A Field Guide to Getting Lost (18 page)

The golden age, the dreamtime, is the present, and too much in it is leaking out now. The Times Square clock that counted down to the millennium, its seconds, minutes, hours, days racing away on a digital display, could have been kept for endangered species, at least thirty lost a day, more than ten thousand a year, half of all of them to be gone in a century unless something changes radically, or everything does. Imagine the present as already a Noah’s ark, and greed and development and poison as a trio of pirates marching the animals and plants over the edge, to the bottom of the sea that is the past. No more flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the midwestern sky for hours and days in the past century, all known Sampson’s pearly mussels gone from midwestern rivers by the 1930s, no more Santa Barbara song sparrows since 1959, no more Tecopa pupfish since 1972, an estimated 142 Sonoran pronghorn left in the U.S. as of the late twentieth century but less than half that by 2002, seventy-two species of snail missing in Hawaii, the blue pike of the Great Lakes gone extinct right about when men first walked on the moon, the speckled cormorant gone from Alaska about the time of the gold rush.

During that California gold rush, Yankees in quantity first came through the heart of the desert tortoises’ territory. The Death Valley Forty-Niners were in haste to make it to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada, and because they had arrived in the Great Basin too late to go over the Sierra’s snowy passes, they hired a Mormon guide to take them down the Spanish Trail to southern California. They called themselves the Sand Walking Company, a corruption of the San Joaquin Company, because none of them recognized the saint whose Spanish name had been given to a river and valley in the southern mother lode. A twenty-year-old New Yorker named O.K. Smith showed up on the trail with pleasant stories of a more direct route to central California, and most of the wagons switched over to the alleged shortcut. The guide continued on the Spanish Trail with the few who didn’t. The strays were abetted by a map that government explorer John C. Fremont—“the pathfinder”—had drawn up, showing a long range running east-west that happened not to exist (a bad map had much to do with the Donner Party’s 1846 stranding too). “These mountains are not explored, being only seen from elevated points on the northern exploring line,” said the map, above an area marked in larger letters: “Unexplored.” The Sand Walkers thought they could travel along the foothills of the fictitious mountain range. Many turned back when the terrain became impassible for wagons, and the rest broke up into smaller parties. These parties got stranded in Death Valley, the lowest land in the Western Hemisphere, a dry lake bed like an empty mouth between two sharp rows of mountain ranges.

“We had been in the region long enough to know that the higher mountains contained the most water, and that the valleys had bad water or none at all, so that while the lower altitude to the south gave some promise of easier crossing it gave us no promise of water or grass, without which we must certainly perish,” wrote William Manly, half a century later. “In a certain sense we were lost. The clear nights and days furnished us with the means of telling the points of the compass as the sun rose and set, but not a sign of life in nature’s wide domain had been seen for a month or more. A vest pocketful of powder and shot would last a good hunter until he starved to death, for there was not a living thing to shoot, great or small.” Manly was a skilled hunter and outdoorsman, and there’s no ready explanation for why the landscape through which he traveled in the winter of 1849-50 seemed to be so without wildlife. For these pioneers, the Mojave was an empty quarter, without water, without animals, without names, without maps, without all the things that give a place life and meaning. They were afraid of Indians, though the only two survivors of one party of eleven men made it because they were rescued by Paiutes. The skeletons of the other nine were found a decade later, inside a low circle of stones. Other parties were shown the location of precious waterholes, springs, and streams by Indians they encountered. Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean he mistook for the Indies almost four hundred years before, but there had been few direct disturbances of the indigenous inhabitants of the more remote western regions, and they were not yet resisting what was not yet a crisis.

