Into Thick Air (45 page)

Likewise.

“I'm from Berkeley. I had a motorcycle dealership, but I sold it—to see the world.”

Ronald Ware is not young but is nonetheless wrinkle-free; it probably helps that he's black, and needn't apply the sunscreen I loathe. Neat
checkered button-down shirt, blue jeans, black leather shoes, white socks. We stand in the shade of a palm. Despite the pit in my stomach I cannot resist asking, Of all places, why Death Valley?

“I was traveling through Europe, and I was in Istanbul when I had this moment, this . . . epiphany. I'd gone to the bazaar, to the great mosques, when I realized that most of all Istanbul was a big noisy city crowded with people. I found myself thinking: I could have found this in San Francisco.

“And I said, why am I in Istanbul when I don't even know my own country? So I set out and found myself here, and I love it. The space, the quiet. I'm sixty-one and I had no idea!”

Ronald also loves desert driving. “I can go a half hour without seeing another car.”

The nomad's pleasure. “Treeless spaces uncramp the soul,” declared Mary Austin a hundred years ago. She liked to urge her horse along at a “jigging coyote trot” through her beloved treeless space, the Mohave desert of puckering summer droughts and zinging winter freezes. This desert.

“I'm a nice man—that's how I had a successful motorcycle business without ever having ridden a motorcycle. But now that I'm seeing my country and meeting people like you, I see that I've been an ignorant dogmatic person, too. I'm just glad that I'm getting out and learning something. About you, about me. The things I like. I've got a substantial wine collection—but I don't even like wine! Investment and prestige, I suppose. But what do I really like?”

He knows.

“Exercise, because it feels good. And soap and water and a good sleep—eight, nine hours. Reading. And this desert. I've been here three times in the last two months.”

Ronald wants to know about my family, and out come my wallet photos. He's married with two children, too; he hasn't lost them but found himself. Solitary travel can do that. A man fills in the missing places in his thoughts and eases into his own skin.

I thank Ronald, who's not sure why I'm grateful, as he did most of the talking.
Just lucky,
I'm thinking as I head into the inn, into the hushed luxury of wrought-iron hanging lamps and antique ladder-back chairs.
In the bathroom I comb the twigs from my hair and use the electric shoe polisher, sending up a cloud of dust. Semitransformed, I emerge and order a focaccia and a beer. I fit right in, despite not having showered since Las Vegas.

This I remedy with a ride to the nearby Furnace Creek Ranch with its faux Old West General Store and Saloon, pool, and showers. A no-fear coyote slinks through the parking lot. A Swiss woman borrows my tire pump. At the adjacent Park Service visitor center I pay my fees and learn that the current wind speed at Badwater is a mere 0.16 knot.

But I've yakked and idled away my chance to reach the low point today. I spend the night in a canyon near Furnace Creek, munching pistachios and reading Mary Austin's account of a prospector who'd camped out so often that he “had gotten to the point where he knew no bad weather, and all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors.”

In the morning I head back to the inn for breakfast. It's just me and one other diner and Betty the hostess. She wears a bright enameled flag brooch. “I never thought I'd like living in a trailer in Death Valley, but I love it. Come by and put your feet up on the coffee table—I don't care.”

I'd love to, but I'm going out to Badwater for the night.

“For the night? I met a hiker who slept out there, and he said it was so quiet that he could hear the blood pumping through him. Badwater sure is a pretty place, but I wouldn't want to sleep listening to that! Too quiet for me, way down in that hole where there ain't no noise—unh-unh.”

She deftly refills my water glass and takes a seat at the table.

“I want to hear a little something—a cricket or a frog or even just the sound of a car passing, not all squealing, but just the sound of its tires, something to remind me that I'm not
all alone
.”

It's already 98 degrees when I leave, all alone. The road south to Badwater is well above the salt pan, hugging the mountain front to the east. It's the shade of all colors mixed together, the unsavory brown-yellow-black that results from kneading all the Play-Doh modeling clay together. The mountain slope is amazingly steep for what appears to be rubble. Once I try to scramble up, just to see if it's somehow stuck together, like limestone, with geologic miracle glue, or if it's truly at the angle of repose. Answer:
the latter. I climb ten feet before sliding back down in a cloud of cobbles and dirt.

