Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  An arrow on the billboard points down to a little home beneath; it wears its own sign, “Adult Entertainment Information.” Of course I brake to a stop. A five-second examination of my soul finds it somewhat south of its usual location, but still committed to my wife.

  Inside, a lady with a French poodle greets me. Pert. Nice eyes. But she’s at least sixty, raising the possibility that the prostitutes have joined the Pipefitters Union Local 211 and this lady has seniority. She’s playing a crossword while the TV shows Kabul burning.

  “Is there something you need?”

  Suddenly shy, I mumble that I’m just passing through.

  “Here’s our souvenirs and novelties.”

  A glass case with dusty coasters and Venus bumper stickers. That’s it?

  “That’s it.”

  I slip out of town at dusk, never giving Pahrump a chance. Riding west, I look for the other Venus, but fail to find her light. I do find an arroyo to call my own. The horizon is humped with hills, but not until the light of morning do I discover that they’re built of cruel limestone, almost but not quite black.

  So long as I avoid the many-headed barrel cactus with hooked red spines, it’s an easy walk up the closest knoll to scan the coming terrain: more hills, another playa, and a sweeping rise to a fretted ridge that may be the rim of Death Valley. I jog back to camp and read the Pahrump Valley Times over coffee and a pastry released from a foil packet. The newspaper I burn after breakfast, not wishing to carry an extra ounce over the pass in the Funeral Mountains. Which, I see on the map, isn’t far from Hell’s Gate and Coffin Peak.

  The usual hints: gloom ahead. On the back page of my journal, under the heading “Cheering Descriptions of Death Valley,” I’ve collected the impressions of others over the past century. Pit of Horrors. Creator’s Dumping Place. The Smoking Furnace. Jaws of Death. More recently, Ken Kesey’s Demon Box included a sweet little poem that goes:Oh, Molly, my Death Valley dolly,

  You’re gone, by golly, you’re dead.

  Where the scorpions hide

  and the sidewinders slide

  You lie in your alkali bed.

  Yet it’s not death calling this morning but the sweet trill of the phainopepla, a silky black flycatcher with a crest like a Roman helmet. The bike takes me down a dreamy road: no power line, little traffic, a stripe of asphalt. What little roadside trash exists is claimed by native squatters like the long lizard that scrambles beneath a scrap of carpet. Ten miles west, the hills are no longer malevolent. They’re losing their hard limestone edges, as if melting under the fabulous sun.

  An hour or two down the road and across the California state line is Death Valley Junction, the last town. From five miles off it looks terribly small, a dash of green wiggling in the heat, all alone in the center of yet another creosote valley. Up close it’s still small, with a single substantial building: a big adobe built Mexican style around a courtyard of tamarisk trees drooping like desperate pines.

  “Built in 1923 by Pacific Coast Borax Company,” says a man slumped in a chair under the long colonnade. I wonder, did I ask? His name is Tom Willett, and he wears sandals and white socks, his long white hair in a pageboy. He faces the courtyard alone, ready to answer tourists before they get out a question.

  “You can’t get there from here!” Mr. Willett announces. I excuse myself and wander out of earshot—but stick to the shade. For this I should thank the Pacific Coast Borax Company, or at least thank borax, a cottony crud found on or near playas. It looks worthless, but its fibers do unexpected things, binding and strengthening, and people have long coveted those things. Since the fourth century the Chinese have known that borax makes a terrific glaze for ceramics. Marco Polo toted some home, having no idea that seven hundred years later it would be used to make Pyrex, the glass that resists the expansion and contraction of heating and cooling that would shatter ordinary glass.

  Back in the 1920s, people knew something else: borax made superb soap flakes. It dissolves grease just as easily as borax itself is dissolved in water, which is why you can’t find borax in most places. It runs away with rain.

  So the miners came to the land of little rain. They hauled away the easy pickings, and left. Death Valley Junction persisted as a filling station until at least 1968, when a woman with presumably little interest in borax brought in her flat tire to be repaired. She’s still here.

