Eating Stone (27 page)

Narrative and symbolism, repeated endlessly on the basalt fissures of the Cosos, gave entry to the supernatural world, wherein lay powers over the natural. The record on the rock face invested the visions with great potency. A weather doctor dreams. A spirit helper dies. The rain comes.

Near the base of the cliff, a rock artist laboriously etched two rams in side profile. Instead of curling back from the forehead as real horns do, the rams’ horns face front, forming the stylized
double arc of a bird in flight. It looks as if the rams are wearing their horns sideways. From nose to tail, the boat-shaped body of the larger ram is longer than my outstretched arms. His rack could fit on my head and break my skinny little neck with its weight.

In these canyons, the sheep-figure styles bear iconic similarities, but the details never seem to repeat themselves. A ram is drawn with reversed horns, as if a strong tailwind had blown his coiffure forward over his eyes. Several sheep have inner sheep: a smaller figure incised inside their bodies. One sheep mounts another. A herd of rams runs across an outcrop, their legs as long and gangly as a giraffe's. An anthropomorph with ear pendants faces a ram that appears to be decapitated.

Among the figures at our lunch spot are sheep with two heads, one on each end of a single body, so that the direction of the run could be either way, to the left or right, like a Chinese pull toy. A fat sheep on its hind legs leaps up toward a deep crack that is guarded by one of those wily black lizards.

At the top of the cliff, four bighorns are tiered on a standalone frieze with breathtaking grace. The next thing above them is the vast Mojave Desert sky, and that is where they seem to be headed: up and over the rim, out of sight. Near this cliff, I feel as if I am animal-watching, an ever imperfect witness to expressions of unfathomable imaginative depth.

We hike out of the black rock narrows and into the green swales of treeless uplands. A few Numic meals—black-tailed jackrabbits—hop away from our path. The sun has grown hotter. The jets have returned to their lairs and it is safe for Ken to let me out of here. We might just make it out of the wilderness alive.

On the crown of a rise, we stop for a rest and a knee-buckling view. The day feels fluid, the season on the cusp of summer's
scorching. What more could a person want than a spring day in the desert with red mariposas, petroglyphs, and a physicist?

To the north lies the glorious valley of the Owens and the smooth blond backs of the Inyo Mountains. To the south, the creosote flats and gypsum basin, where inward-flowing waters vanish. To the west, the silvery blue granite scarp of the Sierra Nevada.

To the east recede pale, silky cutout layers of basin and range, no end to the rhythm, the burnt-salt hole of Death Valley hidden amid the folds, lower than the sea. The mountains above Death Valley hold the region's scant remaining red-blooded desert bighorns, bands that survive the fiercest heat, living on ghost water.

Around here, the locals say that the wind begins at the foot of the Cosos. As everyone knows, weather comes from the west and southwest. The storms that build behind the Sierra carry weight and intent. The storms need to be lured over the dry basins, tricked out of the rain shadow. What better place to call them than from these heights?

I put the Cosos behind me and head east toward southern Utah, driving across space that all but the most dust-gagged grouch would call a void. It is space so immense, you cannot actually see it, at least not with the part of your brain that copes by dwelling in the middle distance, the safest mental quarter for surviving the everyday crush of towns and cities. Out here in the Great Basin, there is no middle, only the farthest horizon and the minute details of a sagebrush leaf or a grain of sand a few inches from your eyes.

Before I crossed the California-Nevada border, I had taken a rough back road to a rib of wrinkled mountains near Death Valley National Park. Death Valley's herd of about three hundred desert bighorns uses both flanks of this range, oblivious to the political differences in their terrain: protected habitat on the national park side, greater perils of human incursion on the other. I entered as one of the invasive projectiles. In the seven hundred miles between the Sierra and home, there were not many places with bighorn sheep. In the millions of acres around me, the locals could be anywhere.

I chose one drainage among dozens and drove partway up the bajada that skirted the base of the mountains, stopped, and parked. I walked for five minutes, glassed a cliff, spotted nine ewes. What was I, some kind of sheep magnet?

The ewes had stocky bodies and thick necks. They looked as pale as ghosts. Compared to that of the sheep of home, their pelage was a lighter gray, the rump patch less distinct. Appearance varies by geographical area and the homeland gene pool.

These ewes showed me features that seemed to arise from their place. I watched them for a while. And what they did, mostly, was bury their noses in wildflowers.

Back on the highway, heading east, the windshield reverie turns to the biology of local adaptations and a less esoteric sub-tickle about the need to find a telephone somewhere after the next hundred empty miles.

Take, for example, local color. At home in the redrock canyons of the Colorado Plateau, the side-blotched lizards have buff-colored backs with a hint of rose. They live in a buff-rose world. The charcoal-colored lizards that I saw in the Cosos camouflaged themselves against the dark basalt. In the white sand playas of New Mexico, the bleached earless lizard evolved a white coloration to blend with the snow-white gypsum crystals beneath its feet.

In their dry, unpredictable environment, the four subspecies of desert bighorn favor a metabolism that accommodates drought. They have smaller bodies and shorter legs than their northern cousins. Their horns are larger, a feature that is believed to perform a thermoregulatory function in extreme heat.

These creatures become who they are by adapting to a particular geography and biotic condition. They are idiosyncratic and local. They are nature's specialists. If their populations are small or confined to remnant habitat, or if they depend on a precarious niche or food source, the risk of extinction can intensify.

