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it's not supposed to snow in the desert. especially in the spring, when on the east coast all the trees are budding, making it impossible to see from my apartment on the hill, through the woods, to my old house. even the huge open-field oak on my road, the one that's been neatly trimmed to allow the passage of power lines, has buds on its croney-finger limbs. when i left it was 90 degrees in the middle of april. but this is the west, the place of bigger proportions, a different scale, so they can't fool around. deserts don't fool around, or at least so i had thought. i was wrong, of course. the desert is a jester, the king of the absurd, and we were driving towards it as fast as possible.
 

the plan had been formed as "let's go to zion national park and then make things up as we go," which appealed to the spontenaeity-as-mystical side of me, and because all i'd been doing for the last few weeks was try to make decisions. so when i got to berkeley, it was oddly perfect that the car was already packed, meals planned, final destination cheerily unknown. first, however, there was to be zion. this meant a two-day trip east, which meant sleeping somewhere en route (lacking as we were in benzedrine). chuck's dad had recommended ely, nevada, which is easily found if you get on highway 50 and go straight, across salt flats and over mountain passes, recursively, with odd things here and there like misplaced sand dunes and the occasional mid-road cow. all the while it is getting cooler... the sun is setting, the mountains so mysteriously tipped with snow that i take pictures of them. funny, that. just as funny as the seeming-snow that fell, levitating over the windshield while i was driving across a flat, leaving no marks. chuck was asleep, so he can not vouch for it, and maybe i dreamt it.
 

upon arriving at the campsite, "closed in winter," we found it to be, well, closed. april is spring, right? whatever, we'll just find a place to toss down our bags for the night so that we could hit the canyon the next day. a light dusting of snow is slowly making its way to the ground, on the edge of perceptability in the dusky light. we find a place to pull off, and step outside. ice crystals form in our veins. i step back inside the car and change from shorts to long pants, doing those changing-in-the-car-gymnastics that are born of a similar necessity to changing-your-shirt-under-a-larger-sweatshirt-contortions that i remember from scenes in mountain cabins on brisk mornings. on went all the layers i'd brought with me, plus a hat borrowed from chuck and my lambskin gloves that i'd assumed would not get used. the tent went up, a small contraption with numerous necessary knots, all of which required bare fingers, and contact with the frigid air.
 

if there is such a thing as a *cold* fever of the mind, this was it - a combination of adrenaline and bewilderment. we laughed at our fate, prayed to the coleman stove as it heated boiling water for our soup, ate strangely tepid "cold" pizza, and watched the snow. it was thick, illuminated by the propane lantern, careening towards us in a way reminiscent of a starfield screensaver, but it stung when we faced it, so we turned our backs to it. and beyond our vision was a brownish darkness that seemed to conceal a chuckling old-testament God.
 

then, just as we'd wriggled into our downy coccoons with prayers of a furnacey morning, the impercetible evidence of falling snow disappeared, our muted scene expanding into the silence of the desert. the divine hand had been played out perfectly, cruelly, and all we could do was laugh and sleep.
 

thus began the pattern of mystical invertions that put our south-western loop into checkerboard contrast.
 

the next morning the sky was blue and the air still bitingly cold, making untying last night's hastey knots into a game of sorts: how long can you continue to effectively use numbed fingers before it is necessary to plunge them into your pockets and dance around cursing the foul chill. holding the hot cocoa with these same hands produced that burning feeling that i've always imagined is all of your capilaries being reborn in a microscopic storm of electric blood-flame. ^[1]
 

we get into the car, verbally acknowledge that we've lost our minds, and set out for some nearby caves. turning up the road is see an alien head on a fence post. thinking this a delusion brought on by the aformentioned insanity, i paid it no mind. then came the unicycle with accompanying sneakers, hovering behind a bush. chuck began hallucinating too, and together we observed the creativity of what must be bored local kids, having fun in an already surreal landscape. they had captured the power of the mirage and tossed it in a coldren with a dust-devil, some tumble-weed, and a cow pie. i would hope that if i lived out here, i would do the same. the caves were closed, but the trip was worth it.
 

