Posted by
Chris Clarke on 07/03 at 05:29 PM
The forecast for Lukeville, Arizona for Thursday, which is when I will be traipsing around the backcountry, is 106 degrees. I am ready. I climbed a mountain yesterday in 97 degree heat, so 106 walking a few hundred yards at a time from an air-conditioned government truck shouldn’t be too taxing. What’s making me fret is the drive. 805 miles, and that’s if I drive the short way through Los Angeles, which I will not, seeing as I’ll be doing it on the Fourth of July. Bakersfield’s drunks are scary enough.
I still haven’t decided which way I am going. But a place along the Colorado looms large as a wayside stop. It’s a place I’ve never been, really, though I’ve driven past it on a road not a hundred feet away perhaps three dozen times. In fact, I slept not far away from it this year, perhaps a half-hour’s walk at a slow pace.
On this treeless, tawny bluff above the Colorado River, row after row of sun-polished stones parallel one another in curving swaths. The furrows between the stone berms are as wide as a footpath and slightly depressed into the desert floor. The rows run in concentric as well as intersecting patterns, giving the impression that someone has contour-plowed the entire crunching pediment. Imagine a rugged desert surface blanketed by a mosaic of stones, the detritus of the eroding mountains above it. Then imagine this surface rearranged by hand, stone by stone, to outline paths side by side in curving swathes that lead nowhere.
— Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise.
Meloy slept here, perhaps illegally, in the edges of the Topock Maze, hoping to get a more visceral feeing for the place, a slowing down of pace from the in and out of the car that its very few modern-day visitors experience.
The Google Earth image shows much of the southern half of the maze. The northern half, eight of eighteen acres, is gone. The Atlantic and Pacific railroad bridge took out the heart of the rockwork, which old-timers describe as an anthropomorphic figure with a snake, the man’s feet on the river bank. Interstate 40 construction destroyed more of the maze. Fenced off now against off-road vehicle yahoos, the remaining ten acres sit beneath the roar of jake brakes, the throb of gas compressors from a nearby PG&E facility.
“Maze” is a descriptor assigned by whites. There is no apparent center to this pattern, no obvious labyrinthine path. Explanations of the purpose of the maze are various, even among the Mojave whose land it’s on. It is perhaps about 600 years old. Its original intent has been filtered through generations of hearthside stories since the time of Chaucer. One must grant the stories of the Hahmakav their rightful precedence over the romantic hypotheses of amateur anthropologists: much of the “lost rock language” of the Southwest, the petroglyphs and pictographs and intaglios whose meanings were thought lost in time, have been deciphered by scientists who followed the unusual expedient of asking the Indians.
But the Indians are split as to what the Topock Maze means, and so it’s likely harmless to search it for our own private interpretations, to rake meaning in furrows from the landscape.
The first book of Ellen Meloy’s that I read was Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River, which was mainly a collection of essays about life on the river with her husband Mark, a river ranger in Desolation Canyon, Utah. Her writing was at once poetic and unsentimental. I read Raven’s Exile during a weekend-long meeting, a work session with close friends in the Mendocino forest made intolerable for all concerned by my advanced case of burnout, and I disappeared into the woods and dripping ferns to read page after page. I was entranced. One of my favorite passages in all the desert writing oeuvre comes from Raven’s Exile, on page 51:
Some sell the desert as a place so abstract, empty, and indifferent, it surrenders its passivity to one’s own lambent dreams. While you perch on a sunset-drenched butte contemplating eternity, however, Truth is the horrid little bug sinking its thorny mandibles into your lotus-positioned butt.
Meloy died at age 58 in 2004 while reading in bed.
I hate writing. Ironic then that it should be the only thing I truly do well. Yesterday on Mount Diablo I cursed myself for reading every leaf, every towhee trill as possible fodder for a sentence or two, cursed that I could not simply lie there exhausted and dripping in the sparse blue oak shade, blinking the sweat from my eyes as I watched the sun refract through leafy apertures, but rather sifted each moment for stilted poetry. Life beguiles. I would rather live it than describe it. Beth asked me this weekend how my book is going. Hers is due out soon, and when she started it I had been working on mine for seven years. Nine chapters done, and two of those needing to be scrapped and written again after last year’s fires rewrote the landscape.
I need time, uninterrupted time, away from shiny distractions.
Last year I spent two weeks at the Mesa Refuge, a writer’s retreat at Point Reyes. Those nine chapters were written in those two weeks. Two other writers were there, awarded that privilege of uninterrupted time, our meals made for us, no phones nor internet nor faxes to distract us, days spent writing in little private sheds overlooking Tomales Bay. On the shelves in the common room were hundreds of books, and when inspiration flagged during my first afternoon there I looked through them and found Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz. A chapter of Ellen’s lament over the nuclear industry’s impact on the desert landscape, and I was reinspired. I finished her book in two days, drinking it between bouts of writing as if it were water on a long, hot run. Three or four days into the stay I was getting ready for bed and turned to a blank book on the bedside table: a journal of thoughts jotted down by the writers who’d slept in that bed. When I picked it up it fell open to Ellen’s page. She runs silent and persistent through the chapters I wrote, a deep aquifer far beneath dark, polished stones.
In January I camped beneath the Topock Maze not knowing it was there. The straitjacketed Colorado burbled past my sandy bed. I watched the sun set over the Chemehuevi Mountains, staring for an hour at the Maze but blind to it. I pitched my tent in a hollow in the tamarisk, slept and woke and watched the mountains again for two hours with coffee, knowing only that something rested in those hills, compelling, familiar, and forever out of reach.
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