One starving pioneer attempted to buy a biscuit off a neighbor for ten dollars and was refused. Another buried $2,500 to lighten his load, having been unable to find anyone who wanted to carry the gold coins for a half share of them. He was never able to find the burial spot either. Still others found ore that suggested rich mines, had they only the food and water to survive there. The Lost Gunsight Mine, named after a silver-rich piece of ore that one of the Death Valley Forty-Niners had made into a gunsight, became famous, as did the Lost Goller Mine. The latter mine consisted of a few nuggets picked up by John Goller’s companion. Upon seeing them, Goller snapped, “I want water; gold will do me no good.” The mines themselves were legends later visitors would look for in vain, built out of bits of ore brought out by these desperadoes. It was a strange sojourn, this journey through a landscape where all their hopes of finding mineral wealth were set aside, where wealth meant nothing and water everything, where they were faced with critical decisions about sharing and surviving, where they all faced death and some met it. It was a detour into the essential and the introspective, as the desert often is, and they were lost in it.

The nomadic Chemehuevi navigated wide expanses of this arid terrain with songs. The songs gave the names of places in geographical order, and the place names were descriptive, evocative, so that a person who’d never been to a place might recognize it from the song. Carobeth Laird commented, “Nowadays when a song is sung it takes great leaps from one locality to another, because there is no one who remembers the route in its entirety.” She explained further, “How does that song go?” meant “What is the route it travels?” Men inherited songs from their father or grandfather, and the song gave them hunting rights to the terrain it described. Despite Manly’s experience, there seemed to be plenty to hunt for those who knew where to look, and when. The Salt Song describes the route of a flock made up of every sort of land bird in the region, and it “travels all night, arriving at Las Vegas about midnight, at Parker towards morning, and back home to the place of origin by sunrise. If the night on which it is sung is very short, the Salt Song—as the other hereditary songs—may be shortened so that it will not outlast the night.” In that song the birds began to leave the flock toward morning, each dropping out into its own place in this orderly world of words and places. A song was the length of the night and a map of the world, and the arid terrain around Las Vegas was the Storied Land of the great myths. The Mojave people just to the south had a turtle song that also lasted the length of a night or several nights.

The silence in which Manly and a companion walked out of Death Valley to seek help for two families stranded there forms a strange contrast. They carried only small canteens and soon ran out of water. So they “traveled along for hours, never speaking, for we found it much better for our thirst to keep our mouths closed as much as possible, and prevent the evaporation.” They were unable to eat the dried ox meat they carried because their mouths were too parched, and when they finally found a small sheet of ice like “window glass,” they quenched their thirst only to find that they were ravenous. It took Manly and his companion twenty-three days to find help and return with provisions and a route out. By that time their traveling companions had despaired of the young men’s ability and altruism, so they were surprised as well as rejoiced at their return. The whole party finally reached the settlements four months after they’d taken their shortcut. Afterward they returned to the mapped world and to their familiar way of living. “Every point of that terrible journey is indelibly fixed upon my memory, and though seventy-three years of age on April 6, 1893, I can locate every camp, and if strong enough, could follow that weary trail from Death Valley to Los Angeles with unerring accuracy,” wrote Manly in his memoir
Death Valley in ’49,
and it was his party who named the place where they were stuck Death Valley.

I know the Storied Land or the country a little north of it. It’s the first desert I came to know and the place that taught me to write. In my late twenties, I started going to the Nevada Test Site, where a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated over the years, started going there with thousands of others to oppose the nuclear testing, a wild mix of Western Shoshones and pagans and Mormons and Franciscans and Buddhists and anarchists and Quakers. The place demanded to be described not with the straight line of a single story but with stories like the roads that converge upon a capital, for many histories had arrived there in the decades since the Death Valley Forty-Niners, and some of the old ones had not been forgotten. The people I met there invited me into a wider sense of home in the West, and a tortoise I picked up not so far from there would carry me out of my old home, a tortoise that might have been Turtle Island itself, the old name for the whole continent, as though the whole continent could be home, and perhaps it’s this sense of place that sprung me from the house I left a quarter century before.

