by Tim Cahill
That is what Paul and I did for two more days: we played chicken with the glacier while our pals, the seals, urged us on with silly smiles and blubbery good humor.
Dusk. The last night, camped at Wolf Point. I sat out on a high promontory, overlooking the sea on one side and a valley that extends back into the Fairweathers on another. Above, the sky was pulsing with pale green arcs and shimmering curtains. The Innuit people call the aurora borealis the “spirit lights.” They dance over the new land and the living sea, these spirit lights, glowing with the vast, pale mysteries of life and death. In the valley below, a moose called; she sounded like a cow, lost and lowing. Nearby, wolves yipped and howled, planning the hunt.
To my left, out in the inlet, I heard the breathing of the killer whales as they moved back down the inlet. Some seals had surely died, just as the moose might die that night. In the far distance, there was the faint thunder of Shaw-whad-seet’s children, of the new land being born.
Manifest Destiny
The New Desert,
an Old Woman
In the soft, cool light of the deserts false dawn, before the sun rises high enough in the sky to batter the land and stun all sentient life into silence, unseen coyotes, separated by half a mile of sage and sand, celebrate the night’s hunt. It is a harmony as joyous as birdsong.
Listen:
A series of high-pitched yips from the foothills to the east: This one is saying he’s eaten his fill of gecko lizard.
In the distance to the west, near the dry expanse of what was once Owens Lake, an answering call: I’ve dug successfully for the kangaroo rat.
To the north now, and the south, other coyotes join in the symphony, and the yips build into howls and answering howls so that, just for the moment of false dawn, when there is light without merciless heat, the desert is alive with the music of the hunt.
A gray fox moves through the night-cooled gravel and sand, stalking one last living tidbit. The top branches of the sage shine silver, as under a full moon, and the fox pounces, agile as a domestic cat. It has, perhaps, caught one of those lizards we call horned toads: ancient dinosaurs with small, slowly blinking black eyes that make them seem indifferent to the sun and the passage of millennia. The back-slanting horns behind the animal’s neck, the unicorn scale on its head, all make the horned toad a difficult meal for the Panamint rattler, a nocturnal hunter in the heat of summer. The lizard’s horns, however, are no defense against the jaws of a fox.
The sun, like a silent eruption, sets fire to the sky. In the still prism of desert air, slanting light is broken so that it scatters over the land: Sage and sand stand red and orange under the dawn. Liquid crimson, bright as rose petals, spills down over the wrinkled brown skin of nearby mountains, defining tortured ridges and filling high canyons with blood.
To the west, rising in baroque granite spires ten thousand feet above the valley floor, are the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. To the east, and soaring nearly as high, are the less celebrated Inyo and White ranges. The mountains catch the dawn and throw it down onto the floor of the desert that lies below them.
All these mountains should surely drain into the valley, but there is no water in this desert, only the baking mineral residue of what was once Owens Lake. It covers one hundred square miles, this great salt flat that has been stolen by the sun and drained by man. In the central depth of the flats, there is a hint of green—false water—rimmed with the chemical red that will, over the next few months, eat the green and fill the lake. Then, later still, the dry lake bed will revert to salt white. Whirling gusts of wind, dust devils, will lift a thin layer of sodium carbonate off the flats and take it dancing over the lake bed, take it spinning and whirling out into the world of sage and sand. But there is no wind in the desert dawn this day, and the lake lies red-rimmed, green and white under brown, bleeding hills.
There is a sense, at dawn, of a time and place without man, like an unexplored planet under a strange red star.
I was walking down out of a canyon to the east, stepping over narrow gullies and dipping down into flash-flood-carved washes on the desert floor. It was still cool, and I was making good time over sand and gravel as the dawn passed over a sea of sage in waves of pastel light. I was racing the heat of day, hurrying toward shelter at the shore of Owens Lake, where there is a town called Keeler.
Keeler was still two hours away, a dark semicircle on the shore of the salt flat. It was built in the late 1870s, when the mine called Cerro Gordo—Fat Hill—yielded a bonanza of silver and Owens Lake was thirty feet deep with water. The mine, five thousand feet above Keeler, on Buena Vista mountain, drew men and women from the depleted gold fields of Northern California and Montana.
