Quiet exists even deep in the city, set to whir of appliance or rhythmic wash of nearby thoroughfare, but silence is uncompromised. On a two-track rut from a another one from a ranch road at the end of a thick, bright dust plume lies Flook Lake playa in upper nether Oregon. When I tried it, pronghorn antelope raced me out of boredom, and it was there I became aware of a noise problem. Steens Mountain and its July snow cap sat unaware some sixty miles east of ringing ears, and I was no match for silence, given past sins. Perhaps the playa would show mercy and return the wind.
I never imagined a peace so tinged in witness... better to focus on its visual: inexhaustible horizon. Dry air will be along to stir sheets of heat and drown out skull bound noise. In time. I'm not fit to hear silence, but I might catch a moment in the flow, or a still eye amidst perpetual wind scour on open rock that seems too exposed or indeterminate to entertain stillness, except by the moment, wherein open scale is more open to suggestion. Witness Death Valley from Chloride cliff; the realm's first mining camp, though obscure. Nothing is known of James McKay, whose grave lies in a fold beneath a ridge from which views are just as spectacularly unknown.
When I tried it I saw a salt streaked underworld, and the view shrank as wind ceased, which is rare in springtime. Wind's ceaseless roar might have enforced the scale of it from a naked mountaintop but wind was quiet; spared silence only by temporary roar of breathing. Each ledge fell to ten others, and I wondered why that naked mountaintop was calm. Chocolate salt flowed around dark chocolate flecks, close at hand and terminally distant, and lazy, marbled slopes fell into an indeterminate matrix of pause in a land of plenty.
view from Chloride cliff... out of range...
