Mon Amour Death Valley Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, July 12, 2007
“Death Valley,” wrote Barbara Lazear Ascher several years ago in the New York Times Magazine, “was Creation’s trial run. The ideas were good. The raw materials were in place, though not necessarily in what we've come to regard as the ‘right’ place.” When you’re here, she wrote, you’re back at the beginning of time. “Voluptuous alluvial fans, dips and rises of gravel dumped by flash floods over the last few million years resemble so many attempts to get form just right. You can practically hear Creation's thoughtful ‘Hmmmmm.’ It’s that silent here.” And that beautiful.
Two days after we got married Cheryl and I, we were sleeping in a tent in Death Valley: our own “Hmmmmm.” Being there was like looking through a Hubble Telescope of a different kind, without the scopes. We were back in time. In keeping with today’s theme of death everywhere, but the sublime kind, here are a few pictures from that trip.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
