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Escalante Desert
Great Basin | April
I
see myself in the truck's mirror. But the face I see is black with sun,
drenched in rain and sweat, the under-eyes are blue, with veins popping,
and the nose and ears are rutty and exposed from sun. I am panting like
a dog, my nose is bleeding. Things could be worse, I could be sitting
on a couch, with three or four guys with their hands down their pants,
watching the Lakers, talking about mortgages and the prices of cell phone
service.
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The Loneliest Road
Great Basin | June
A journey across the Nevada's Great Basin and the Loneliest Road in America. We follow the struggle between off-roaders, Great Basin Indians and conservationists over the fate of a blue butterfly. It's called Sand Mountain, and it's the second largest sand dune in North America. Sand Mountain is a seif-dune, and was molded from the sands of dried up Lake Lahontan. In the Pleistocene, this sea covered the Great Basin.
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Summer Lake
Great Basin | August
Part II of a conversation about travel writing, this episode continues into the southern Oregon Desert. Because these observations are my own, they are in some regards infallible. My experience in a youth church group, or how my dog died, or what its like to live in a trailer park - all of these things make my contribution to the current events discussion more real, and less subject to the football-crowd responses of people who have fallen into political camps, and base their responses entirely on layers and layers of media.
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Rachel, Nevada and Area 51
Great Basin | March
That was my cue. I'd heard it before. The UFO crowd approaches their beliefs
much like somebody with an unusual religious belief - shy when faced with
potential mockery, but explosively chatty when faced with an ounce of
interest. I said that I thought the government was coming up with a way
to make everybody the middle child.
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The Owyhee River
Great Basin | May
Part I of the Oregon Testament. There is nothing extraordinary about finding Native American antiquities in Oregon. Arrowheads and other stone tools are still found. But to find such a thing on your own, even if you are one among thousands to do so, is an immeasurable joy and education; because to experience it for yourself is to set yourself on a quest of deduction and discovery.
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The Alvord Desert
Great Basin | May
Part II of the Oregon Testament. The stone tools that Hans and I hold in our hands have small etched teeth. There is a comfortable cut in the rock, so that it fits snugly into the left hand. On other parts of the rock, there are deliberate cuts for functions we can only guess at. Hans knows that the primary function of these tools is to scrape the hide off freshly killed animal. But what did they hunt?
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Mono Lake, an Economy of Ecology
Great Basin | June
I finally reach the famed Tufas of Mono Lake; the monoliths which one day were preserved under water. They are twisted, trollish, ungodly, like a woman turned to stone at Gomorrah. They are beautiful and obscure; the pale gray-white of un-uniform columns springing out of the shore, out of the lake. Monolithic calcification brought into the dry world by the California Pipeline. I can only see them with my head-lamp, and from the light of the stars, which makes them appear much larger than they are.
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East Oregon High Desert
Great Basin | February
It was an honor, I suppose, to be drinking Johnny Walker with a military official on Alaska Airlines' red-eye flight to Portland. "After fourteen flights in ten days," the top technology officer for the Army said as a way of introduction, "you'd figure I'd get upgraded to first-class." I explained to him the benefits of coach class. "I'll take crying babies over internet executives any day," I said, and I explained to him the story of the youthful Brazilian woman who sat next to me on a flight to Frankfurt ten years ago...
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The White Mountains
Great Basin | April
At the high tundra peaks, twisted pines shot up from the steep dolomite cliffs. Many of these bristlecone pines were brewing sap long before Abraham emerged from the wilderness. They are witch trees - leathered from millennia, worn, tattered and distant. They persist only here and other far reaches of the Great Basin, at the brink of death. These trees, and in particular the anonymous 4,800 year old Methuselah, may be the oldest living organisms on Earth.
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Zion Canyon
Great Basin | July
Since no one was around, Ramona felt free to tell me about life in Mesquite. "I can finally own land for my horses," she said. "That is what life is all about, some land and lots of trails." She talked about the Indian heiroglyphics in the area, and the summer heat. And, "I'd say about eighty percent of the young people gambling here are Mormons from Utah. They come across the border to be bad. To drink and smoke and do everything they can't get away with in Utah."
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