Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  An endorheic lake such as this one has a dry bed—around here we call the lakebed a playa (Spanish for “beach”)—which is among the flattest landscapes on Earth. This is why desert playas are used for rocketry and for setting land speed records. It is also why huge playas like Smoke Creek and Black Rock are the site of Nevada’s signature form of outdoor recreation. First, drive your truck out onto the playa. Then, weight the accelerator pedal with a chunk of granite or jimmy it with a bitterbrush branch. As the vehicle begins covering ground, tune the radio to the baseball game, then clamber out your window and onto the top of your truck’s cab. Be sure to take the six-pack with you. Now, sit back and enjoy the sun, the breeze, and the scenery of the distant mountains as your unmanned truck drives itself randomly across the expansive sublimity of one of the most isotropic landscapes on the planet. Wear your shades, because playas are bright white from a coating of fine-grained saline sediment that contains evaporative minerals such as borax and sodium carbonate. The playa is also the cradle of fantastic dust storms, as rising spirals of hot desert wind whip the white dust into towering gyres that can be seen for many miles. Recent research even suggests that the particles liberated from playas in this way act as condensation nuclei: they are the seeds from which clouds are grown in the wild garden of the sky.

  My grandpa, who, I am proud to say, was a home brewer during Prohibition, used to tell me stories of accidentally oversugaring beer batches and having the bottles explode beneath the beds where they were hidden. “A lot of people wet their beds back then,” he used to joke, “from the bottom up. Pop! Pop! Pop!” Playa lakes are often created in the same way: they are flooded from below. Even in the absence of runoff from snowmelt, it sometimes happens that the water table beneath the playa rises high enough to intersect the surface, at which point water percolates up onto the endorheic lakebed from below. When that happens, what looks like the sun-baked, rock-hard surface of the playa is actually a thin crust, beneath which looms a subterranean megalake. Every now and then, some uninitiated visitor tearing across the playa at high speed fails to notice the telltale dimples that subtly reveal the upward movement of underground water. No matter. They figure it out when the crust of the playa cracks, like thin ice, and their vehicle is swallowed by the water below.

  Like many larger endorheic terminus lakes, my little home lake does have water in it now and then. Even in dry years there is enough subsurface moisture around its margin to sustain tules—the reeds traditionally used by our Paiute neighbors to fashion everything from delicate duck decoys to functional boats to thatching for their sturdy wickiups. Coyote willow, which also grows around the lake, is handy on hard hikes: break off a branch and gnaw it a little as you walk, and its natural salicin, which is chemically related to aspirin, has a mild analgesic effect. If we have had a big snow year, the runoff onto the playa during the melt-out will create a broad expanse of gleaming water, though the lake may be no more than a few inches deep. In those years, it becomes an oasis for wading birds, including stilts, avocets, and ibis of both the white and white-faced varieties. If we have had several wet winters in a row, the lake becomes more expansive and a bit deeper, and, in those years, migrating tundra swans will join the resident Canada geese in wintering with us. In one unusually wet year, we had more than a hundred graceful swans on the lake from Thanksgiving until we uncorked the Redbreast Irish whiskey on St. Paddy’s Day. That was the winter we almost forgot that water is not a permanent feature of this landscape. Here in the desert, even a lake is like a swan, an antelope, a wildfire, a moment of clarity. It comes and goes.

  In most parts of most years, my home lake is bone-dry, and sometimes it remains parched for so long that it becomes a vast, lovely garden of weeds. It has been perfectly waterless for three years now—just as it was on that shimmering day, sixteen years ago, when I looked out over this light-filled basin and asked Eryn to set aside her usual good sense and marry me. On such a day, who needs water? Besides, I am so accustomed to hiking through the lake that I am not sure I would want to go around it.