Six or seven blocks northwest of where I live now is the hill where the last Brown Satyr butterfly was collected in the 1870s, as that intensely local species was going extinct. Some of the individuals of the gold rush were likeable, but their cumulative effect was terrible; they worked feverishly to acquire what could be hoarded—notably the tons of gold dug out of the mountains—and for it they paid with what couldn’t be hoarded and didn’t belong to them, the clear streams and rivers filled up with miners’ mercury and dirt, the salmon runs already starting to fail in their time, the forests chopped down for smelters, the California grizzly extinct everywhere but the state flag by 1922, the languages and stories of the tribes devastated by violence and by disease in this place that was blank and unborn to the miners. It was this acquisitiveness and its increasingly sophisticated new technologies that came to extract more and more wealth from the wild and remote places of the world to empty them out, filling up banks with more money than could ever be spent, more than there are things to buy. Now the scarcity is real, and growing.

It’s not as simple as a morality tale because what came into being is partly beautiful, and it has come to have its own complexities. There’s a Catholic university on the hill where the butterfly left off being, and I have heard great poets read there and environmentalists speak. About twice as far from my white birdcage of an apartment in the opposite direction is the San Francisco Zen Center, one of the key locations for the arrival of Buddhism in the West. The handsome brick building in a poor neighborhood was erected long ago as a residence for Jewish women, and a few Stars of David are still worked into the iron balconies. One morning four months after my midsummer dream of the tortoise, I woke up knowing it was time to go there. I arrived in time for the Saturday morning talk and sat behind a huge African-American man. Whenever he shifted his weight the altar appeared and it was the more interesting in glimpses. That day, someone mentioned that the stone Buddha on it was from an Afghanistan that had ceased to exist long ago. I had just given the two wool blankets I had inherited from that house in my dreams to the Quakers for winter relief in Afghanistan. The statue with its serene full face seemed to be looking back from the place where the blankets were going. Its soft brown stone spoke of an aridity and solidity that made the place real, made me see stony mountains shaped by erosion into folds like the curves of the statue’s robes.

A gaunt man with cropped gray hair sat down cross-legged, arranged his dark robes, and without preamble began to tell a story, softly, slowly, with long pauses: “Good morning. For many years there was someone who used to come here and sell us boxes of candy. Actually they were tins of candy, and they were caramel-coated in chocolate, and they looked like little chocolate turtles. So we called him the Turtle Man, and the Turtle Man would come and sell us this very sweet caramel-covered chocolate. And the Turtle Man couldn’t see. He was blind, so we bought two boxes instead of one. And then we’d put them in the desk in the office and then, even though we all thought they were way too sweet, we would eat them—quickly. The Turtle Man did this for many years. Like many blind people, he had a white cane, and he’d tap his way up the stairs and then he’d tap the door, and then he’d come in. We’d do our transaction, and then he’d leave.

“And one day I was out on the street right out here and I heard this voice go help . . . help . . . help . . . and it was the Turtle Man, and he was standing over there on the corner. He needed to cross the street and his way of crossing the street was to stand on the curb and say help and just say help until someone came along and helped him across the street. I didn’t watch him, but I assume that at each street crossing this was how the Turtle Man negotiated the crossing: he just stood there and said help, help.

“So I thought, Isn’t that really amazing? What an amazing life. You walk along and you reach a barrier and you stop and you just call out help. You don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know who’s around if anyone, and you wait, and then somebody turns up and they help you across that barrier, and then you walk on knowing that pretty soon you’re going to meet another barrier and you’re going to have to stop again and cry out help, help, help, not knowing if anyone’s there, not knowing who it will be that will turn up to help you across the next barrier.

“And yet somehow the Turtle Man could roam around the city selling boxes of turtle candy, coming to places like Zen Center and persuading them to buy a couple of cans.

“And he was, you know, a bit of a hustler. He knew we didn’t really want them, but he knew we were good for two cans. The Turtle Man wasn’t a fool. It was always a kind of a thrill to see him. It was almost like it was a miracle. It was like the Turtle Man defied gravity, he defied common sense, he defied conventionality. It was like the Turtle Man was a superhero, so it was always a little bit exciting and a little bit joyous when he turned up at the door.