Too Dark to See Stars

by Jessica Tomberlin

As I drove across the twisting roads between the desert canyons, waiting for the cell reception to return, all the what if’s of life began to play tricks on me – What if I never found Furnace Creek, and was forced to turn around, would I be able to find my way back to the main road; what If I were to crash into the side of one of these canyon walls, to be rendered powerless against the elements: The heat of the desert, the labyrinth of canyons and caves casting their immense shadows, the coyotes and the scorpions hiding between the shadows, the stars above that refused to light the way, the dark matter of everything – and so I drove.

I drove and drove and drove and drove. I drove in fear that the place I was heading to might never open itself up to me. The oasis in the desert I had read so much about – if it existed at all – felt as though it were a million miles away and forever out of reach.

***

It is unclear how the 3.3 million acres of desert bordering Nevada and California first came to be called Death Valley. Writing in his journal in 1849, William Lewis Manly talks of the first white travelers who struggled through the region in search of gold, and later gave the land its name. Some believe the name was derived from the Timbisha Shoshone tribesmen who lived there before the pioneers “discovered” the land, and first called the place Tomesha, or “ground afire.”

Eventually, the valley became a place of refugee to the Shoshone’s aging and ailing, a peaceful place for the weak and weary to rest – and yes, for some, to die – so that it came to be called the valley of death. Still, others argue the Shoshone were devastated to learn the pioneers had misunderstood their homeland enough to give it a name like Death Valley. Like so many stories born from the desert, the versions of myth around the place’s name and origin are numerous. One constant found among them is this: In the desert, darkness reigns.

I was on my way to 31-years-old when I found myself road tripping across the Southwest in search of the kind of healing that only travel can bring. It was the summer of 2015, four years and two days after the day my mom suffered a sudden and massive heart attack. I was 26-years-old when she died. She was 26-years-old while pregnant with me.

For me, the sudden loss of my mother in this way was so surreal, so unexpected and shocking, so unlikely to the point of inconceivable, that at times I felt like it must not be happening to me at all, but to someone else entirely. In the years that followed her death, it often felt as if I were merely a spectator of my own life, an outsider looking on in horror. After several years of living life as if it were something in which I had little to no control over, I woke up one day with the urge to escape. Less than three weeks later, I found myself driving alone at night in Death Valley.

The route I’d mapped out for myself was something resembling that of a circle – or more an oval, to be precise – I liked the fact that it was a little messy, not quite round or square, and most importantly, did not contain any hard, definite edges, although that is not to say it was not rough by design.

Heading west from the Grand Canyon on my way to Death Valley, the small Nevada town I’d planned to stay in between turned out to be lacking in what I would consider appropriate accommodations for a woman traveling alone at night. When I pulled up to the one hotel I’d managed to find online, I discovered a casino with motel rooms attached. It smelled of cigarettes, grass, dirt and dried sweat that lingers on the skin.

I knew what I needed to do. Cancel the motel and keep driving, but first I needed a second opinion. I called my dad. I knew he would object to the idea of me staying in this place alone. Dad is a worrier. My paternal grandmother was a worrier. There is scientific evidence that the worry gene is hereditary.

So, with a little less money in my pocket, I added an extra night onto my Death Valley reservation and kept on driving. It was only nine o’clock at night when I began the drive, but it could just as easily have been after midnight. Time was irrelevant. There was no time. There was only light and dark, and I was consumed by darkness.

Around 550 square miles (roughly the size of Los Angeles) of Death Valley proper are located below sea level. Driving on roads below sea level gives one the feeling of what it might be like to drive across the bottom of the ocean floor, the black water engulfing everything in its wake as you become one with the abyss.

The hour’s drive to my hotel at Furnace Creek was the first time I’d felt afraid since beginning my trip from Los Angeles to Tucson, up to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Los Alamos, back West through the Four Corners, passed the Grand Canyon to Nevada, and finally, to Death Valley, my last stop before heading back to Los Angeles. I should have been afraid before. I knew I’d been lucky more than once already. Things had gone one way when they just as easily could have gone another.

Before my mom’s heart attack, I’d lived a fortunate – if imperfect – life. So I often found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Life was good and things were going well, and yet I was constantly looking for where things might go wrong.