  A lake without water speaks more to memory and to hope than it does to the kind of certainty that is so rare on this side of the vale of tears. Most of what we love is ultimately transient, and it takes a desiccated resilience to reconcile with that fact. So the term I like best to describe the intermittent, uncertain nature of this endorheic Great Basin playa lake is ephemeral. If the ephemerality of my home lake makes it less picturesque, its periodic waterlessness also gives it a hard, bright certainty that inspires appreciation for what it means to live in this world. The water will return in time. Until it does, we will gaze out across this shimmering lakebed and slake our thirst with light.

  FOR CENTURIES, people have been “dowsing,” an activity that is also known by a variety of vernacular terms such as “witching,” “divining,” and, Hannah and Caroline’s favorite, “doodlebugging.” Dowsing is the activity of attempting to locate—without the use of scientific equipment—something valuable that lies beneath the ground. In earlier centuries dowsers primarily sought lodes of precious metals, while in more recent times dowsing has more often been used to witch wells—that is, to locate sources of subterranean water in advance of drilling a domestic water well. The devices used by dowsers vary, but most employ some form of “witching stick,” which, during the Renaissance, was known as the virgula divina (Latin for “divine rod”). This divining rod is often a Y-shaped stick cut from witch hazel, willow, or peach, but it may be made of any number of other materials. In order to appreciate dowsing, you must understand only two things: the practice has been widespread for more than five hundred years; and, there is absolutely no scientific evidence of its effectiveness.

  Out here in Silver Hills, our wells are deep, expensive, and sometimes unreliable, and so your good or bad luck with a well often determines not only the value of your property but also its inhabitability. The hit-or-miss nature of drilling for high desert water has given rise to a rich body of local folk narratives, which sometimes focus on the quality of a well as an indicator of human character. For example, we all know the story about our neighbor who went 700 feet, came up dry, picked a new spot, and then went 900 feet before finally discovering sulfurous, fetid, barely potable liquid that leaks out at three gallons per minute. And we all know why this guy had to pay north of fifty grand for a dribble of putrid water: because he sided with a local developer who wants to turn some of our pronghorn calving grounds and mule deer winter range into a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs. Meanwhile, the nicest guy on our road went only 300 feet and scored forty-five gallons per minute of liquid gold—a sure sign that he has received his reward on earth, even if it turns out there is no water in heaven. While no Silver Hillbilly would ever mention God, let alone karma, out here in Silver Hills we seem to believe that water, like faith, must be the evidence of things unseen.

  Before we could build our passive-solar home, we first had to succeed in sinking a well, so we asked around among Silver Hillbillies about good drillers. The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t who drilled your well that mattered but where they drilled it. And that, rumor had it, was the exclusive province of Chickenfeathers, an eighty-odd-year-old neighbor who was locally renowned as a dowser. While no one on my road would admit to having had the old man witch their own well, each neighbor told me that everyone else on the road had used him to witch theirs.

  When I expressed polite skepticism about Chickenfeathers to Ludde, my closest neighbor and my mentor as a curmudgeon, he replied, “You’re gonna spend a shitload of dollars on a well no scientist can tell you where to drill. Maybe Chickenfeathers knows where to drill, maybe he doesn’t, but he only charges forty bucks. You think you know better?” This from a man who once watched me put my truck into four-wheel drive after I was stuck in the mud and asked, “Do you also wipe your ass after you pull your pants up?”

  I called Chickenfeathers. He said he was too old to drive, so we made arrangements for my dad to give him a lift out to
Ranting Hill. Chickenfeathers turned out to be closer to 180 than eighty, and he was dressed like the Great Basin cowboy he was: roper boots, dusty jeans, plaid shirt, leather vest, silver bolo tie, rabbit-felt cowboy hat with feathers on the face of the crown, and a cowhide satchel that he wore slung over one shoulder. When he got to our place, Chickenfeathers just wanted to sit on the tailgate and talk and watch the mountains etch the sky. He had lived a long time, and he was a man who was done hurrying.

  After a half hour, Chickenfeathers finally opened the leather satchel, from which he removed a curved, forked stick that he said was freshly cut from coyote willow; along with the witching stick he had a smaller leather bag, which swung from a handsome lanyard artfully braided from thin strips of sagebrush bark. He positioned the forks of the willow rod in his weathered hands, glanced at my dad and me, and said, with total confidence, “Let’s find you boys some water.”

