Precession

By

Ray Purcell

Tongues of incandescing gas rose in curtains of yellow and red as if summoned up to feed the cold lightless vacuum of the desert night. We sat, Courtney and I, warmed by the fire and illuminated by the ubiquitous and venerable Colman lantern. The fuel issued into the mantles of the lamp with an almost trademark hiss. Courtney was absorbed in a fantasy about Knights in some medieval setting, bold and noble deeds, and chivalrous comportment; a story who’s hero would necessarily be a heroine. I on the other hand was only occasionally reading from the latest Ken Follett novel.

I was alternately distracted: one moment by the harsh white illumination cast by the lantern versus the soft yellow light that suffused from the fire as they competed to illuminate the wizened sandstone cliff that loomed over our camp; the next by the soft smooth youthful curves of my daughter’s face. I felt compelled to savor and ponder each of these in turn.

After adding wood to the fire I settled back hoping to fend off the encroaching cold. Sinking down into the sling chair I stretched out my legs and held myself tightly while considering the inexorable patina that I had been gathering. I simply felt more graceful accepting the inevitable from this fireside, the time was right to be contemplative. Time seems more genteel around a campfire, less urgent and demanding. But then that’s why we had chosen to come to the desert to spend our last day together.

I reflected on our day wandering the dry washes and scaling the ridges of Red Rock Canyon. Time is conspicuous in the desert, but it’s also languid. The layers of sand and silt have gathered over epochs, swirled by wind, spread by water and at last buried layer after subsequent layer. Now, thrust up by faulting the leafs of the book have been mistreated, crumpled. The astonishing span of time is laid bare and is inescapable; it mocks the niggardly years accrued by any man- by all men.

Courtney spoke and I tumbled out of my omniscience. She commented on the night sky, so I turned down the lantern. The bubble of brash light immediately collapsed and we stood to put the fire at our backs. As our eyes adjusted Courtney said: “I can’t remember many of the constellations.’ I recognize the Big Dipper,... and is that Orion?” It was early enough in the evening and the Big Dipper wasn’t fully upside down. I pointed out Orion, then drew her attention to Orion’s “belt” so that she could follow the “sword” down to the Orion Nebula. Then I drew my finger across the sky to the stellar nursery of the Pleiades. Looking northeast we tried to find the catawampus “W” where Cassiopeia sits on her thrown. Finally, I looked north to the constellations of Draco and Cehphis.

The star-party was winding down and our butts were getting cold since our good fire was becoming reduced to embers for want of new wood. We scuttled about tidying the camp for the night and at last sealed ourselves in our sleeping bags. The last thing I thought of before dropping off to sleep was the North Star, actually the Pole Stars. In my mind’s eye I pictured desert nomads circled about a fire of camel dung in the sands of Southwest Asia 3000 years ago.

In 2700 BC those desert herdsman and caravans would probably have used the Pole Star to find their way from oasis to oasis, or follow trade routes across an other wise vast and featureless terrain. Except that then the star closest to due north would have been Thuban, the brightest star in the constellation Draco. According to Arabic Astrology, Thuban rising was auspicious for prospectors. Before falling off to sleep I wondered if there were a star that was the guardian of parents who were about to have their first child move out, at least a star whose portent was a less painful transition.

We slept in the next morning, waiting for the Sun to rise and take some of the night chill off of the kitchen. Our family car camping traditions demand that I cook, and I have little humility when it comes to my prowess on the camp stove. But, put a roof over my head and I loose all creative interest in the culinary arts; it’s like putting a cover over the canary cage, I just won’t sing.

First the water goes on for coffee, clean and cold. Once at a rolling boil the water’s poured over a freshly ground dark roast, from beans glistening with aromatic oil and plump like little bronze godlets. While the coffee steeps in the press the cast iron skillet slowly warms. The cooking surface of the pan is covered with a slick veneer lovingly seasoned over years careful use. The coffee gets pressed and portions poured. Now for a breakfast guaranteed to harden your arteries and leave you weeping for joy at your own funeral.

