I see you have a small chunk of basalt in your palm. Turn it over. See this glossy, maroonish patina? Desert varnish, a chemical reaction wrought by exposure to the elements. This is the same sheen that almost blinds you when you look to the north end of the valley. You may have noticed the abrupt change from the light granites to the dark basalt there. It is a startling, brooding, malignant presence, largely because of the varnish’s illusion. It looks slick, evil. If you have hiked in those environs, you may have suffered a common fate in slipping on it, gouging chunks from your knees, shins, and palms as you fell. Because of incidents like these, local hikers have bred and nursed a superstition that the basalt harbors evil, that it intends, somewhere deep in its black soul, harm and destruction (I used to be among those hikers. I saw no hypocrisy in labeling the land as evil for exacting the same retaliatory price from me as I had inflicted on it with boulders rolled from canyon walls).
It is just that, of course: a superstition, nothing more. You hold the evidence in your hand. The varnish responsible for the basalt’s appearance is as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke. Turned sideways – like this – the varnish vanishes. Beneath those fractions of millimeters, the basalt is nothing but a dark, fine-grained, rather ordinary rock. It took me some time and fierce concentration to realize the basalt’s place in this valley as an edge to the topography here, a contraction of resistance mistaken by us as hostility. A defense mechanism of sorts. It is easy to attribute malignancy to something beyond a simple understanding. All psyches have their protective sheaths, and this desert valley is no exception.
A little too much sand and dust here. Sift it. This white dust – see it, blowing away there? Gone – that was alkali dust. Comes from the playa lake over there in the southwest part of the valley. I have spent many afternoons on the edge of that dried lake, standing in the rising winds and the clouds of dust, trying to fathom what had gone on here. The lake is dry now, has been for millennia, except for brief periods after rainstorms. I was always overtaken by a great weariness on the shores of that dusty expanse, a drying-up of the springs of libido, an atrophy of the will-power. The fatigue gummed up the synapses, preventing cogent thought and clear vision. Much later, furtively, feeling the kind of guilt associated with reading an intimate’s diary, I stole a look at a satellite photo of the area. The lake stared back at me, dully, lifeless, an eye drained of any hint of former vibrance. I have come to believe that the lake’s fate was due to an extroversion in the extreme, a loss of that fine point of dynamic balance between the incoming and the outgoing, a giving-away to the winds and soils to the point of bankruptcy. There is this, though. One afternoon, shortly after a storm, a friend and I camped across the valley witnessed an unusual spectacle over that lake. The sun was low in a sky banked with clouds. The range beyond the lake was in shadow; the lake was in sunlight. On the wall of the mountains, we saw a large circular patch of light dancing and sparkling on a dark backdrop. It took some time to realize what was happening. When, for this brief period of equilibrium, the lake was recollected and water joyously pooled in its sink, the light immediately announced the lake’s rebirth. It was a valley-wide testimony of a resurrection. Even in this desert, no exhausted playa lake is beyond redemption.
Ah, this last one is revealing. Igneous origin. Dark crystals, with lesser amounts of the lighter colored felsic minerals. Diorite, a relative of the granite we saw up the wash. See the size of the crystals? This stone was longer in crystallizing than the granite. Interesting story with these igneous rocks.
Most of this valley is surrounded by what is called a pluton, an intrusion of fiery magma on a local scale that cools and is subsequently exposed through erosion. The striking thing about plutons is their reluctance to reveal much of their history. They are guarded entities, probably deservedly so. They stand in stark contrast to the highly revealing stratigraphy of sedimentary formations in the western parts of this valley. You can make some inferences based on other evidence, such as that basalt tendril overlying the granite there in the north. But it is a difficult chore to tease out much more information in the field without the use of mass spectrometers, uranium dating, and the like. I have mixed feelings about the use of these techniques: necessary, perhaps, on a small scale, but ultimately an assault upon privacy and integrity that pains me. Igneous history does not loosen and reveal much; perhaps this should be respected in the same fashion that we avoid prying into a friend’s painful memories.
If you sleep up the mountain there, on a particular shelf of this diorite, you may have unsettling dreams. I dreamt that the bedrock was groaning in its present crystallized form, that it yearned for the days eons-gone of easy fluidity and a heat that transformed all into pliability. The individual minerals – the biotite, plagioclase, amphibole, and quartz – were crying out in trapped agony, held hostage in a matrix of tyrannical structure and organization, a ruthless logic subsuming all. I saw the iron-tight lattice of law permeating the pluton and choking the spontaneity out of the valley. I awoke with a start in a cold sweat, straining at the silence. Just as my heart slowed and I settled back into sleep, a sharp crack from the boulders above heaving in frost expansion unnerved me. I burned the geologic maps in my possession at first light and tried to avoid thinking for the rest of the day.
In the night of the new moon, I am prone to moments of doubting, to fears and pity for the past and future of this gaunt terrain. At sunrise, though, these fears are banished by the sight of the western wall etched sharply in light and shadow. It is then that I know such concerns are misplaced. This desert topography, with all its weakness, its pain, its remnants of destruction is truly the zenith of landscape evolution. This is a singular place, far out on the bounds of conventionality, and it is this fact that hints of salvation. I have trekked for miles along the abrupt fault scarp at the base of these pewter mountains, that all-too-visible reminder of frailty and injury. There are places, sacred places, at the mouths of those elaborate dendritic drainages, where if the breeze is just right, you can hear the busy dripping and gurgling of water intent on leveling this range. The range allows this to occur, even encourages the process with its denuded slopes and sharp vertical relief. The range participates in this way in hastening its own death, arching its back in equanimity to the whip-lashes of erosion in the hands of aridity.
And yet, if you walk further along the fault, past these gaping mouths, you can feel in the returning silence sub-audible rumbles, the unvocalized screams of defiance, the humming chants of solidarity with subterranean pressure, its source. The range, even in its accelerated decline is growing, being uplifted, staking its claim to a more abundant life. No place else will you find the two processes brought more to the fore, more polarized.
It is this intensity and fearlessness that will be the redemption of this taut land.
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Via Perennis 