the approach to zion national park takes you past startling spires and touristy villages filled with vintage cars parked next to unnaturally green lawns planted with satelite dishes, or alternatively, naturally planted satelite cars with vintage lawns and unnatually green dishes, depending. but there are definitely impressive outcroppings of rock. you wind deeper and deeper, expecting that the park must be coming up after every bend. and then you go deeper. then all of a sudden there are more people then you'd seen in days, all huddled around informative displays in the shade of fabricated faux-old wooden beams supported by freshly-quarried pink sandstone with rustic angles. ^[2] so this was the desert. we found a campsite and were the only ones not to put up a tent. the night was gorgeous, the moon nearly full, and the surrounding cliffs patient and comforting.
 

our primary mission of this campaign was a not-so-strategic assault on the narrows, the upper section of the canyon that had been sussinctly carved by the virgin river, which occupied the majority of the floor of the canyon. the water temperature was reported to be 54 degrees. so, this was to be a test of our new-found lunacy - could we match wits with the absurdity of the desert and thus view one of its more wonderous beauties? we strapped to us the necessary equipment: high-energy food, unhostile water, extra foot gear, and a towel. douglas adams may have been nutty, but he certainly wasn't wrong about the towel. mounting the park shuttlebus, propane powered for our planet's pleasure, we followed the asphalt river as it twined the aquaeous one, past mountains named for angels, and were dropped at the last stop. from there it was a mile of paved trail, to where most people stopped.
 

i think it took us about five seconds to switch into our other shoes - wool socks or scuba booties and sandals. silently we saluted those who were about to lose their toes, and left the others to crane their necks as we disappeared around the corner.
 

it was truly beautiful. carved sandstone is one of the earth's more voluptuous forms, and we were surrounded by an orgy of it, made dramatic by contrasting shadows and rays from a near-noonday sun. but where the tones and curves of the rock were warm, their creator and ever-companion river was icy. it stole from us first our senses, then our toes, and finally chuck's breath. after about 3.5 miles, we came to a giant boulder surrounded on all sides by frosty green pools which, after a few minutes observation, looked to end our trip. but, being without senses firstly, and corporeal body soon to follow, chuck wrapped his pack in a garbage bag, held it aloft and proceeded slowly forward, as a single pawl-bearer with his better judgement suffocating in plastic. ^[3] fortunately, humans are still embued with some animal instincts, and as he stood in the middle of the challenge, water lapping his exposed armpits, his brain pulled the emergency cord, stopped this foolish train, and back we went. the river felt more familiar as we went with its current now, remembering the all-important most-shallow-parts, and where the wall had been made smooth with mineral deposits, and where we'd seen the ducks, and taken pictures. all in all we'd seen less than a dozen people since we entered the narrows. it wasn't until i got in my sleeping bag that night that my feet finally felt truly warm again, and i realized that this wasn't the desert i wanted to see.
 

there is nothing worse than having a young body and feeling it get old. maybe it's all the radio waves passing through my body and pummeling my cells, maybe it's my funny feet, but i have bad knees. this was made abundantly clear at the end of our hike in the narrows, during which i had slipped and slid to find decent footing, and in the process somehow screwed up my knee. chuck, for his part, had a recently-twisted ankle, a notoriously slow-healing injury, aggrevated by the hike. remembering, however, that we had lost our minds, we decided to take on the "angel's landing", a knife-edged summit 1500 feet up and 2.5 miles up switch-backs marked "strenuous."
 

i was fine going up, and the view was definitely worth it, especially with sheer drops on either side and a newly-arrived haze in the canyon that gave the whole place a somewhat less plastic-perfect air. we scrambled up the final section, clinging to chains that had worn patterns into the neighboring sand stone, stepping on tree roots burnished my thousands of vibram soles, to a slab of slanted white rock etched with memorials to people i can only assume died while climbing these popular "big walls." we ate our gorp and oranges under the tryanny of persistant and fearless chipmucks. then came the way down. i didn't do so well in that direction. i was gimped by a pain that seemed to have no association with physics except that, past a certain grade of slope, it made me want to strangle random french tourists. i craved flat ground and no people. so we went to the mojave.
 

to get there we had to pass from desert to human wasteland, namely las vegas. the absurdity starts many miles out and the city is as improbable the entire way through. we wanted to cruise the strip, but it was hard to find - there are no big signs saying "this way to the strip," which makes you wonder how people find it unless they enter the city by air and are immediately conducted to the casinos. i guess it shouldn't have been surprising that it was on las vegas blvd. it wasn't like the movies, at least not in the afternoon. it looked run-down, violent, sad, except for where it looked like paris or vienna or a dark, futuristic egypt. at least there was good mexican food and a chance to pay homage to the bellagio and consider robbing it. sure would make buying that house in north carolina much easier.
 

