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| Artist's Drive, Death Valley |
As a Christmas present to me, Judy planned every detail of a trip to Death Valley. She had visited the valley several times as a young woman. She wanted to see it again and to introduce me to the stark beauty of the lowest spot in North America.
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| Red Rock Canyon, Nevada |
We flew into Las Vegas. The casinos are mammoth buildings. From our 8th floor room at the Excalibur, there was no way to get coffee, or reach the food court, or find a Wi-Fi hot spot, or open a door to the outside without walking thorough the acre of flashing lights and noises and garish colors that was the casino. I began to appreciate the part of the path that took me by the black jack tables and roulette wheels; there were only people there, no machines.
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| Badwater, 282 feet below sea level |
From Vegas we drove to Death Valley by way of Red Rock Canyon, and began to soak in the unusual beauty of the bare rock mountains surrounding the narrow valley. The colors and shapes of the layers of rock somehow make the solid wall of cliffs seem fluid and dynamic. It was mesmerizing, the way gazing the ocean is. After a few days with those rocks, I felt the way I used to after watching whales.
We stayed at Stovepipe Wells, an old "bungalette" resort in Death Valley. There we met Jim Galvin, who spends six or seven weeks there every winter and has been made an honorary member of the staff. He sets up his telescopes on the patio outside his room and invites passersby to look through them. We saw sun spots during the day and Jupiter with its moons at night. While I was looking at the craters on the crescent moon, Judy and Jim talked astronomy and cameras. Later, when were driving through the desert from Stovepipe Wells to Furnace Creek, we decided to get out of the car and look up. It was absolutely quiet. The night sky in Death Valley was like a black bowl of stars, with bright stars all the way down to where the dark sky meets the dark desert.
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| Wild horses |
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| Old coyote |
The next afternoon, as we left the busy National Park Service visitors' center, we saw an old coyote cross the road. I swear he paused and looked both ways before creaking at a slow trot across that road.
As we rounded the bend at the ghost town of Amorgosa, two wild horses and a foal emerged from the desert field and ran behind the old opera house.
We returned to Las Vegas On Super Bowl Sunday, to stay one night before catching a plane to Phoenix. The porter at the Excalibur had told us with excitement about all the athletes who would be gathering there on Sunday to watch the football game. We decided not to stay at a casino hotel. The Motel 6 near the airport turned out to be clean, quiet, and comfortable. The small, spare room was done in a 60s retro style. It reminded me of a ship's cabin in the clever way everything fit together.
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| Kathe, Lisha, Maggie with pendant |
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| Wild horses of Scottsdale |
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| Judy in the snow |
In Phoenix we hooked up with our friends Kathe and Lisha, who live in Southwest Colorado. We stayed in a two-bedroom apartment that Kathe had found, a comfortable place for talking and eating and catching up. We poked around the art galleries of Scottsdale, where I discovered the oils of Benjamin Wu and the bronzes of David McGary. Judy liked the big copper horses in a central fountain. Kate and Lisha had just been to the Tucson Gem and Mineral show. They'd given me a pendant made of variscite, so we pumped the rock and crystal dealers in Scottdale for more information about the stone. We talked about the Enneagram all the way out to the gift shop at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, and then kept Enneababbling on into the night.
Judy and I flew home to Portland and were greeted by snow. We were compelled to sit by the fire and read. It felt like the gift of four more days of vacation.
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| Backyard Buddha emerges |
