death valley part 3

we hadn't counted on the moon setting. it's surprising just how much light a full moon puts out (especially when your pupils are dilated to the size of olives). i guess we usually don't think about the moon rising and setting, i just figured it would light our way as long as we cared to dally about in death valley.

so now we were cold, it was getting really dark, and we could not find our way back to overlook platform. nice. i didn't really fear for my life; there sure weren't any critters out in this desolate waste, nor steep sharp cliffs nearby, but i was beginning to think we were going to have a loooonnnggg uncomfortable night ahead of us.

'shit', jeffe said, stealing the word right of my mouth.

'damn. we haven't walked that far. we can't be more than a half a mile or so from the car. and we know its up...' i looked at the myriad of little creases in the sandy earth stretching as far as the eye could see to the left and right, which wasn't very far damn far now in the growing gloom, and my optimism faded. it wasn't easy climbing up this stuff and damn it was getting dark, and damn i was getting cold, and damn every little hill we climbed just seemed to lead to another set just like it.

'shit.' i said, and took a long swig out of the bottle of water i was carrying and plopped down to the ground.

'look' jeffe pointed in the sky above us. i thought it was more of the strange military jet lights which we briefly mistook for ufo's for when we saw them an hour ago (must be a base nearby somewhere), and looked to where he was pointing. one of the cliff walls, just a large, dark shape we could see only due to the lack of stars inside it's outline, above and to the right was glowing a little. and the glow was getting stronger.

'what the fuck?' for the life of me i could not tell what it was. indian ghosts, ufo's, mutual hallucination? then i had it. 'those are headlights shining on a rock wall! c'mon!' finally, something outside of our little fractal landscape that we could get our bearings from. as we scrambled towards it, i somehow had the sense to mark out a unique formation of stars near the wall, which was good, because in a few minutes of climbing over little ravines we were back in fractal land.

'its this way.' jeffe said, pointing up a little ravine to the right.

'no its not. we need to head towards that little cluster of stars that look like a smiley face off to our left.' i tried pointing it out to him, but he couldn't see it and ended up trusting me. after some very determined climbing, and only a few wrong forks...i could finally make out the platform. 'there!' i yelled 'damn i'm good.' my sweatshirt and the cooler of coronas in the car was calling me as drew close to the now pitch-black platform. 'what time do you think it is?' i asked as we briskly walked down the path towards the parking lot.

'its gotta be 1, maybe 2 in the morning.' we reached the beautiful, beautiful, rental car, unlocked the trunk, grabbed a couple of beers and drank deeply. 'no way.' i heard jeffe say from inside the car. 'its fuckin 10 o'clock.'

'no way.' but it was. the entire adventure starting with when we first pulled in to zabriskiehad had only taken 3 hours. weird. we got back in the car and were on the road for five minutes when this car comes zooming up like a bat out of hell behind me. we had seen no more than 2 or 3 cars on the road since we got past the hills outside vegas. i slow down to let him zoom by. he rides my ass. i slow even more and pull over a bit even though he has all the room in the world to pass. he slows down and moves with me. great, we survive death valley only to get carjacked out in the middle of fuckin nowhere. jeffe is shooting video of his dirty sandled feet with the night vision setting on my new dv cam.

'tim, check this out, i can see my foot even in total darkness!' he is zooming the camera in and out, and turning it at odd angles. he hadn't even seen the car behind. just as i was beginning to get real nervous and about to tell him to shut the fuck up, when the car behind me roars past into the desert night. as it passes, i see the cherries on top - california state patrol car. nice. vitamin A and open beers...that could have been a real buzzkill. he must have run a check on my plates, saw it was a vegas rental car, and cruised on to bigger fish. my partner in crime had rewound the tape and was trying to show me infra-red footage of his big toe as i watched the trooper speed off.

'grab me another beer, would you jeffe?'

posted by bluematrix at 08/26/05 10:17 | link | comments (1)

death valley part 2...

the light was fading and the tourists had left. i thought i heard my name, a soft echo in the distance. 'the ghost indians are calling me' i thought. i listened and heard it again - not ghost indians, but jeffe, and he sounded pretty far away. i yelled back. he told me to keep yelling. it appears he had wondered off and lost his way, all the dunes and ravines looked the same, and he was using my voice to echo-locate his way back. this went on every couple of minutes for the next half hour.

'dude, you have to check it out from down there, its so intense, everything is a fractal, the ravines the cuts in the ravines, the formations in the cuts, the swirls in the formations, its all the same, its all a big fuckin fractal.' he was excited, out of breath and speaking very fast.

