Chapter 4. Birefringence
The white crystals were strewn over the slope below the excavation as though they’d been clawed out by some giant and heedless burrowing animal in pursuit of more important matters. Their facets were all glittering parallelograms, and they ranged from boulders the size of milk crates all the way down to tiny tabs no bigger than a fingernail.
Two hikers with daypacks on their backs moved jerkily along the steep slope, keeping their downhill legs planted while they leaned into the hillside to pick up particularly attractive samples of the crystals and examine them, turning them this way and that, holding them up to the blue sky, then at arm’s length against the dark spine of the opposing ridge a couple of miles to the west, rotating them some more, then dropping them to pick up another. Now and then one or the other of them would retain a crystal for a minute or two before rejecting it for a purer or less fragmented specimen.
One of the men wore a brown broad-brimmed hat, shorts, and an oversized blue teeshirt that accentuated his remarkable skinniness. The other, shorter and more solidly built, was in a faded long-sleeved shirt, carefully tucked in, and fatigue pants. He wore an eyeshade, but only thick and wavy hair, beginning to gray, protected the top of his head from the fierce mountain sun. He said, “You get a double image if you turn it to the right angle. It’s like a ghost. Or an echo.” He was holding a large crystal between thumb and forefinger and examining one finger of his other hand through it.
“Yup. Double refraction,” the skinny man replied, dropping one crystal and stooping to pick up another. “The anisotropy of the calcite divides the light into two separate beams, with different polarizations . . . ”
“Don’t tell me. Please.” They continued picking their way along the slope in silence.
“There’s a lot of iridescence, too” said the shorter man eventually. “But only at the right angles. You can see it retreating back into the crystal, as if there were different planes.”
“I could explain that, too,” began the skinny man, the lightness of his tone indicating that he knew he was merely provoking.
“Yes, but don’t,” said his companion.
The skinny man removed his hat and smoothed his sweaty, thinning hair toward the back of his scalp with strokes of the palm of one hand. “We should probably keep moving, if we want to make it to the top and not spend the night on the mountain.” They were pinned high on the western slope of this ridge by the direct rays of the late afternoon sun. Far below them lay the valley where they had camped the night before. The tiny green dot of their tent was visible at the foot of the next ridge to the west, near the shore of a small lake. The color of the lake shaded from pale green at its south end to near black at the gap in the rock walls where the water began its tumbling trip down through a long gorge and finally out onto the desert, which could be seen lying still as painted scenery many miles away.
“I suppose so,” said the shorter man. He gazed down at the crystal in his hand. “The problem is deciding which ones to take with me. I keep finding more beautiful ones. And they’re quite heavy.”
“I know. You keep thinking the next one is going to be better. Anyway, the idea would be not to carry any of them up to the top, since we’re coming back this way.”
“Of course. So that at least means I don’t have to decide yet.” The shorter man dug in his deep pockets for the current favorites, then placed them all carefully on the top of a flat boulder. “On the way back I can make my final selection.” He shrugged his daypack off his shoulders and set it down, pulled out his water bottle and took a few swallows. “Not that I want a lecture,” he said, “but do you know how these things were used? It’s a long way to climb for a few pretty calcite crystals.”
The skinny man replaced his hat. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Bomb sights, I think. Maybe the double image was useful for some kind of altitude measurement. Like in those old rangefinder cameras. But I don’t really know.”
They both shouldered their backpacks and began climbing the steep trail once more, taking the short, slow steps of high altitude and pausing often to rest. By now they were above 12,000 feet. Before long they emerged from among the outcrops of reddish rock and began to work their way diagonally upward across a long slope of drab sand and small platelets of loose rock. A fierce wind met them once they left the shelter of the rocks, whistling up the ridge to thunder around their ears and making it difficult to balance. It was hard going; the loose material continually gave way and slid down under their weight and the upward thrusts of their legs, making every step the equivalent of two or more on a hard surface. It would have been shorter to climb straight upward toward the summit, but the slope seemed too steep, and they instinctively took the longer diagonal, which was also marked by a faint trail. After a couple of hundred yards of this slogging they reached the edge of the summit ridge, where they turned back toward the north and paused to rest before starting the last stretch. To their right the mountain now fell away almost vertically for a couple of thousand feet. At the bottom of this drop was a rocky bowl that cupped a perfectly circular blue lake. The skinny man stood casually with his bent uphill leg at the edge, pressing on the crown of his hat with one hand and gazing first downward into the bowl and then outward at a series of increasingly lower ridges and, beyond them, the distant desert floor. Getting a glimpse over the knife edge, his companion made a muffled exclamation, lay down on his stomach, and poked his head over to look, as though clinging to the peak of a dangerously pitched roof. “One good gust,” he said after a while, “and you’ll be airborne, on your way to that lake. An Icarian flight, I’m afraid. I don’t think there’d even be any point in calling the Forest Service. And it’s your turn to cook tonight.”