Inside the car, I felt what I knew to be a false sense of security, an illusion of control, and still I held onto the conviction that I was safe inside that metal and aluminum box, with its sheets of glass that captured my reflection against the night, and the rubber soles below that held me up above the darkness. At the same time, I was painfully aware of the fragility of these elements that were my only protection against whatever lay outside, and my last defense for keeping it from coming in.

I became overly aware of my driving – my hands placed firmly on ten and two. I did not listen to music because I did not want to be distracted. Joan Didion’s essay on morality haunted me as I drove – I thought about the story of the divers, the 90-degree water, the magma, the underground nuclear testing, and all the other dangers I knew were out there lurking in the night.

Real dangers occupied my mind along with those imagined, the ones we create ourselves. Whether outside in the dead of night or inside a darkened room, these monsters of the mind seem always to be there, patiently awaiting our inevitable return to them.

There was a thickness to the darkness, like driving through fog. I could see only as far as my headlights on the road in front of me. As I drove, I felt more out of control of my life than ever before, but I kept going. Something inside of me kept moving me forward, as it always had. I knew that starting down the path was hardest part. Focusing on the destination always makes the journey feel longer, and the fear stronger.

The billions of stars hovering above the car were not bright enough to reach me. It was as if the sky were as flat as a canvas, and what I had mistaken for stars were instead part of some unknown artists’ masterpiece made of paper, charcoal, and splattered shades of blue and white paint.

When I was young I used to shut my eyes so tight, and press my fingers against them until I could see what looked like stars inside the black caves behind my eyelids.

As children, it’s all the things we cannot see that make us inherently afraid of the dark. As though we were all gifted at birth with some intuitive knowledge of the unknown as suspect. Our sense of sight threatened, we cannot know what might be waiting in the shadows, and so we are left to imagine in the dark.

As adults, the monsters hiding inside our closets or under our beds are replaced by new terrors of the mind: we are plagued by a fear of the future, or simply afraid of the unknown. We lie awake in the dark imagining the possibilities waiting to be wrought into the world.
The drive became more grueling by the minute, when suddenly several tiny pair of glowing lights appeared, shining in the space between the canyons and the road. They were all that was visible against the shadows and a thousand shades of black. I realized later it was the eyes of the desert rabbits lighting my way. I had almost missed them.

Sometimes, when we keep our eyes open, stay alert, eventually the light comes through. Maybe small at first, and far away, but it’s there, and that light is our hope, hope that the darkness won’t last forever. That it is, like most dark things, a temporary set back; a necessary element of any story worth telling, and every life is filled with them. This is how we grow.

I kept driving for what seemed like another hour before a glow appeared, illuminating the road ahead. When the bars on my phone began to gain in number and the “no service” badge of death disappeared, I knew that I was close to my destination. I found a three-car parking lot outside of a small office and parked in a spot close to the door. I proceeded to check in with a smiling, grey-haired woman who directed me to keep driving two miles up the road to The Ranch at Furnace Creek, the part of the resort open during off-season from June to August when the summer days reach temperatures well over 100°F.

Finally, I reached my oasis, a mirage-like miracle, small enough that you could pass right by it in the daylight, much less at 10:00 at night. I discovered a little village complete with a general store, café, and office. The place resembled something you might expect to see on the film set of a black and white Western starring John Wayne, equipped with motel rooms for cast and crew lined along the back of the property.

I got out of the car and stared into the black hole that was the sky, still starless to my eyes. It was as if I were staring into the pupil of nature itself. I felt how small my life was in the face of that unending blackness. Using my phone as a flashlight, I made my way to my room in the same way I’d made the drive with my headlights shining on the road, one step at a time.

Once inside, I put down my bags and opened the balcony to try to take a look out onto the property, but with the patio lights on there was only the black wall of night in front of me. Behind that wall, coyotes were howling. Because I was on the first floor, I decided against reading on the porch.

I began to research, and make a plan for the day ahead with help from a book I’d acquired while in Santa Fe. First published in 1946, Death Valley and Its Country was written by George P. Putnam, an early explorer best known for being the widower of Amelia Earhart. In Putnam’s time, the area was still only considered a National Monument. Despite the fact that (at 2,980 square miles) it exceeded in size all National Parks in the continental United States with the exception of Yellowstone, Death Valley would not become a National Park until more than 50 years later.

