Well, we decided then that Greg and Ed would not be sent on any more backcountry trips for a while, and we concocted some halfway-legitimate reason for a cover story. Business continued pretty much as usual for some time. Ed still worked with Greg quite a bit on backroads patrol and policing. One day, Ed came into the station here shaking his head. Seemed that Greg had become obsessed with some strange idea of permanence. I didn’t quite know what Ed was talking about until he related it to me as Greg had talked about it. Ed said it sounded like some sort of crisis in faith for Greg; I said it sounded like gibberish to me. I have never been one for those far-out questions. I told Ed to handle the situation as he saw fit.
* * * * *
What anchors the desert in this valley day after day?
What out here is permanent?
There is so much that changes, so much in flux.
Everywhere I look, nothing but impermanence. Everything I see, impermanent. Everything I hear, touch, taste, impermanent.
Everything I thought I knew to be true, to be absolute and unchanging; it’s dust, chaff. Relative and conditional, like all the rest.
What if nothing is permanent and we’ve been deluding ourselves all along?
* * * * *
It didn’t look like a fun existence from where I stood . When the guy wasn’t obsessing about this weird idea, he just seemed drained, subdued and tired. Most of the time, though, he was riveted and intense about it. I talked to Greg about all of this and tried to get him to forget it all. No luck. He only became more fixated, more intense about it. Finally, I decided to try a little facetious humor, to see if that would snap him out of it. If he was really serious about permanence, why didn’t he plan on spending a couple of weeks studying Telescope Peak from Badwater Basin? After all, if mountains weren’t permanent, what was? To my mild surprise, Greg thought that was a great idea. And when the season ended two weeks later, he began to spend his time at Badwater. I decided to stick around to check on him periodically. For several days, I’d just pull up off the road and watch. He seemed to spend most of his time staring at the mountain range, sitting cross-legged on a blanket out there on the salt flats.
* * * * * * * *
Conventional wisdom – It deserves a hearing like all the rest.
The question: is there any truth to it?
The sun rises on the range – it sits and receives the rays.
The sun sets on the range – still it squats and absorbs.
Hard boundaries raised against the sky. The skyline appears unchanging.
But on the fans, the sand grains slide over one another like an hour glass rushing to exhaustion. The creek’s rivulets weave back and forth, changing the fabric all the while.
The range will outlast us. But its difference from our impermanence is only a matter of scale.
A slow-motion house of cards, built on a foundation of sand.
* * * * * * * *
I decided it was time to touch bases with Greg, talk to the guy and make sure he was all right. I drove out to Badwater the next day – a blazing hot day. The valley was a furnace. Temperature was easily 125 degrees. I could see the heat waves rising off the salt flats. Everything at a distance seemed to shimmer. Greg was sitting far out on the flats with his back to me. He seemed to float on the heat waves. I walked out towards him. It was eerie; there was the huge silence, with the only sound my boots crunching on the salt crystals, and this suffocating heat pressing in on me. Greg didn’t hear me approach; he didn’t move the whole time I closed the distance between us. Strange: I knew it was Greg, but all of a sudden, I had this spasm of gut-wrenching fear. Something screamed in my head that it was not Greg sitting there, that I really didn’t know this man at all, that I had better turn and run because this terrific POWER was present and trying to break through the shimmering mirages. Crazy. Then, just like that, the panic was gone and the silence was back.
I finally got out to Greg, and just as it had looked from the road, he was in a trance. I called his name, and he came to with a start. He got up and turned to face me. His body was deep brown, and he was wearing nothing but some sort of breechcloth, a bandanna around his head, and sandals – not great desert attire. The black arrowhead was hanging around his neck, glistening in the sun. He had black rings under his eyes, and his eyes looked burnt-out – clear, distant, pupils the size of pin-heads.
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