“Heights don’t really bother me. And this wind is so steady you can basically lean against it.” The shorter man glanced up at his friend poised glamorously on the brink of disaster and tightened his lips. He got to his feet carefully and they started toward the top, staying a few feet below the edge of the ridge. In a few minutes they reached the summit. It was a nearly level table of slatey rock, blown completely bare by the relentless gales. Previous hikers, apparently with time on their hands, had constructed a windbreak about a foot and a half high by carefully stacking the flat rocks. Possibly some of the braver ones had even spent the night up here in this desolation. The two hikers sat gratefully down in the lee of the windbreak and gazed out over the dry and crumpled terrain to the east: miles of long, parallel, reclining ridges, then the broad trench of the desert valley, and finally the tall and silent White Mountains. Nothing moved. There was no sign of human activity.
The skinny man unzipped his daypack and pulled out a plastic bag of trail mix. His companion, as if only now reminded of food, unwrapped a granola bar. They sat thoughtfully munching and taking occasional swigs of water from their bottles. It was warm in the lee of the rock wall, though they could hear the wind roaring a few inches above their heads, and neither of them seemed anxious to stand up again. But the sun was lowering, and they had a long walk back down to the valley floor.
The skinny man finally got to his feet and took a few steps to the very summit of the mountain, where he posed, mountaineer-like, in the rushing wind. At his feet, tucked into a crevice in the rock, was a small box. “There’s a trail register here,” he said. “We should add our names to the list of conquerors.” He squatted, undid the hook latch on the box, and opened its lid. Like an angry hand, a sudden blast of wind seized all the small rectangles of paper contained in the box and sent them instantly fleeing out over the ridge like a flock of anxious sparrows, their dips and tumbles precisely tracing the streamlines and eddies of the wind’s chaotic flow.
“God damn it, how the hell could you do that?” exploded the shorter man, from his seat in the lee of the rock wall. Without speaking, the skinny man had bared his teeth in an expression half grimace, half smile, as he watched the sailing papers disperse, already shrinking into the distance.
His friend also turned to watch the papers.
“Son of a bitch!” he said. “That’s probably something like 50 years of records you just pissed away.”
“You’d think they would have put something in there to hold them down. A rock or something. With the wind that’s always blowing up here.” The skinny man seemed only mildly concerned by the mishap.
“You just don’t give a shit, do you? Those are irreplaceable records! Literally irreplaceable. There’s no copy of that history. You’ve just destroyed something that can never be reconstructed.”
“The genealogist speaks,” said the skinny man, making an obvious effort to appear unconcerned and continuing to gaze to the east, where a few scraps of paper were still visible, brief flickers of white in the pure air.
“You’re goddamn right,” said the shorter man, who had now stood up, ignoring the cold wind in his outrage. “You really don’t see it, do you? You’ve just trampled a wildflower, a little florescence of the human endeavor. It’s something those people did, something they accomplished, and you just erased it from the record. You might as well have killed them. Or at least moved them a step closer to death and oblivion. It’s a callous act. Callous! As if you had the right to obliterate someone else’s legacy.”
“Legacy! Was that their legacy?”
“Yes! Yes it was! Part of it. You think it’s nothing, a name and a date on a scrap of paper, but who are you to decide what’s worth saving? Don’t you understand? Every bit of it matters, every bit! Every bit of purposeful activity matters. It’s like another little stone added to this windbreak. Would you destroy that?”
“Well, it was an accident. But yes, some people would. Some people would consider that windbreak an abomination, out here in this wilderness.”
“Yes, and those people are idiots. Mindless agents of entropy and death. Those little things are all there is.” He turned and waved an angry arm out at the miles of dry ridges, with their narrow rivulets of pale green clinging to the depths of the washes, and beyond them the unrelieved beige of the desert. “That’s what else there is! Do you see that?” He was silent for a while. They were both silent. “I know it doesn’t seem like much, but you’ve actually destroyed part of their life’s work,” he said, more calmly. “It’s a small thing, but small accomplishments are all most of us have. And sometimes not even accomplishments. Just a record, a notation somewhere that someone lived. I assure you, it matters. It matters to someone. Except for those records, there’s only that.” He swung his arm out toward the desert again. “That dead nothing out there, that tombstone, with the carving already eroding off it. You’ve consigned them to the void.”
The skinny man continued to gaze eastward although the fleeing bits of paper had vanished. He had removed his hat to prevent it from following the escaped names into that emptiness. Finally he said, “Well, that’s not how I see it.”
“I know you don’t. I know that,” said his friend, sitting down again in the lee of the windbreak.