'thats nice, jeffe, but if i hadn't stayed up here to yell back at you, you'd still be out there wandering around. and far be it from me to sound like your mother or anything, but this is death valley - they probably didn't call it that just for grins.' i had noticed the full moon during the sunset, but the giant orb was now the main light source. the landscape had changed dramatically from burning warm colors to sharp black and white with shadows so crisp and contrasty they looked fake. we went from being on mars to being on the moon.

'yea, yea, but you still need to check it out, we won't go far. come on.'

sure why not, i thought. there was a rough path that started where the safety railing stopped off to the right of the stone platform and soon we were half walking, half sliding down it. i kept looking up over my shoulder to make sure i could still see the platform as we descended further into the valley, but already the only thing that distinguished it from the countless jutting formations around it was the lines of the hollow metal bars that made up the safety rail reflecting the moonlight. i wish i had some bread crumbs, i thought.

'jeffe, this is probably good here.' i said.

'no, no, just a little farther is this really cool dried river bed.' i shrugged and we continued our moonlight journey. it was so quiet and so ethereal. we hadn't been walking more than 15 minutes, how hard could it be to get back?

we found the dry river bed, and talked for a long while over a smoke on how cool it was to be this buzzed, hiking under a full moon, in death valley. we both knew that if we were to make a highlight reel of our lives, this scene would definitely make it in. we grew quiet as we lay on our backs and looked at the stars.

it started to get cold. i knew that for all its heat during the day, the desert gets pretty damn cold at night. heat rises, and because there is no clouds or humidity in the desert to reflect the heat back (the greenhouse effect) it just continues to rise and dissipate into space. just an hour (or maybe three, since we weren't wearing watches) before we were sweating in the desert heat and our shorts and t-shirts were fine.

i got to my feet and said 'lets roll jeffe, i'm cold' and we started to make our way back. the scene behind us really was a giant fractal. the occasional rare rain and constant wind carved out gullies from the top of the ridge of the valley. and those gullies divided again and again as they made their way towards the valley floor. talk about your fork in the road.

'the platform is just over this ridge' jeffe stated confidently, but after a few wrong forks in the road, this proved not to be the case.

posted by bluematrix at 08/22/05 08:59 | link | comments (1)

vegas was less than two hours behind us. we pulled the rental car off the side of the road, turned off the engine, and got out. it was deathly quiet, how appropriate i thought since our destination was death valley. everything around us was painted the color of sand and red-orange, as if the whole world was rusting. the yellow sun creeping towards the horizon in front of us, the burnt mesas in the distance to our right, the shimmering dark strip of highway dividing everything into left and right, even the blue sky was tinged with red in the late afternoon. and not a car, not a tree, not a damn thing as far as the eye could see in any direction except for the plateaus and the occasional sage bush. we stood quietly beside the car, soaking it all in, this vast alien landscape that made us feel small and out of place.

jeffe and i looked at each other, smiled, swallowed the vitamin a we'd saved with a long swig from the bottle of water, and got back in the car.

after driving a while, i noticed the road sloped gently downwards for a long ways in front of us. on a whim, i turned the motor off and we coasted - for six miles. just as i started to wonder if the vitamins were any good, i began to feel sunshine in my stomach. it slowly spread outwards. my awareness grew razor sharp - the particles of dust on the dirty windshield, the thin film of sweat on the smooth plastic of the steering wheel, and, since the engine was still off, even the sound of the hot rubber of the tires sticking to the road as we drifted down and down. i could tell jeffe wanted the engine back on, but i could see no good reason to do so, not yet. we gently descended two thousand feet this way.

it was beginning to get rather surreal.

the sun was getting ready to set, impossibly vibrant and red, and we knew that we would not make the valley floor before it sank below the horizon. we definitely did not want to be in the car for our first sunset at death valley. we saw a sign denoting the zabriskie viewing area ahead. i started the engine and not wanting to have the automatic transmission drop on out the ground shifting into drive at 60mph, i came to a stop before putting it drive and continuing on. in a few minutes we turned into a decent sized parking lot with several cars in it. sand shifted over the painted lines as i pulled into a spot and got out. a short path lead upwards and we stopped to read the sign put there by the state of california.

