Rants from the Hill Page 5
When I protested my looming enphonement—not because I’m a Luddite purist but, rather, because I’m exceedingly stubborn and cheap—my wife mentioned my paternal obligations, which rendered further resistance futile. Besides, I rationalized, a smartphone might be handy out there in case of a real emergency, like remembering that I failed to put a fresh box of IPA into my beer fridge before setting out on a long hike.
So Eryn stuck me with the fancy phone, and off I went, back into the wilderness, where, after a series of methodical trials, I discovered that the phone has reception in one spot and one spot only: the very peak of our local mountain, about five miles from home and 2,000 feet above it. In effect, there was only one place where I could afford to have an accident—though, in fairness, it was a good place, and I could easily imagine heroically clasping the swinging rope ladder as the chopper plucked me off the east face of the mountain’s sheer granite palisades. Nevertheless, the reality is that the near-total lack of coverage makes the phone useless, and until pronghorn and coyotes start texting there is no profit margin in pointing a satellite at me out there.
But here is the strange part: Before getting the smartphone, I rarely contemplated the real risks I run in this wild place; now, because I have the phone and know it won’t work, I worry that this unreliable piece of emergency equipment will leave me vulnerable to fires and snakebite, driving snow and freezing winds, dehydration and heat stroke. Before acquiring the phone, I was a blithely happy eccentric walking around alone in the desert; since getting it, I have become a fretting eccentric walking around alone in the desert obsessing that he won’t be able to count on his phone to save him.
On the other hand, carrying a piece of emergency equipment that I am certain cannot help me has profoundly altered the way I think about the thousands of miles I walk out in the Silver Hills. Rather than harboring a cavalier, unexamined assumption of my own invulnerability, I feel humbled, and in that humility I have become more vigilant. I now routinely carry a hefty daypack with extra food, water, and clothes, and I take the compass, headlamp, and bivvy sack. I check the weather before I head out, and I think more carefully than ever about elevation, hydration, and exposure. I notice the direction of the wind, or a sudden drop in temperature, or the behavior of wild animals when a storm is brewing.
Maybe Emerson was onto something when he observed that civilized man “has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.” My cell phone was my fancy watch, but because I knew that I could not rely upon it, I watched the angle of the sun more carefully than ever before, and in this new habit of attention I became, as Uncle Waldo himself put it, self-reliant. In a strange way, my worthless phone had helped me to escape some small prison of dependency. Over time, I also found that I enjoyed a more profound sense of my own isolation. I was utterly alone out there, and I knew that not because I had no phone but because I had a phone with which I could not possibly contact another human being. It was a sweet liberation to feel the modest rectangular bump in my pocket and be reminded that I am, just as I want to be, entirely out of touch.
While it is easy to wax rhapsodic about the ennobling virtues of my useless phone, I confess that I often find myself contemplating what purposes it might serve if the worst were to happen—if I were to be incapacitated in the wild by blizzard or wildfire or buzzworm venom. Just as a broken clock is nevertheless correct twice each day, I have reason to suspect that my useless phone might somehow prove handy in an emergency. While I could not call for help, maybe I could use the phone to dig, like a pawing coyote, through the sand in search of life-preserving water. Would it work to strike it against granite to spark a fire? Or, maybe I could use it as Cactus Ed Abbey used his rock in Desert Solitaire, to bean a harmless jackrabbit and thus keep myself alive another day or two? Or, perhaps I could get a glint off the screen sufficient to improvise a signal mirror, alerting rescuers to my remote location. And if, after all, it did not work to use the phone to secure water, fire, food, or salvation, at least I could, after bashing my fist against a boulder in a fit of helpless frustration, use it as a splint to brace my fractured wrist.
Even in a case so dire that my phone did nothing to aid my survival, it might at least allow me to orchestrate and record my demise. For example, I could use it to play soothing music—say, Bessie Smith crooning “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”; or, perhaps, something nostalgic and pastoral from my lost youth, like John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”; or maybe something more folksy and Western, like Roy Rogers crooning “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” If the phone had not been repurposed as a splint, I could use it to take a picture of myself—perhaps looking manly and stoical, like Kit Carson or Jim Bridger. Or maybe I’d just go out cool, flashing a peace sign as my final gesture.
