Bayou and I had one of those conversations this evening.
The kind of conversation that takes you places- forward, backward, inside, out and around. The sort of talk that gifts you with realizations and understandings that you lacked before. In some ways it felt like a conversation I’d waited years to have. Red wine is such a wonderful gateway drug into the subconscious & distant past.
As you may remember, I lived in Lake Tahoe for a time.1 My tenure there was unceremoniously upended by the Dot Com Bubble Burst, and I briefly -thank god- was directed to Las Vegas for work. It was a quick and messy affair; my resume located on the ‘net by a questionable company who hired me with little more than a glance, and voila- there I was. A lot like my journey to Tahoe, in fact.
But this didn’t end the way Tahoe did. The company that hired me gave me a relocation check that -haha!- no bank or casino in the area would cash. I knew I was in trouble. After much haggling back and forth with my contact, who offered for me to stay at his apartment2, I decided to head back to Tahoe. I checked into a 3rd rate hotel off the strip and headed home the next morning.
On my way down from Tahoe I had seen a sign for the ghost town called Rhyolite. I had no time table to return home (pretty much as long as my last $500 lasted me), and I wasn’t feeling all that keen about returning to Tahoe.3 I set out early enough that even in February, the desert was very visible and starkly bare4 . I reveled in the sound of my wheels on the pavement, a certain CD that replayed over and over, and the hush of my own thoughts.
About two hours outside Vegas, near Beatty, Nevada I found the sign. I pulled off the highway, got out, and looked around. For miles, as far as my tired eyes could see, there was sand, horizon, and scrub. There were no sounds but the wind and the decrepit gravel grating beneath my shoes. I looked southwest towards Death Valley. The rolling hills in the distance looked like a small mountain range, and the brown desert stretching ahead of me towards the Valley became increasingly gray. The sky was a hard dual demarcation above the hills; at first a searing, pale gold- like a sunset blinded by its own intensity, or a sunrise fading into the white heat of day. Above that a surly, dark cloud bank, angry black and densely hovering above the hills. It was simultaneously foreboding and peaceful. I took a long, 365 degree look around before I got back in the car and headed to Rhyolite.
This was in the days before digital cameras were affordable or good. I had a Pentax point-and-shoot, I think, and a few rolls of film. I hate that I was driving alone, and felt compelled to get into the heart of the ghost town. There were some neat hand-made signs, bright and colorful little art installations touting the ghostly ruins of Rhyolite. They were cool and kitschy and I didn’t record them; only their spirit and a shred of color reside in my memory- the details are blurrier with every passing year. But the essence remains.
I headed up the gravelly, bumpy road into the ghost town. A small set of hills ringed the western side of it, and the road headed inexorably towards Rhyolite’s reason for existence- the mind shaft where gold had been found and birthed the town. And 81 years after the last business closed, there I was- the only soul for miles.
The lighting was eerie and full of portent, as though ghosts of the town’s past would spring up from the earth wailing and screaming their torment for my lone ears to hear. Instead, the only sounds I heard were the same as by the highway- my shoes crunching the earth and the wind whipping through the rocks. It was so still, so devoid of movement and activity.
And it was one of the most gorgeous moments I’ve spent alive on this earth.
At that moment, no one on earth knew where I was. I had no ties that bound, no immediate needs, no drive and desire to be somewhere. It was a purely present moment, utterly distanced from the past and the future. The day-to-day trappings of life were as absent as the day I was born. It was ‘now’ in the finest sense of the word.
I walked around and snapped pictures of the dilapidated structures; the bank, the old jail, a general store, the mine shaft. The place had an echo-ey feeling about it; like the long-gone voices and sounds of Rhyolite still wafted on the breeze, sounds that did not know they should be dead. The creaking of wooden wheels, iron on iron, silver sliding into gritty, dirty palms. I could feel the past, alive, but under the ever-present wind and dust.
During my relating of this time to Bayou, in conjunction with another subject entirely, I finally realized what I had felt in that one hour of my time. I felt free. I was alone for miles and miles in that austere, wintry desert. And I felt so light- all the cares and burdens that brought me there were gone, if but for 50-60 odd minutes. The wind and the dirt, my camera and that shell of a town, cleansed me of the immediate pain and fear that plagued me every step of the way. It was truly halcyon.
Maui was beautiful and gorgeous in its own right; but even in the vast blue waters I felt unrelenting presence. India was a cacophony of human and animal sounds; in my hotel room there was some escape, but no quiet. Europe had the buzz of barely civil night life in the so-called quietest hours. Nowhere, nowhere I have ever been was as amazing and lovely and so full of true solitude as Rhyolite.
You may be wondering what brought this tiny corner, this singular hour of my life so close to the fore. It’s not my life but someone else’s that brings me to that patch of desert, on the border of Death Valley. It’s someone else’s journey that has not yet ended in her own personal Rhyolite, where the world and its worries are held at bay by the wind and the sand.
I do not pray. I… think. And tonight I think of her and hope for the best outcome, hope for a journey that takes her to places where solitude is real and not isolating, but healing.
Everyone needs their own private Rhyolite.
This was eloquently written.