and then we were out again, where the streets have no names and all that. the sun was going down as we turned into the mojave national preserve, which, not being a national park per se, we didn't have to pay for. the jack rabbits were out and, due to some cruel instinctual joke, ran towards our on-coming headlights instead of away, about every fifty feet. chuck stated that, as the resident carnivore, i was responsible for eating any incidental kills, of which there were thankfully none. we found a side-road with a few campsites, deployed our tarps and bags, and lay down below the silhouettes of joshua trees. the desert was alive with sound, muffled by an oppressive silence, so that it took a while to get to sleep. noises that could break through to silence did so explosively, like the rustle of a cow or the scurry of a mouse near my head. otherwise there was the silence that you hear when you remove the ambient human noise, the cars and lawnmowers and footsteps, the acoustics of being indoors, and the appliances that, even turned off, seem to hum and sing with leaking electricity. then you remove bits of yourself, dissipating into the desert, under a sky that wraps around you more than you'd imagined possible.
 

i like to think that the mojave is where dr. seuss got his ideas. there is something surreal and yet childishly appealing about joshua trees, with their odd angles and lobe-like construction, a no-leafed tree that might as well come in shades of fluorescent orange and blue. we half expected a lorax to be perched atop one. instead we saw quails, dashing here and there as fast as there little blurred legs could carry them, with a black feather sprouting incongruously from there heads. it is a fantasy place, where the wind draws circles in the sand with brushes of dead grass, where dunes can howl if you push them right, where an old railway depot can conjur the image of the atlantian "hotel california," where two dudes can be free to lose their minds.
 

after all, only crazy people would visit a place called "death valley." a valley of death. no mincing of words there. if it wasn't for my brother's recommendation i probably never would have wanted to go, but it being so close, and we being up for anything, we went. incidentally, there is good greek food in baker, california, but not that you would find it unless you were driving around in this middle-of-nowhere. being fed, we continued the descent begun the day before, down through dizzying canyons, whose angles made one wonder which way the road curved, down and down some more, as our ears popped, down into the center of the earth.
 

the valley was wider and longer than i had pictured it, not simpley a concentrated desert furnace, but a landscape sampled from other worlds, the most unlikely of each brought here and place side by side. never would i have expected it to be so colorful. stripes of greens and purples and yellows, folded and eroded, the product of a slow and patient violence. in the center, and endless field of salt formations born of boiling heat, the water ripped away, leaving them to scream with spikey maws of cemented, dirty cystals. and further on, sculpted dunes glowing against the darkening mountains.
 

at the lowest point there is, of course, a pull-off and a sign for us tourists: Badwater - 282 feet below sea level. we got out, surveyed this otherwise unremarkable section of salt flat, and then spied a beautiful incongruity. a woman in high heels and a deep ochre dress, barely held onto her by thin straps and blowing in the warm valley wind. she was pretty, but it was her presence in this notoriously evil place that made me, for the span of about ten minutes, completely obsessed with her. all i wanted was a picture of her, set of to one side with the valley of death stretched out behind her. she somehow tamed it, or challenged it, or ignored it. she was mystical within it. there could be a hundred stories in that image. but i didn't get it. i think her boyfriend may have beaten me up if i'd tried. it was a dream on which i was eavesdropping.
 

after this torture, it seemed that the God whose cruelty we were testing, decided to give us a break. we set up camp in a strong wind, using the car as a break behind which to cook and sleep. as i set about making dinner, chuck pulled out a bottle of wine. there was no better place than this to drink it, we reasoned. as we did so, the clouds dropped a light, improbable rain on us, and gave us a rainbow, with tinges of a second one, reversed, above it. and then the sun set, and we sat in the shadow of the valley of death, and we feared no evil. we were drunk. and the stories flowed. and a second bottle came out. and for a while, we spoke from our hearts, the hearts that understand the desert and don't ask it to be reasonable.
 

made brave by being on the good side of God, we headed back into the valley and up the other side to a place called scotty's castle, an early 1900's mansion that you would love to spend christmas in. and then we left the valley. the trip had been cursed and blessed, in whichever order and for whatever duration one may chose to interperet, and we wanted to head homeward. but there was one more stop.
 