  I meet her out by the mailbox. Marta Becket is seventy-six, trim as a creosote, with pancake makeup. With little prodding, she tells me that she’s a “solo dance-mime,” and that she can still dance on her toes. Mr. Willet is her stagehand and sidekick. What was once the headquarters of Pacific Borax is now their venue: the Amargosa Opera House.

  Where? She shows me, preferring action over talk. It’s not really an opera house. The flat tire gave Ms. Becket time enough to wander over to the big adobe and spy the old social hall. She peered into the shadows of Death Valley Junction, imagined a new life, and never let go.

  I’m a week too early for the season. Ms. Becket compliments me on my choice of travel time: after the big heat, before the snowbird rush. “I like the visitors, too, of course—they come to my shows. But then they all leave, and in the moonlight this place is just beautiful.”

  I look up and down the road and notice what I’d overlooked: a stone ridge that rises from the valley floor like a fin. I imagine it in the moonlight, bid good-bye to Ms. Becket, and head west.

  It’s another ten miles and a thousand-foot climb to the Funeral Range, a mess of black lavas and fans of white, gray, and pink rubble that appear utterly out of place, as if they were deposited by dump trucks. I crest the pass and immediately feel the hot blast coming up Furnace Creek, the entrance to Death Valley. I’d expected as much. The Smoking Furnace. I hunker down in a wind-cheat and descend a thousand feet in elevation before halting.

  “Dante’s View” says the sign for a spur road leading up, not down. I take it, ignoring the warning about the 14 percent grade I’ ll encounter thirteen miles later, at road’s end. I want to see the object of my final desire from Dante’s.

  Onward, past the old mines whose tailings look strangely natural. Past the black hills and desert holly, a silver-leafed saltbush looking like sprinkles on a chocolate cake. Every fifteen or thirty minutes a car passes, and the tourists grin and give me the thumbs up. Meanwhile, I weaken and stop to eat tomorrow’s breakfast, another foil pastry. Another hour and I must break out the emergency food, a package of ramen noodles, and devour them uncooked. I accelerate to 4 mph, and pass a tarantula.

  Just short of the summit I pass a car that could go no farther, blowing steam and gurgling wildly. The urge to walk is defeated by a feeling that I’ve been riding for years for this last hill. Forearms gleaming with sweat, I push on to Dante’s View, park the bike, stagger to the edge of the abyss, and utter the standard Holy Smokes or whatever sums up the reaction to looking out the window of an airplane.

  Exactly 5,755 feet below my feet is Badwater, the lowest point in North America. There’s a road down there, my road, and the car on that road is not like a toy but like a pill bug. From this height the salt flats appear amoeboid, not a pretty word but not exactly a pretty sight, either. The broad spills of white are tenuously connected to each other with ribbons of white. The slope below me is gutted and gullied and slopped with scree all the way to the floor of Death Valley, long and narrow and bounded on the far side by the 11,000-foot-high Panamint Mountains. Here and there the range is speckled with trees, but the summits are bald fans of gray rubble.

  I hobble back to the bike and find a place to lay out my bag on the rim without rolling over the edge. The few tourists climb back into their machines and leave me alone. The wind comes up and buffets my exposed position, but I will not be moved.

  When I wake at 1 AM the wind has stopped. I sit up and look over the brink at the briny eye of Death Valley. Still there. The salt shines in the starlight, and I can hardly believe that I’ve woken to a view usually reserved
for soaring birds. No wonder people climb mountains.

  I lie back and look for the Big Dipper, the only constellation I’m reasonably sure of, but cannot find it. It makes no difference. I see one, then two, three, four falling stars. Five, six, seven. (And I didn’t even drink a beer tonight.)

  Two more flame out, leaving a brief trace in their wake—is it real, or just an afterimage? Perhaps because I am alone, I think about the first words spoken between two humans, a million years ago or so, and surmise that maybe, just maybe, they were, “Did you see that?”

  TWENTY YEARS AGO I was a rolling penny-pincher who’d discovered that I could ride my bike from Tucson to Utah for the cost of pancakes, raisins, beans, and coffee. Now, sitting on the verge of Death Valley with a steaming cup of coffee and my pipe, I have money but nothing to eat. With map in hand I peer down into the valley and make idle calculations: Badwater is precisely 2.4 miles west by suicide leap, and 40 miles by road.