I won't do that again. I'm left with the impression that Death Valley is, on a grand time scale, a temporary pit. Come to think of it, so is Africa's Lac Assal. One big crack in the crust, and Assal would be flooded in the titanic rush of the Indian Ocean. When things warm up and the ice melts, South America's Salina Grande will also vanish in a flood. Asia's Dead Sea, robbed of water by ever-increasing use of the Jordan River, is sinking by several feet each year; likewise, Europe's Caspian Sea is dependent on the flow of the Volga. The only sure bet is Australia's Lake Eyre, which, like Australia itself, will probably persist in blissful geologic ignorance of the rest of the globe. Otherwise, it's safe to say that the low points will never be the same again. Neither will I, so I'm just in time.

The valley bottom, which from Dante's View appeared to be a perfectly level salt pan, is not. What looked smooth is actually blisters and little towers of salt. The farther south I ride, the closer they approach the road, until the tongue of salt reaches almost to the road and the crumbling mountain. Then the final drop, and I can go no lower. “BADWATER,” says the sign, “–280 FEET”: lowest point in North America. But not the least popular: there are ten cars in the lot. I peek in the windows to see their guidebooks and guess their origin from the language: Japanese, German, and Italian.

High above in the late-afternoon sun, clouds in long whips promise a show at sundown. Below sea level there's not a single puff of wind. It's the right evening for something I've been denied at every other low point for reason of wind or water: a night on the salt.

It's rough riding across the foot-wide polygons, whose borders are thickly ridged or wrecked in heaves like sea ice. I walk the bike west, toward the center, occasionally turning to watch the road and parked cars diminish with distance. Beyond the last tourists, the salt floes are much broader, three to ten feet across, with two-inch-high ridges between. The snowy surface is built of thousands of stalagmites less than a half-inch tall that crunch underfoot with a sound like knuckles popping. I could ride now, but even walking the bike leaves a track. So I carry it, not wanting to leave a mark that I myself wouldn't want to find.

If anyone ever comes out here. I'm about a mile from the road when I hear rapid crunching and turn to see two familiar faces, panting and grinning. It's my neighbors from Tucson, Rob and Jennifer. I'd forgotten that they would be returning from a Sierra hike and promised to look for me.

“We've searched half of Death Valley for you!”

After the ritual backslaps, I congratulate Rob on his remarkable tracking: You did it!

“No—you did it,” says Rob. “The last pit! Now, how would you like to come back with us to our camp? We promise pasta and wine. But you'll have to pay with stories of your trip.”

I tell the truth: I don't want the journey to end until I spend a night on the salt. Not that I'm sure it's legal. When I picked up my permit, the nice NPS man simply told me that I had to camp two miles off the road. At the time, I had no idea that it's against park rules to bring a bike onto Badwater—even if you carry it—or to camp there. (I've since learned better, to my sorrow, thanks to a dutiful NPS officer and my publisher, the Sierra Club.)

I promise my neighbors endless tales back in Tucson, and we part ways. The bike begins to cut into my shoulder. I pad the frame with my spare shirt. When it appears I've reached the center of the valley, I quit, lay out my ground cloth, and sit.

The sun goes down in flames without a sound. It's a good thing Betty the hostess isn't here, fidgeting in the silence. Quiet, I suppose, reminds her of death. But to be able to “hear the blood pumping” is to hear life, your own life.

I eat dinner and open a beer. Light my pipe and watch the smoke laze in blue reefs around my bag. No wind. When I stand I feel a thermocline developing: it's colder at my feet than my head. All I need now is data: my thermometer says it's 75 at my toes and 82 at eye level.

At 8 PM the moon is just a grin on the western horizon, two hours behind the sun. The cool light catches the ridges of salt that encircle my camp and extend to the mountains. A very crisp scene: the perfectly flat pure white floor of the valley, the black masses of the mountains beyond, rising 6,000 feet to the east and 11,000 feet to the west.

There goes the moon. The earth is spinning, and I'm pinned by gravity and good fortune. I think of the Seven Summits and the urge to leave Everest not long after you arrive—and how different this is, lying on a glazed sea of salt.

Everybody has a plan, something that may or may not happen—but that's really not the point. It's the plan that counts, the pleasure of possibility. You might hope to sail alone to the palm islands in a boat of your own design. To please your spouse in a remarkably athletic way or marry the right person the next time around. Or to sell your house before the plumbing goes and move to a carefree condo at the clean edge of a golf course until God's call.

