Hey — you’re probably not going anywhere these days.
Me neither.
It doesn’t mean you can’t dream.
Let me take you somewhere. (Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to take you on a virtual road trip to a few different places, just for a break from the world as it is right now.)
Up out of the flat of the valley on Route 15 in Nevada, past the turnoff onto Route 61 — the Great Basin Highway — and the huge pasture of solar power farm above Arrolime, you reach the roadside hiccup of Crystal.
Crystal’s got a casino, a smoke shop and fireworks store, a Chevron gas station, and literally nothing else. If you work in Crystal, you live somewhere else.
There’s almost an acre of parking lots for sleeping truckers, two bizarrely irrigated patches of grass — one surrounded by a circle of streetlights — and the Valley of Fire Highway, heading east.
Calling it a highway is a bit of a misnomer, really. It’s a two-lane, narrow road heading east with sagebrush, dust and gravel stretching out on both sides of you. No real shoulders to the road — occasional deep dips in the pavement to throw the car around and make sure you’re paying attention, cracked asphalt and desert grass tufted in patches where the asphalt ends.
Out in front of you, a lumpy row of low grey-brown mountains marks the horizon, looking as two-dimensional as if they had been painted on a theatre backdrop.
But soon you’re winding your way up into the mountains themselves — they jump all at once from the distance to right on top of you, almost before you notice it happening.
At Mile Marker 10, the road’s bending into the contour of the lead edge of the hills. A mile or so later, you’re in Nevada’s oldest and largest state park, shooting down a long defile to the park gates and some of the most bizarre and windswept stone you’ll find in the whole state.
The names say it all: the Fire Wave, the Pink Canyon, the Beehives, the Seven Sisters, the White Domes, the Fire Cave. There’s a visitor’s centre where you can find everything from information on the flora and fauna to details about the Indigenous people who made the area their home, but the real star is the land itself. All of it.
It’s acre after acre of wind- and sand-carved sandstone, mash-ups of pink and red and white stone, all of it eroded by sand and wind into smooth curves that make you think of the ocean, not the desert. In other spots, stone has sheared away in ragged strips, some of it new enough that the endless sanding has not managed to smooth the sharp edges.
There’s a visitor’s centre where you can find everything from information on the flora and fauna to details about the Indigenous people who made the area their home, but the real star is the land itself. All of it.
Plants are scattered and few, mostly desert grasses tucked into folds in the rock where sand and thin soil has gathered. Everywhere, the shape of the ground is established by the angle of repose of sliding stone and gravel. Long alluvial fans stretch out at the base of hills, and open sheets of stone are scattered with individual rocks that have followed their own gravitational path to where they are now — and where, on the side away from the wind, they gather their own small trailing vees of entrained sand.
When there’s wind, there’s the whisper whistle of it angling through the rock formations. When there isn’t wind, it’s as if everything there is waiting for something. It’s an impending landscape, fraught with the tension of something about to happen — but something that never does. Like this sentence, it leaves you hanging, until …
All through the day, the heat grows. Little moves. In the sky, eagles hang, wings out and virtually motionless. If you’re lucky, a small lizard flickers past, gone again so quickly you wonder if maybe you’ve imagined it. Caves and canyons beckon, promise, and end abruptly. Everything has a way of looking to be so close that you could walk there in a moment, yet an hour elapses and you are still walking, hardly even closer than when you started.
It is big, so big — and you are small.
And at times, that’s a wonderfully useful thing to remember.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
