Rants from the Hill Page 6

  Because the Washoe Zephyr shotguns so much desert sand, we must sometimes resort to wearing ski goggles while hiking. Without them, the amount of dirt that ends up in your eyes after a hike would be enough to pot a houseplant with, if your stinging eyeballs were not so dried out as to cause the debris to stick to them almost indefinitely. Inside your boots, you will discover enough gravel to sandbag a levee. And don’t bother clenching your teeth in frustration while being blasted by the Zephyr, because you will be doubly exasperated when you feel the grit between your molars. Is it any wonder that the Buddhist and Hindu concept of nirvana—which signifies a liberation after a lengthy period of suffering—is understood by some etymologists of Sanskrit to mean a state of no wind? Each evening when the blast of the Washoe Zephyr subsides, it is as if the world has suddenly stopped clenching its muscles and squinting its eyes. Calm comes over the land in a form that can never be produced by the absence of wind, but only by a cessation of it.

  What has somehow been lost in the story of the Washoe Zephyr is that the name of this big wind is, in fact, a joke—one that originated with Twain and the frontier storytellers he gulped red eye with up in Virginia City. Named for Zephyrus, the Greek god who was celebrated as the bringer of light summer breezes, the word zephyr specifically evokes the gentle stirring of a soft, Western breeze. This is what Shakespeare intended, when, in Cymbeline, he wrote that two beautiful children “Are as gentle / as zephyrs blowing below the violet, / Not wagging his sweet head.” Calling our ripping Washoe wind a zephyr is a triumph of the sort of ironic understatement that is essential to the American tall-tale tradition. The droll implication of the Washoe Zephyr’s name is that out here in the desert West the landscape is so vast and intense that our version of a gentle breeze is a blast that carries off lumber yards, wheelbarrows, children, and vacant lots.

  We desert rats do not enjoy the Zephyr, but we endure it, and in enduring it we are made more thoroughly a part of this place. That the name of this grueling, incessant wind is a wry joke is very much to the point. We also endure the desert through laughter, which seems a fit gesture of reciprocation with a landscape that so often seems to be laughing at us—that chuckles knowingly even at our vain pretention to inhabit it. But if the Washoe Zephyr were suddenly to cease forever, a fleeting moment of nirvana might be followed by a sense that something extraordinary had vanished from this land. Because our embrace of nature in this place is an expression of struggle as well as affection, the Washoe Zephyr is something we can no longer live without.

  OUR PART OF THE DESERT West is so inaccessible that the common detritus of the dominant endemic species, Hillbillicus nevadensis redneckii, is nowhere to be seen. So while the rutted, dusty BLM roads in the sandy, sage-choked wash bottoms are beribboned with spent shell casings, wide-mouthed bottles of Coors light, and empty cans of chew, there is simply no easy way to litter the steep, rocky high country. However, there is one unfortunate exception to this rule, and that is when trash is airlifted into these isolated mountains and canyons in the form of balloons.

  I have picked up so many trashed balloons over the years that I find myself wondering what the hell is so jolly about California, which is the nearby, upwind place where all this aerial trash originates. Maybe the prevalence of balloons in the otherwise litter-free high desert should not surprise me, since millions of balloons are released in the United States each year. We release balloons at graduation celebrations, birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, football games, even funerals. There is actually a company called Eternal Ascent that will, for fifteen hundred dollars, load your ashes into a balloon and float them away. Balloon launches for a pet’s ashes cost only six hundred dollars, though, so if I go this route, I have instructed my family to claim I was a Saint Bernard.

  The moment a balloon is released it becomes trash, and this trash can cover serious ground. A sixteen-inch-diameter, helium-filled latex toy balloon will float for twenty-four to thirty-six hours and can cover hundreds of miles while climbing to an altitude of 25,000 feet, where it freezes, explodes, and rains down to earth in the form of garbage, which some desert rat like me then has to tote home in his backpack. And while latex balloons will, eventually, biodegrade, the same is not true of metalized nylon balloons, which become a permanent feature of the natural environment. That is the downside of these so-called foil balloons; their only upside is that they are really shiny.

