Deep Blue

Beneath the sea, beneath the sea beneath the deep blue sea . . . we were at 170 feet below sea level in Death Valley. It feels a little as I imagine Jacques Cousteau might have, in his watery underworld, only without the gear. Here is the sea floor, here are the sand dunes. Here are the rugged, impassable and impassive mountains, holding it all in. Our 10-cylinder Ford purrs across the dips and rises that stymied horse drawn wagons. It takes us hours to go from below sea level to almost 9,000 feet in the Sierra's Tioga Pass; the gold rushing forty-niners spent days and weeks and months trying to traverse this salt encrusted landscape, many dying in the passage.

What's most interesting about Death Valley is that the reason for its existence is the constant, ongoing movement of the Panamint Mountain plate. It remains active, which is to say it is constantly pushing up; thereby pushing the floor of the valley ever lower. I close my eyes and can almost feel, in my pelvis, the gyroscopic quality of this see-sawing movement. We've made it to California, and the earth does still move here.

There's so much those of us who grow up and live 3,000 miles away just don't know about this landscape, and therefore about the people who live here. Maybe at one point in geography class I learned that Mount Whitney, pictured to the left with me and the two dogs, is the highest point in the 48 states: but growing up with Katahdin and Mount Washington, who thinks of these things?! Yet here it is, shadowing the Owens River Valley: a fabulously beautiful and mineral rich area, which Los Angeles's William Mulholland (think Mulholland Drive, those of you rich in LA or movie lore), a working class Irish immigrant who rose through the ranks to become superintendent of LA's water system, tapped as the giant aqueduct which travels down and across the state and makes LA the fabulous LA it is. The aqueduct pipe is 10' in diameter and buried for miles and miles; like the Blade Runner-ish Hoover Dam we crossed to get here, it is an engineering marvel and one that makes it difficult not to respect man's uncanny ingenuity--even when it is harnassed to sap the landscape and create plagues such as nuclear waste (buried just to the east of here, in Nevada) and global warming.