On the Amargosa River

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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mnaz
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On the Amargosa River

Post by mnaz » March 23rd, 2017, 12:56 am

(from 2005)

From Tonopah I turn south again into the great arcs, not ready to give them up, and stop in Beatty, one ridge west of Death Valley, to duck out of roundscape in a motel built in rows of pre-fab mobile home boxes fastened together. I settle in to admire the fake gray wood grain paneling and pink floral bedspread, then after a shot of blended I walk over to Main Street, the old casino-- two stories of spalled plaster and curved wrought-iron fake balconies at each second floor window, like you'd see on Bourbon Street. Across the street is a block of false-front bars and stores, like a Hollywood back-lot set made for old westerns.

At the old casino a few locals finger their machines, but I want an undistracted local point of view, so I cross the street for a beer at a bar with fake timber posts and beams like a mine tunnel-- just me and the owner, thick black moustache, tall and taciturn, a drought of words. So finally I ask him what he thinks about the huge nuclear waste dump that the feds wanted to build near town. "More money and more jobs," he says. And he's probably right. Why not make money packing hot sludge in the desert on the back end of our great fission powers?

Then I remember, I'm on the western edge of the Nevada Test Site; just beyond the first ridge east, a thousand nuclear bombs were set off. Tourists used to watch the tops of mushroom clouds over burnt ridges from Las Vegas hotels. Beatty has lived on the western front of nuclear waste for a long time and not backed down, even worked it into the economy, and there's been no trouble. But I heard it was different on the eastern front: Saint George was not as fortunate, two hundred miles east in the path of hot fallout downwind, and the spikes of killer cancer afterward. They weren't warned. No point in warning.

I walk east from the false-front bars, past motorhomes beside the Amargosa River's trickle, a parched bed of cottonwoods, willow and mesquite crowded by rogue tamarisks. The Amargosa flows all the way to Death Valley, underground mostly, seeping up impossibly in places into hard desert. At the east edge of town are casino hotels with big parking lots for tourists on the eve of their descent into Death Valley.

