is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Taking Sand Mountain (no strategy).
As I was driving through a desolate portion of Hwy 50 in Nevada, I said to Evany, who was dozing on and off, "hey, check out how beautiful that random sand dune is." It looked like a huge, impossibly smooth, unworldly creature had been dropped onto an otherwise rocky dirty basin of land, and now was slumbering peacefully amongst incongruous surroundings. We were awed, and took photos from the moving car. Then we realized that it was indeed "Sand Mountain," the thing mentioned in our Road Trip USA book. So we took a left onto a terrible terrible road on which we could drive no faster than 10 mph and still the car was a-shake-shake-shaking down the oddly grooved and bumpy surface. We parked and put on our hiking shoes.
As we approached San Mountain, I knew things were going to get rough. First of all, it's made of sand, and sand is hard to walk on. Second, there was a guy descending it, and he looked like a tiny ant. Sand Mountain is huge. Check out how small approaching cars look from the top of it!
[oops. missing image.]
But how could we not attempt it? As we approached the colossus we were surrounded by tiny foot level sandstorms that would swoop up toward us full of light and then dissipate. On the way up we encountered some real sand, the kind that wants to whip you and then make you like it. Ouchy.
We made it to the top. But not before almost giving up a few times (me) and feeling like we might puke or pass out (Evany). Did I mention that we began this hike at 6 pm? And hadn't eaten since 11 am (except for the yummy chocolate chip cookies that Colleen made us)? Anyway, it was well worth the climb. The view from the top was even more amazing than the view from the road that had so bewitched us into the folly of the climb in the first place.
As if to raise the bar a bit higher, I decided that I wanted to walk along the razor-edge top of the dune, and discovered that it was relatively easy, or at least possible to do so if I kept my feet facing outward like a ballerina and then walked in a kind of first position formation across the top. Evany photographed me looking awfully silly, I suppose. It really was a very amazing experience, as one side of the dune was in darkness, the other in light from the setting sun, and there I was astride between the two worlds. Evany sat down to admire the view in the opposite direction, and so she missed the moment when I fell down the mountain made of sand. I fell down and down and down. It was pretty fun, after the initial alarm that accompanies falling in general. And now it is safe to say that I am fully exfoliated. Even my lungs are exfoliated, I believe. As Natalie might say, I am soft as a stripper now.
Digression: Natalie spent a night in a strip club in Vegas with a bunch of people she works with, and when she got a lap dance, she was allowed to touch the stripper, who was, I'm told, softer than just about anything you can imagine. Softer than baby bunnies! Anyway, ever since Natalie told this story, Mr. Perrone and I have been trying to use the phrase "soft as a stripper" as often as possible. The best one so far, courtesy of Mr. Perrone, intended to be used on new parents: "Your baby's bottom is as soft as a stripper!"
After the fall, I laid around in the sand looking up at the dune. I fell on the dark side, and there were these amazing wafts of sand being blown up over the top, and lit by the sun. And there was this profound silence punctuated only by the noise of the shuttering of sand. When you give up trying to keep the sand off of you, it's pretty amazing to be dune bound.
There were of course some stupid-ass dune-buggy guys there, who kept breaking the silence.
Descending Sand Mountain took much less time. Since there was no danger of me becoming more sandlogged than I already was, I experimented with various techniques for running down the dune and then plugging my feet into the sand to brake the fast-descending action. That was fun, too.
After Evany used the restroom back by the car, she said, "I have sand EVERYWHERE." I said, "I know how you feel." She replied, "I mean EVERYWHERE." And I said, "I am wearing a skirt."
We got back on Hwy 50, which is called "the loneliest road." It is. After a terrible traffic jam in Carson City, we hardly saw any cars at all, and very little civilization. In the dusk-time light, what had seemed desolate became very beautiful, and it filled me with an amazing sense of joy that I was where I was, seeing what I was seeing, doing what I was doing. Dusk-time in general seems magical to me, that time that is neither night nor day when the sky is trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up so it stops trying to do what it is told and is what it really is, if only for a while. It gives out a very deep hue (a blue so blue only blood could be more red, as Homer would say. No, not Homer Simpson).
Because of our Sand Mountain adventure, we ended up driving the last few hours in the dark, which was very disorienting because it was pitch black and we had nothing to orient us to our surroundings. We might have been driving through Nevada, or Argentina, or a bowl of hardened oatmeal for all we could tell. We were listening to Massive Attack's album "Mezzanine" which, in addition to being maybe the most sexy album ever, is a good accompaniment to a disorienting drive. I saw that tour they did for Mezzanine way-back-when, at a huge venue in Vienna, Austria, and it was one of the best rock shows I've ever seen. That's right, rock show. I couldn't believe that they took their Massive Attack hiphoptriphop thing and added hard rock guitar to it. Not too much of it. Just the right amount at precisely the right moments. It was so amazing, so wall-of-sound transcendently mind-blowingly good-loud that it was like witnessing something new happening. If that's not a good rock show, I don't know what is.
Stats:
San Francisco, CA to Austin, Nevada (Elevation: 6575; Population: 300)
Miles: 412
Lodging: $45
Dinner: Toiyabe Cafe, Austin. I had a grilled cheese, fries and a vanilla milkshake. Evany had fish and chips and a chocolate milkshake. We both agreed that the vanilla shake was far superior to the chocolate one at this particular establishment.
10:46 p.m. - August 25, 2004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
