I Probably Should've Brought a Tent by Erik Shonstrom

Author:Erik Shonstrom [Shonstrom, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493060566
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2022-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

14

Pink Volcano of the Mojave

ROAD TRIPS RUN THE RISK OF EITHER DEADENING THE SENSES WITH hours of monotonous sameness rushing by the window at sixty miles per hour, reminding us that no matter how fast or where we go we’re still mired in our own inescapable neurosis, or they loosen the spirit from the anchor of the daily grind and lift us up on the breeze to soar, like our hands sticking out the window planing on the wind. But however they make us feel, there are never enough places to stop and pee.

I pulled the car over into the parking lot. The blazing sun baked every square inch of ground, and I could feel my hair practically cooking as I walked out toward the crater. The middle schoolers I was taking on this adventure—Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Red Rock Canyon—ran past me shrieking toward the rim. Ubehebe Crater is one of the more distinctive landmarks in Death Valley—an area already stuffed with more landmarks than Disneyworld. A massive half-mile-wide pit in the middle of a desolate landscape, the crater is the collapsed cone of a volcano. Visiting Ubehebe is a strange experience. To saunter down the black, sandy volcanic sands into the baking calm of the center is to enter another world. The Timbisha Shoshone believe their people came from Ubehebe Crater. The story goes that Coyote was carrying the Timbisha Shoshone in a basket across the desert and set the basket down to sleep. As Coyote napped, the people snuck out of the basket and dispersed across the desert. The crater is now all that’s left, a depression of a giant basket.

Creation myths such as these always make more sense to me than biblical tales. Like many Indigenous peoples, the Shoshone’s stories about themselves are rooted in place, defined in part by the landscape around them. I always find these narratives compelling. Hardly surprising; bookshelves are full of white dudes like me trying to force our way into some comprehension of the natural world using native mythology as a guide. We’re like the weirdo unpopular kids in middle school trying to hang out with the cool, popular crowd so that we can be associated with something sublime rather than recognized for our awkwardness and body odor.

We all climbed down the sides of the crater, where the heat pressed down on us in stifling stillness. The rocky, wrinkled walls were reddish brown, and black sand had poured down over eons in great huge fans along the bottom. I had brought a book of Native American origin stories to read to the students at night, but wondered if I even should. What was I trying to do, after all, bringing them here, to this place, junked up on McDonald’s and Subway, for a glimpse at a landscape that is so deeply steeped in Indigenous memory, only to roar off again in our minivans to some other sacred spot.

In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin travels to the outback of Australia trying to learn about the “Dreamtime” of the Aborigines.

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