Jackrabbit Country

They say the desert resonates with dreamers. Post cards from here are plastered with arches and great red walls of stone, but the American southwest has no monopoly on dramatic scenery. There’s something more in the scrubby brush and mesquite smoke and frigid starry nights. Thompson called it jackrabbit country.

Maybe it’s a sense of scale.

On the first day of school in the 4th grade, Miss Fogg announced to the room that the class would embark on a yearlong project to visualize One Million. It’s a big number, and Miss Fogg thought that it would be compelling for the children to behold one million of something tangible.

hillside-1

Each day, as often as we could remember, we were to collect and bring to class the pop-tabs from aluminum cans from our lunch, or from around the house, or from a neighbor’s trash. A string was suspended around the perimeter of the room, and every morning we would count the tabs and add them to the string. A counter on the chalkboard kept us up on our progress.

I don’t remember how many pop tabs we collected, but I do remember that it fell far short of a million. The project was designed to help children conceptualize a large number, and, ironically, failed on account of the responsible adult’s inability to conceptualize the magnitude of that number.

In spite of the project sort of falling apart, the idea was a good one. To this day, when I’m confronted with more than, like, a couple hundred of anything, I begin to lose track. Numbers in the millions, and billions, and trillions are thrown around in headlines and policy discussions in a way that borders on disingenuity. Try changing “billion” to “thousand-million” next time you read the news.

Hearing that the national debt is 17 trillion dollars, or that the sun is 93 million miles away, or that the jagged peaks of Glacier Park were carved out by glaciers some time in the last two million years is not helpful. But in the desert the geologic record is clear and profound. In the Grand Canyon, a reasonably fit person can walk through nearly two billion (two thousand million) years of earth history before lunch.

The desert provides a missing bit of context. It’s a place to feel small. And not just physically small, but cosmically infinitesimal. Simply being amid the sandstone and paying attention weaves two truths: that nothing we do, as individuals or as a society, makes any difference in the light of an honest discussion of scale, and that living well for the inconceivably brief time that we occupy this place is the most important thing we can do. (I’ll allow you to define “living well” for yourself.)

The dreamer is drawn to an inhospitable place. To sandstone cliffs and scabland where the climate can kill him in a day. To prickly pear and mesquite and that low, scrubby juniper that leaves his ankles bloody. He’s drawn to jackrabbit country in a search for something intangible, for context.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Timing is Everything

I don’t remember much about the request except that it was probably objectively reasonable. I remember feeling slighted at his response that if I needed an answer right that moment, then it was a no.

He was under the thumb of some looming work deadline, probably, or another of the banal inconveniences of adult life that are unfathomable to an eight-year-old. If I’d asked earlier in the day or at dinner it would likely have yielded a quick permission.

“Timing,” my father still reminds me, “is everything.”

rainbow-1

That pithy phrase is one of those paternal legacies from growing up that is simple and neatly packaged enough it might have come from a shitty action movie: A child is told “timing is everything” by his father, and as a man, now a secret agent, remembers that bit of advice and uses it to defuse a bomb or something. [Father’s voiceover, flashback montage, etc].

But it extends well beyond the demands of some impatient child.

A moment’s delay in telling a joke is the difference between laughter and one of those awkward pauses where everyone looks at their shoes. An hour in the sun can turn a couloir from an icy death-gully to an avalanche hazard, and for a few minutes in the middle that otherwise dangerous place might hold blissful corn skiing.

There’s a Tom Waits album that rattles around in your head, and at home it’s background music while you finish the dishes. But as the sun sets around you behind the wheel and the miles tic by it means a little more. His growl sounds off through the tinny speakers in the dash, but there’s no denying Diamonds on my Windshield is the American anthem for a long drive. The radio’s gone off the air, it gives you time to think … and blazing through this midnight jungle remember someone that you met, and one more block, the engine talks, whispers ‘home at last,” it whispers, ‘home at last.’

It’s not so different from Desert Solitaire, that book they told you to read in college by that guy who measured driving distances in six-packs of beer (litter isn’t ugly, the highway is ugly). I guess it’s a better influence than The Monkey Wrench Gang. Maybe you didn’t read it, or maybe you’ve forgotten. But somehow when you crack that book while coffee steams around your bare feet and a new day paints the Kaibab red it becomes our greatest and most heartbreaking ode to the natural world.

And sometimes people come into your life only to fade away again by no fault but that you crossed each other’s paths a bit too early or a bit too late.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail