back if we live, and
we don’t know why.
--John
Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1957
Heat. It's not that I've never felt 102 degrees Fahrenheit before. A few years ago in Vegas, I felt what 105 degrees after midnight feels like. I once lived on the fifth floor, in an old building, in El Paso with only a small window-unit air conditioner during a summer that had ninety consecutive days over one hundred. Heat is something I know. A couple of years ago I experienced 117 degrees in Laughlin, Nevada. I know what heat is.
Still, I have never felt heat like the 102 degrees I felt Saturday, April 8, 2022 at Badwater Basin, Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level.
I'm not sure what made the heat so thick--definitely not the humidity--but wow, opening that car door and stepping out onto a parking lot that overlooked a salt flat before a gigantic mountain on the other side, and having the heat grab your head and yank your face towards its scorching mouth as it burps breath out of the hot bowels of hell itself---well, it kind of gets your attention.
We were amazed. Marci had her umbrella. I had my gleeful astonishment. I wondered, O I wondered, what it would feel like to be here on the Fourth of July. If 102 felt this otherworldly, what would 117 feel like here, deeper down on the thinnest crust anywhere on the continent? To be standing in a crack in the foundation of North America that is constantly ripping apart with big dreams of building a north-south running Mediterranean Sea someday was one of the most significant moments in my life.
Marci and I had been across Death Valley National Park twenty-five years earlier on our honeymoon. However, we'd come in from Beaty and went through Stovepipe Wells. Although the entire park is amazing, you have not truly experienced Death Valley until you've been to Badwater Basin. It, and getting there, are an essential part of experiencing the park, as is Dante's View.
Here we were, on this vast bed of salt in a heat so heavy it's indescribable, looking at a line of people holding umbrellas walking off into the distance and vanishing somewhere before Telescope Peak rises 11,331 feet above the valley floor. It was a scene from a rainy day in Paris placed on Mars. No, that doesn't quite work. The air was not thin, and the temperature definitely not cold. Perhaps there are no comparisons for Death Valley. Perhaps it is its own deep thing. There are, of course, other places below sea level on Planet Earth. But I have the sneaking suspicion, when you get that far out of the normal human experience, each place breaths its own deep, hot breath that says I am the only place like this. Don't go looking for anyone else. I am it. I will occupy your soul forever, and whether you live or die here, you will never, ever be the same.
Acutely aware through the sublimely blunt physicality of that message--it is dangerous to be out here--we did not wander far, but O how great it was to experience that heat and feel the pressure and see that soft, sodium light which softens a landscape that cannot be softened and is like no other.
I've seen a lot out west, been high in the Sierras, deep in the Redwoods, high on a cliff in a hard rain, looking out into the steely-gray ocean, but out on that salt flat, I simply had my mind blown.
I also became keenly aware that because of light and shadow, the world is beautiful everywhere, under all conditions. Climate change will not destroy our world--it will only destroy our capacity to live on it in style. Death Valley was suddenly one of my favorite spots on earth--stone bold gorgeous in its brutality--but it is not a place that sustains much. A world without much water can sustain the souls of a few nomadic wanderers, but it cannot sustain complex civilizations of inhabitants living cushy lives well-fed and artificially heated and cooled.
A lifeless earth would no doubt still be beautiful--any place that receives light is--it just would no longer be our home.
Environmentalism is spiritual, no doubt. It seeks to preserve beautiful, natural places. But most of all it is pragmatic. It is about us. Do we want a world that will continue to sustain us or do we not? Will we succeed or will we not? It's that basic. And the fear of not succeeding should keep us all awake at night. The fact that it doesn't just demonstrates how truly human we are.
One thing for sure, though, is we are all in this together--even the millions of species who have no say in the outcome. What we do impacts everything. We have become like God. We need to act as if we know the difference between good and evil. We need to grow up. I need to grow up and take on the responsibility that is mine. You probably need to do the same.
Devil's Hole Pupfish, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown 2022
None of it is important or all of it is.
--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941
November 13, 2022.
"Is that it?" I asked my brother. We slowly eased past a pull-out off the gravel road and watched a few people walk up a jeep trail to a fenced-off area near the base of a brush-covered basalt hill.
"Probably," replied my brother.
There was a blue park sign that said, "Where are the fish?" in crisp, cream colored print. But I wasn't so sure this was the place. There was no sign saying Devils Hole. And the fenced-off area looked more like something that would surround a hazardous waste dump than a site in a national park, monument or wildlife refuge. Where was the fancy wood sign? The log fences? The boardwalk or gravel trail? -- the type of things we'd just seen down at the visitor center.
We scanned the hillside. There was a trail and a bridge with a brown handrail. Maybe that was it.
Then I noticed up ahead, further down the road, the usual sign-grandeur that accompanies federal and state parks. "That's it!"
I let off the brake. Gavel moved under the weight of the tires with that familiar pop. We were off towards our destination.