As for me, I wanted to pedal my bike to the lowest points on earth. To my everlasting surprise, I did.

I RETURNED HOME to mild fanfare. My wife threw a party honoring me as low-rider of the decade. We provided guests with the lowest entertainment possible: a game of limbo. Some time later, my friend Mark from high school interviewed me for his website as we sat outside a Tucson coffeehouse on Speedway Boulevard. The interview went fine, but I didn't recognize my words when they appeared on the Internet. Sorry! said Mark, but the recorder had captured the sounds of Speedway, making it difficult for his mother to transcribe the tape. Much of the time she simply guessed at what I was saying.

Even so, the interview, “Adventures of the Ultimate Underachiever,” generated an immediate result. A man e-mailed me an article from the journal
South American Explorer.
Authored by Victor Ponce, it began with “Recent mapping by Argentina's Instituto Geografico Militar has determined that the lowest point in the American continent is in the Grand Bajo de San Julian. . . .”

San Julian is not the low point I visited, Salina Grande, but another Patagonian pit about five hundred miles south. Before my journey, sources including the National Geographic map of South America had made the claim for Salina Grande, so there I went.

Of course, it was faintly depressing to have pedaled to the wrong depression.
Once more consulting my fabulous
Times Atlas of the World
, I found the Gran Bajo de San Julian. The map indicated no point below sea level, but I'd no reason to doubt the existence of a deeper hole. Mountaineers occasionally fib about reaching a summit, but nobody bothers to lie about the pits.

I stared at the map of Patagonia. The Andes were crowned by enormous ice fields. Glaciers swept out of the mountains and calved into lakes that reached deep into Argentine Patagonia. The notion of pedaling past icebergs in the desert was alluring—but Patagonia's dripping forests and brutal winds had permanently repelled me.

Yet it couldn't hurt merely to
plan
a trip. Through no effort of my own, a logical route to the Gran Bajo presented itself: from the base of 12,700-foot Mount Fitz Roy, along the Rio Chalia and through a village with the unlikely name of Mata Amarilla, or “kill yellow.”

I paused, the atlas still open to Plate 121, and considered the village. There must be another translation, or else some very strange yellow killers. I could imagine them, drinking
mate
tea as a sheep roasted in the courtyard. I could even imagine their surprise when a man and woman rolled up on bikes, an old but sturdy couple on their second honeymoon, riding to the new lowest points on the planet.

I've been lucky. I was surely the slowest bicyclist ever backed by Discovery Online, and I'm grateful for their support (while it lasted). My deepest thanks go to editor Greg Henderson—the only one of the bunch who truly wanted to join me beside a salt pit for a beer and sour Skittles.

I'm glad, too, that Stephen Vivona and Frank Cook got me hooked on bicycle riding long ago. My high school and college English teachers, Ken Wright, Jim Potts, and Ed Abbey, did a wonderful thing: they made me want to write.

I traveled to the depressions alone but with plenty of help. Discovery's Jodi Bettencourt juggled invoices and visas, and Doren Burrell assembled the traveling digital studio. Rune Eriksen of Telenor Satellite donated a phone
and
told me where to find the northernmost tree in Norway. Amina Elzeneing and Dr. Moustafa El Ghamrawy showed me the depths of Egyptian hospitality; Salim Ayoub did the same for Jordan, as well as telling me the true reason Arabs drive at night without headlights. I'm also grateful for those who took me into their homes, yet didn't get a peep in the story: Doris Soto and Fernando Jara, Delphina and Scott Knight, George and Deb the Catgirl.

My agents, Ellen Geiger and Matt McGowan, gently introduced me to the art of writing a proposal. When it came time to write the book, I often
ducked into Espresso Art or Ike's until the sun went down, after which I headed for The Mint, The Surly Wench, or The Shanty. Not a one of them booted me for antisocial behavior. Peter Friederici and Mary Alice Yakutchik read parts of the manuscript and provided kind words when I needed them. Greg Henderson, Steven Hopp, and Barbara Kingsolver edited the first draft and wrote almost another book in the margins, doing their best to make it better. (They did.) Diana Landau of Sierra Club Books is the smart and patient editor I needed for the final push.