On the newly updated website for “The Oasis at Death Valley” – a luxury hotel that encompasses both The Furnace Creek Ranch where I was staying, and the larger Furnace Creek Inn where I’d checked-in with the grey-haired woman – it said the Ranch had been welcoming guests since 1933, but Putnam’s version of Death Valley talks of a place called the Old Furnace Creek Ranch that existed there at least 50 years before then.

According to Putnam, a man named Jim Dayton was the caretaker of the Old Furnace Creek Ranch for 15 years prior to his untimely death during an ill-fated trip to Los Angeles in the summer of 1898. I too would be taking that trip, from Death Valley to the city of angels, my first and final destination of the summer. I hoped for a better fate than that of the caretaker, who never made it to Los Angeles, but instead died alongside his horses, alone in the desert.

The source of Putnam’s story was a man called Shorty Harris, a close friend of Jim Dayton’s, and one of the now infamous “jackass prospectors” of the region, whose lives and stories weave together to create a sense of place, and bring the valley’s rich history to life. The most famous of these prospectors is Death Valley Scotty, a man with a “castle” named after him that was supposedly financed with gold from a mine that no one but Scotty ever saw. He died in the valley in 1954 at the age of 81, but the legend of the man and his mythical mine live on in spirit, while his multi-million dollar castle remains a staple of the region.

Sadly, a few months after my trip, on October 18, 2015, Death Valley received close to its annual average rainfall in five hours, flooding Scotty’s Castle. It is still under repair today.

I finished my research and got into bed, letting the television play the only thing I could find on at that hour: Magic Mike, which felt all wrong and out of place there. At the same time, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, the television felt oddly comforting. I laughed at the idea of what this scene would look like to someone on the outside looking in: me lying in bed with my down comforter, and a B-movie playing in my air-conditioned room in the middle of the desert.

After all, I knew that life was not found in front of the television. To truly live, we must go out into the world – to see it, to touch, and feel and taste it, to stretch our arms out and embrace the uncertainty of it all – to bravely move ahead, into the darkness.

The next morning, the monsters disappeared with the daylight. I opened the curtains to my once invisible patio where two bright, plastic, white chairs, and a small, round table bathed in sunshine now sat reflecting specs of yellow and gold back at me through the window, as the heat glowing against the glass warmed my hands. At just past nine, the red line of the outdoor thermometer had already managed to creep past 90. By mid-day temperatures reached 98 °F before I stopped counting. Mild compared to the area’s record high, which reached 134 °F on July 10 of 1913, still the highest officially recorded temperature on earth to date.

I started the day on the meandering Artists’ Drive. The curves of the road were non-existent until you were right up on them, just before the turn. I wondered how I’d made the drive at night. This time, I was not completely alone on the path. At certain points, the road would open up to the sky, and I could see beyond: other travelers appeared and then disappeared again behind the canyons made of a thousand shades of brown and yellow, pink, red, purple and blue.

Driving was not the way to experience this place. I felt both desire and fear as I was struck by the urge to park my car and go running out into the middle of the desert until I became invisible, a spec of dust floating up from the dirt into the sea of blue sky. I was overwhelmed by the scale of things – the endless expansion of nature, and the smallness of humanity both equally beautiful and unpredictable in their own way.
Unlike the Artist’s Drive, the road leading me to the Salt Flats – my next destination – was a never-ending, straight and narrow one that seemed to dead end at the mountains. As I drove towards the place where the mountains met the sky, and the road disappeared into the landscape, I understood the meaning of purple mountains majesty for the first time.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit says that “blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in… for the blue world.” Staring into the vastness of desert against the backdrop of my own blue longing, I was consumed with temptation to veer off the path and drive across the unpaved land beside me. It was too dangerous to walk the entire distance alone in the heat, and I wanted to know what it felt like to move across the open desert, to travel towards the mountains that painted the blue sky purple, and stand in awe amidst the otherworldly scene.

In his book, Putnam warns of the many men who’d tried to make the same trip on foot, and soon found the soles of their feet covered in blisters. Upon removing their shoes to free their feet from the blisters, the men were met with the heat of the sand that burned their blistered skin. Invariably, the skin became infected, thus sealing the men’s fate. He says, “They died of new boots.”