The problem was one of those signs we approached said, "Thank You for Visiting Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge," letting us know we were leaving. The grand sign I'd seen was an entrance to the park rather than a trailhead. Not our sign, not our place. So, we turned around at the wide pull out that showcased the sign that looked very out of place on such a lonesome, rough road. We headed back to where we'd seen the square of chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. We pulled in by the two cars.
Lloyd hopped out and put on his coat. I weathered-up inside the car, then got out. I knew a fierce cold wind awaited me.
And then we were off--walking down a jeep road blocked off by a gate that had a brown metal sign saying, "Official Use Only" and a paper sign taped to it saying, "Foot traffic welcome." No little wood sign saying something like "Devil's Hole .5 miles." No wood bench. Nothing that would indicate this place being a national wildlife refuge, let alone Death Valley National Park, which I would later learn, it is.
Why this strange behavior from the national park system? Why hide such a significant site in Death Valley National Park within the boundaries of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which has an incredibly impressive visitor center itself, and leave this most import square of parkland looking as inviting as a chemical waste dump?
The answer is reverence.
Reverence is a virtue, and as such, looks different moment to moment and place to place, depending on the circumstances, but always remains the same at its core. Sometimes it looks like an altar of gold in a room that smells of burning incense. Sometimes it's a pure white room with nothing but a small black polished stone in the center of it. When I was young, I learned it was a small child sitting in church with his arms folded waiting for the sacrament. Older now, I also know it sometimes looks and sounds like a comedian lambasting a dictator while riling up room of gleeful disdainers to rolls of laughter aimed at their oppressor. It also looks like a woman who won't give up her seat on the bus.
Here, rightfully, it looked like a place you want to avoid and keep moving on to somewhere else. Here, as I would learn, reverence is everything, and I was about to partake in one of the most sacred moments in my life.
So, what is reverence?
In Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff says, "Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control--God, truth, justice, nature, even death." He continues, "The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all." He finishes this thought by saying, "This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment".
I love that definition, but I would make one change--a much needed change for the twenty-first century. I would scratch out the word "human," not because we aren't important, but because we already know we are important. In addition to our fellow humans, it's other beings that we so often treat irreverently.
Reverence: The capacity for awe, which as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow beings.
I think I would also leave off "flaws and all". What we usually see as a flaw in others is really just a mirror brightly beaming back to us our inability to accept, let alone appreciate the is of the situation. My identification of your flaws says more about me than it does about you. Likewise, the role of the "big bad wolf" in European folklore says more about the society in which those stories developed than it says about wolves themselves.
So, here we were, at Devils Hole, a small square of Death Valley National Park inside Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge, facing a savage wind as we silently waited for three people to exit the barred cage bridge suspended over the hole. I noticed all the panels and equipment bolted to the hillside. It was not unlike waiting to peer into an open casket at a viewing or waiting for the casket to be lowered at the cemetery on a brutally cold day in February. Except, here we were celebrating the miraculously still living rather than mourning the recently departed.
All but one of our fellow humans silently exited the viewing. It was now our turn. We walked out on the metal bridge and peered through the bars down at a black oblong spot deep down at the bottom of the hole in the stone. Without prior knowledge, it would be difficult to even tell we were looking at water--so hard and flat and black it was from our view. Yet, I could feel the significance of the moment. We were at Devils Hole! In that pool, there is a species of pretty, little blue fish about an inch long, the Devils Hole pupfish, which exists nowhere else on earth. That pool, 10 feet wide by 40 feet in length, is their entire existence, and this fence, this cage, the solar panels and satellite equipment and gages anchored to the stone hillside were there to ensure those little jewels could continue their way of life.
Reverence is, in short, action based on respect for life.
Reverence for something so small and special is an incredibly large indicator of our human capacity to mirror the divine and, Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven.
The fact bombs were simultaneously raining down on Ukraine was a stark reminder of how terribly we fall short of following that command. Yet, to be an eyewitness at our capacity to do good was still humbling. To think people have dedicated their lives to preserving a fish that has no impact (other than spiritually) on them gives me hope.
In Calm Surrender: Walking the Hard Road of Forgiveness, Kent Nerburn says the following of that particular virtue:
Forgiveness cannot be a disengaged, pastel emotion. It is demanded in the bloodiest of human circumstances, and it must stand against the strongest winds of human rage and hate. To be a real virtue, engaged with the world around us, it must be muscular, alive, and able to withstand the outrages and inequities of inhuman and inhumane acts. It must be able to face the dark side of the human condition.
I think the same can be said of humility. The more brutal and inhospitable this world and the societies we've created become, the more we need a reverence that is muscular, alive, and able to withstand the outrages and iniquities of inhuman and inhumane acts.
That is what we were witnessing here: reverence hell-bent on respecting and preserving "the least of these," and in so doing, respecting the big I Am, the source of everything.
