by Leath Tonino
Godspeed.
NEVADA
Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere
There is no road, hasn’t been a road since Gerlach, that crust of a town where we turned from pavement to playa, to hairline-fractured hardpan, and the truck transcended its truckness to become one with the earth. Dust swings left and right in the rearview mirror, a brown tail whipping into oblivion the memories of Reno’s traffic and Fernley’s crowded Walmart parking lot. The dust erases and welcomes. The dust coats tongues. Ancient Lake Lahontan’s parched floor is at once beneath our tires and in the air.
The four of us—childhood friends from Vermont, high school brothers scattered to various corners of the country, so-called grown men—don’t give a fat flying hoot about next month’s Burning Man festivities. We’ve pilgrimaged to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert not for sixty thousand humans, not for lasers and womp-womp bass and skyscraper flames, but for the desert’s own severe weirdness. Its isolation. Its fierce summer heat. Specifically, we’re interested in the trailless maze, the jumbled volcanic mess, that is King Lear Peak’s west slope.
Sweat out the sins of a well-lived life, says somebody, raising a toast to tomorrow’s climb.
Click, click, click—the chorus of beer cans. Amen, amen, amen.
Last time the gang got together was Arizona, the Grand Canyon, that hungry hugeness so famous for eating eons and hours and everything between, including the name you carry to its rim, drop like a pebble, kiss goodbye. Maybe that kiss is why, without fail, we choose the arid West’s skeleton landscapes for these reunion trips? To abandon ourselves? To serve ourselves raw to the raw terrain? Maybe that’s the urge behind the drinking too?
We wonder and wander and laugh the truck onto a rugged two-track that leads to sagebrush, sagebrush, sagebrush, and eventually a Bureau of Land Management sign, its map peppered with bullet holes. Pissing for just shy of eternity, I read the toponyms of nowhere’s middle: Old Razorback Mountain, Mormon Dan Butte, Lassen-Clapper Murder Site, Sawtooth Knob. Then it’s more speed, more cranium-scouring scenery, the Jackson Mountains rising wall-like, King Lear’s craggy crown piercing the blue sky at 8,923 feet.
A jackrabbit darts, stops, darts.
Excuse me, sir, madam, might we park here?
Out come the coolers for seats and out goes our attention, eight eyes scanning desolation. We make like the dust and settle, kick off the sandals and relax. Mustangs pass far to the north of camp, their heads lowered. One with a white mane ghosts away from the herd.
Wild horses? Spirits of the desiccated void? Emissaries from the place past all places? Living on what? Living how? It’s a slow, dreamy kind of surprise, the brain’s movements hardly noticeable against such vastness. We hand binoculars back and forth, back and forth.
No green, mossy, Vermont-born soul could ever feel at home in this wasteland, says somebody.
Click, click, click—the chorus.
As planned, and without the slightest effort, the afternoon becomes a pile of cans, which in turn becomes a red sinking sun, which in turn becomes a half-dozen nighthawks winging low and fast and sharp in pursuit of insects. The insects become feathers, become blood, and keep flying in their new form. It all happens right in front of us, unobscured. The purple dusk becomes a moon-sliver, the moon-sliver a slurred run of jokes, the jokes a stumble toward bed.
Lying supine, sleeping bags rolled out, consciousness easing into its rest, a massive whispering darkness fills the ears: Middle of nowhere, middle of nowhere, middle of …
But that phrase, it’s wrong, isn’t it?
After our long day of travel and awe, after celebrating the myths of dead emptiness and places past all places, we’re starting to sort of understand. The jackrabbits, the mustangs, the nighthawks—the history held in names like Mormon Dan, in bullet holes, in the sediments of ancient Lake Lahontan—these all proclaim the same truth. That nowhere is the middle of nowhere. That everywhere is the middle of somewhere. That nature has no edges. That the center is relentlessly here, now, as it is back in the Green Mountains of our youth, south at the Grand Canyon, in Gerlach, in Fernley’s Walmart parking lot, in Reno, wherever.
Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow we’ll wake before dawn, drag ass up the broken ridges and chossy gullies in soft pink light, scrape our fingers against the undeniable reality of this land. By noon, if things go smoothly, if nobody pukes from exhaustion, we’ll stand atop the summit of King Lear, hearts ticking in our chapped lips and drumming in our temples, jaws slack.
