Black Rock Hot Springs. I’m awake at 4:30 a.m., but unwilling to shed my cocoon of two old down sleeping bags inside the pickup canopy. At 6 a.m., the Black Rock itself, a monolith of dark lava looming above the east side of the spring, is highlighted by a tangerine sunrise. Water from the pool seeps downhill toward my camp and supports a one-acre swath of Great Basin bulrushes, their naked green stems rising to brown tops. Bulrushes give way to alkali salt grass on the flat. This is a world in which fresh water, even hot and laden with minerals, is a rarity that is life-giving and critically important.
I make coffee, find my towel and lawn chair, then walk up the two-track road in the direction of the spring. Powdery dust records nighttime passings like snow. The dainty oblong tracks of a mother skunk and her kits seem to be headed for the water. Beetles have left two parallel lines of dits about a half-inch apart that transect the dusty ruts. Bird tracks, probably a chukar, point in the direction of the bare hills. I keep to the side of the road—marring the trails of those who live here with my own clumsy footprints seems presumptuous.
The pool is unoccupied, the water perfect for soaking. I slide in up to my neck. The poultice of mineral heat draws out the tension from yesterday’s trip across the playa when thunderstorms were threatening and a rainstorm would have made an airlift necessary for getting my two-wheel-drive pickup out of the muck. Moon is full and dropping onto purple hills bordering the white alkali flat. As Sun pushes up, Moon thins and pales, becoming a translucent eye round with surprise that the October night is over. Small wraiths of steam drift across the surface of the pool, vanish into bone-dry air. The glassy water carries away the last ripples of my quiet entry.
From the rushes across the pool, a red-winged blackbird scolds me out of my reverie. Here at the brink of winter, he acts as though he still has a territory to defend. Perhaps he’s a little confused by the October day length that mimics spring. Not to be outdone, a lesser yellowlegs hazes me three times, announcing her presence with a double-noted call that sounds like you you!, as in what are you you doing in my water? She drops to the pool’s edge thirty feet away, and I am compelled to ask why are you you still here? She should be gathering with her kin and moving to gentler climates. Who am I to talk? For a week I have been free from a flock, a free agent, a free spirit blowing like dust along the backroads of the northern Great Basin, a place where all surface water flows inland to die and is reincarnated as thunderstorms on the surrounding mountains.
Wild hot water works its magic on deeper stressors that have built up along the subduction zones of my neck and back. After a stormy summer of intense demands I could not have anticipated, I scrubbed my calendar clean, loaded the old pickup, and drove in a southeasterly direction with the resolve of someone who had somewhere to be. In fact, the only place I needed to be was in the unencumbered state of my youth four decades back, with nothing more pressing to think about than casting the appropriate fly to a trout cruising in clear desert water or which hot pool might best suit body and mind at the end of the day.
When I descended out of the hills into the first treeless expanse of sagebrush and alkali, my chest fluttered open like a new kite catching its first breeze. That feeling of expansiveness is curious. No longer was I wrapped in the womblike shadows of coastal coniferous forest, my “native” habitat. Then again, “home” is a moving target. Although my maternal ancestors are generations deep in the Coast Range, my paternal family inhabited the bare and arid country around Hells Canyon, the place where Dad spent his formative years. My chromosomes must be stamped with the epigenetic fingerprints of home in these contrary landscapes. Even though it’s a wide straddle between Snake River and the Coast Range, Peace finds me in both places.
From the pool, I look southwest toward the site of Burning Man, an event I have no interest in attending. The last time I visited the Black Rock Desert, Kim and I were young and still childless. We parked the car and wandered in separate directions over the brink of a low hill. In the windless sagebrush, I sat in silence so deep I could hear the rhythmic whooshing of blood in my temples. The sound was lovely and unique in my experience. Suddenly I understood the soundtrack to the 1971 Australian outback movie “Walkabout.” Give me a pass on the crowds, regardless of how well-intentioned. In this place an absence of human distraction is what I aspire to, even though I’ve now reached an age where silence opens my ears to tinnitus.
The scolding red-winged blackbird leaves to join a flock dancing in a small murmuration above the bulrushes. Lesser yellowlegs yells an accusatory you you! and flits away across the playa. My brain drifts on warm water, discovers the trail back to the summer now passed. Although I was teaching for much of the time, the season became an extended teachable moment in which I was the student. I am learning that aging is, among many other things, a process of letting go. Hanging on works for a while. But life will eventually drag us over rough and excruciating ground. This lesson has come from watching the dreadful outcome of grasping for control when control has already left on the last bus. Conversely, there is grace and beauty in releasing the physical manifestations of our lives as time dictates. This is not new wisdom, only new to me. One of my jobs from this point on is now clear—I aspire to become as graceful and beautiful as possible. And oh my goodness, is there work to be done!
For now, the last traces of anxiety dissipate on wisps of steam. An autumn day spreads outward like the open desert basin. Maybe I’ll put on some clothes. Have a little breakfast. Go for an empty-headed walk. That red splotch of rocks on the northern hills looks interesting.
May Peace find you in any of its multitude of forms.
Eugene-area friends, join wonderful Marina Richie and me at Oakshire Public House on Saturday, October 29 at 4 p.m. We'll celebrate Marina's new book "Halcyon Journey," a deep dive into kingfishers, citizen science, and personal transformation. I'll read some avian-inspired pieces from "Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground," a book of poems and essays whose youth was cut short by the onset of Covid. We plan to have a blast, and hope you can join us!
Thanks for your soul words that take us with your slide into hot springs of the Black Rock Desert--wide open and a poultice for intense demands, yet persistent with wondrous life etched in beetle, skunk, and chukar tracks. I'm thrilled to join you today in Eugene as we intertwine Halcyon Journey and Palindrome at Oakshire Brewery.