  Because they conduct electricity, metalized balloons also cause hundreds of blackouts in the United States each year by short-circuiting power lines, which de facto suggests the vulnerability of the grid. If Edward Abbey or Barry Commoner were alive today, they might enjoy the idea that the elaborate infrastructure of postindustrial capitalism can be brought down by a single, drifting, metalized Mickey Mouse. So the next time you release a balloon, do not think of it as a celebratory symbol of freedom. Think of it as trash. You should also think of it as you would a message in a bottle, because someday, somewhere, there is a chance that someone like me will have to read whatever unimaginative nonsense is on your balloon. Given this rare opportunity to communicate across time and space, please try to come up with something more clever than the message on the frog-shaped foil balloon I recovered out here yesterday: “Hoppy Birthday.”

  By now, you may be wondering what kind of dark-souled curmudgeon would go out of his way to profess loathing for the universally beloved balloon. I confess that I am taking this principled stand against balloons in part because I would otherwise need to stand against something harder to fight, like corporate greed or global climate change. But there is one use of balloons that I approve of wholeheartedly: to make one’s lawn chair fly. Manned balloon flights date back to the early eighteenth century, but when Mark Twain defined a balloon as a “thing to take meteoric observations and commit suicide with,” he anticipated the incredible adventure of a true Western American folk hero, “Lawnchair Larry.”

  Truck driver Larry Walters was a man with a dream. On July 2, 1982, in a backyard in suburban San Pedro, California, Larry tied forty-two large, helium-filled balloons to his aluminum lawn chair, which he dubbed Inspiration I. He then outfitted the lawn chair with the same gear that Western heroes have always provisioned themselves with: sandwiches, beer, and a gun. But Larry had made a serious miscalculation, and when his friends cut the cord that tethered him to California, he disappeared in a meteoric rise of more than 1,000 feet per minute. Larry did not level out until he reached an altitude of almost 16,000 feet, where he drifted into LAX’s airspace and was spotted by a TWA pilot, who found himself reporting to air traffic control that he had just seen a gun-toting guy in a lawn chair sail by. Larry managed to shoot a few of his balloons before accidentally dropping his pellet gun, after which he descended slowly into a Long Beach neighborhood, where he became entangled in power lines and caused a twenty-minute blackout. Perfectly unharmed, he climbed down from his lawn chair and was immediately arrested. When a reporter asked about the inspiration for his epic, fourteen-hour flight, Larry replied, “A man can’t just sit around.”

  Larry’s heroic adventure notwithstanding, the fact remains that unless you want to fly in a lawn chair or take down the power grid, balloons are trash. Fun trash. Colorful trash. But trash just the same. Now, the problem with being both an environmentalist and a father is that whenever I rant about an issue I always end up caught by my daughters in some act of complicity that exposes my hypocrisy. In this case, the trouble started when little Caroline insisted that we celebrate sister Hannah’s ninth birthday with a balloon release. I was in a tough spot, since I had to choose between being an uptight, sanctimonious, balloon-reviling ecogeek and being a really cool dad who happened to be externalizing the true cost of his coolness by exporting some aerial trash downwind to Utah. I remained on the fence, until Caroline explained that our balloons would not go to Utah but rather to the moon, where she intended to clean them up herself, just as soon as she becomes an astronaut.