Or we won’t. Perhaps we’ll just hunker, curl under the truck and nap in its meager shade. Having come this far, it hardly matters.
Countless stars are spinning overhead, chasing one another in dizzying circles. Either the drink has finally caught us or this patch of desert, this pinprick, this speck of a speck, this actually is the center of the universe, the axis on which the cosmos rotates.
Amen, says somebody, probably a jackrabbit.
Amen.
Listening to Big Empty
I wake at dawn, and before my eyes even open, I’m drenched by the creek. Not the water but the song, the liquid harmony braiding and unbraiding ten feet beyond the tent’s thin wall. No need for the blindfold yet, I tell myself. Stay warm in the sleeping bag, listening to this music.
The coffee ritual gets me, though, and soon I’m at the picnic table, firing up the stove, hearing the hiss of propane, the grinding flick of a lighter. For a while there’s just my boots stomping heat into numb toes, the odd dark-eyed junco clicking in snowy underbrush. Then it’s the percolator’s oh-so-sweet gurgle and a deliciously bitter sip that pricks my ears.
Getting here, to this day of uninterrupted focus, was a chore—six hours of tires whumping over old pavement, six hours of pop-country and ranting talk show hosts. Great Basin National Park is located south of Route 50 in Nevada, the nation’s so-called Loneliest Road. Since 1934 the park has welcomed a total of 3.5 million visitors, which is about how many people flooded Zion National Park’s sandstone canyons in 2015 alone. Where better than the Big Empty to practice walking the land with ears in your feet?
Actually, the plan isn’t to walk—that proves tricky once blindfolded—but to sit. To explore the uncharted microtopography of snaps, grumbles, chirrs, buzzes, and burbles. To stage a quiet revolt against the tyranny of eyesight, the dominant and mostly unquestioned belief in our culture that nature is primarily a visual spectacle.
Years ago in Grand Teton National Park, on what had to be the most postcard-perfect autumn weekend of all eternity, I tied a bandanna around my head—blacked out the vistas, deposed the tyrant. My friends were incredulous: Why conduct your little sensory deprivation experiment now, in the presence of these stupendously toothy peaks? I told them that it wasn’t deprivation I was after, but the opposite. Enrichment. A nuanced sense of the terrain. A hidden park inside the park.
At that exact moment, or so the story goes in my memory, a bull elk bugled nearby, sending overtones rushing through the forest. Countless aspen leaves rattled on their stems. The bones in my body whistled like so many flutes. For an instant that felt more like an hour, nobody made a peep.
See, I said.
Then I quickly corrected myself, cinching the blindfold tighter: Hear.
That nature is more than scenes and scenery, more than a movie to watch or some image to capture and upload, is hardly a new thought. George Catlin, the frontier painter who in 1832 proposed “a nation’s Park,” included in his vision (excuse that sneaky ocular metaphor) a prairie refuge characterized by “desolate fields of silence.” John Muir could supposedly identify every tree species in the Sierra Nevada simply by listening to its “wind-music.”
Natural sounds don’t just provide listeners with a sense of place—they are the place, no less than dirt and grizzly bears. Wilderness fragmented by human din is not wild, and an ecosystem gone mute won’t function as it should. Frogs need to discuss potential dangers. Birds need to court by crooning. Quite simply, land conservation,
to deserve the name, must include the conservation of soundscapes.
The National Park Service picked up on this in 1972 when the Noise Control Act was passed, a law requiring the federal government to regulate, among other things, commercial helicopter and airplane tours over national parks. But it wasn’t until 2000, with the creation of a natural sounds division, that the agency got serious about “protecting, maintaining, and restoring acoustical environments.” Tasks range from baseline audio sampling at frontcountry and backcountry sites to the analysis of burgeoning threats, such as growing crowds and industrial development adjacent to park boundaries.
Intrusive anthropogenic noise, while a serious issue, is but half the problem. The other half is underhearing. Disregard. Earbuds. A negligence on the part of hikers and picnickers and photographers to open themselves to potential opportunities. Can we climb El Capitan’s immaculate granite with our ears? Can we watch a Yellowstone wolf’s howl cut across the face of the full moon without ever lifting our gaze? These whimsical questions should be asked and answered by experts and regular parkgoers alike. They should be engaged with playfully, in the field.