I could, instead, create a text message that, although it could not be sent, would later be discovered and allow me to shape my own legacy. I would want something profound, of course. All Henry David Thoreau came up with for last words was “moose…Indian,” which set the bar for expiring environmental writers mercifully low. (By the way, Thoreau’s penultimate words were far better than his final words; when asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied, “I was not aware that we had quarreled.”) But I hold with my patron saint, Mark Twain, who insisted that no one should leave something as important as their final words to the last minute. He wisely admonished that preparing in advance enables a person “to say something smart with his latest gasp.” I have taken Twain’s advice to heart and, after a great deal of consideration, have resolved upon texting these poignant and incisive final words: “crawling 2k ft up mtn 2 call fr hlp—pls put IPA in fridge.”
IT IS UNFORTUNATE that we English speakers have relatively few words for mud, a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions that it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it, as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for snow. If a useless neologism like ginormous can make the Oxford English Dictionary, you would think we could spare an extra word or two to distinguish one person’s home mud from another’s. Out here in Silver Hills, our mud is less a description of the ground than it is a full season, a marker of identity, and a way of life.
Lacking a hundred helpful synonyms for mud, I think, instead, of stories that suggest what is special about the thick, deep, slippery gunk that we Silver Hillbillies call “gumbo.” When hiking during mud season in spring, the gumbo becomes so heavy on our boots that we often find it easier to shuffle along like cross-country skiers than to lift our heavy feet off the ground. When driving on even the slightest slope, it makes little difference whether you put your foot on the gas or the brake, since even while braking you simply slide along without resistance, like a capsule gliding through space. Our gumbo also has the unique quality of sticking to itself, gathering so thickly on truck tires that it is limited only by the wheel wells, which shear it off with each revolution, neat as a spindle turning on a lathe.
In early spring, the road to our house is sometimes so thick with gumbo that it becomes impassible even to high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicles. When that happens, we have two choices: park at the paved road and slog several miles through the muck; or, wait until evening, when the mud freezes up, making it viscous enough that it becomes possible to pilot perilously across it. In more than a decade out here, I have never completed a full mud season without sliding off the road, and our family now runs a “gumbo pool”: five bucks buys a guess as to the first date on which one of us, neighbors included, will end up in the ditch.
But the best thing about mud season in Silver Hills is the “gumbo luge,” which Hannah and Caroline love. Here’s how it works. When the spring thaw begins, the first dozen truck trips down our road leave shallow wheel ruts. Those ruts deepen a little each day and by mid-season are so deep that it is risky to try to avoid them, since a slide into the ruts results in a jaw-rattling drop that is hard on spines as well as transmissions. Instead, the trick is
to get squarely into these twin tire canyons from the start, after which the impressive depth of the channels unfailingly prevents the vehicle from sliding off the road. In fact, the ruts are so deep that you can drive our road without ever placing your hands on the steering wheel. Instead, you simply slide along, secure in the deep tracks that guide your rig even around hairpin turns. No true Silver Hillbilly would be caught with their hands on the wheel while running the gumbo luge, and it is common practice to lace your fingers behind your head while gunning your truck along through the muddy slots.
One morning, during the height of mud season, I was sitting at my writing desk and looking out the window—which is about all I do at my writing desk—when I saw a spectacle so astonishing and surreal that I grabbed my birding binoculars to scope it out. There, in the twin tubes of the binocs, was a pink Cadillac, fishtailing wildly up our driveway. Understand that in all my years on Ranting Hill, I had never seen a two-wheel-drive vehicle out here during mud season, that our driveway is an unbroken half-mile long sheet of hazardous gumbo, and that the only pink things I have ever seen around here are rock penstemon, long-leafed phlox, and my kids’ pacifiers. I instantly sprinted for the door, booted up, and headed out to see what would become of whomever was crazy enough to brave Silver Hills gumbo in a Caddy.