In those days, more than a century ago, the silver bullion was loaded onto steamships that crossed Owens Lake and freighted, by mule team, to Los Angeles. Cerro Gordo produced so much silver in its first years of production that millions of dollars worth of it was stacked in bars on the docks of Owens Lake, awaiting shipment. Men, seeking shelter from the sun, built walls of silver and draped canvas over them: men, on the docks of a mineral lake, living in mazes of silver.
It was the incredible wealth dug out of the hills above the Owens Valley that built Los Angeles, just as ore from the Comstock Lode had built San Francisco.
The mine was played out in less than a decade, but then zinc was discovered in 1879, and Keeler was founded on the shore of the lake, at the base of the mountain, to serve the new influx of miners. In 1907, an aerial tramway was built to haul ore down the hill in buckets. It is said that drunken miners, down in Keeler on a toot, hitched rides back up to Cerro Gordo in ore buckets. According to legend, some of them stood up to measure their progress and had their heads lopped off at the tramway towers. There are skulls, say the old-timers, to be found on the hillside along the path of the old tramway.
Cerro Gordo was the worlds major source of high-grade zinc, and Los Angeles, booming with wealth from silver and zinc, found itself unable to provide water for a growing population. It was then, just after the turn of the century, that civic leaders in the City of Angels hatched a plan to divert water from the Owens Valley to the Southern California coast. Land and riparian rights were bought and paid for, often under shady circumstances, and an aqueduct was constructed. Three-quarters of a century later, orbiting astronauts would say that the California aqueduct was the only man-made object visible on the face of the earth.
Los Angeles assured the ranchers of Owens Valley that it wanted only enough water to quench its thirst, but the thirst was insatiable. By 1924 Owens Lake was virtually dry. The farmers and ranchers of Owens Valley, whose produce had once fed the miners of Cerro Gordo—whose work, in turn, built Los Angeles—were driven from their land by man-made drought. Several times, in the 1920s, “Valleyites” attempted to blow up the aqueduct that was draining away their lives. They failed, and land that had once supported orchards was claimed by the desert. Mesquite and sage grew where cattle had once grazed in grass up to their bellies.
The bleakest part of the new desert lay on the western edge of the dry lake, surrounding the old town of Keeler. It is not a ghost town, not yet. Though the road sign claims a population of fifty, there are closer to seventy people living in Keeler today. Folks live in trailers or in homes separated from one another by rows of abandoned ramshackle houses. Keeler is a good, cheap place to buy land and retire in a self-created oasis of lawn and flowers. Some people come to escape something—better not ask what—and others live in Keeler because they are poor and a welfare check lasts longer on the shores of a dry lake than it does in Bakersfield. There are some good artists who live cheaply in Keeler, and their creations are the heart of a dying town.
The soul of Keeler, though, is a woman named “just Annie,” of Annie’s Keeler Market. It is a small grocery, and it looks more like a home than a store. You have to go around back, to the house behind the store, and knock on the door to get Annie to open up for you. She has lived on the shores of Ow
ens Lake since the 1930s, and nothing much surprises her anymore, least of all a large, sweating man carrying a backpack who wants a raspberry Popsicle with a cold beer chaser.
Annie’s store doesn’t pay for itself as it once did. The market is really a community service, and though the signs inside say NO CREDIT and DON’T ASK, Annie will generally carry a tab.
For a stranger stumbling in out of the desert heat, Annie has a shower in the back and a washing machine to clean the desert grime off his clothes. In back of the grocery, alongside the house, there is a shady area with several picnic tables, some overstuffed chairs, and a sofa. It is a place for the people of Keeler to meet after work, to drink a beer or a soda and wait for the day to cool into night.
Annie can remember when there was water up to the shores of Keeler. That was back when she first came here, in the 1930s, though the history books say the lake was drained by 1924. Annie is adamant: She recalls mail boats heading south to Olancha.