As pioneering soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause puts it, writing of the Grand Canyon: “The pictures of the park really do only convey a fraction of the experience.” If you’re not hearing the ancient stratigraphy crumbling grain by grain, you might as well be sitting on the tour bus, looking out the window.
After a strong cup of coffee and twenty minutes of keen listening—the juncos, I realize, have taken to the pinyon pines, their voices mapping in my mind the precise location of perches—an annoying rumble rises in my gut. Nope, not hunger. The other morning rumble, the one that follows a dinner of baked beans, hotdogs, and beer. Like a rockfall in the echoey alpine cirque of my belly.
Strolling to the bathroom, I work on parsing the various sounds within a single footstep: the crush of loose surface snow, then the creak as the sole flexes and compacts the base, and last the tinkle of crystals thrown ahead by the push-off. It’s November, a squall forecasted to arrive this morning, and the campground is vacant—not that I would expect otherwise. On my first trip here, I climbed 13,065-foot Wheeler Peak, the park’s centerpiece, and had the entire summit to myself. Plus a sizable chunk of the Great Basin. Plus the whining of my nervous system, the pulse of blood in my temples.
Today I’m hoping to hear nothing, or almost nothing. The approaching storm’s invisible edge. My small fidgeting within the heave and sigh of some larger elemental calm. It’s hard to describe the way our world knits itself into wholeness one whir and rustle at a time without getting all cheesy and metaphysical, but it’s true, very real.
A Clark’s nutcracker cuts by with a whoosh of wings, arresting me midstep, and the sky audibly regathers itself in the bird’s wake. Then the spell’s gone, dissolved, which is a good thing, as it would be dangerous to delay my rendezvous with the “comfort station” any longer.
Misnomer? You bet your frigid fanny, and you can throw in the icy seat as well! Never fear, I’m a pretty tough guy, and moreover, I’m beginning to get lost in aural reveries. I experiment with the concrete walls and the ping-ponging resonance, humming for a few minutes, chanting some bass notes. Boy, if I could get a corvid in here, I think, then we’d really be jamming.
Back outside, the mountain slope above the campground is beginning to moan, a lenticular cloud forming around Wheeler Peak’s summit. Channeling Muir, I hike into the pinyon-juniper woodlands—pausing, crouching, trying to distinguish between the thrum of sagebrush and the thrum of cliffrose. Identities emerge. Mormon tea is whispery, delicate. Mountain mahogany is coarse, gruff. Prickly pears have little to say, though they do nip at the ear when I lean in too close. I’m reminded of other natural history pursuits—sorting seashells, parsing lichens with a hand lens—and how the ecological community starts to resemble just that: a community, a neighborhood of individuals.
The nondescript forest is suddenly described. A snag and a living tree speak the same language but different dialects. Even the growing wind comes across as a gang of many.
Far as I can tell, the sounds we absorb—a mountain lion’s scream, a glacier’s groan—become landmarks in our personal sonic geography. Capitol Reef National Park is for me the back-and-forth of raven chortles inside slickrock alcoves. Rocky Mountain National Park is an electric crackle and the slam of thunder against an exposed ridgeline. Of a solo backpacking trip on the beaches of the Olympic Peninsula, the color I remember is gray—foggy gray, continuous gray. But the push and rake of waves, that was strange, unforgettable. By day the ocean laughed like a schoolyard of happy children. By night it bellowed like a tortured monster. And it never stopped. It was always speaking, even when it wasn’t.
Hiking along, I ruminate. Maybe it’s not so much what we hear as that we attempt to hear, that occasionally we meet a landscape delicately, on tiptoes, alert to possibilities. Maybe it’s this effort and intention that drops a pin flag into our life. Maybe park rangers should hand out complimentary blindfolds as a way of encouraging toddlers and grandparents and everybody else to take it easy, quit the chitchat. Maybe once our ears are tuned, once the practice has been ingrained, we can abandon the blindfolds and enjoy a synesthetic wonderland, our senses working in concert to perceive an infinitely layered world.
