Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  There is a deceptive transparency to the mountain air and light here in the high country of the Great Basin. As Steve and I climb silently toward the summit, I am struck by how much is visible from here: spectacularly beautiful, nearly uninhabited basin and range rippling out to the horizon, snow-clad peaks dotting the impossibly wide sky, vast sagebrush basins and alkali playas shimmering in the valleys below. But I am also struck by how much remains invisible, even from here. I am not able to see the Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, which are now as much a part of this place as granite and sage. Even looking through this remarkably clear, dry air, I cannot make out a single one of the six thousand people who, according to the National Cancer Institute, died as a result of radiation exposure from nuclear detonations in Nevada. It is not the view from this alpine peak that has sharpened my vision but the unforeseen appearance overhead of missile-bearing, supersonic fighter jets. I have entered a strange kind of patrolled wilderness in which fantasies of solitude are ruptured by the realization that we are always on the radar. Because today is Veterans Day, I find it impossible to forget the downwinders, for they too are veterans of the Cold War. A memory of these innocent victims is our only monument to the sacrifice they made for their nation on the invisible, nuclear battlefield of the American West.

  Most of the time we Great Basinians tacitly agree to ignore the stubborn half-lives of radioactive isotopes in our land and the ineradicable memories of our people succumbing to cancer in small desert hospitals. We do so because we have dishes to wash, kids to dress, friends to help, mountains to climb. But while we work hard to forget, there is something besides fighter jets that reminds us that the West’s nuclear history is not all in the past. Yucca Mountain, which is on the federal government’s test site in southern Nevada, is the proposed repository for all of our nation’s high-level nuclear waste—the most dangerous form of garbage our species has ever created. If some folks have their way, this waste will be transported by rail from more than a hundred sites in thirty-nine states, to be interred in a crypt beneath the Nevada desert. My intent here is not to revisit a decades-old debate about the risks and benefits of nuclear power generation. I only want to observe that one of the threads that connects Westerners to each other, and to Americans in other regions, is the glowing, invisible thread of the nuclear waste that may end up hidden beneath this magnificent desert. The same desert that has already been attacked with nine hundred nuclear weapons. The desert that is our home.

  How long will obsidian last, I wonder? How long Strontium or Cesium? How long the memories of loved ones now gone? What is the half-life of this indescribable alpine light? We have summited Augusta, whose towering peak remains awash in history and time. Here my vision seems unusually clear, and as I gaze out across the terrible beauty of the Great Basin, I see clearly that we are downwinders all.

  I once attended a hearing to learn more about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s specific plans for nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain. The meeting was long and slow and consisted mostly of NRC scientists discussing in mind-numbing detail the technical design of the cask-and-cave burial system by which high-level radioactive waste could, they felt, be kept safe throughout the project’s ten-thousand-year regulatory compliance period. Among the last to testify, however, was not a scientist but Corbin Harney, an elder of the Western Shoshone—who remain, to this day, an unconquered people. Corbin explained quietly that he opposed the plan because it was his ethical and spiritual duty to protect the land, its animals, and the people who would come after him.

  “I understand completely,” the NRC scientist replied, respectfully, “but we believe the storage casks will remain safe for ten thousand years.”

  “I understand completely,” replied the old Shoshone, “but then what?”

  OUR CORNER OF THE western Great Basin is tucked into the rain shadow of the magnificent Sierra Nevada Mountains, which knock the bottom out of those big, wet storms that rise in the Pacific Ocean and cross California’s Central Valley before pounding the Range of Light. Here, in Silver Hills, we average only seven inches of precipitation each year, while just up the mountain at Donner Pass (7,057 feet in elevation) the average is fifty-two inches, which falls in the form of thirty-four feet of snow—a detail that may be of special interest if you happen to be traveling by wagon train and do not have an appetite for “the other other white meat.”

  We do not see many clouds above Ranting Hill, where three hundred days of sunshine each year ensure that our passive-solar house remains self-heating until well into the cold nights we experience at this elevation. This winter has been especially clear and dry, making clouds in Silver Hills as scarce as city council members uncorrupted by real estate developers. In an era in which everything I thought was stored on my laptop is apparently kept in THE cloud, I find myself doubly troubled by these unbroken skies.

  All this stunning high-desert cloudlessness has me thinking about clouds. Stratus. Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus. These are names so lovely that we might have named our daughters after them. It would, at least, have made hollering at the girls more entertaining: “Cirrus, take out the compost! Nimbus, collect those eggs!” Mostly, I am envisioning the signature cloud of the western Great Basin: the lenticular. A lenticular is a high-elevation cloud that is flat on the bottom and arched gracefully across its domed top. It resembles a flying saucer, for which it is sometimes mistaken—especially here in rural Nevada, where so few of us are wholly sane, and where we lead the nation in UFO sightings and alien abduction conspiracy theories. A lenticular forms when the moist air pouring over the Sierra hits the dry air rising from the desert floor, creating a cloud that is, essentially, a standing wave made visible. As that moist air sweeps over the top of the cloud, it vanishes into vapor, which is what makes the lenticular so special: it never leaves home as do other clouds, which drift across the sky. Lenticular clouds are the children of mountain and desert, and their essential nature is to perish precisely where they are born and shaped, an aerial analog of the dramatic ecotone below them.