  Chickenfeathers began to wander around the desert in the general vicinity of where we imagined the house might someday be built, zigzagging through the desert peach and bitterbrush like a slow-motion hound working to catch a scent. My dad and I followed along behind him, alternating glances between the witching stick and the old man’s face, which wore a look of unrelenting concentration. Chickenfeathers’s unhurried approach gave me plenty of time to think about what I was actually doing: paying forty bills for the privilege of watching a cowboy wizard shuffle around in the dust to get his entirely unscientific opinion about where I should bet a lot of money I could not afford to lose. I was embarrassed for engaging in what was clearly pure superstition. What next? Would I pay somebody to find water in the lines of my palm—in tea leaves or a tarot deck? My pretensions to intelligence faded as I admitted that I had now entered the Magic Eight Ball school of problem solving—though I rationalized that my fate may have been sealed when, as a kid, my own Magic Eight Ball cracked, lost its fluid, and remained stuck on “Reply hazy, try again.”

  “Right here, boys!” called Chickenfeathers, indicating a perfectly random spot in the open desert. “Right here,” he repeated with confidence. He opened the small leather pouch and took out a silver plumb bob, which was attached to a long string adorned with chicken feathers. He began to swing the feathered bob back and forth hypnotically over the sand, apparently feeling for the water through some invisible vibration along that feathered string, listening for the life-giving water percolating in its rock sanctuary far below the desiccated surface of the Great Basin. “You’ll go 400 feet and get twenty-six gallons a minute,” he declared, “and that water will be sweet as honey in the rock.”

  After forking over a pair of Andy Jacksons and then delivering Chickenfeathers to his small house out on a remote BLM inholding, my dad and I tried once again to figure out where to drill the well. We agreed that Chickenfeathers’s performance had not inspired much confidence, but we lacked any clear way to make a sensible, informed decision about where to locate the well. The problem seemed to be not where we should drill but on what grounds we could rationalize choosing a spot other than the one Chickenfeathers had recommended with such conviction. In the absence of hard facts, it seemed natural to have recourse to pure superstition, and so, eventually, we simply gave up and drilled where Chickenfeathers said we should.

  When the drilling was done, we had gone 440 feet and struck almost thirty gallons per minute of water that is more delicious than words will ever tell. I have no way of knowing if Chickenfeathers was correct, or just lucky. I know only that I got my forty bucks worth no matter what is true, no matter what remains hidden. We do not know where those invisible, subterranean rivers flow, or how to find them, or what it means even if we do. But there is an old kind of listening that reminds us of the sweet water that is always down there, somewhere.

  NINETEEN nineteen was a decent year for America, all in all. The Grand Canyon received protection as a national park, the Nineteenth Amendment at last gave women the vote, the world witnessed the end of the war that was to have ended all wars, and American heroes Jackie Robinson and J. D. Salinger were born. Then again, 1919 was not all good. The Volstead Act initiated Prohibition. There were the infamous Palmer raids against political and labor “agitators,” many of whom were deported for the obscure crime of “undermining American society.” It was also the year of the Great Molasses Flood, in which two million gallons of viscous, saccharine goo from a ruptured distillery tank flowed in a fifteen-foot flash flood down the paved slot canyons of Boston. And the American poet Wallace Stevens had the bright idea to put a jar in a wild forest in Tennessee. “Anecdote of the Jar,” his 1919 poem documenting this bizarre experiment, begins this way:

  I placed a jar in Tennessee,

  And round it was, upon a hill.

  It made the slovenly wilderness

  Surround that hill.

  The wilderness rose up to it,

  And sprawled around, no longer wild.

