Nevada envelops you in a sanctity of light and open space, but there's also a barren bleakness to it in places . . . less sand gleam and more rising rock, the same sculpted rock battered and wrought by eternal seasons as in any dry land, though starker, less painted than John Ford movies and rocks found on postcards. Most just call it "the ugly desert," beaten-down brown except for its snow-graced ridges above high sage valleys up north; only the odd saddle bum poet pays any mind to its quiet power.
This bleak terrain reflects in some of its towns, which aren't pretty. Some have a haunted grand hotel left standing from the silver or gold rush glory years, but most are dirty, ramshackle, cluttered with junk and derelict buildings. Some are half ghost towns. And I guess there was also a little bleakness to my drift when I kept kept rolling in great wide zigzag circuits, thousands of miles on ribbons across glow, keeping my distance from gathering clouds of world doom, or when I made those first runs to daylight to heal city wounds real or imagined. Drawn to empty bleakness.
It would be hard to convince anyone otherwise, held to city logic; if you seek desert wastes, you're off the track, one more fugitive gone to the outer bright wastes that were made for your kind; for castoffs, outlaws, poets, misfits, hermits, hippies, seekers, drifters, grifters, survivalists, revivalists, mountain men, prophets with murmuring in their ears, monks out looking for the God silence, prospectors of all stripes out west, hoping arid light will cure them of damp disease.
But there is power in free-roaming vista. Other deserts may run farther, higher or hotter than Nevada, each with their own space and light, but not this interplay of distant rock sculpture and space draped in windswept silence to such immense proportions in all directions, ridge after ridge, each of them far enough to lure me on and close enough to contemplate, and each a powerful entity, bottomless spirit of cosmic birth, depth unknown. These places penetrate you; they bring all that space inside to dwell as a mystical reservoir in reach beneath machinations of mind. These are the outer passages.
More from my old Nevada Notes
Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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