Disoriented by awe. That’s how I feel since we got home from Death Valley, where we camped and hiked with our friends Stephen and Joanne Hatch. Something mysterious happened to me out there in the wildness of the Mojave Desert.
Like Edward Abbey in the canyonlands of southern Utah, I became aware of an immense silence in which I lost myself: “Not a silence so much as a great stillness… a suspension of time, a continuous present.” It felt like I’d never lived so vividly in the present moment as in Death Valley. My mind stopped. I had no thoughts in my head and no desire to write.
Death and Timbisha
“If you look with the mind of the swirling earth,” wrote Muscogee poet Joy Harjo, “you become the land, beautiful.” I became that stunning desert land. We call it Death Valley because of the number of early pioneers who perished there. “How could rocks and sand and silence make us afraid and yet be so wonderful?” asked Edna Brush Perkins in The White Heart of Mojave.
The Shoshone People native to this land call it (and themselves) Timbisha, their word for the sacred red pigment found in the surrounding mountains. How can they live in such a place? “This is our land. This is our home, Tupippuh Nummu,” says tribal member Barbara Durham. “It’s not dead, it’s alive.”
According to her tradition, the color red represents “the way forward.” The red ochre called Timbisha was used in spiritual ceremonies. A red flicker feather left along a path and the red color in the sunrise point the way toward the future. Tribal elder Pauline Esteves explains: “To see the flicker [feather] reminds you: Who are you, anyway? Where are you going? What kind of life are you leading? It makes you reflect back.”
Red Rock and Alluvial Fans
I was ecstatic over all the red rock, which speaks deeply to me ever since I first encountered it in Sedona over fifty years ago and vibrate with this insight from poet Rose Leiter:
I am breathing in the red rocks. They are teaching me how to live – slowly. These red rocks fill my belly with love. I am full of red rock love. I am full of the silence that tells everything. Impenetrable red rock mountains soften, dissolve, become liquid. They take over my body and run through my veins, strengthening my desire to be one with you.
But I also breathed in the salt flats, the sand dunes, the hills in shades of yellow, beige, grey, chocolate brown, green and purple. Three million years ago the earth split and created the marvels of Death Valley. Flash floods continue to scour the canyons and wash alluvial fans of sand and gravel down the mountainsides, decorating the earth’s skin in magnificent shapes and patterns, colors and textures. I was particularly charmed by the purple-looking “fans” along the North Highway
Black Rock and Wosa
I also breathed in the fields of black rock and cinders, especially around Ubehebe Crater. Roughly 2000 years ago, when Jesus walked the earth, rising magma encountered groundwater and created a steam and gas explosion that spewed shattered rock, black ash, and volcanic cinders over a six-mile square area, leaving a crater 600 feet deep. The Shoshone call this Wosa, Coyote’s burden basket, the place where the People emerged to spread in four directions across the land.
Ubehebe both thrilled and frightened me. You could walk right up to the edge of the crater. Without any guard rails, it was primal, beautiful, and scary, because it would be easy to slip and fall in! We hoped to walk around the perimeter of the crater, but it was windy and cold, and we weren’t dressed warmly enough. Trembling plants grew sparsely among the black cinders. I fell in love with a solitary creosote bush at the edge of the crater, exquisitely sculpted by the wind.
The lowest point in North America is Death Valley’s Badwater Basin at 282 feet below sea level. We drove miles around it as we left the national park. Normally a surreal salt landscape you can walk though, most of it lay beneath a lake formed only the week before after California’s torrential atmospheric rivers.
Death Valley is officially the hottest place on earth, holding the world record for the highest air temperature: 134˚ F recorded in July 1913, a record that stands unbroken today but is sometimes disputed. And yet, as the Shoshone insist, the valley is alive and hosts more than a thousand plant species, over forty of them found nowhere else on earth. The only wildflower we saw in our late winter visit in February was bright yellow desert gold at the lower elevations. But we saw Joshua trees, salt bush, desert holly, mesquite, and creosote. And what was that neon yellow lichen or fungus only on the creosote and only at the higher elevations?
