[At around seven o’clock I’ll be reading the bit below as an introduction to my writer’s group. Thought I’d share it with you here as well.]
The little house I moved into last year was 400 feet from the Southern Pacific’s main line between Las Vegas and LA, but I stopped hearing the trains soon enough. The 18-wheelers took longer to get used to. The trains kept to a schedule, but there was no telling when 150 decibels worth of jake-brake would shatter the night as big rigs shed the momentum of their descent out of the McCullough Mountains.
In my first weeks there the rebound relationship that had followed my divorce came to an end as predictable as the assignation had been. We’d be on the phone in mid-agony and a train would approach, the crossing signals starting their clamor. The interruptions did little to improve our communication. I would ask her to repeat what she had just said, and then I would wish I hadn’t.
Still, the trains and trucks passed, and the relationship ended, and the noise from all three ebbed gradually in their wake. What flowed in to replace the noise was not silence, though it seemed that way at first. There was always the wind, and the song of sage sparrows in the creosote, and the wingbeat chuff of ravens headed north toward the Lucy Gray Mountains. There was coyote chorus an hour before dark. There was the electric buzz of hawkmoth heading for the moonlit datura flowers.
It was a subtle cacophony, to be sure, drowned out the first few weeks by the noise between my ears: the vestiges of my former life, the busyness and habit and worry. That internal noise never did quite stop. After a while, though, it did quiet down for an hour or three at a time. I would walk out into the sea of creosote surrounding my house, ramble through the washes in the 114-degree heat, and empty myself out into the desert. Dust devils swirled down below on the dry lake, columns of alkali-bleached soil reaching a mile into the air.
There was a wild forest of Joshua trees on the other side of the McCullough Range, ten miles across the Nevada line. The forest was 1500 feet higher and ten degrees cooler. In August, my house still an oven at dawn, I slept up there about one night in three. The monsoons finally came that month, one dark and violent storm after another sweeping across the desert, lightning visible a hundred miles away as rain washed the haze from the air. Flash floods rearranged the roads. The heat slackened. The evenings stretched, grew languid. I sat in the desert behind my house, the air full of nighthawks and bats gorging themselves on craneflies against a sky of saffron and cherry blossom.
The stars were brilliant on any clear night, but especially so on the new moon. One early morning in late August the moon was paper thin, a crescent low in the east just before sunrise. The next night it was gone and the light from the stars enough to read by, the temperature a mere 99 at one a.m.. I put on my running shoes. The bottom of the valley was five miles distant, a steady downhill glide. I leapt the cattle guard a hundred yards past the tracks, landed light, kept going. New-opened flowers of roadside datura glowed like moons. Hawkmoths sped past me seeking them. The painted white lines at the shoulders were near floodlit by starlight. It was clear to me where I needed to go.
Chris,
I love the imagery you project into this piece. The columns of alkali-bleached soil reaching a mile into the air has to be my favorite. Living on the South Plains of Texas, I have seen similar columns of dust swirling in the distance while driving along the county roads.
Good luck with your writer’s group.
Just noticed the “rate this entry” in the comments system and gave it a try. No fair. When you click on “of typical Coyote Crossing quality” it should be giving 5 stars instead of dragging the star rating down! Guess I should have clicked on “really, really good” instead. Couldn’t really go with “changed my life” as my life has been changed so much lately that it can’t handle any further changes or I won’t be the same person anymore. Anyhow, okay, really, really good (*****).