  I choose the road. The gravity that was yesterday’s anchor is today’s catapult, and the descent is a rush of colors and wind. Delighted by the geologic wreckage on all sides, I stop to check out the half-dissolved mountains and to strip off another piece of clothing. My thermometer tells one story—58, 65, 74, 87—and my water bottle tells another: it’s being squashed by the grip of increasing pressure.

  Back in Furnace Creek, the road descends between ridges of yellow mud and gray ash gouged by the sort of storms that come once every hundred years. Despite the many tricks of desert plants, none have figured out a way to persist on these smooth fingers of earth.

  But just when it seems that Death Valley is truly dead, a jungle of date palms and tangled mesquite rises above the shocks of arrow-weed and the springs of Furnace Creek. In 1849 an old blind man was found here. He was an Indian, buried up to his neck in sand, yet alive. The people who found him were a party of forty wagons, heading for California gold. The people who had left him had seen the wagons and abandoned their village in haste, and the old man made himself scarce in the way of a sidewinder snake.

  The buried man survived, but the people and their wagons trundled down the canyon and proceeded to put the death in Death Valley. It was December, and they feared the Sierra snow more than this desert, but a subsequent three-day dry stretch made them rue the choice. Mr. Fish died, but he was old and ready to go. Young Isham somehow got separated and lost; later, they buried him where he fell. Thirst took Mr. Culverwell, and the nine men who struck off on foot may or may not have survived. Nobody’s sure, but with each retelling of the story Death Valley grew more deadly. In a Los Angeles Times article from 1908, “The Lost Wagon Train,” not a one survived after their “dreadful death march” foolishly entered the valley “in the height of summer.”

  Wheeling down Furnace Creek, I can see how the myth picked up momentum: the creek vanishes into the gravels. The badlands and canyon walls fall back, and the traveler loses the intimacy of shadows. Another turn, and Furnace Creek opens into Death Valley like an alley onto a great thoroughfare. The valley, sunk between two parallel ranges, runs north and south to the horizon.

  The road forks: eighteen miles south to Badwater, or a few hundred yards north to the Furnace Creek Inn and food. The inn is three stories of adobe and stone under a red tile roof, buried in palms and gardens. When I pedal up and ask a man coming out if they serve breakfast, he looks at his watch and says, “It’s twelve-fifteen.” He checks me out. The verdict: safe, although it’s clear I just descended a vertical mile on my bike. Wondering, he is, where I came from.

  Likewise.

  “I’m from Berkeley. I had a motorcycle dealership, but I sold it—to see the world.”

  Ronald Ware is not young but is nonetheless wrinkle-free; it probably helps that he’s black, and needn’t apply the sunscreen I loathe. Neat checkered button-down shirt, blue jeans, black leather shoes, white socks. We stand in the shade of a palm. Despite the pit in my stomach I cannot resist asking, Of all places, why Death Valley?

  “I was traveling through Europe, and I was in Istanbul when I had this moment, this . . . epiphany. I’d gone to the bazaar, to the great mosques, when I realized that most of all Istanbul was a big noisy city crowded with people. I found myself thinking: I could have found this in San Francisco.

  “And I said, why am I in Istanbul when I don’t even know my own country? So I set out and found myself here, and I love it. The space, the quiet. I’m sixty-one and I had no idea!”

  Ronald also loves desert driving. “I can go a half hour without seeing another car.”

  The nomad’s pleasure. “Treeless spaces uncramp the soul,” declared Mary Austin a hundred years ago. She liked to urge her horse along at a “jigging coyote trot” through her beloved treeless space, the Mohave desert of puckering summer droughts and zinging winter freezes. This desert.

  “I’m a nice man—that’s how I had a successful motorcycle business without ever having ridden a motorcycle. But now that I’m seeing my country and meeting people like you, I see that I’ve been an ignorant dogmatic person, too. I’m just glad that I’m getting out and learning something. About you, about me. The things I like. I’ve got a substantial wine collection—but I don’t even like wine! Investment and prestige, I suppose. But what do I really like?”

  He knows.

