Desert Songs

“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance.
Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn)



My wife Karen was able to join me this time

They say there are dunes in the desert that sing. The Eureka Dunes, tucked away in a hard-to-reach corner in the northwest of Death Valley National Park are reputed to make sounds sometimes, like distant bass organ pipes, or the low-pitched drone of an otherworldly chorus. No one really knows why this happens, but the songs the sands sing here are well documented. I’ve never seen the Eureka Dunes, but I know they are there, and someday I will hear them.
 

We were in Death Valley once again for the annual Corps Camp, operated by Chris and Laurie Kostman at Adventure Corps for cyclists who seek stimulating challenges in unique surroundings.

As a onetime opera singer, I wanted this year to do some of my own vocalizing in Death Valley (not in public mind you; these days the sound of my voice reminds me of how a critic once described Tom Waits’s: as if soaked in a vat of bourbon, hung in a smokehouse for several months and then taken outside and run over by a car).

Spinning along the highway by myself each day I sang opera, folk songs, and even some Leonard Cohen, with nothing but the sand, the sagebrush, and the occasional coyote for an audience. As it happened I might have sounded quite good—at least what I could hear of me as the wind blew my voice back into my ears.

A major artistic highlight was our visit to the Amargosa Opera House at Death Valley Junction, after cycling a breezy 30 miles and several thousand feet up from Furnace Creek. (Yes, there is an Opera House in Death Valley Junction, lovingly created by Marta Becket in an old borax mining company recreation hall). Our friend and cycling sorceress Pam was having her birthday, so cyclist/soprano Jill and I serenaded her with a few operatic snippets, plus Happy Birthday, on the Opera House steps (the management was wise enough not to let us onto the actual stage). It was an experience to treasure. If Kodak were still in business, this would have been one of their moments.

Karen, after a challenging climb

But the real music last week came from our gears clicking and our wheels spinning in perfect concert with the air and the desert and the mountains. It was a terrific week of cycling. The weather was perfect; the pernicious winds we have battled on previous visits made only fleeting appearances, then blew themselves off to bully other cyclists in other places. Each morning we set out on our bikes, riding out through the gates of the Furnace Creek Ranch, onto California Highway 190 into the dawn and towards a new destination. Legendary destinations with romantic names: Hell's Gate, Stovepipe Wells, Zabriskie Point.

The air was crackling dry and the sun was ever-present. Lips and ears sunburned. Legs grew weary. Sometimes the road surface was rough and pebbly enough to cause our bike saddles to vibrate for hours and behave like some device the CIA might use for interrogation. None of this mattered. What mattered was that we were moving across a strange and beautiful part of the planet propelled by our own power. I would not have traded any of it.

I rode farther and climbed higher than I did last year, although I still didn’t approach the heights reached by my friends Tim and Pam, who somehow persevered up 15% grades to reach spectacular Dante’s View, 5,600 feet above the valley. As I do every year, I vowed to train harder next time so that I don’t feel like I’m sliding backwards downhill on all the steep mountain climbs.

This was my fourth trip to Death Valley, and each time I have come home a bit stronger and wiser than when I arrived. Valued volunteer and Furnace Creek 508 veteran Steve Barnes said to me that the Valley possesses an energy that comes out of the ground and invigorates everyone who visits there. I believe this. Somehow you are made whole again like a song whose words are finally fitted into the tune.

They say there are dunes in the desert that sing. Someday I will hear them.



Through the Gates of Dawn towards another adventure