“I think there’s actually something right about it, to tell you the truth. It fits our fate, doesn’t it? Isn’t that basically what happens to all our great accomplishments? Blown away on the winds of time,” the skinny man said. “Anyway, I don’t see loss,” he continued. “Nothing’s lost there. Those papers still exist, they’re still flying around out there. I don’t see loss, I see dissemination. In the literal sense, of seeding. Somebody out there in Benton or Tonopah is going to be walking to the Kwik Mart and is going to find one of those scraps, with just a name and a date. And they’re going to pick it up and start wondering what it means. Or one of them is going to blow in the window of somebody’s trailer home, or wash up on the beach at Crowley Lake, next to all the cow pies, and somebody’s going to start wondering. And that’s how the ripples spread. Those scraps of paper were useless, sitting up here in this box. Up here is where they were dead. How many people would see them here? The 50 other people who might climb this mountain in the next 50 years? That box is the cemetery, not the world out there.”
“Horseshit,” said his friend, not looking at him.
“I’m serious, man. You’re not happy unless the information is trapped in a box, a nice little dead list. Of what? People who climbed a fucking mountain. Conquered nature, or whatever. And then what? The list can be read by other fools who perform the same irrelevant feat. And there it sits, forever, as far as you’re concerned. Their legacy. What’s so important about that? It’s about as important as graffiti, although at least they didn’t spray paint their names on the rocks up here. Who the hell cares if Barney Boot-heel climbed this mountain in 1964?”
“You’re missing the point. Totally. We’ve got to preserve that kind of thing, if humanity’s going to create any more meaning than a committee of chimpanzees pounding on typewriters. Randomness is not life. It’s the opposite of life. Only intention, execution, and preservation can drive a wedge into that glittering nothing out there. I suppose you see what you did as expressing some kind of freedom, but it’s not freedom. It’s really just a form of nihilism, your ‘dissemination’.”
“For a poet, you make a great accountant,” said the skinny man. “That information is dead when it’s in the box. Or it’s on the road to becoming dead. Information is nothing until you release it to the universe. Then it comes alive, and just because no one knows what’ll happen to it. Especially in this modern day and age.” He emphasized the cliche annoyingly. “Imagine this: down there on highway 395 is a young woman at a rest stop, with the top down on her red Prius convertible. The scrap of paper falls onto the passenger seat while she’s looking in the rearview mirror and combing her beautiful blonde hair. She picks it up and reads it: Barney Boot-heel, July 1964. A couple of her axons begin to buzz. It’s a message from the universe! She gets interested. When she gets home to Umpqua, Washington, she Googles the name and finds out that Barney Boot-heel is, or was, a professor of linguistics at Fresno State University. Just for fun, she rings up the linguistics department to tell Professor Boot-heel that she found his message in a bottle. They tell her he retired 10 years ago, and now he’s in a nursing home in Grass Valley and he has Alzheimer’s. But she can’t let it go. The universe is talking to her, trying to tell her something! She drives the Prius to Grass Valley to visit the nursing home. The old man is just shuffling down the hallways in those paper slippers with his hands folded in front of him and a worried look on his face, completely non compos mentis. He doesn’t even remember that he ever climbed a mountain. Holding onto his arm is his kind but embittered 45-year-old son, whose wife recently divorced him, taking the three kids and the house in Marin County. Their eyes meet. . .”
“You are so full of shit,” said the shorter man, his voice no longer expressing passion, but only irritation and disgust. “None of that is going to happen, and you know it perfectly well. Those scraps of paper, those names, are effectively lost now, as if they’d never been. As if those people had never lived. They’ve just gone to join all the roving Safeway bags and gum wrappers that litter the trashy byways of our decaying culture. You’ve taken order and intention, human striving and achievement, no matter how minor, and turned it into mere litter.”
They were both silent, staring out toward the desert while they examined their intellectual positions. Finally the skinny man took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips. “We better get going,” he said. “I don’t really want to be up here once it starts to get dark.” The shorter man got silently to his feet and followed his companion carefully down the ridge trail, staying well below the frightening edge. Threading their way among the rocky outcrops, they came again to the abandoned calcite mine, with its sloppy white bib of tailings. Presumably the miners, most of them now dead, had diligently selected out all the really good crystals and sent them off to fly over the burning cities of Germany and Japan. All that were left here were the scattered rejects, although there were some beautiful specimens among them. But the two hikers were approaching the m
ine from the opposite direction now, and the sun had vanished behind the next ridge to the west, leaving this slope in deep shade.
“I can’t figure out where I left the ones I was planning to carry down,” said the shorter man, with an edge of the earlier irritation still in his voice. He stood with his hands on his hips, scanning the pile of debris.
“Well, just grab a bunch,” said the skinny man, unslinging his pack. “We can sort out the good ones when we get back down to the tent.” He crossed the fan of tailings once, efficiently loading crystals into his pack, then waited somewhat impatiently while the shorter man made his own, more careful selections. Eventually they shouldered their packs and started on down the mountainside. The crunching of boot soles faded slowly in the twilight.
Later, the wind dwindled and died. The mountain, and the huge emptiness surrounding it, lay perfectly silent under a black sky densely spattered with white stars.
The Inelegant Universe Page 4