I decide to stay awhile in Beatty, maybe head into the Bullfrog Hills for a good view of the far side's feathery arc, and try to imagine some scruff prospector on a mule-- old Shorty Harris himself, the guy who started this place-- riding unseen in the glow toward me, toward his big gold find. From the right spot on those slopes you might see old boomtown ruins frame a radiant roundscape beyond like dark Stonehenge piers, or sun rays caught on jagged tops of wasted walls in charcoal shadows, depending on the angle. Boom to bust in a decade.

~~~~~~
Late next morning I walk to the town library, a few blocks past Main Street, housed in a geodesic dome with little square wing additions sprouting out, and I pass the familiar spread-out hodgepodge of a desert town, the random trailers, campers, satellite dishes, junk cars, junk piles, tires, propane tanks, vacant shacks and occasional proper house with a cactus garden and lawn ornaments without a lawn, all crouched below mineral-tinged hills, hunkered down, awaiting the first hundred degree day sometime in mid-spring.

Inside the dome library, instead of searching the racks I sit behind a computer screen again-- a strange recent habit. Yet everything is there: food, war, wisdom, propaganda, poetry-- even poetry, I'm reading poetry on a computer screen for godssake, great new streams pouring in from all corners-- a few tight rhythms of the old empires, but mostly the wailing aftermath of cities a few complicated ridges past the ends of cowboy deserts. It's always the same: love and war, and what do they have to do with rock? Only difference is, now you just hit a button: "755,257 results, time: 0.18 seconds". Even the far-out desert is wired into great districts of machines, whole warehouses of them hooked together in data lust. A lot of heat comes off those arrays; it could be dangerous.

Back on my shade porch I mix a cranberry-vodka in that hour of quickening between bright clarity and blinding noon as heat starts to waft-- the best time of desert. I don't hear the Amargosa toads now, but when I first got here they were croaking in thin, overlapping choruses, celebrating a trickle; it must have rained upstream. Did Shorty the gold seeker on a mule also hear the toads when he got here? Did he really name the Bullfrog Hills when he found gold in a bullfrog-like rock? Or were the Amargosa toads croaking in his head when he saw that rock, whatever it looked like?

The toads are silent now; does the Amargosa still seep? That strange Ice Age remnant, where the pioneers once hunted, gathered and made sharp points from quartz long before Fremont, Carson, Young and the others with map and conquer dreams. I think of the surreal springs downstream, incongruous life in desolation, that elusive river in a desolate place, foretold by seers for all this time. The desert works in mysterious ways; you dig for water, yet sometimes it miraculously seeps out of the wastes.

I remember a naysayer who sneaked onto late-night TV in the cut-rate room I splurged on last time in Las Vegas, mumbling about "unsustainable groundwater pumping"-- a rare gap in the escapist program. But he was misguided. No limits whatsoever apply in Vegas-- first rule of the universe. Keep pumping . . . Then I realize, I'm too close again; if my orbit gets any shallower, Vegas could suck me in out of space again.

On the second night in Beatty I quaff a couple beers at the fake mine tunnel bar, and think about which way to go. Where can I go? South, and I'm pulled out of my orbit. East, and I might hit the Armageddon plains, if I make it that far. West, and I might fall into Death Valley. No, it will have to be north. I'll give up the roundscape for now, the best parts of it, back into the heartland.

Pungent diesel fumes come through the open door as a semi rumbles up to the stop sign, huffs and turns north to grind through a thousand gears toward some metropolis at the far side of star and sage seaways, another relentless rig on the lines and points, separated from its goal by the spaces between, my destination. Tomorrow I'll follow the rig but never catch it; they always outrun you, there and back; they run and run and chew up continents; you could have a two-state head start but it wouldn't matter.

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justwalt
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Location: location infers reality... reality is still a theory

Re: On the Amargosa River

Post by justwalt » April 9th, 2017, 4:22 pm

Well this helps to confirm my thoughts of late, of which I will
start writing about tonight...

that universal door that opens now and again,
I have to go through it soon... on the other side,
is the northern Arizonia deserts and canyons.

A nice sabbatical for a few months... my excuse.

Nice reporting
and thanks
many is a word

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mnaz
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Re: On the Amargosa River

Post by mnaz » April 9th, 2017, 6:32 pm

Thanks Walt. A land of endless inspiration . . . I'll be traveling that way pretty soon; who knows? maybe we'll pass each other on one of those red rock roads to the horizon.

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justwalt
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Joined: January 28th, 2009, 4:18 pm
Location: location infers reality... reality is still a theory

Re: On the Amargosa River

Post by justwalt » April 9th, 2017, 7:33 pm

I see a lot of the Navajo res is closed to hikers and campers due to
a lack of standard respect for residential areas and littering.

There's plenty of off-res open land, but I'm looking for a rock to
crawl under, a cliff, a cave... it doesn't have to look pretty,
I just need some alone-time.

Going to spend this spring and summer preparing, pushing up the
vitamins and minerals, muscling-up the legs and test some equipment.

Course, there's a couple other states up in that corner that I haven't
seen yet... if I finished that area, it leaves only three states left That I missed.
many is a word

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mnaz
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Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: On the Amargosa River

Post by mnaz » April 10th, 2017, 8:55 am

I've always liked Nevada. It has the most space and dirt tracks and fewest fences that I've seen (although that has changed for the worse in the last 15 years, with the up-surge in big strip-mining). But I've "dug" all the S-W deserts, even into the W. Texas cattle plains (which started to get too far east) . . .

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justwalt
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Joined: January 28th, 2009, 4:18 pm
Location: location infers reality... reality is still a theory

Re: On the Amargosa River

Post by justwalt » April 10th, 2017, 11:00 pm

I skipped through Vegas In the middle of the night... nothing there for me,
then or now. And wow, google earth shows Nevada all torn up.

I've been looking at the whole SW, all the deserts, or any wide expanse of
nothingness... tough to find these days. Every time I look all I see are more
and more roads, sand and paved. I remember...I REMEMBER, how this land
looked forty years ago... Just can't believe it now, glad I'm old.

I'll definatelt hit ya up man, before I head out. Told a friend about my plans
and he thinks we should both hop the bikes and ride out, visit a few friends
along the way... that'll be a stop in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles and I guess
Oregon, and where you're at...

I really want some isolation, but riding to all these places adds up to about
6,000 miles. That long in the saddle might do it for me... driving or riding,
that's when I meditate.

Yeah, stay alive a while, l'll shoot for September-October-ish

Peace
many is a word

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