  Well, that was pretty persuas
ive, so we began preparations for our birthday launch. We would use latex rather than Mylar, we would release only one balloon per kid, and we would be careful to aim them at the moon. We also decided that, just in case they ended up on the other side of the Great Basin—in the Wasatch Mountains instead of the lunar mountains—we would write something witty on the balloons to help compensate the finder for their trouble. On one balloon we wrote, “PLEASE RETURN TO LARRY WALTERS.” On the other, “SORRY, UTAH!” We then ate some birthday cake and ice cream before heading outside to position ourselves for the launch. The girls aimed for the moon, I counted down from ten to blastoff, and they opened their small hands and sent the bright yellow and orange balloons on their way into the azure Nevada sky. The balloons rose, the girls cheered, the moon waited. It was one of those sparkling experiences when time, worry, and even the desert wind—everything in the world, save two rising balloons—stood still for one long, gorgeous moment.

  I try to tell myself that, because I have retrieved more than a hundred trashed balloons from the remote desert, I have earned the right to release a few, but I know that is just more of the same evasive horseshit we all tell ourselves every day. The plain fact is that I littered, and that I had a lot of fun doing it. I hope my neighbors in Utah will cut me some slack on this one. After all, a man can’t just sit around.

  FIRE HAS REMAINED ABSENT from our home landscape this summer, at least so far. Winter was so long and wet as to have delayed fire season, and it seems strange that our home mountain, valley, and foothills have remained unscorched even into midsummer. After so many years of scrutinizing weather—of spending July and August with a beer in one hand and binoculars in the other, of phoning in plumes every month or so—there is something almost disconcerting about this lack of fire. This fireless summer has made me feel like the urbanite who flees to the country to escape the constant din of the city and then can’t sleep because it is too quiet. After all, this land was sculpted by burning, the natural fire cycle here having been as short as fifteen years. Wildfires are common, and their fuel is as much the intense aridity and desiccating wind as it is the sage, rabbitbrush, and bitterbrush, the juniper, gooseberry, and desert peach. Out here, fire isn’t an accident; it’s weather.

  Last July, a simultaneous trio of wind-driven wildfires burned more than 12,000 acres of our home mountain and valley, prompting evacuations along the wildlands interface where we live. The first two nights of the fire, which for their safety Eryn and the girls spent in town, proved relatively uneventful. I was fortunate to have a crew of wildlands firefighters occupying our two main firebreaks, and I spent those nights bringing them coffee and listening to their incredible stories about the unpredictable power of fire. Even as the glowing clouds of smoke in the Western sky reflected the flames marching up the valley on the other side of the foothills, I remained fairly confident that my defensible space and fuels reduction work would make it possible for these guys to save our house, even if the fire ultimately crested Ranting Hill.

  By afternoon on the third day, however, things were worse. The fire had moved closer and was burning hotter, and the winds had intensified. Visibility was radically reduced by the thickening smoke, which was now heavy with ash lifted from the incineration of the sagebrush steppe out on the public lands. The acrid smoke stung my eyes and burned in my nostrils and throat, even though I had adopted the precaution of tying a bandana over my face, train-robber style. Then, about two hours before dark, an arm of the blaze to our north jumped a firebreak on the BLM and threatened more homes, resulting in the hurried redeployment of the crews protecting our place. I will never forget my feeling of exhaustion and anxiety as I watched those brush trucks and water tenders roll away. Left alone at the house, I had no choice but to watch and wait.

  At dusk, just as the smoky darkness began to settle and the sky faintly resumed its fiery glow, the wind suddenly shifted. I knew immediately I was in trouble—that there were no longer any crews between me and the fire and that the scalding winds would funnel the flames through the canyon gaps toward our home. I raced out onto the balcony, faced directly into the warm wind, and raised my binoculars to scope the western horizon. In the foreground of my field of vision was my neighbor’s house and barn; in the distance was open sagebrush steppe spread out beneath a toothed ridgeline that was chiseled into the falling sky. As I scanned that ridge through the binocs, a half-mile-long curtain of flames suddenly broke over it like a wave, cresting the horizon and pushing forward in a wind-driven phalanx that seemed to suck the air out of my chest. In almost the same moment, I spun around to see an immense, red-bellied, firefighting air tanker coming at me out of the thick smoke. Flying over our roof, it seemed impossibly large and dangerously low. As it roared above me I watched it drop yet lower, over my neighbor’s house, releasing, as it did, several thousand gallons of water and fire retardant, colored fuchsia by its ferris oxide. It was a surreal moment: the darkness falling and the smoke swirling, the sky glowing and the fire blazing in an approaching wall, and then the immense cloud of bright-pink retardant cascading across the juniper-dotted desert. That was the last image I registered before scrambling off the balcony, jumping into my truck, and racing to town by a circuitous backcountry route that reduced the chance of fire blocking my escape. One glimpse of that wall of flames had convinced me that I would have nothing to say about what this fire ultimately did.