From the crest of the knoll beneath Ranting Hill I witnessed an utterly indelible image: the pink Cadillac had gone sideways off the driveway, slid down a small hill, and lodged firmly atop a charred juniper stump, where it rested with its rear end up in the air and its wheels spinning madly, shotgunning mud everywhere. Covering my face with my forearm to deflect the gumbo strafing, I worked my way down to the car, which had music blaring from behind its tinted windows. I rapped on the driver’s side window and waited for a reply. Eventually, the power window rolled slowly down, and Loretta Lynn came blasting out: “Well, sloe gin fizz works mighty fast, when you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass!” In the driver’s seat was a middle-aged woman who looked uncannily like Loretta, only frosted blonde. She held in her hand a highball glass, from which she had apparently managed to spill not one drop of her cocktail. Rather than turning the music down, she held her pointer finger up, as if to say, “hold on a second,” then took a sip of her drink and gunned the engine again.
“Your tires aren’t on the ground!” I shouted over the cranking tunes, revving engine, and splattering mud.
“What’s that, hon?” she yelled back.
“Your tires!” I screamed, pointing helpfully toward the part of her car that was three feet off the ground.
She took another sip of her cocktail, leaned slowly out the window, craned her neck backward, and then began to laugh, reaching out to give me a fist bump, as if she had just slapped in the game-winning RBI. She then turned off the ignition and, in the silence that followed, said in a gravelly voice, “I’m the Mary Kay lady. Want a drink?”
If she looked like Loretta Lynn, she sounded more like Tom Waits. Though it was eleven in the morning, I felt obliged not to let her drink alone, and so I promptly agreed. She spread her knees, reached down between her ankles, and pulled a thermos and second highball glass from beneath the driver’s seat, pouring me a tall one of something that tasted suspiciously like straight gin.
“I came to invite you to a party,” she said, “but I forgot the invitation. I don’t want to get my heels muddy,” she continued, pulling out her phone, “so let’s just have a drink.” She made a quick call, described roughly where she was, and instructed someone on the other end of the line to “bring blush.”
We passed the next half hour pleasantly, she turning the Loretta back on and passing fresh drinks through the window, me standing up to my ankles in gumbo and receiving what I am guessing were excellent tips about skin care. Just as we polished off the thermos, a large man wearing a huge hat came riding up the driveway on a ginormous horse. He dismounted with a wide smile, climbed down the hill, shook my hand firmly, then lifted the Mary Kay lady out through the window of the Caddy, drink still in hand, gently folding her over his broad shoulder like a sack of grain. Clambering up the slope, he placed her on the horse, whose name, it turned out, was Blush. He then slid the pointed toe of his boot into the stirrup and swung himself up behind her, encircling her waist with his arms, as the two of them rode off together, laughing. I could see her clear plastic heels tapping Blush’s flanks, as the big man hollered back at me, “Thanks, chief. See ya after mud season!”
It took a few weeks for the gumbo to firm up enough for a tow truck to get in and winch out the abandoned car, during which time I had the great pleasure of sitting at my writing desk, looking out at that beautiful pink wreck stranded down there among the gooseberry and rabbitbrush. To commemorate the visit from the Mary Kay lady, whose name I never learned, I did what I think any eccentric, reclusive writer would have done: I composed a haiku.
Light pink Cadillac
High-centered on an old stump
Wheels spinning freely.
THOSE OF US WHO LIVE in these high desert foothills are all too familiar with the summer wind that is known locally as the Washoe Zephyr. During his time as a cub newspaper reporter in the mining camps of the western Nevada Territory (then nicknamed “Washoe,” after the native people who inhabit the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada), Mark Twain was also familiar with this special wind, which was already the stuff of tall tales by the time he arrived on the Comstock in the early 1860s. Calling the Washoe Zephyr “a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise,” in Roughing It (1872) Twain described the layers of items he observed blowing by above him: “hats, chickens, and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sagebrush, and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo-robes lower still; shovels and coal-scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats, and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies, and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots.” “A Washoe wind,” Twain concluded, “is by no means a trifling matter.”
