The valley here runs south to north. At sunset the shadow of the Clark and Ivanpah mountains creeps across the valley floor, a second hand marking the time in yards. From where I sit, a mile up the washed-out road to the Lucy Grays, I watch the shadow advance.
It is an odd perspective. From up here, two-thirds of the way up the east side of the valley and six miles from the dry lake, the shadow seems abrupt: a distinct terminator between sunlit and shadowed land. When the shadow arrives in a few minutes, though, it is hard to tell just when it begins. Up close, the line between shadow and light is near-impossible to pin down. I am sitting in full sun, and then after some time I notice that the sun is not quite so bright. A quarter of the sun’s disk has dropped behind the ridge, then half, but what remains above still shines brightly. It seems as though the sun will never set, Zeno’s tortoise there in the sky moving half the distance between it and the ridgeline, then half the remainder, then half of what’s left after that.
A sudden breeze raises the skin on the back of my neck. The sun is now a brilliant pinpoint atop Clark Mountain. The sun is now fully behind Clark Mountain, but the sky is still brilliant where the sun was a moment ago. I am fully in the mountain’s shade here, the light from the sky alone enough to cast my shadow within the shadow.
A man confronting loss and mid-life crisis retreats to the desert to work, to confront his demons: my stay in this valley has been predictable, has been clichéd. It has been five months since I moved into this little house beside the railroad tracks, and what I expected to get out of my time here I no longer remember. I have written, though not enough. I have hiked the hills and creosote flats here, though not enough. I have slept under the stars, but nowhere even close to enough.
I have spent three consecutive summer days without leaving the house, turned inward and grieving. I’ve trudged eight miles in triple-digit temperatures and laughed at my own giddiness. I have spent a month sleeping in three-hour shifts on the floor beneath the ceiling fan. I have argued on the phone and cursed the passing trains for drowning out words I didn’t want to hear. I have been cruel to people I’ve loved half my life. I have found glimmers of solace in old friendships. I have exulted in this valley and resented its remoteness. I have spent night after night trying to read with moths and flies and stingless wasps covering each illuminated page. I have been jolted out of sleep by those same insects as they land on my eyelids in the dark. I have watched a hundred sunsets, coming earlier and earlier each day.
I have watched the thunderstorms scud across the valley below me, smelled the acrid lightning, seen the stripes of renewed green where the storms passed two weeks ago and fed the creosote.
I have learned nothing, aside from a few facts.
These days the nighttime temperature is close to freezing and I huddle thankfully beneath my comforter, but I still have trouble sleeping. My last cup of coffee may have been twelve hours ago, or longer, and yet I lie awake my heart racing, mind running full tilt in its exercise wheel, relaxed but taut. The other night it was coyotes, singing an uncharacteristically prolonged chorus — 45 minutes, as opposed to the usual three. I didn’t know they ever sang that long, and then a passing train silenced them at 3:15 am.
They did not sing last night but I lay awake anyway, wondering at the pull this valley has had on me. I hiked with a friend in Wee Thump yesterday and our conversation played again and again in my mind, her gasp at the pink and backlit clouds as we drove down Big Tiger Wash and back into the Ivanpah Valley. No matter how distracted I have been these last months by my own internal turmoil, coming into the valley that way at sunset has filled my chest. I lose myself in the yucca and the slanted light.
This is my last week in this little house, and I pack my few belongings here a little at a time. I will spend December in Los Angeles with The Raven and after that, it all depends. I will have to make a living, somehow. Easier to find a job in Tucson from Los Angeles than from here. Easier to pitch stories to magazines from, well, just about anywhere. It takes me five minutes to upload five hundred words, from here, and sometimes it takes two or three tries.
It’s a strange thing. I spent my first months here enmired in leaving, aslog in my past’s tar pits. The last few weeks my eyes have been pointed forward, though I still track asphaltum on the kitchen floor. At some point in the last five months I went from shadow into dim sunlight, but I’ll be damned if I can point out when.
perhaps watching paint dry is the profoundest act humanly possible
It may not be something you can see or feel, but you sound a whole lot better than you did a year ago. I’m grateful for that.
A thought provoking text…I will come back to read it and read it again as you describe the combined stillness and motion of being alive. Thank you.