Letter from the desert: Light and Sound
Posted by Chris Clarke on September 7, 2008
This valley I live in is quiet.
It’s not silent. Sometimes, in fact, there is a hell of a lot of noise here. Eighteen-wheelers roar down the road in front of my house fairly often, as do RVs ridiculously towing boats through the desert toward the marina at Cottonwood Cove. And there are the freight trains on the tracks 400 feet from my bedroom window, loud enough that one cannot hold a conversation while they pass.
But you can hear any of the above coming from a long way away, and then they are gone, and the noise stops, and you hear nothing even in the center of Downtown Nipton aside from crickets, and the gurgle of the swamp cooler at the Trading Post, and at sunset, if you’re lucky, the coyotes up toward Crescent Peak heralding the beginning of the night’s jackrabbit harvest.
On Friday night The Raven and I watched the moon set behind the Joshua Trees, parked a ways off Morning Star Mine Road, at the extreme southern end of this valley I live in. The coyotes were out, and singing loud enough that it seemed we might reach out and touch their wind-ruffled fur. There were powerlines nearby and we heard a short circuit buzzing on one of the insulators, a faint and insectile sound.
Thirty thousand feet above, or forty thousand, planes bound for LAX blinked past. Their sound was soft enough, but it was constant. We reflected for a while on the changes wrought were there thirty of those planes an hour flying a mile overhead instead of eight, a likely outcome if the Ivanpah Airport is built. When the wind is right in Nipton you can hear the jake brakes on Interstate 15, ten miles away.
On Saturday night, after a day spent in the company of burros and settling for a time into the pitch blackness of the Arizona night, we blinked hard at the lights of Las Vegas and whimpered a little at their relentlessness. It was a relief to pass Sloan on our way southward, to drop down off the low pass into the north end of this valley I live in. Darkness folded itself around us even on the Interstate, and night pressed hard up against our high-beams. Jean, a town consisting of one high-rise casino, was 13 miles off: a ten-minute drive. “A mile past Jean is where the airport would start,” I said, “more or less.” The Raven murmured.
We drove past Jean into deeper black, a velvet black, and I imagined for a few miles that the blackness was gone, driven off by bright white runway edge lights, blue taxiway lights, the forward lights of jet liners landing and taking off, terminal lights and sodium vapor lights in the parking lots, the headlights of travelers blasting the verges of the new access road they’d build on the east edge of the valley to bring traffic down from Sloan, and then I drove the image from my mind as those imagined lights would drive the night before them. I drove the image from my mind, I drove past white dashed lines emerging from blackness just ahead of us, I let the night drive the memory of Vegas Lit By Drowned Wild Canyons from my heart.
Ten minutes passed, and a sign announcing a mile to the Primm exit. “A mile north of Primm,” quoth The Raven. “That’d be the south end of the airport, right?”
More or less.
On Friday night as the moon set and the Milky Way increased in brightness, as we sat and resolutely faced away from Vegas’ glare to our north, the coyotes sang as deep-voiced as wolves. Doves called one another off in the distance. The breeze brought their song to us, then shifted and we heard them no longer. “You know, it’s interesting,” The Raven offered. “Full moon sky and Milky Way sky are completely different kinds of romantic.”
I have heard of lovers who park near the beach and watch the planes rising ponderous from the runways of Los Angeles International Airport, rolling deafening over their heads. I expect they find the time well-spent, and yet they lack the sight of galaxies reflected in their lover’s eyes, the murmur of soft breath caught in their lover’s throat as the coyotes wind up into song a hundred yards away.