  I am no expert on poetry, but this little gem has always struck me as horseshit. Anyone who has been to Tennessee will testify that folks there do not leave empty a jar that might be handy for holding shell casings, poker winnings, dentures, or moonshine. And I doubt we need a poet to reveal the profundity that a jar is round—especially not a poet so lazy that he would rhyme “hill” with “hill.” Most troubling, though, is Stevens’s haughty denigration of wilderness. Slovenly? I’ll hazard a guess that the wilderness is at least as well ordered as the closet of your average poet. And does Stevens actually believe that his little jar can make the wilderness rise up and relinquish its wildness? We get a lot more truth from Wallace Stegner than from Wallace Stevens. After all, Wallace of the West wrote not only that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” but also “I despise that locution ‘having sex,’ which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking.” With that kind of insight and literary expressiveness, can it be any surprise that Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize? While Stevens deserves some credit for having once punched Ernest Hemingway in the face, it should be noted that the blow broke Stevens’s hand, after which Papa proceeded to administer a humiliating drubbing.

  But I must confess that my certainty about Wallace of the East’s misunderstanding of wilderness and wildness has been challenged by my recent discovery of an unusual piece of trash in a remote desert canyon out here in Silver Hills. A few weeks ago, as I was hiking some knobs and draws about four miles northwest of Ranting Hill, I emerged from a rocky traverse and suddenly spotted the wreck of a Jeep in the canyon bottom below me. It was a captivating sight, and rather than being appalled that this lovely spot had been littered with a wasted car, I was instead fascinated by it. First of all, the Jeep was no beater but was a late-model, bright red Cherokee. This is significant, because we do not drive red cars in rural Nevada, where we live by the tacit but inviolable rule that “look at me” colors should be confined to places like suburban Connecticut, where Wallace Stevens lived. Then, there was the fact that the Jeep had been blown to smithereens by everything from .22 pistol rounds and peppered shotgun blasts to the heavier damage inflicted by high-powered rifle fire. In one sense, the Jeep was still a Jeep, but in another sense it had simply become a large, red, perforated object that, like Stevens’s empty jar, resided awkwardly in a place where it did not belong.

  There was also an appealing sense in which the Jeep had become naturalized. Its cherry red paint had already begun to fade in the unrelenting sun, and the winds channeling through the throat of the canyon had coated its seats and floorboards with a thick layer of alkali dust. Giant, white poopsplosions on the crumpled hood showed where a raptor had used the Jeep as a hunting perch, while the interior of the vehicle had already been repurposed as a pack-rat nest—one not only woven from sage branches and studded with owl pellets but also consisting of taillight shards, tufts of carpeted floor mats, foam from shredded bucket seats, and fragments of shattered mirrors that gl
inted from deep within the stick nest. Jackrabbit tracks surrounded the ruin, and bone-studded, taper-tipped coyote scat was also nearby.

  Then, there was the mystery of how the Jeep came to rest in this inaccessible place. It could have tumbled from the cliff above, where an obscure two-track marks the route to an old prospect hole that was hand-dug by pocket hunters who hoped the silver in Silver Hills was not played out, but the Cherokee showed no structural damage consistent with rolling. Or it could have been wrecked before it arrived here, maybe dropped by one of the CH-47 Chinook helicopters that sometimes use this remote desert for training exercises. Both explanations seemed unlikely. And while it would be extremely difficult to drive a vehicle to this spot, it did at least seem possible. If that is what actually happened, this could have been the work of rebellious teenagers, who nabbed the car in Reno and took a joyride that resulted in more of an adventure than they bargained for. Or, the car may have been hotwired and used in the commission of a crime, after which the crooks needed to make it disappear.

  Or, maybe the road trip that ended here was taken by some desperate man—a poet, perhaps—who went out one evening to buy a loaf of bread, began to think too much about his past, and just kept following these remote desert two-tracks until he ran aground in this sandy wash bottom and could sail no farther. Maybe he climbed out of his Cherokee, stood for a moment with the door wide open and the radio playing, took a deep breath of the sage-filled night air, and then simply left the keys to all the doors in his life swinging in the ignition. Perhaps, while walking across the open desert by starlight he was transformed, and at daybreak he reached a gravel road, flagged down a hay truck, climbed aboard, and vanished into an entirely new future.