7th
Scattered Reflections on Desert Silence (2008)
In a stifling panic I slam the heavy door to the jeep into place, and lean back against it taking a moment to catch my breath. The cool air is startling, as it rushes into my lungs. My eyes are useless in the darkness of the desert under the non-existent new moon. My senses are startled like the shock from a plunge into cold water. My hands remain at my side pushing against the smoothly painted metal of the door. As I slowly become aware of my body, I blink and hear my heart beating inside my chest. I need to get farther away from all this noise!
My ears begin to dial in to the sounds around me. My eyes are taking longer then I expected to adapt to the stillness of all this darkness. From under the Jeep, I hear the clicking of hot metal cooling in the desert air. Further. I push myself away from the vehicle and run stumbling through the loose sand towards the dirt road I veered off moments ago. My senses cannot seem to adjust to this darkness, and my feet are finding it difficult to navigate the unfamiliar desert topography. I am fighting against a still and silent opponent, who I cannot see or hear. This must be what a bat feels like flying by sonar in a room with no walls. One foot in front of the next, stay in control. The pull of gravity is heavy on my shoulders, first one and then the other. I am loosing my balance!
Thwump! The stillness and darkness of this world has brought me to my knees, face first in the cool grainy sand. I needed that. I have been beaten by a stronger opponent, who now cradles me humbly in her arms and allows me to think clearly for once. I roll over onto my back. This sand is actually very supportive, its grits even have a nice taste to them. The sidewalk outside of my apartment would not be as forgiving.
How did I get out here? When did I start running from that drone of Los Angeles? The sun was still up when I left; it can’t be more then a few hours. It is so incredibly quiet out here. I can feel my ears working hard to recalibrate to the silence, instinctively I pop them to equalize the pressure. As the filtering threshold of my hearing falls with my heart rate, the sound of my own blood pumping in my ears fades, and in it’s place I discover the whirling hum of a cricket orchestra performing from all directions. My right left stereo panning is reporting absurd information to my brain; the crickets make a swooping echo in slow clockwise circles through my senses. My ears are not ready for these subtleties.
My eyes have better adjusted to the darkness. In shades of grey and blue I can see the scattering of stars blanketing the world above me. There are more then I remember since I was last away from the city lights. I yearn for a clearer view, and focus on the patches of darkness between stars. Droplets of light appear in the gaps. Would I see these speckles if science had not taught me they where there existing infinitely as light in the darkness?
These are the little tricks the natural world plays to remind you where man came from, and what he will remember if he lands on his back when he trips in the desert. I try to tune my ears to the cricket buzz, in the same way I calibrated my eyes off the stars. How long have I been lying here? I suppose I came out here so that sort of thing wouldn’t matter.
I didn’t realize how well you could see clouds by starlight. I sit up to see how wide the horizon really is. It snakes fluidly over the subtlety of silhouetted mountains in all directions. The dawn sunlight must only be a few hours out. I can see the brightness in the eastern sky. Counties and States thousands of miles from here are being blinded by an early morning exposure of light, and explosion of alarm clocks, barking dogs and trash trucks.
Out of the eerie silence I hear a great low rumbling. It only takes a moment to spot the plane off in the distance. Against the stationary backdrop of the desert night, the blinking and roaring of the plane is painfully obvious. In my world of absolute stillness and silence, this object is creating the only movement and sound of all the thousands of square miles I am intimately connected with. It shreds through the sky as a brutal reminder of great reach of all the noise and chaos I have tried to leave behind tonight. To the passengers however, I would slip away into the darkness of just another vast dark space between the glowing clusters of suburbia that are visible from the sky. Order another ginger ale, a carbonated over stimulation of the tongue. And I like ginger ale. The sound of the plane is louder now, tumbling along at ground level like the clatter of a freight train. As it glides into and out of clouds, its wingtip-lights illuminate the sky with the glow of man made authority. Not the innocent white light of the stars that humans have been calibrating their nighttime white balance to for millenniums, but red and green, the most extreme perversions of the visible spectrum.
It takes a lifetime for the plane to finally be out of sight and out of earshot. The night sky is silent and innocent once more. My gaze pans down the great azimuth of beauty to final rest on my Jeep. While silent now, I imagine the great rumble of chaos it must have made as it charged down this road for many miles, before I arbitrarily stopped at this temple of serenity. How the light must have violated these hills, and the sound forced an unwilling echo from the rocks. I remember back to the delirium that the engine’s sound and the headlight’s glow had left me in when I first escaped its confines. Now it is silent and at peace with its surroundings, accepted respectfully on the same terms of diplomacy with the desert that I was served while laying on the ground.
However there will be a time, and I sense it is near that I will fire that engine back to life, the radio will be where I left it at an unavoidably high volume, and the headlights will spark on and cut across the flatness of the desert. I will return my scenes to the distractions of technology, and urbanization. Flooding my ears with sound, and my eyes with constant light. I inevitably must return to my apartment, with its humming air conditioner, the gentle roar of the freeway nearby, and that television set in the next room mumbling laughter through the walls. My ears will relearn to tune out the natural frequencies of this world that allow me to hear these crickets chirping. These are the realities of my predicament. These are the realities of the human predicament. Unfortunate.