Maybe, maybe. Not today.
After a few slow miles, a soughing draws me to a particular pinyon pine. I lie down in a crunchy patch of exposed duff on the leeward side of the trunk, bark inches from my forehead. Out comes a thick cotton bandanna, soft on the bridge of my nose.
Stories unfold beneath the pine, all without beginning, middle, or end, all without plot or character. Branches clatter against branches. A million needles sift fast-moving air. I want to rip free the bandanna, find the source of a specific sound, but the fun is hanging in there, riding the ride, letting the tension build. Sometimes the wind is too intense, like an eighteen-wheeler is about to smash me into oblivion. I brace for impact, tensing every muscle, only to relax seconds later—ah, an unexpected lull.
Bernie Krause again: “When the sound of wind is hushed and subtle, it sometimes reminds me of the breath of living organisms; it becomes the crossover between animals and an alive-sounding earth.”
This is my last thought before thinking stops altogether, before I disappear. Where do I go? Away, that’s all I can say. I travel, return, separate from a state of consciousness that resembles dreaming yet involves no slumber. Pulling off the blindfold, I try to stand but stumble instead. I can barely see, barely walk, barely pick up the journal that falls from my pocket—and when I do, there are no notes to write.
Words fail. The day’s eloquence presses against me from all sides. I’m out of it. By which I mean in it. Way deep.
And then I’m in my jacket’s hood, the storm’s first snowflakes scratching tiny poems—haiku—against the nylon.
WYOMING
The Irrigator’s Club
A friend in Wyoming wrote me, saying one guy quit the ranch and they could use a sub. Okay, why not. It was summer, and my laptop was fast becoming an enemy of all things fresh, outdoorsy, healthy, and inspired. I stowed the cursed machine, drove across two and a half states, suited up in beat jeans and leaky waders, got to work.
About that work. Flood irrigating is a dirty job, a boring job, a thankless job. Grow grass to grow cattle to grow humans. Dam ditches. Shunt water left and right. Six days a week you’re in the fields at sunup, sloshing around, heaving on tarps, taking your crowbar to a recalcitrant piece of plywood jammed tight in some culvert. Maybe your four-wheeler breaks down three miles from the barn. Maybe you splinter a thumb. Maybe you run out of smokes.
And there’s the shit, of course. Grow grass to grow cattle to make shit, you think, not exactly chuckling at the joke, not exactly confident, after another nine-hour shift, that it is a joke. For the hundredth time you step in a mushy pile. For the thousandth time. You’re an irrigator. Welcome to the club.
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Don’t get me wrong, though—flood irrigating is also a job of texture and rhythm, big skies and deep surprises. Black bears among cottonwoods. Elk snorting and bugling. The ranch is wild, and any morning you might see two bald eagles, a prairie falcon, a great blue heron, a yellow warbler, some seven hundred Canada geese. You might see a coyote pup. You might see a curious frog. You might encounter the real world, the elemental world, the world your laptop only offers in pretend. On rare occasions, if you’re lucky, you just might feel it too.
I did, during my third week. Massive field. Sweaty afternoon. Sort of dazed, sort of tired, sort of happy in that dazed-tired way that doesn’t register as happiness until later, when you’re cracking a beer on the porch at dusk. I hopped off my wheeler and headed for a cluster of aspens on the far side of a barbed-wire fence. Ah, nothing like a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and trembling shade.
But about fifty paces out—what the heck? I stopped, squinted. Hanging from the fence’s top strand was a brown shape, a brown strangeness, a brown question mark. A paper bag pinned there by wind? A desiccated cow pie posted as a joke?
Surely you’re familiar with this floaty moment between knowing and not-knowing, this drifty moment between certainty and uncertainty. Or perhaps it’s more of a slide, a smooth, slow, subtle slide from pure perception—without name, without thought—to the earth’s nouns, every weird vision landed in its proper place by the categorizing brain. Such confused openness never lasts long, but it renders time meaningless, so what’s the difference? Oh, to be in limbo, approaching on silent feet, with silent breath, a fence you’ve passed repeatedly but never really noticed. Oh, to inch toward that regular humdrum fence as if it were a bomb, a god, a force.