A changing world has instead favored the generalists, the animals that adapt, often aggressively (think of coyotes and catfish), to the presence and behavior of millions of human beings. As robust competitors, the generalists often displace the native species, which shrink in numbers, lose genetic vigor, and become more or less captive on small refugia. The generalists use us, live at our fringes, or move in among us. Wildlife is gone, a cynic might say. We now live amid the feral.

The desert bighorns’ intractable faith to their homelands seems
both to save and to doom them. Perhaps they would fare better if they were not so quirky and perishable, if they were not so bloody local, if they were not so “inconveniently” themselves.

I carry my shrieky sarcasm down the Nevada highway, aiming the truck east at a cross-grain to the north-south basin and range rhythm. Somewhere out there is a telephone.

In a press of culture that lurches toward the numbing conformity of a universal (call it the species Homo sapiens consumerii), there is less room for local peculiarities and colors. Weather becomes not an adventure but an impertinence. You no longer know where the rain comes from. Everything looks the same. You lose the safe places and the foreboding niches. A Petco now sits over the lip of the arroyo where, according to the old folks, the spooks and skinwalkers lived. The diner with that edgy menu now has an espresso machine from Italy.

Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.

There comes a time in a woman's life when she is quite relieved not to be smart anymore, when she surrenders a certain cognitive alertness and leaves life's irksome details to others. She conveys an aura of lofty preoccupation, as if she were on the brink of solving the world's most profound philosophical dilemma. Meanwhile, she is actually … well, she is not wise, or cosmic, or visionary. She is simply spaced-out. Such absentmindedness does not lend itself to trouble unless one happens to be driving across Nevada.

The long, lonely road rises and falls in a breathing rhythm of block faults, of dark mountains and pale valleys. Ascent, summit, descent. The bright sun floods the highway with a fierce gold light. For miles and miles, I encounter no other vehicles. Each empty valley gives way to seductive fantasy: Maybe I'll live here, I think. Or there. Maybe here.

Somewhere in a glorious eternity of sky and sagebrush, I pull over at a lone roadside outpost to make my phone call at last. Either there is no sign at the store or, daydreaming and road-numb, I miss it. The blockish red building is obviously commercial. It is a place that reeks of copper-wire communications technology—a pay phone, maybe a pay phone that has yet to be gut-shot or ripped out of the wall by angry losers like me who don't own cell phones.

The door sticks. I push hard and it flings open with a loud crash, my body a backlit spaghetti-Western silhouette standing beneath the transom.

There is a bar. There are women who are not dressed for cool weather. They glare at me as if I were about the twenty-eighth extraterrestrial to drop by that day, like when was it ever going to end, Nevada being a state that could really grow sick and tired of space aliens. I wonder if there is a phone. I wonder why six blondes would sit around in a bar in their underwear in the middle of the day.

The bartender speaks with courteous indifference. “We won't sell you a drink,” she announces. “And you're not looking for work, right?”

“I'm looking for a phone,” I say to a wave of eye rolling by my hosts. Business is slow—not exactly rush hour. Lipstick is re-applied. Satin camisoles are flounced with yawny tedium. Everyone is wearing dangerous shoes.

The bartender's bangs are moussed into a stiff crest. She is very athletic-looking in a red kimono the size of a cocktail napkin. It is a cocktail napkin. She figures I am so clueless, so pathetically uncellular, she will, this once, help me out. “Use our phone,” she offers. When she walks over to the end of the bar to pick up a cordless telephone off its cradle, her bangs precede her by three inches.

If a man walks in, I tell myself, I will just pretend I'm the accountant.

When I finish my call, I thank the bartender. A million questions swell inside my head like aerosol foam. I envision a session of candid shoptalk over cups of herbal tea, secrets of the trade revealed, perhaps a comparison of the sexual fetishes of ranch hands versus those of the local road crews. Maybe they could do something with my hair. But I inquire only about the next town.

“Fifty miles up the road,” the bartender replies. “It's flat broke and leaking people. At the rate of one or two families a month, they pack up and move to Vegas.”

With this mantra of the rural desert West, I can commiserate. I know what heat and isolation and wind can do to plans to lead Normal Lives. I know about feuds and how people get cheesed off at each other for about thirty-five years but never remember what the fight was about. How everyone starts to look like the country around them, squinty and restless and wily. Maybe they eat rabbits. Maybe some simply pack up and move away.

The only certainty is the certainty of what they leave behind: thunder in August, heart-crushing love affairs with the light, no money. How warm air rises from the valleys at noon and comes down cool from the high country as the sun goes down. How the ground beneath your feet shapes your muscles. How where you live—the locale—makes you who you are.

I say good-bye to the blondes and I am back on the highway, riding the Great Basin's wide-open swells. I gas up in the leaky town. Not many live here in the first place, and now they are exiting like tumbleweeds with a marketing plan. Las Vegas booms, the fastest-growing city in the West. The more you fill it, the emptier it gets.

Everyone has work to do, I think. Everyone needs a job. If I had been less spaced-out, less enamored of the landscape outside my truck window, I would have missed the one and only time in my roaming life to ever wash up at a bordello. I would have had a lesser picture of Nevada's fluid employment opportunities.