Real pork link sausage dance and spit as they’re placed lovingly in the skillet. They're slowly fried and turned with consummate attention between savory sips of brew. Now, ready yourself. I herd them little sausages to the margin of the pan so the center is cleared for a dollop of sweet butter. The butter bubbles but never browns, and with a deft snap of the wrist the egg shell fully cracks into two and the crystal clear white cascades onto the griddle with agonizing grace. Timing it’s entrance, the yolk plops into the waiting pool with almost comic relief, diffusing the otherwise exhausting dramatic tension. The process is repeated until the pan is full off single yellow eyes staring up at me. One masterful flip and faster that you can spell over easy- ysae revo- the whole mess gets slid into waiting plates and is unceremoniously demolished .

Since Courtney has to fly back to Maryland to begin her ten month term with AmeriCorps tomorrow, we have to be home today to tie off loose ends. So, in an awe-shucks-do-I-have-to sort of way we tidy up camp and pack the car. We roll out the dirt road and head for home with small plumes of dust rising from the tires; well at least the general direction of home. There’s one more dirt road between us and the highway, and it has a small understated handmade sign that simply points to the Burro Schmidt Tunnel.

We are in consensus that this one last side trip is destined to occur, so as if guided by a propitious star I turn the wheels of the Saturn Station Wagon to the right and we bounced and scuddered over the riled rough road. I had read stories about Wm. Henry “Burro” Schmidt in our local paper. He was, as the story’s told, the sort of rugged individualist the like of which still gravitate to the Mojave Desert. Folks who are really better off left with themselves for company. His tale goes that he established a mining claim on Copper Mountain in 1906. With what may have begun as an exploration of a vein of ore or perhaps a tunnel that may have provided a short-cut to the smelter, Schmidt began to bore into the side of Copper Mountain.

History tells that no income came of his tunnel, and that in the interim of the tunnel’s construction a road was cut to the smelter, but he continued digging anyway, and almost entirely by hand. It’s not generally known what muse inspired Schmidt, but the tunnel became an obsession. His mining claims never paid so he supported himself by hiring out to ranchers in the Kern River Valley, and then when he had enough to get by he returned to the pick, rock bar, and hand drill. Thirty-two years, 5800 tons of rock, and 2500 feet latter Schmidt popped out a hole on the other side of the mountain in 1939. He died in Ridgecrest in 1954,but his legacy lives on in the tunnel that is maintained by a citizens group in Schmidt's memory on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

Courtney and I followed the small but unmistakable road signs over some marginal but passable road for a two wheel drive vehicle. This area is clearly popular with the rising tide of off highway recreationists of the two and four wheeled sort who, for the most part are cautious and friendly. We ultimately found ourselves in a flat parking area in the vicinity of what said to have been Burro’s own residence.

There are really several, what can best be identified as dwellings. These habitations are clearly as unique and structurally pragmatic as the rugged individualists who possess the desire for solitude and resilience to live in them. I’ve found an interesting paradox about the desert; which is, that merchandise of one kind and another, one way or another will find it’s way into the desert, but seldom finds it’s way back out. After they have outlived their usefulness these artifacts either pile up or are reused. Here we found that what ever odds and ends couldn’t be incorporated into, or used to patch one of the structures, was used as an objet du yard art.

She and I pulled out our headlamps and walked a short distance up a dusty road to the tunnel entrance. It looked like all the mine shaft entrances I had ever seen in a Western Movie with bracing over the entrance and iron rails set into the ground. At the entrance the was a commemorative plaque to Schmidt’s accomplishment placed by the Peter Lebec Chapter of E Clampus Vitus. We wandered into the tunnel following the beams of our headlamps.