When what was left of the mines finally closed, when the lake died, Keeler began its slow slide into history. Oh, there was a time when Annie’s husband was alive and people from Lone Pine, fifteen miles away, drove to Keeler to buy Annie’s meat. Then the desert, like an enemy, closed in around Keeler. People gave up on it, moved away.
Some ecologists argue that the water that might have made Keeler and the Owens Valley fertile was, in truth, best sent to Los Angeles. They say that the uninhabitable desolation of the valley is what saved its wildlife and provided a place for man to live apart from man, if only for a while. Tourism, not agriculture, provides aliving for people elsewhere in the Owens Valley. With water, the valley might have become a chaos of tract homes.
There are no tract homes near Keeler, and no tourists to speak of. People like Annie, who watched the lake go dry, feel cheated, though she doesn’t address the question directly. She says she hates the “soda ash” that blows off the lake in a high wind. It gets into the house and dirties wall and floors. Just recently, she had to repaint the kitchen. Her late husband’s fishing hat had hung beside the refrigerator for years, and she had to take it down, for the first time since he died, to repaint. Because of the soda ash. Blowing in off a lake that has been flushed down the toilets of Los Angeles.
Annie is willing to pose for a picture, but she’d like her prize toy poodle in the photo, too. “Jump up, Fifi,” Annie says, patting her lap. “You’re a good girl, yes you are. You’re all Annie has left now, aren’t you?”
She scratches the little dog behind the ears. “Fifi’s all Annie has left, yes she is.…”
Out beyond Annie’s Keeler Market, in the cool indigo of a gathering desert night, a coyote calls. In a land bereft of tract homes and taco stands, a gray fox moves like mercury through the sage.
World-Class Attractions
It is said that as a somewhat deflated George Armstrong Custer lay bleeding in the Montana dirt at the Little Big Horn, he turned his glazed and dimming eyes east and said, “At least we won’t have to go back through South Dakota.”
These days, Custer might actually enjoy a trip through South Dakota. He could stop at the Badlands and battle the Winnebagos for a look at Mount Rushmore. He could hardly fail to resist those several hundred signs commanding him to visit Wall Drug (TURN WHERE YOU SEE THE 80-FOOT DINOSAUR). Out in eastern South Dakota, in Mitchell, Custer would marvel at the “World’s Only Corn Palace,” a great one-block square building decorated entirely with colored corncobs. Although it is true that the Incas fashioned replicas of cornstalks out of pure gold, it took South Dakotans to come up with the idea of decorating the outside of a building with corncobs. When I was there last Thanksgiving, birds were feeding on the colored corn face of a mammoth astronaut.
Interstate 90 through South Dakota is, indeed, a paradise of kitsch. By comparison, the more northerly route across the country, I-94 through North Dakota, is bleak, barren, almost entirely lacking in roadside attractions. Those the state does have—like Route 46, the world’s straightest road, 121 miles without a curve—seem to emphasize the drawbacks of driving through it.
Even people who love North Dakota end up damning it with faint praise. Teddy Roosevelt arrived there in 1883, at the age of twenty-five, a spindly young fellow wearing thick eyeglasses. The trip west toughened Roosevelt, and after he demolished a local bully in a fair fight, he won the fearsome nickname Old Four Eyes, which is what all the really tough guys in North Dakota are called. North Dakota, Roosevelt wrote, “has a desolate, grim beauty that has a curious fascination for me.” The adjectives here tell the story: grim … desolate … curious.
Recently, I drove through North Dakota on the way to Wisconsin to visit my parents. I hadn’t been in the state for more than ten years and was delighted to discover that there is now a genuine tourist attraction along I-94. Just outside the National Grasslands, I was amazed to see, in the distance, a huge cow standing on a ridge. This cow was at least five miles away, and it dwarfed all the other cows that were standing around in little groups talking about the best way to get out of North Dakota.
At eighty miles an hour, which is the only way to drive through North Dakota, you stare at that big cow for quite some time before you get to the sign saying that you have been looking at the world’s largest Holstein cow. There is a turnoff and an arrow. You can drive right up to the world’s largest Holstein cow. My guess, having missed the turnoff, is that the cow was fashioned from ferroconcrete. Clustered about its hooves were a cafe, a gas station, and perhaps a motel. All else was utter desolation.
