Adieu. I am going off line for everything but a few crucial things while the family is on vacation here in the Owens Valley, Bishop California, God’s Own Country, and the Eastern Sierra Nevada to all of you.
This is the land of the perfect, utterly perfect light, and it has been a cool year with lower temperatures and massive snowfalls. So it is in the dry 80s here, dropping to the low 50s at night. Bishop is a town in a deep, deep valley between the jagged Sierras to the west and the White Inyo Mountains to the east. The White Inyo Mountains … brooding, mysterious, gently rounded desert range, deceptively high – very, very high, actually cresting at over 14,000 feet and only a couple of hundred feet below Mt. Whitney.
The White Inyo Mountains have captured my imagination. Austere and silent. When you are in the Sierras, you are weirdly almost in civilization – so well traveled and hiked and actually sitting overtop of populated California. When you are in the waterless, motionless, sparse White Inyo Mountains at the crest, looking over at the Sierras but at their same level, looking out upon the rough edges of the famous Sierra Nevada – well, the White Inyo Mountains are so utterly different in topography and geology and origin, you realize you are now in the Great Basin and there is practically no one and it is a wilderness and desolation in a way that the Sierra Nevada never quite is.
But here’s what I’m up to. In this land of perfect light, with a wonderful friendly gym, hiking, biking, everything outdoors, I am going to undertake to … break my addiction to mindless web surfing. I am going off line and not spending any time blogging, or responding to anything other than utterly crucial emails, but most of all I’m not going to just surf. No mindless, endless, restless searching for nothing in particular. I wonder if this habit does have anything to do with dopamine – I just threw that in to sound scientific – all I mean is that I spend too much time in an undirected way online and if there is any place to break the habit, it’s here. But don’t try this at home, kids! It’s dangerous stuff. Adieu for a while. Here is a favorite line from Blaise Cendrars’ marvelous poem (it dates from just after 1900 or so, one of his earliest and finest), Prose of the Transsiberien, or, Little Jeanne of France, in the free translation by Dos Passos:
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They are afraid when I leave, I will never return.
And all the women I’ve ever known rise up before me on the horizon
With pitiful gestures and the sad looks of lighthouses in the rain.
Well, one thing we won’t have here is much rain, or a lighthouse, or sad looks either.