It was really a tidy tunnel as homemade tunnels go, and it was clear someone had been maintaining it. We passed hand lettered signs cautioning about this or against that. I latter learned that the signs were placed by Evelyn Seger, a desert rat of a woman who was the most recent property owner. She and her husband had purchased the claim and the surrounding property after their retirement, and acted as the tunnels caretakers and docents. Evelyn continued to live here alone long after her husbands death, and until her own passing at the age of 97.

We were well into the tunnel when we came to a “T” intersection where the cart tracks doglegged to the right. After a few hundred more feet we popped out the other side of Copper Mountain. Outside, from the platform of earth where the cart rails ended, the El Paso Mountains fell away to the abandoned town of Garlock, and Koehn Dry Lake. Off in the distance the Mojave Desert spread out with views as far south as the Angeles Mountains.

Courtney and I chatted and laughed about how strange Schmidt’s apparent obsession had been. We marveled at the enormity of the physical labor accomplished by a man with consumption- Tuberculosis. True, life is only about process, and the world is full of monuments to nothing more than their own construction. Buddhist Monks painstakingly craft intricate Mandalas of colored sand so that, in the end, their creation can be scattered. An endeavor who’s entire purpose is to teach the impermanence of worldly things.

We retraced our steps to the car and at last headed home. As I drove I asked Courtney about her AmeriCorps program and what she was looking forward to doing. This would be her second term and she had to travel to one of the National Campuses to complete it. She had served her last term working in an after-school program working with kids who were performing poorly in school. She was excited about the success of this last program that brought many of these disenfranchised, apathetic, and socially overlooked kids up to grade level with their reading skills. But this particular program was canceled when President Bush cut the AmeriCorps budget.

She told me the campus she would be living at in Perry Point Maryland would house crews that would provide manpower for: resource conservation projects like trails, campgrounds, and erosion control; wildland firefighting; disaster relief support; and start up projects like after school programs in homeless shelters. She told me that her area of service would be the entire Eastern Seaboard. During one of our lapses into silence I thought about the larger concept of service, and I occasionally stole last looks at my daughter.

When did this punky fireball of a kid mature into a firebrand of a young woman. When she was ten she began telling us about her code of honor. As I looked at her absorbed in her book about a medieval knight, who happened to be a girl, I thought about the lineage of literature that had supported, encouraged, and empowered her since she was a kid. Stories both fiction and non; tales of honor, courage, and lives lived worthy.

The next day my wife and I delivered Courtney to the airport. We were all lighthearted, cheerful, and... stoic. Her mom and I didn’t get misty eyed until we got in the car to go home. Before I went to bed that night I pulled out a letter that Courtney had written me where she described me as her North Star and I wondered how I had ever been so worthy.

As I lay in bed I considered that it took 300 million years for the sand, silt and mud to accumulate, compress, and then be thrust up to form Red Rock Canyon. It takes 26 thousand years for the Earth to complete one circular wobble of it’s axis. William “Burro” Schmidt spent thirty-two years of his life digging a hole through Copper Mountain. Arguably, it takes twenty years to raise a child. Before I fell asleep my last thoughts were about... process.

Courtney’s been gone a week now. Yesterday morning I was listening to National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday while I was in the car. Ken Watenabi had been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Supporting Actor in The Last Samurai, and he was being interviewed. Watenabi has been acting the role of a Samurai for 23 years in the Japanese media. In the course of the interview the ideals that embodied the Samurai: honor, duty, and service before self were discussed. Then the interviewer asked the actor if he thought that the Samurai ethos had perished. Watenabi responded that he thought they had. But, I disagree.

In the next 26 thousand years the North Pole will point to six different North Stars. For the time being Polaris currently occupies that position, but in 4000 thousand years the Pole Star will be Alrai, in the constellation Cepheus. If process is as relative as time, then I believe that the next North Star will be my daughter, and all those sons and daughters who like her who hold dear the values of service, valor, and honor- and they will be the guides to those who travel across a vast and featureless landscape.

January 2004