Death Valley is a land of extremes. It is one of the hottest places on the surface of the Earth and holds the record for the highest recorded temperature in the U.S. at 134 degrees. At 282 feet below the level of the sea, it is the driest place in North America with an average rainfall of only 1.96 inches a year. the raised metal letters danced in the growing shadows, and we turned away and made our way up the path.

i thought i could heard the low voices of indians talking. 'cool, ghosts' i thought. as we reached the small stone observation platform, the voices became clearer but still entirely unintelligible. two attractive couples were speaking in something that was probably dutch or norwegian judging by their fair complexion. there was also a family of japanese tourists speaking in hushed clipped phrases. jeffe and i remained quiet. i walked over to the railing and looked out...over mars.

i felt the stirrings of some nervous anxiety, and sat down cross legged and began to breath deeply as i gazed past the deep dark ruts to the flatness of the valley proper, miles away. i reached into the small pack and pulled out the expensive new dv cam i had bought just for this trip and still sitting, began shooting. jeffe wandered off the platform and started down to explore. i watche his progress until he was out of site. everything outside the platform had turned various shades of vivid red and orange, as if i had put a colored filter over the lens. 'yep, definitely surreal', i thought, as the dutch and japanese voices melded into alien chanting. my camera zoomed in and out - from the colored shadows growing long over the tall cliffs jutting around me, to an inch from my hand, up to the tourists, then back to the valley again.

'just not something you do everyday,' i think i said out loud, and laughed.

posted by bluematrix at 08/16/05 00:13 | link | comments (3)

music and information overdoses...

the austin city limits music festival, september 23-25
holy frijoles, if you are into music outside of corporate radio, check out the line up in this 3-day extravaganza here. there are 7 stages (most of them with stellar bands going simultaneously) cranking it out from 10am to 10pm. the first night they expect you to choose between wilco, franz ferdininand and coldplay. sheesh.

if any of you listen to radioparadise.com (the best playlist of any station i've ever heard), you'll recognize damn near all of the bands playing this year. I just found out the 3 day passes sold out over the weekend, and the single day passes are going fast. the icing on the cake is that austin is one of my favorite towns, with beautiful weather year round, one of the highest educated populations of any american city, lakes, rolling hills and...well you get the idea.

wikipedia.com
as a kid i used to love browsing encyclopedias. it was like having a tiny library in your house. there were so many strange and exotic things to learn about and damn near all of them seemed to be touched on in those dozen or so heavy, leather bound books.

recently i began perusing the free online encyclopedia wikipedia that was founded in 2001. not just a storehouse of knowledge (most things you need more information on can be googled just as easily), the hyperlinked text within each subject build bridges to things and ideas that continually surprise me. there are close to 700,000 articles, available in many languages and they invite you to submit and edit things. its organic nature reminds me of the internet itself.

the home page is divided into categories like; in the news, selected anniversaries, did you know, featured articles, and photos. intellectually stimulating as well as fun. the recently featured articles section ranged from sharon tate, to the geology of death valley (which is a fantastic place btw...hmmm, feel a blog entry coming on that soon...), to grunge music.

kcrw.com
i learned of this musical gem from our very own motime master, howard. though not as fun to listen to on the fly as radiopardise, this LA station is a treasure trove of new music available to listen to, or better yet, watch at your convenience.

my favorite part of the site is called 'morning becomes eclectic'. as bands come to LA to play (as they all must) many stop by the station to perform live and are videotaped as they do - then the sessions are archived for anyone to download later. I just watched beck for 20 minutes yesterday. tres cool. plus they carry npr, and all kinds of fun non-corporate music shows.

posted by bluematrix at 08/09/05 10:29 | link | comments (5)

my 30th birthday was fast approaching. i felt funny. i never imagined being 30. i just assumed my 20's would last indefinitely, and here it was, the end of my second decade of life. it felt like the end of my youth. after some consideration (read tequila) i determined that what was needed was a grand futile gesture to send off my 20's. something daring, something foolish, something to remember.

the day came. it was a warm and clear april afternoon near the texas coastal town of clear lake, a half hour's drive from my apartment in houston. i was relaxed and anxious at the same time as i pulled on the really ugly orange jumpsuit over my shorts and t-shirt with the others.

'there's been a slight change everybody. we will not be taking up the small plane we did our ground training on yesterday. we'll be going up with the jump club in their plane over there.' our jump instructor informed us of this glibly as he pointed to a much larger plane warming up on the single runway of the small airport. the five of us looked over at the old, tarnished silver, twin propeller monstrosity and began to get nervous. yesterday we were all feeling cocky and brave and excited as we climbed out of the small side door of the newer single engine plane, stood on the strut, and jumped lightly several feet to the ground. tomorrow will be a piece of cake we all thought.

