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Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Trona, California
When
the dry sea bed of Searles Lake appears, and I pull onto the five mile
dirt road, I am looking into what at first I thought was déjà vu. Actually,
it was my imagined Gomorrah, with Lot running up the slope which I was
descending. The sand is black and brown, and the valley and the lakebed
are engulfed in dirt and dust and dust devils - a dozen of them - and when one crosses a hundred feet in front of the jeep, she shakes
in its wake. The wind here blows at over 60 miles per hour, and with that
and the wash-scarred road, I lose control at the wheel 4 times, each time
plowing into the embankment with an innocent thud.
I
am halfway to the Pinnacles when I engage a truck blocking my way. I stop
and the driver is startled by my sudden appearance. Its funny how people
are unusually friendly in the happy wilderness, but here, in the dark
side of nature, people are suspect and wary. I ease him when I notice
his photo pack, and exchange some technicals on our systems. He was a
former AP photographer, and now a writer and make-up artist from Burbank.
I explain to him that the massive 140 foot pinnacles rising like raw fingers
from utter flatness were created some 100,000 years ago, when this entire
region was 650 feet underwater, and algae mixed with thermal pockets had
created these spires. Later, when saltwater brine infested the great sea,
they carbonized the spires into hard rock.
We
parted ways and I drove on. I walked the great pinnacles, and found refuge
from the wind in a cave at one's top. I stared down at my photographer
friend, who clicked away at the base for a half hour. He looked lonely
and wondered where I had gone off to, and left for Burbank.
Sunset
came after hours, and I watched the valley below, and the shadows of the
great pinnacles drawing longer and longer, until the night sky was pitch
black.
I
found my way the two miles to the Jeep by flashing my head-lamp in the
distance, until my hubcaps returned the flash. It is in places like this
that people claim to see UFO's, gods, angels and revelations. For me,
it has always been the opposite; a walk through this desolation makes
me realize how consistent the world is in its understandability, simplicity
and uniformity.
Dirt
smells like dirt anywhere. The Earth, and all of its life, are nature's
last stand against chaos in a relatively barren, dark and cold universe.
For all the meaning we ascribe ourselves and our gods, we are the bacteria
on the dung-fly: in measure of time, and the scope of what may be infinite
'universes', our place in history will probably be as relevant as that
desert vulture who has long found refuge in the mountains above me.
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