A Good Place
We hiked in Mosaic Canyon, named after the layers of breccia (pronounced “bretcha”), reminiscent of the mosaics of glass and stone found around the Mediterranean Sea. Underneath the breccia lay smooth cream-colored dolomite formed 700 million years ago, long before the continent of North America even existed. Over thousands of years, the dolomite was buried and compressed by miles of sediment and turned into shining polished marble in the lower part of the canyon.
We also hiked Golden Canyon up to the spires of Red Rock Cathedral, beginning in wondrous slot canyons and ending in vast open spaces called “badlands.” Why do we so often and officially use such negative language for land I find so spectacularly “good”?
Death Valley has been called a hot sink, a desert oven, a place to make a fortune in gold and silver. But it’s simply “home” to the Timbisha Shoshone. “Come here with some goodness,” says Pauline Esteves. I went to Death Valley with what I hoped was some goodness. And I found even more goodness there. “The desert is a good place,” insisted Edward Abbey: “clean, honest, dangerous, uncluttered, strong, open, big.” When you go into the desert, these same qualities seep into your soul.
Postscript: Death Valley Days
I was a big fan of TV westerns growing up in the 1950s. The Old West captivated my east coast heart. Death Valley Days was a favorite program, and we watched it together as a family. The first stories were historically accurate accounts of early pioneers in Death Valley. There were homesteaders and miners, “Indians” and Mexicans, wizened prospectors with their burros, and “claim jumpers.” Many stories focused on brave pioneer women, some who relished their life in the wilderness, others who languished in their isolation and longed for the city.
The series was sponsored by 20-Mule Team Borax, mined in Death Valley. The Pacific Coast Borax Company hoped the series would increase sales of their products, and it worked. Even my family began to use Boraxo soap powder to wash our hands, and my mother used borax in the laundry. “Death Valley Days” ran successfully for eighteen years from 1952-1970. Some episodes were restored as recently as 2013 and broadcast on Encore Westerns.
Each show began with a mournful trumpet call, which eventually became a longer instrumental. The music played as a team of twenty mules pulled wagons of borax slowly across an expansive Death Valley. I was haunted by this evocative image and now understand that I was unconsciously beginning to fall in love with the emptiness of the desert.
You can see one of the original 20-mule team wagons at the Harmony Borax Works in Death Valley and an original borax sign at the Last Kind Words Saloon in Furnace Creek, where we shared a festive Valentine’s Day dinner with Stephen and Joanne. I didn’t get to see that wagon on this trip, but I will next time. And there will be a next time.
Land of Little Rain
I missed Death Valley so much when I returned to Tucson, I reread The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, an ecologist, feminist, and humanist before these terms were even coined. Her book was originally published in 1903. My copy was published in 1971, the first literature I read on the desert when I moved to Sedona.
In the opening chapter, Austin wonders why so many people stayed in Death Valley, “the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands.” Then she concludes, “one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections.” I lived in Death Valley for only five days, but its hold on me is strong and powerful.
Thanks to our friends and guides, Stephen and Joanne Hatch, and to Dave Denny for these wondrous photos. Be sure to read Dave’s reflections on Death Valley here. He writes about our need to “return to the wild” and the shadow side of civilization with a unique understanding of “enlightenment” as “the bonding of the wild in us to the (wild) process of the universe.” If you prefer to listen to stories about Death Valley and what the desert has to teach us, you’ll find links to our Fire and Light podcast, “Return to the Wild,” here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tessa, “Disoriented by Awe” could be your life’s epitaph! You write with such love and wonder about the natural world, especially the desert. I never considered going to Death Valley but now the destination is on my travel wish list. And “Death Valley Days”? Yes– I watched the TV series too but always felt immensely happy I wasn’t born during those harsh pioneer days in the stark wilderness. Maybe I need to watch the reruns? Thanks for inspiring me once again!