Twain’s comic exaggeration is funny only if you do not actually live here. In our decade on Ranting Hill, quite a few of the items on Twain’s list actually have blown away from here, along with plenty of things he did not think to mention. The Washoe Zephyr hauls off papers and magazines, hats and sweaters, tarps and blankets, but would you believe that it also blows away plastic coolers, bird netting, chicken wire, and five-gallon buckets, that it routinely rolls everything from soccer balls to trash cans off our hill, and that the only way to keep a half-full bottle of beer from being knocked over is to down it straightaway? Our heavy outdoor furniture routinely slides around the patio as if it were an ice rink, and the Zephyr has even toppled well-stacked cords of juniper and pine. Around here the tumbleweed (Russian thistle) does not tumble at all. It is instead dislodged by dust devils, sucked up into the gyre, and transported aloft toward Utah. On one memorable occasion, a sudden blast knifed under the girls’ blue, plastic wading pool. I stood, gripping my beer as I watched the cobalt disc simply sail off into the desert sky. It took me an hour of hiking around even to find the pool, which had returned to earth and lodged in a juniper copse a half mile from the house.
Meteorologists call the Washoe Zephyr a seasonal, diurnal wind, because it occurs regularly during the summer and is driven by temperature and pressure gradients that are built up and broken down over the course of the day. Like everything and everybody around here, though, our wind is extremely weird. In the normal pattern, diurnal, mountain-slope winds move upslope during the day and downslope at night—just as you would expect, given that hot air rises and cool air sinks. But here, in the western Great Basin, the pattern is reversed: the wind howls down from the canyons all afternoon at twenty to thirty miles per hour, finally shutting off or gently reversing itself an hour or so after dark. What causes this odd wind pattern?
Weather geeks have been arguing about the
mechanism of the Washoe Zephyr for a long time. While a number of theories have been proposed, the most persuasive is that this unfailing west-southwest afternoon wind is a “thermally driven flow phenomenon.” During the day, heated air rises from the desert floor, creating a conveyor or chimney effect that sucks the cooler air down out of the Sierra Nevada. But the situation is more complicated than that, since the Zephyr is produced not only by this thermal differential but also by a giant, regional-scale pressure gradient. In summer, the low-pressure system produced in the desert of central Nevada remains in an unstable relationship with the high-pressure system formed on the western side of the Sierra. The great equalizer is the Zephyr, which relieves the pressure of this atmospheric asymmetry by pulling California air through the mountain passes and down into the Nevada desert.
Scientific theories notwithstanding, the Zephyr remains a distinctive but poorly understood feature of life in the western Great Basin. Even Twain recognized the mystery surrounding the wind’s origin. The Washoe Zephyr, he wrote, is “a peculiarly Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth ‘whence it cometh’. That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from the West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side!” Like the cloud that often hovers atop Mount Shasta even when skies surrounding the peak are clear, our home wind is produced by the mountains. While we tend to think of wind as something that blows in from somewhere else, the Washoe Zephyr is endemic, a signature phenomenon created by the daily conversation taking place between mountains and desert.
I would need to be pretty softhearted to have much good to say about the Washoe Zephyr, which is more akin to an existential trial than it is to a welcome breeze. A nature writer such as Annie Dillard can emote about the “spiritual energy of wind” only because she is lolling in the gentle breeze that ripples the verdant banks of Virginia’s Tinker Creek. As Twain knew so well, the case is entirely different in the Western desert. Here the wind is so desiccating as to make gardening virtually impossible. It is so hot that facing into it is like standing in front of the open door of a kiln being vented into your face by the world’s largest exhaust fan. When wildfires burn up in the Sierra, which they do much of each summer, the Zephyr funnels their choking smoke and ash directly into these desert basins and has, on occasion, driven roaring flames toward our home.