  “Exercise, because it feels good. And soap and water and a good sleep—eight, nine hours. Reading. And this desert. I’ve been here three times in the last two months.”

  Ronald wants to know about my family, and out come my wallet photos. He’s married with two children, too; he hasn’t lost them but found himself. Solitary travel can do that. A man fills in the missing places in his thoughts and eases into his own skin.

  I thank Ronald, who’s not sure why I’m grateful, as he did most of the talking. Just lucky, I’m thinking as I head into the inn, into the hushed luxury of wrought-iron hanging lamps and antique ladder-back chairs. In the bathroom I comb the twigs from my hair and use the electric shoe polisher, sending up a cloud of dust. Semitransformed, I emerge and order a focaccia and a beer. I fit right in, despite not having showered since Las Vegas.

  This I remedy with a ride to the nearby Furnace Creek Ranch with its faux Old West General Store and Saloon, pool, and showers. A no-fear coyote slinks through the parking lot. A Swiss woman borrows my tire pump. At the adjacent Park Service visitor center I pay my fees and learn that the current wind speed at Badwater is a mere 0.16 knot.

  But I’ve yakked and idled away my chance to reach the low point today. I spend the night in a canyon near Furnace Creek, munching pistachios and reading Mary Austin’s account of a prospector who’d camped out so often that he “had gotten to the point where he knew no bad weather, and all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors.”

  In the morning I head back to the inn for breakfast. It’s just me and one other diner and Betty the hostess. She wears a bright enameled flag brooch. “I never thought I’d like living in a trailer in Death Valley, but I love it. Come by and put your feet up on the coffee table—I don’t care.”

  I’d love to, but I’m going out to Badwater for the night.

  “For the night? I met a hiker who slept out there, and he said it was so quiet that he could hear the blood pumping through him. Badwater sure is a pretty place, but I wouldn’t want to sleep listening to that! Too quiet for me, way down in that hole where there ain’t no noise—unh-unh.”

  She deftly refills my water glass and takes a seat at the table.

  “I want to hear a little something—a cricket or a frog or even just the sound of a car passing, not all squealing, but just the sound of its tires, something to remind me that I’m not all alone.”

  It’s already 98 degrees when I leave, all alone. The road south to Badwater is well above the salt pan, hugging the mountain front to the east. It’s the shade of all colors mixed together, the unsavory brown-yellow-black that results from kneading all the Play-Doh modeling clay together. The mountain slop
e is amazingly steep for what appears to be rubble. Once I try to scramble up, just to see if it’s somehow stuck together, like limestone, with geologic miracle glue, or if it’s truly at the angle of repose. Answer: the latter. I climb ten feet before sliding back down in a cloud of cobbles and dirt.

  I won’t do that again. I’m left with the impression that Death Valley is, on a grand time scale, a temporary pit. Come to think of it, so is Africa’s Lac Assal. One big crack in the crust, and Assal would be flooded in the titanic rush of the Indian Ocean. When things warm up and the ice melts, South America’s Salina Grande will also vanish in a flood. Asia’s Dead Sea, robbed of water by ever-increasing use of the Jordan River, is sinking by several feet each year; likewise, Europe’s Caspian Sea is dependent on the flow of the Volga. The only sure bet is Australia’s Lake Eyre, which, like Australia itself, will probably persist in blissful geologic ignorance of the rest of the globe. Otherwise, it’s safe to say that the low points will never be the same again. Neither will I, so I’m just in time.

  The valley bottom, which from Dante’s View appeared to be a perfectly level salt pan, is not. What looked smooth is actually blisters and little towers of salt. The farther south I ride, the closer they approach the road, until the tongue of salt reaches almost to the road and the crumbling mountain. Then the final drop, and I can go no lower. “BADWATER,” says the sign, “–280 FEET”: lowest point in North America. But not the least popular: there are ten cars in the lot. I peek in the windows to see their guidebooks and guess their origin from the language: Japanese, German, and Italian.

  High above in the late-afternoon sun, clouds in long whips promise a show at sundown. Below sea level there’s not a single puff of wind. It’s the right evening for something I’ve been denied at every other low point for reason of wind or water: a night on the salt.