Pico Iyer says you should always
take a book with you when you travel, but it should not be about the place
you’re traveling to. And so, I spent a
week and a half walking (not hiking, I insist) around Death Valley and other
parts of the Mojave desert, spending at least some of the evenings reading Iain
Sinclair’s American Smoke. It’s a book in which, in his oblique and free
associative way, Sinclair investigates his own American literary influences and
enthusiasms. The fact that I share some
of these – Burroughs, Kerouac, Ed Dorn - makes it a damn good read.
Consequently, by day I would be
walking round, say, the Ubehebe Crater then at night I’d be reading about
Sinclair walking around Gloucester, Massachusetts in the footsteps of Charles
Olson. Or I’d be walking on the
Racetrack Playa then reading Sinclair’s account of walking the waterfront in
Vancouver looking for the site of Malcolm Lowry’s shack, bulldozed in 1957.
One of the disappointing things, or
at least one of the defining features, of Death Valley these days, is that
you’re seldom entirely alone when walking there, certainly not when visiting
one of the “main attractions.”
At the Ubehebe Crater, for example,
a handful of people were visible walking down to the very bottom of the crater.
The National Park Services website
says “Walking to the bottom of the main crater is easy; however, the trip back
up can be exhausting.” That’s a bit of
spectacular understatement. It’s a steep
600 foot drop, and some of the people I watched making the return ascent were
crawling on their hands and knees by the end. There are actually a couple of people in this photograph – two minute dots on the diagonal light gray path rising on the left. You can see them slightly better here.
Being of sound
mind I walked around the rim instead. The
National Park Services website again: “Walking around the rim is moderately difficult due to the
initial climb and loose footing.” And
the winds – don’t forget the lacerating winds.
And you might think that visiting
the Racecourse Playa – 20 odd miles down a bone-shaking dirt road – would buy
you a bit of solitude. But the day I was
there a camera club was in situ -
much fancy equipment, many tripods, many people shooting the same landscapes
from the same angle. Those are their Jeeps on the right of the rock formation, but at least they're forming a Herzog-esque fata morgana.
Of course you don’t have to engage
with these other people, and only an idiot or a snob would say that a little human presence
ruins a walk, but if you actually want to be alone in Death Valley, the best
plan is to visit some location that nobody else wants to go.
I was much taken by these cyanide
tanks at Journigan’s Mill – yes really, Death Valley was once a great source of cyanide – and although there was evidence that plenty of other people
had been there before (beer bottles, the remains of fires, some wrecked cars) when
I was there I had it to myself, and could walk in ruins in solitude.
I don’t know that Jack Kerouac ever
went to Death Valley but when I got back I dug out some of my Kerouac
books. He was one of the first authors I
ever discovered for myself. I was pretty
young at the time and there’s always a tendency to think you’ve “outgrown”
early enthusiasms – but some you never quite do.
It’s true I don’t have quite the
passion for Kerouac’s writing that I once did, but any time I go back and read
his work, I’m always reminded why it moved me so much. Here’s a passage from The Dharma Bums, about walking, more or less. “Try the meditation
of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about
and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re
floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and
fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in
dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