That some in this world still have the fierce humility to try and save a species so small and fragile gives me hope.
Hope is what this book is all about. Hope that we can save ourselves through humility and reverence to life as a whole. Hope is not reality, but it is perhaps fuel for a spark to create enough energy to change a trajectory, and therefore, perhaps, an outcome.
Reverence not only changes the world within the practitioner; it also has the very real potential of changing the world beyond the tidepool.
Awe is powerful. To be astounded has the potential to absolutely change everything, if we will but let it.
The sun blasted the east-facing, chunky walls of the Virgin River Gorge and threw blue shadows over a canyon so deep, narrow, and twisting that during the winter months there are some places the sun never reaches.
If you think such a place would be sacred to all who encountered it, and that we were either hiking on some trail through protected back country or driving lazily down some two-lane road with a 35 miles per hour speed limit in a state or national park, well, you are wrong.
Like millions of others before us, we were powering though this magical place on an interstate, curving this way and that way, trying to get a glimpse of the amazing terrain above us without flying through a guardrail and into the Virgin River, which though small, drops 70 feet per mile, a rate ten times as steep as the Colorado River does through the Grand Canyon.
In 1973 this section of Interstate, the most expensive of its day, opened in a canyon no highway had known before to shave off about 30 minutes of drive time between St. George and Las Vegas. What was lost in the trade cannot be measured in time or money. A canyon to match the beauty and significance of Boquillas and Santa Elena Canyons of Big Bend National Park was reduced to a quick, exciting drive. What should exist instead is a slow journey to be savored mile by mile.
As often is the case when atrocities to the landscape are committed in the name of interstates, the powers that be created a park here, the Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area. Even so, all hikes in the canyon are accompanied by the sound of traffic. Trails can give access to the wilderness. They can't restore what has been removed from the wilderness experience forever by concrete rivers wild with the roar of traffic. No matter how good looking your trail signs are, you can't squeeze an interstate into a narrow gorge and retain anything remotely resembling the wilds.
I'm glad, however, for the guilty attempt. Having a park designated requires access, and so the park provides places to get off the freeway and picnic, camp, or hike, which would not otherwise be there. I especially love the little campground. Crime with guilt is better than crime with no guilt at all. Half-hearted apologies are better than no apologies at all. But how amazing that canyon must have been before they blasted an interstate through it.
2.
Twenty-five years ago, Marci and I went through here on our honeymoon, and I wrote about it--sort of:
I took my love and drove her down to Mesquite through a heat deep and white, walled-up against the last black shadow of Virgin River Gorge, my head thick with need. She spoke of Alabama mud and the magnolia trees that bloom along Sestina Road.
The poem is a fictionalized account of our honeymoon. Though beautiful, I now find it strange. Marci is from the desert. She knows nothing of Alabama mud and magnolia trees. The woman along with me for the ride in that poem clearly is not her. Why?
Some of that, I'm sure can be chalked up to the creative process. I randomly picked words for the sestina form and created my first stanza, which to some degree, directed the rest of the poem. Also, artistically, I would have been drawn to the contrast between the parched desert dirt and slick Alabama mud. Even so, I now realize it was fear that made me write the poem somewhat distanced from reality. I jumped into my marriage believing Marci couldn't love me for long. 25 years later, I'm very glad I did that. Sometimes you have to take a risk and be more than you believe you can be. I'd received so much rejection up to that point, I simply did not believe my marriage would last. Fictionalizing the poem gave me some emotional distance, a road out, should things not work out.
There is a beauty and a yearning that comes through the writing when a writer isn't quite ready to name his subject, as when I wrote "Sestina Road". There is nothing wrong with that. That's the power behind Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The first brave step to name a fear is a powerful one, cloaked though it is, in metaphor.
However, there is also something to be gained from writing clearly and simply without guise, what you see and name along the way--the blatant is of the experience. Hopefully, what is gained is a solidity that cannot be denied. As I mature as a writer, that is what I'm after: the undeniable rock of reality beneath things, the is of the moment striped of artifice.
I pulled off the interstate to see where the bones of the earth uplifted and punctured the skin of our planet to rub the sky--as well as view the river sharp enough to slice through it all. No story needs to be added. Rock in sunlight is all a moment needs.
3.
The campground sits high above the Virgin River in a wider area of the canyon before everything funnels you towards the deep shadows and narrow spaces that is the gorge. Here things are softer, more relaxed, which you would not know if you never left the interstate which focuses your eye only on what's ahead of you--that great gouge in the upheaval.
Here though, along this quiet, little loop, you notice smaller things, like sunlight behind the sharp needles of a cholla surrounded by small sunlit yellow flowers shaking in the morning wind. You also notice the glisten of polished stones in the desert pavement and hear birds chirping somewhere down by the river. You feel sunlight seep in deep to bone. Life is good.
Then you get back in the car and head back towards the interstate. Death Valley pulls you forward.