my brother goes to pomona college, which is in the "outskirts" of los angeles. the amazing thing about l.a. is that it is surrounded by, and in many cases overruns, lovely rolling hills and not insignificant mountains, yet it seems somehow to ignore them, like a steamroller running over a squirrel. it is an impressive beasty. and yet, coming into it from the more impressive desert, it didn't seem so frightful and manic. it was just a city, a place where people run around doing things, surrounded by a grand environment that is the last thing on their minds when they get up in the morning. if any thought is given to it at all. as chuck and i rolled down the highway, everything seemed so constructed, in both meanings of the word, that we had to laugh a bit.
 

a digression about technology: it's pretty cool, no matter your predelictions or prejudices against it. i did not know how to get in contact with my brother. so while driving out of death valley, i whipped out my much-maligned cell phone and thumbed two short emails, one to him saying when we would get into town, and one to my mom asking for his number. it took a while to get far enough out of the valley to get a digital signal, but soon the emails we off in internet-land. being impatient, we decided to call my mom, which was less expensive than i would have expected. she gave my my bro's number and directions to his dorm, i left a message on his phone, which he got five minutes before we rolled up infront of his door.
 

he was wearing a navy blue tank-top, but we'll forgive him for that. we caught up on things, compared notes about death valley, and while he went out and did what college students do, chuck and i alternately curse and thanked the dorm. it provided showers, but it was, after all, a dorm, something in which we had done our time. it was a fine example of the cinderblock-functional school of college architecture, and made is count our blessings for having gone to swarthmore, with the slate rooves of the lodges, the grand breakfast room of mary lyons, and the parapets of palmer. for dinner we went to a sushi place with a stream down the middle, covered with plexiglass and filled with koi. it was a test of one's instincts - when i first walked in i held back my step, having quick flashbacks of the zion narrows, before i actually stepped down onto the plastic. we took off our shoes and sat at a sunken table, and i had to keep myself from making "l.a. story" jokes with chuck. "i'll have a double-half-caf' tuna with a twist of lemon." ^[4]
 

saying our goodbyes we ducked back out of the wasteland into what was becoming greener territory. that night we snuck into a campsite, late after the ranger had left, performed a precision deployment of gear that we had practiced over the week, and stept until a train passed by our slumbering heads at about six a.m., at which point we snuck out again. brave us, we have cheated the underfunded park service. having no time for morals, we drove up the coast in the rain. we made an attempt at visiting the hurst castle, but having missed the tour we wanted, we settled for reading about it in books in the gift shop. this was kind of like looking at postcards of the grand canyon in your car in the parking lot of the grand canyon. we then wound our way along rt. 1, with its cliffs and gulleys, and always out to our left, a white sky and white sea eerily merged where a horizon should be.
 

as we passed through big sur, our hiking boots, neglectfully burried in the back seat, reach out their laces and begged for some excercise, so we went for a walk. first, up into the redwoods, one of which had been hollowed out by time and fire, and would have made for a good two-story hermitage on the inside. in that atmosphere it seemed that the fantastic was waiting, pressed close against the skin between it and reality, and all we had to do was see it, writhing slowly and impatiently under every surface. on our second hike down to the ocean we found other hints of it, where people had made huts of driftwood, though the creativity seemed tinged with sinister human intentions. the crows watching us closely, we left, and after stopping in santa cruz for a stroll and some peet's coffee, we were back in berkeley.
 

after a trip like this, when your mind is eventually returned to you, it seems to have new wrinkles. some are filled with sparkling colorful goop, others with slowly spilling smoke, and yet others that are completely unaccesible. and you have to cram it back into your head, where it takes a while to feel at home. and you pray that the pictures all come out right.
 

samira: Chris, I like this, but I also had a hard time with the lack of capitalization. I know that is something of a trademark for you, buit this is really long to be lacking in those signpost like things. Also, I would be careful with tenses. You slip back and forth from telling us what has happened to a conversational present tense. I want to make sure that that is intentional, rather than the product of stream of conciousness writing and suggest that you look back at it. If the tense shifts serve a purpose, great, but if not, you might want to eliminate them--they are a bit distracting. gabriel: And no pictures! Wah! I'm a four-year-old, Chris! I need my picture book! ;^> cfanjul: excuses excuses: the pictures i left out because they were all in chuck's, so you just have to use your imagination ;) as for the tenses, i thought to take them out - yes, they are the product of the writing flow, and though it even made me confused, i kinda like how they change the pace and emphasis. at least, they do for me, though i see how this method could be more controlled and consistent. Add comment