On the Amargosa River
Posted: 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.
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.