I doubt if the businesses under the cow prosper. By the time you get to the sign showing you where to turn off to see the world’s largest Holstein cow, you’ve pretty much already seen it. That brings up the question of the North Dakota mind, which my fellow Montanans do not hold in high regard.
While Montanans are ranchers, NoDaks are farmers: stolid, respectable, churchgoing folk who have difficulty mastering the mechanical intricacies of the dinner table and who can be spotted by the tiny fork-caused craters in their foreheads. Montanans tell NoDak jokes—you can always get a one-armed NoDak out of a tree simply by waving at him—and NoDaks invariably respond with polite bewilderment.
I suppose it is unfair to attribute feeblemindedness to an entire state upon the evidence of one dim-bulb roadside attraction. People from Wisconsin, where I grew up, are known to be beautiful, sexy, and wonderfully intelligent, yet the state has gone to idiotic lengths to publicize a fact that most people already know, namely that cheese is made there. I am thinking specifically of the twelve-foot-high sculpture of a rat named Igor outside the Fennimore cheese factory in Fennimore, Wisconsin. Igor has four feet, is gray with blue eyes, and has whiskers erupting from its snout. Igor appears to be gnawing a huge piece of swiss cheese.
Large as Igor’s cheese may be, it is not the world’s largest cheese sculpture. The world’s largest cheese, indeed the alleged “Largest Cheese in the History of Mankind,” is located in Neillsville, Wisconsin. The seventeen-ton cheddar is enclosed in a semitrailer with one glass side for viewing. Jane and Michael Stern, in their book Amazing America, unraveled the secret of this monolithic cheese. “We peered closely at the cheese and thought it looked pretty unappetizing, like a block of compressed burlap. We looked closer at the fact sheet: ‘This cheese was eaten in 1965, at a cheese convention.’ ” The Sterns, sticklers for accuracy, suggest a more honest appellation for the thing in the glass truck: “The Largest Piece of Cheeselike Burlap in the History of Mankind.”
Out there in Neillsville, next to the truck containing the ersatz cheese, is an attraction that would astound all of North Dakota. It is “Chatty Belle, the World’s Largest Talking Cow.” Chatty Belle is nowhere near as large as the world’s largest cow, but Chatty will, at the touch of a button, tell you about a variety of dairy products. (The NoDak Holstein is, predictably, entirely mute.)
Now, what I suggest is that North Dakota engineers—who have already built the tallest structure known to man
, the 2,063-foot-high KTHI-TV tower—install a bank of Woodstock-like speakers in the world’s largest Holstein, thereby wresting the locution crown from Chatty Belle as well.
The problem here is just what exactly the new world’s largest talking Holstein should say. It could, perhaps, threaten tourists who refuse to turn in to the cafe. This approach might work in Nevada, but NoDaks are nothing if not polite, and I imagine they wouldn’t want to threaten interstate travelers. Maybe the cow should say clever things; maybe it should have a script full of aphorisms and bons mots. Of course, the NoDaks would have to hire a Montanan to write such a script. I could do it myself.
I’d have a photoelectric sensing device atop the rise so that even before you could say, “Hey, what’s that up there on the ridge?” a great godlike voice would shake the land: “Hi, I’m Igor the Rat.”
This single sentence would, in one fell swoop, establish an attraction any American family should want to see: “The Largest Talking Holstein Cow That Thinks It’s a Gray 12-Foot-High Fiberglass Rat Outside of a Cheese Factory in Fennimore, Wisconsin, in the History of Mankind.”
This is the sort of roadside attraction North Dakotans can point to with pride; then again, maybe not. It takes an awful lot of them to screw in a light bulb.
Fire and Brimstone
on the Volcano Watch
On Friday, March 27, Mount St. Helens, a volcanic mountain in the state of Washington, erupted, spewing forth a plume of steam and gas and ash to a height of some four miles.