  From town, we scoured the news for clues about what might be happening in the wildlands surrounding Ranting Hill, but information was frustratingly slow and imprecise. We knew all the roads were closed now, and things were bad. Beyond that, there was no way to tell what might be going on.

  Early the next morning, when it was declared safe, my dad and I drove out to the house, saying little and not knowing what we would find. The beautiful culmination of our family’s many years of saving, planning, and work might still be standing—or it might not. Arriving in our rural neighborhood, we soon learned that fire crews had been redeployed to our road just in time; although several of my neighbors’ fences burned, none of us lost a home.

  It is true that we came to this wild place to be exposed to the power of forces beyond our control, including wind, snow, aridity, and even fire. That fuchsia stain on the desert remained visible for several years, a humbling reminder that we desert rats remain guests in the house of fire. Even now, when I come home tired from a long day at work, I am sometimes able to see our house the way I saw it that morning: with a kind of inspired surprise that keeps fresh my deep appreciation for the special place that is our home.

  I FREELY ADMIT that those of us who live in remote desert places tend to be eccentric, though it remains unclear to me whether the weird are attracted to this wild country or if our weirdness is instead produced by it. When you live in relative isolation—and in a severe physical environment that conspires with that isolation to scour away affectation and superfluity—you discover some odd things about yourself, among which is that you are odd. Living in this high desert outback also helps correct for the homogenizing tendencies of living in town, where our unique character is too easily distorted or diluted by the social demands of conformity, consistency, and compromise. Out here, we tend to revert to whatever we might have been if the demands of the social contract had never been imposed on us in the first place. I do not claim that the end result of this process is always pretty. On the contrary, neither nature nor human nature inspires much romanticism out here, where a pastoral fantasy is about as sustainable as an orchid in the desert sun. Still, it is liberating to live in a place where no one is close enough to see what you are up to, let alone volunteer their opinion that you ought to mow your lawn or go to church.

  A recitation of my own weird habits and tendencies would be lengthy. And while I am not in the habit of expounding upon these innumerable idiosyncrasies, Hannah has reached an age at which she has begun to insist that I explain and defend them—an exercise that largely defeats the purpose of rural desert living, in
which the sanctity of indefensible eccentricity is all but holy. As it turns out, however, this concept of freedom is too abstract for Hannah, whose social comparisons have led her to the mildly troubling conclusion that I am “totally not like other dads.”

  As Hannah becomes more socially aware, more concerned about what is normal, and more worried that our family may not qualify, I am barraged with unanswerable questions. Why do I correct the baseball radio announcers when I know they can’t hear me? Why do I tell chicken-crossing-the-road jokes to our laying hens? Why am I not afraid of scorpions and rattlesnakes but nervous around cows? Why do I fly kites using a fishing pole? How did I ever learn so much about pronghorn antelope without learning anything about her favorite pop stars? Why do I have pet names for my chainsaw (“Landshark”) and weed-whacker (“Cujo”)? Why do I always have to say what kind of animal’s butt the poop came from? Why do I like to put goldfish into the BLM stock tanks? Why do I so often wear no pants? This kind of interrogation makes me wish my kid would just ask about something simple, like mortality, God, or where babies come from. But, no, it always has to be the “no pants thing” again.