I sat in silent reflection a moment longer, thinking of these men. Ill-equipped for a true hike in my own faux-hiking boots – bought more for the colorful patches sewn into each side than for their ability to withstand obscure terrains – I stayed the course, making my way to the parking lot full of cars and tourists in the distance. When I opened the car door and stepped into the desert, the thick, hot air took my breath away.

Badwater Basin sits at the lowest point in Death Valley (and in North America), an elevation of 282ft below sea level. The Badwater name refers not to the lack of water, but to the taste, which – as you may have guessed – is said to be quite salty.

Rain comes tumbling into the basin from the surrounding mountains on either side of the valley, forming temporary lakes, before disappearing into the air and ground. After thousands of years, this cycle of renewal continues, water evaporates, minerals concentrate, the dust clears, and only the salt remains – a blinding white layer of crystals above the sand. Badwater Basin is where the rain goes to die.

I stared down at the part of the salt flats directly beneath my feet. The white crystals mixing with the grey of the sand made the little pockets of salt look like clouds floating across the land below like a mirror image of the sky. Surrounded by the sun shining down on the back of my neck and reflecting up at me from the sand, I felt what Putnam referred to as “the therapeutic baking of summer.”

For those of us who prefer a nomadic life, we often – unwillingly or not – use travel as therapy. We must keep moving in order to live. Our story is in need of a reset, and we reset on the road. I was traveling to escape from all the loss. In search of the girl I used to be and the woman I desperately wanted to become. My luggage consisted of two suitcases: one filled with clothes and toiletries, the other now almost full of books. There was no place big enough for the baggage of loss I felt.

I am speaking of the loss of my mother, but also of the losses that followed her death. Some were small that felt big at the time, others were more subtle, the kind of loss that slowly sneaks up on you as time passes. The former resembles a kind of swift, sharp pain, while the latter forever leaves behind the dull ache of loss. Loss of any kind leaves us feeling not quite ourselves. On the outside we look the same, but inside there are blisters on the soul.

My mother taught me to travel. She took me on my first plane ride before I was a year old, and we often traveled as a family throughout my childhood. I treated every trip my parents took that did not include my sister and me as if they might never return. Imagining all kinds of scenarios, hoping for the best, I held my breath and prepared for the worst. But none of my worrying had managed to save my mother, who did not die while traveling, as I had often feared, but instead died standing inside of her walk-in closet while picking out which clothes to wear to work. My dad and sister were at the house when it happened. I was in London, traveling.

When I boarded the plane for Dallas the morning after she died, on my way back to the house where I’d grown up, it struck me that I was not going home. The home I’d left behind weeks before, now simply ceased to exist. Neither my mother nor I could ever go home again.
I wondered if that’s what I’d been searching for on all those roads. Instead of an escape, maybe what I was looking for was a return, a way of finally coming to terms with my loss, my grief, my fears, my flaws, myself. Maybe that night on a dark road in Death Valley I was finally becoming me.
As darkness fell on my last evening in the valley, I lingered on the patio until it was surrounded by the night again. I sat gazing into the atmosphere in search of the light I knew was hiding there, patiently engaged in a staring contest with the sky. Until finally, my eyes adjusted to reveal the cosmos, and a million miles of stars appeared like magic in front of me.

***

In June of 2016, a year after I left the valley, a man’s body was found along a remote road there on a day when temperatures reached 118 degrees. Another heat related death was reported just two months later. In July, all of Furnace Creek was without power for 38 hours after a lightening strike burned three poles. It was the fourth major electrical failure in Death Valley that summer.

That real dangers existed in Death Valley was a certainty, as they did in any desert region, where heat and drought are both real concerns for travelers passing through and residents alike. But there was also immense beauty, and the strange phenomenon of the variety of landscapes existing in such close proximity, creating an enchanting and unique geographical region. A place of death, but also a place of survival and rejuvenation – where one could feel both lost and found at the same time.

Short Stories Magazine
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Jessica Tomberlin is an adjunct instructor of ESOL and creative writing. Her writing has appeared in PBS’s Antiques Roadshow Insider, JSTOR Daily, and the documentary film series, Our Americas, among other places.