son and heir #9: going west
Last week I went to the American southwest for the first time -- flying into Las Vegas, driving for a few hours around Red Rock, then northeast to Utah, to Dixie National Forest, Cedar Breaks, Kolob Canyons, then back over the border to Nevada, the old mining towns, Great Basin, Cathedral Gorge. Then back to Harry Reid, though I still have yet to see the Strip except from an airplane window. I saw so many new things in such a short time that the images are all superimposed on one another, a stack of translucent memories. Tan mountains draped with a black netting of junipers and Joshua trees; red-orange sandstone jutting out through dusty scrub. Yuccas drooping over the white rocks of a wash, with the sun half an inch above my head and bearing down as if it is trying to absorb me. Looking out over a canyon, my friend explained that this had all once been unfathomably enormous sand dunes. Looking out over another canyon, the sun set behind us; my shadow spread out over the vast rock-face on the distant other side, making scale only a matter of perspective.
At Great Basin, lying back on a wide, flat rock at the campsite, I saw the Milky Way for the first time since I was a child. With lamps on I saw a black sky scattered with white dots; once we turned the lamps off the stars slowly filled my field of vision. My friends and I called out the shooting stars, the last of the Perseids. There were airplanes, too -- Reno to Salt Lake? -- and satellites. The only constellation I recognized was the Big Dipper. Four stars made up a small diamond, and when the north would flicker on, the south would flicker off; when the east would flicker on, the west would flicker off. Driving back to our campsite after sunset, cottontails and jackrabbits had leapt back and forth across the road. They were cannier than the nighthawks, which perched on the double yellow lines and, as the car approached, flitted up towards the headlights. The next morning we went down into Lehman Caves, which was recently discovered to be millions of years older than previously thought. School dances were held there, earlier in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, settlers painted their names and their places of origin onto the ceiling with the charcoal from their candles. A more recent piece of graffiti, overlaying older names, read: SKATEN RINK.
In southwest Utah, we drove down state roads past houses flying Trump 2024 flags, turned onto a dirt road, ascended by foot past rings of brittle grey wood that had been cut down for the sake of fire suppression, up to a hilltop rock formation with a broad overhang under which there were red and yellow pictographs. A humanoid figure with outstretched wings; another figure with a big, heavy head and little lines for limbs. In the natural pockets in the rock, earlier visitors had left shiny, jagged pieces of obsidian or clods of iron. Charred firewood had been discarded in the brush beneath. We could find very little information about the painters. It is possible that some of it is fake. The petroglyphs we saw at Parowan Gap are real: the stories of the Southern Paiute live alongside the block capitals of miners and Mormon settlers. Just down the road, dinosaur tracks have been fossilized in rock visible only if you look through binoculars or climb all the way to the top. I clambered up a few hundred feet of rock, keeping an eye out for snakes coming out from the crevices, then rested in the shade of an overhang and turned back, gathering burrs on my socks and shorts as I half-walked, half-slid down. Lizards lay in the sun; tarantula hawks swung back and forth in the dry, dazzling air.
We went into the slot canyons of Cathedral Gorge at night, with the glow of Vegas on the horizon and the stars filling the rest of the sky. The dust blew through the beam of my headlamp like snow in headlights. We turned sideways to wiggle through the narrow gaps in the rock. One of my friends had a blacklight, illuminating dried-up pools of human piss and more recent dribbles of rodent droppings. I found a little cave I could only just fit into on my hands and knees, and crawled through the sand in the dark until I felt that I might be trapped if I went any further, though the tunnel curved and kept going on to somewhere. I tried to take pictures of my friends and my ageing phone camera turned them into uncannily blurred silhouettes. Edward Abbey hated flashlights, my friend said. At the campsite we built a fire out of juniper wood, smoking our food on the fire-pit grate. Mice skittered around our tents as we slept; moths, shiny-white or dappled brown, clung to the concrete wall of the campsite toilets. Automated sprinklers watered the Russian olives, which are not native to Nevada. In the morning the lizards came out again to find the sun; a park ranger came out to rake the gravel road.
In Pioche, Nevada there is a row at the far end of the cemetery devoted to the graves of Old West miners. None of them died of natural causes. One epitaph, carved into a plank, reads, 'Feared by some, respected by few, detested by others. Shot in the back five times from ambush.' The locals keep the graves decent, commemorating the dead with fake flowers and cowboy boots, even as thorny scrub encroaches. The more recently deceased rest across the chain-link fence, their headstones evenly spaced between mown and watered grass. Some of the fake flowers had blown away; I tucked them back into the cowboy boots. I picked up a discarded bottle of Dr Pepper and a few other scraps of trash, thinking of the rule that you must leave a place better than you found it.