  In the disturbing absence of both altocumuli and the baseball season, my wandering writer’s mind has also turned to the peculiar kind of cloud known as a “word cloud.” As a graphic representation of words commonly used in any given text, a word cloud not only transforms language into visual art but also employs font size to represent the frequency of each word’s use. So, for example, a word cloud of anything uttered by a political candidate would depict the word FREEDOM in 36-point type, while words such as sustainable, endangered, poverty, or disarmament would languish in wee 10-point. Thinking about word clouds caused me to wonder if, like actual clouds, they might function as messengers, as harbingers of fine weather or gathering storms. I wondered if a word cloud might form around a writer’s sensibilities and values, not only exposing elements of style or voice but also revealing his secret dreams about this world as it is, or as it should be.

  To test this proposition, I constructed a word cloud using the text of a tall stack of these “Rants from the Hill.” The results of my lexical experiment were surprising and also a little disturbing, and at first it was tough to discern the silver lining of my vaguely ominous word cloud. The first thing I noticed is my obsession with local flora and fauna, which may confirm Eryn’s suspicion that I am becoming a misanthropic curmudgeon. In fact, both misanthrope and curmudgeon appeared fairly prominently in the word cloud. Perhaps worse, it appears that I play favorites. Of the six native shrubs hereabouts, sage, rabbitbrush, bitterbrush, ephedra, and desert peach all received considerable air time, while gooseberry did not. For the record, gooseberry is a lovely little shrub in the currant family, rich with berries, excellent habitat for native birds and insects, and often as beautifully domed as a lenticular cloud. What could I have against gooseberry that I should snub it in this way? Could it have been a superstitious association with an actual goose that attacked me when I was a boy?

  And why do I write so much more about pronghorn than mule deer?
Might it be because the pronghorn was the sole antelope-like ungulate to survive the massive Pleistocene extinctions and has thus evolved in this place over the past twenty million years—or is it just cool to write about an animal that can run sixty miles per hour? Why do I apparently prefer packrats to kangaroo rats? Could it be because some fossil packrat midden sites in this area have seen continuous use for fifty thousand years, and that the ancient objects collected by packrats are indispensable to our understanding of long-term climate change? And what of my obvious bias for jackrabbits over cottontails? This must be attributable to the fact that cute, slow animals like the cottontail seem so out of place in this harsh, beautiful environment that any sensible person would join me in rooting for their predators—those elegant, vicious owls and coyotes whose names are so well represented in my Rant word cloud.

  It seemed to me that my rationale for these preferences was perfectly defensible, but this self-assurance lasted only until the girls became involved in analysis of the word cloud. Hannah began by observing that neither she nor her little sister appeared anywhere in the word diagram. “That’s because I so often call you my daughters, which is right here,” I replied, pointing to a rather tiny daughters that appeared buried in the cloud. (Driven by remorse, I have since introduced their names more often throughout these essays.)

  “Yeah, Dad, but daughters looks a lot smaller than chainsaw or weed-whacker.”

  “Well, sure,” I replied, “but a weed-whacker has a hundred and one uses. How many uses do you have?”

  Wisely ignoring me, Hannah went on to point out that daughters also appeared smaller than tractor, pickup, shotgun, snowshoes, and baseball. Before I could mount a defense, Eryn chimed in that beer and even IPA were also larger than anybody in the family and that whiskey was among the most beloved words, even when bourbon and rye were also taken into consideration. Then came the coup de grâce: little Caroline noticed a word she could sound out and asked why scat also appeared larger than daughters. Sensing my impending loss in this battle of words, I beat a hasty retreat to my beer fridge to snag an IPA, quoting as I did from Twain: “Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” This filched witticism wasn’t a great fit, but I rationalized that writers, like children, must always have the last word. Besides, fool might now appear in my next Rant word cloud, which somehow seemed encouraging. (And if it didn’t, I could always engage in word cloud seeding: fool, fool, fool, fool, fool!)

  While the word cloud experiment offered a painful reminder of how rarely I win an argument (even with small children), it also revealed how endemic my prose is. In that sense, the cloud offered a salutary reminder that writing can function not only as a description of a local environment but also as an efflorescence of it. As what supergeeks would call “weighted keyword metadata,” my Rant word cloud is literally created by desert diction, by words like playa, caliche, arroyo, midden, aridity, pogonip, zephyr, foothill, and canyon. In some profound sense, the words desert and home appear equally gigantic in my word cloud because, to me, they signify the same thing. The prominence of wind, snow, and fire must reflect the presence of those forces in this extreme landscape and in the wild imaginations of those of us who inhabit it—just as surely as must the absence of rain clouds. If, as a writer, I am less dreary than a stratus and less fluffy than a cumulus, neither am I as productive as a nimbus nor as lofty as a cirrus. Ultimately, my word cloud is a lexical and lyrical lenticular—something sculpted here in this montane-desert ecotone and always on the move in order to remain in place.

