Broken Down

"You know rattle snakes, right?", I asked.
"Yes, why?"

I paused to set the shutter speed and turn the focus ring on my camera lens. "This is great. Evolution in action, you're gonna love it. So," I paused, and depressed the little silver shutter button on my camera "I read that farmers shot so many rattlesnakes, that now, a lot of them don't have rattles. Turned out to be a bad evolutionary strategy in light of the invention of shotguns. Now, they just sneak up on you and bite". "Oh my god", she said, looking around her feet, "do they have them here?". "Sure do. Don't worry, they're big, you'll see 'em coming", I said, squinting in the morning sun through the viewfinder and snapping off a couple more photos. Ken looked over and interjected, in between swigs of beer. "You shouldn't worry about 'em though, if you get medical attention, you'll be fine. Unless it's a baby. They don't know when to stop biting, they just go crazy, and you're dead before you know it". The dregs of his beer swirled around the bottom of the bottle, and he pulled a joint out of a pocket in his jacket sleeve.

I never used to understand what prophets and wise men ever saw in the desert, but when you see it with your own eyes, you witness something transcendent. It is a steadily pulverizing, withering landscape. The desert produced the three major monotheistic religions of the world, and I don't think it's coincidence. Like a monolithic, vengeful God, there is no escape, no place to hide from the scorching sun during the day, or the freezing cold at night. The only thing like it in the world is the ocean. I'm pretty sure if there was ever a people who lived amongst the waves of the ocean, they would dream up something like the god of Abraham. Except it might be more temperamental.

Tunnels of unseen desert creatures collapsed under our sneakers as we walked further into the desert, sending us stumbling and throwing up little clouds of dust in our wake. I wondered exactly whose homes we kept inadvertantly destroying, and how long it would take to build them again. In the desert, everything seems closer than it is. With nothing but creosote bushes, desert shrubs and the occasional joshua tree, distance doesn't really register. What you perceive seems to be largely based on where you stand on the optimism-pessimism spectrum. The train tracks off in the distance might take an hour to walk to. Or it might take two. But it didn’t much matter either way. When your bus is broken down indefinitely on the side of the road, time doesn't register much either. So here we all were, two dozen of us, getting to know each other in the desert and passing time as best we could. Drinking, smoking, throwing a frisbee, or just inventing our own pastimes.

Another traveling with our group, a goateed former Mormon flanked by two Czech girls walked towards us from the directtion of the tracks. As they approached, he waved, and we stopped. "We just got back from the tracks, take a look at these.” He pulled out a half dozen barely recognizable coins from his pocket. They reflected little distorted ovals in his dark sunglasses “I put all the change in my pockets on the tracks. Look, I tried to make this one sandwich into the other".
We passed the ex-coins around the five of us. A former nickel landed in my palm; Thomas Jefferson's face was warped and flattened, and an imprint of Lincoln's profile intruded into the back of his head. "That's awesome", I said; and I meant it. I turned the mangled disc over in my palm, admiring the handiwork of the locomotive. Monticello was completely leveled. "That's probably the most productive thing anybody's done here today". I meant that too.

My earliest memories of the desert come from driving across the state to visit the relatives during summer vacation. I remember the rolling, dusty hills covered in muted grey-green bushes, and I was awed, every single time, by the cliffs and gorges. The way you could see the time marked so clearly on the cliff faces in the erosion patterns left an impression on me. It was like God was playing with an open hand for a change. It's such a vivid depiction of the passing of glacially slow, powerful events, that you're forced to consider what geologic time really is, and where you stand in it. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify your own feelings of self-importance, but pretty soon you forget about all of that stuff anyway. You realize we’re all just tourists passing through this world. Sitting around, doing what we do, and waiting around for our ride out.