'don't worry,' the clean cut 30ish instructor said, 'it's basically the same thing, it's just that you won't be climbing out on to the strut.' we were too inexperienced to know differently. 'time to rock and roll', he said and we started walking to the unfamiliar aircraft.

i was still pretty calm. skydiving was the exactly the gesture i was looking and here on terra firma with the previous days training under my belt i still felt relatively smug that i had thought of it and was about to make it happen.

after the instructor made sure our chutes were on properly, we awkwardly climbed in the big yawning door and saw that there were a dozen or so experienced jumpers already inside. they were all laughing and joking in their fashionable suits - in marked contrast to our newbie nervousness and worn, mismatched overalls. i still felt remarkably calm though.

and then we were airborne.

and then it hit me. i was about to throw myself out of a perfectly good airplane at 6000 feet above the ground. FUCK! what was i thinking! there is no fucking way i'm going out that hole in the side of the plane. i tried to think up reasons i could tell the instructor on why i had changed my mind, but my brain had frozen with panic.

the pilots voice came on over the intercom as we sat on the benches along the curved interior walls. 'afraid i have some bad news for you first timers...i was thinking we could finds some holes, but there's too many clouds to let you jump today. we'll be taking the club up to 10,000, dropping them off to do some cloud busting, but we'll have to reschedule your jump for another time. sorry.'

wow, am i the luckiest dog there is or what, i thought. i don't have to look like a total wuss in front of all these brave (and insane) men and women after all. cool. my blood pressure dropped rapidly back to normal. well, i wasted $100, but what the hell, lesson learned. two of the other four strangers looked disappointed, but a pudgy older guy looked even more relieved than i felt, as he wiped the sweat off his upper lip.

at 10,000 feet the happy group gleefully sprang out of the plane and were quickly torn away by the fierce wind. we began our descent back to earth. and then we heard the intercom came back on. 'well ladies and gents, looks like we have a big enough hole for y'all to jump. instructor, get em over to the door and get em out.' no, No, NO. how fuckin cruel is that? i just got my wits back, and now we're being herded to the gaping hole.

we watched as the first of our group, a short girl in her mid 20's, got hooked up the 150' static line connected to the doorway, and sat down near the opening. 'remember' the instructor yelled over the wind, 'arms and legs back, just like a shuttlecock.' she swung her legs out of the plane and the wind tore at them furiously before she scootched out the door and was gone and i was being motioned to take her place. this was not how we had trained at all yesterday. we were supposed to climb out of a nice small plane, position ourselves while hanging onto the strut and let go, not scooch on our ass on the floor of some world war II piece of shit while the wind pushed our legs against the side of the plane like a frickin rag doll.

'remember, arms and legs back. go go go now!' the instructor yelled as i hesitated. 'hey, fuck you', i thought as i somehow managed to push away from the plane and was instantly grabbed by the wind. i tried to put my arms and legs back, but ended up tumbling awkwardly, disoriented, for what seemed like an eternity, but was in reality only a few seconds. 'i'm going to die, i'm going to DIE!' i thought in a moment of terror like i had never known. i'd never know what my 30's would look like. shit.

and then i felt a jerk and i was pulled right side up as the chute blew out of the backpack into the blue sky. the large, beautiful, life-saving, parachute opened gloriously in blazing color, the screaming wind died down and my death drop dramatically transformed into a graceful slow descent.

wow.

i sat in the harness and felt like a child in a swing. it was quiet except for the wind gently rippling over the large silk rectangle above me. (the round parachutes were put away years ago in favor of parasails which allowed even a novice like me a large degree of control over where i was going.) i looked at the face of the altimeter wedged on my chest and marveled that i was 3000 feet high. i looked below my dangling feet and felt a mighty yell of joy come out of me. oh yea, this was sweet. i looked down and to the right and saw galveston bay stretch to the horizon in the sunlight and it was one of the most beautiful sites i have ever seen.

i tugged on the handle in my right hand and veered slowly to the right. damn, i was flying and it felt really good. i tugged on the handle in my left hand and swerved left and laughed like a child. the minutes seemed like hours as i flew gently downwards. at 1000 feet i saw the little airport and began to maneuver my way towards it. i was surprised at how much control i had - like i was in the flying elvis' or a green beret or something.

i approached the ground and yanked up on both handles and softly stalled and landed as if i had been doing this my whole life. the grin on my face was so large it hurt. as i gathered up the silk towards me, i looked up. 'damn. i just threw myself out of an airplane. now that took some MAJOR cajones. yep, i am one studly motherfucker' i thought proudly as i walked towards the oncoming jeep coming to take me back to the hangar. i walked towards it in my orange jumpsuit with some major swagger in my step, and felt like tom cruise in top gun. oh yea.

posted by bluematrix at 08/03/05 22:59 | link | comments (11)