  WHEN WE FEEL THE SEASON begin to change from fall to winter up here on Ranting Hill, we get an itch to head out into the remote hinterlands that will soon be closed for the year by snow. It is as if we all sense that we will soon be huddled around our woodstove, happy to be holed up together but wondering if a few more trips out into the Great Basin might have eased the cabin fever just a bit.

  With the bittersweet turning of the season looming, our family piled into the truck and headed east from Ranting Hill, speeding along highway 50, the officially designated “Loneliest Road in America,” through boulder-choked mountain passes and across vast alkali basins on our way to a remarkable place called Sand Mountain, where we arrived in the chill of an early November afternoon. Sand Mountain is a single, winding sand dune, three miles long and a mile wide. This megadune rises among rocky desert mountains that are so much darker in color and so geologically dissimilar from it as to make this dramatic, white dune appear absolutely surreal. Unlike a beach dune, which is clearly part of its home landscape, Sand Mountain is so unique as to appear completely alien.

  To appreciate Sand Mountain requires a leap of imagination. Fifteen thousand years ago the Sierra Nevada Mountains were heavily glaciated, but a subsequent warming trend began to melt the glaciers, dumping enough water down the eastern Sierra to fill immense expanses of the Great Basin with massive inland lakes. Ancient Lake Lahontan, whose depth reached 800 feet, once extended across much of present-day northern Nevada and covered more than 8,000 square miles of this now-desiccated landscape. Toward the end of the Pleistocene, the giant lake began to dry up, and four thousand years ago it had contracted so far as to expose the spot where Sand Mountain now rises. As the massive, retreating glaciers scoured the Sierra Nevada, they ground off flakes and pebbles of granite, which were further degraded as they tumbled down rivers and were borne out into the Great Basin.

  At the delta of the Walker River near Shurz, Nevada (pop. 658)—where the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka lies buried in a Paiute graveyard—this granitic sand accumulates in a place that is sanctified by wind. Here, the prevailing Southwesterlies swoop down and gather up this glacier-ground and river-trundled sand, lifting it high into the air and carrying it across the open desert more than thirty miles, where the flanks of the Stillwater Mountains at last slow the winds, causing them to drop their payload of Sierra sand in this enchanted spot. Over time, this weird, lovely pile of sand has grown to 600 feet in height, making Sand Mountain one of the tallest dunes in North America. This is the story of the birth of Sand Mountain, which is still being born.

  Sand Mountain is one of only thirty-five dunes on the planet that knows how to sing. A “singing dune” consists of what is called singing, whistling, or even barking sand—sand that is capable of making a roaring or booming sound that has also been described as a hollow rustle. Although scientists debate precisely how the sound is created, it is associated with the rate of collision in the shear band where avalanching sand on a steep face makes contact with static sand below. Only dunes in warm, dry climates are capable of song, and even then they are silent, unless consisting of perfectly clean sand with silica-based grains of a specific and nearly uniform size and shape. When Sand Mountain sings, it produces a unique note of between sixty and 105 hertz. Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone people have long honored this distinctive song, which they attribute to Kwansee, their ancient tribal benefactor, who lies buried beneath the dune and who sings for his lost love.

  When Eryn, the girls, and I arrived at Sand Mountain, the sun was already dropping into the horizon clouds. Although it was cold and windy, we decided to try for the summit ridge of the dune before nightfall, clambering first up the flank of the mountain and then along one of its winding knife ridges, straight into the sky. Each step pushed a small avalanche of sand behind us, making the climb so challenging that we grown-ups adopted the technique that Hannah and Caroline had instinctively used from the start: scrambling upward on all fours. After the better part of an hour of this odd clambering we reached the summit, which turned out to be a single ridge of sand so incredibly narrow that we all straddled it, as if riding horseback, in order to keep from sliding down the even more precipitous incline on its far side. From this precarious position we had a sweeping view along the sinuous, dragon-backed ridge of the giant dune, down to the expansive playa below, and then out to the vast, rippling basin and range country beyond.

  From our
perch we discerned no life apart from ourselves, but I am aware of one secret life that is lived here, and here alone. The Sand Mountain blue butterfly (Euphilotes pallescens arenamontana) is a lovely little sister in the family Lycaenidae, the gossamer-winged butterflies. It lives nowhere on earth save for this one barren, striking place. The little blue’s existence is restricted to Sand Mountain because its survival depends entirely on Kearney buckwheat (Eriogonum nummulare), a local plant that is the sole food source for its larvae. The Sand Mountain blue spends its entire life within 200 feet of its host plant, and that life consists of only a single, beautiful week. We too often forget how much beauty a week can produce. The little blue butterfly is here because of the buckwheat, which is here because of the dune, which is here because a special wind delivered the harvest of a long-vanished glacier that patiently turned a mountain of stone into one of sand.