IN THIS ISSUE, the first of four travelogue entries from Matt McGowan about the Sierras and the West Coast, a meditation on chance from Charlie Alison, a quip about the little white dog, and a last word, a new word.
Inside Draw
TRAVEL YONDER
By Matt McGowan
Managed to get some pretty decent sleep last night despite the all-night party on the street below us. Kicked myself for not choosing a more strategic location, but my wife said there wasn’t one. “It’s Vegas, what do you expect?”
Leaving it wasn’t hard. Before we did, though, I think a prostitute propositioned me across a parking lot. He was wearing heels and a short black skirt, and his hair was pulled back in a messy bun. “Who wants some of Lola?” he yelled, looking my direction, before turning and walking away in a huff. In all fairness, he might have been talking to a couple who’d just parked their car near me and were getting ready to hit the casinos at 7 a.m. on a Saturday.
When Vegas ends, it really ends. Driving northwest out of the city, it’s strip mall, casino, strip mall, casino, strip mall, casino. And then bam! Nothing. Nothing but nothing, not even a palm tree nursery or an RV park or a U-Haul dealer. Now only dirt and dust and grit and rock and one or two sad-looking parched cacti. This harsh, Mars-like landscape goes on forever.
At Beatty, Nevada, we turned left and headed toward the valley of death. A surreal landscape, for sure. Miles of sand and a big ole salty dry sea bed, but, in my opinion, hardly worth stopping for. We did, for a bathroom break, during which my wife encountered a lizard the size of a kitten, and then we took a selfie, in which my Pacific Northwestern wife looks like she’s experiencing Current Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Driving out of Death Valley, I swear I saw people standing by the side of the road. But when I got to them, they were gone. Then I saw something on the road. It was moving through the heat waves, so I thought it was a mirage too. But when we got closer, it walked out of the waves. It was a coyote, spotty and ragged. The car didn’t scare him. He walked slowly across the road and looked right at me when we passed.
Farther west to Owens Valley, which I’ve wanted to see for 30 years, ever since my late father-in-law told me it was the best way to see Mount Whitney and the Sierras. He was right. An incredible base-to-summit profile for a hundred miles. I guess it was kind of a bucket-list thing, to drive from the lowest elevation point (282 feet below sea level) in the lower 48 to its highest (or at least the base of Whitney, which is 14,890 or something). Next time I come here, to Lone Pine, California, and the base of Mount Whitney, I plan to drive up the portal road and hike to the top of the mountain.
Ended the day in Mammoth Lakes. Ate at the hotel, Austria Hof, a modest Swiss-style ski lodge only a stone’s throw from the first ski lift. Authentic German food. My wife had Spaetzle, and I had goulash with beef tips. So good.
Yosemite, another place I’ve dreamed about visiting, all the way back to when I was a boy, is right around the corner. We’re going there next.
The writer, Matt McGowan, is author of the recently released novel, 1971, available through Amazon.
Chances Are
ESSAY
By Charlie Alison
While attending a conference during college, I wound up talking with a bunch of other students at a mixer. The conference was in Denton, Texas, and hosted by North Texas State University and the Texas Woman’s University. Like everyone else at that age, I was full of philosophical thoughts, some of them maybe even worth saying out loud.
At some point, a woman asked me if I believed in pre-destiny.
I sought clarification: Are you asking whether I think that the order of the universe is determined? Or if I believe there’s a greater omniscient power behind things and it’s preordained?
The former, she said.
“Definitely,” I replied. “If you could see where every single bit of matter was at any given moment — every molecule, every synaptic nerve, every twinge of the moon’s gravitational field — and knew all the directions each thing was headed, their speed, their mass, etc., yes, you could predict the future — the whole future.”
“But, if I had changed my question a moment ago,” the woman asked, “wouldn’t that have changed this outcome?”
She was studying at the Texas Woman’s University and had immediately told me that she was not lesbian. I appreciated that clarification because I have no clue about gender identification and am too shy to ask for fear of causing an unintended insult and am not really sure it’s any of my business at all, until it is, of course. She also seemed way smarter than me, but I had a head start on this particular conversation. I had thought about this question a lot and at that age probably thought I knew the answers, starting via the example of an all-knowing god.
If god knows everything, I thought, then all is preordained and we humans are just along for the ride. No choices about salvation or sin, because everything is baked in. The question of whether the universe is scientifically knowable, however, offers more food for thought, which brought me back to her question.
“But you didn’t change your question, did you? You asked the question you intended to ask. And that would have been pre-figured in the calculations,” I said. “But now that you’re thinking about it, you’re trying to decide what question you won’t ask next so as to alter the course of human events in the next few minutes. And now you’re reconsidering that question because that’s just the direction that might be predicted based on our conversation so far. And now you doubt your path, pondering all the what ifs. And now you’re thinking that all of this thinking by the brain is just another fine mess. You’re thinking: ‘I should just flip a coin and let it choose which question I ask.’”
She looked quizzically at me and then nodded. “So we’re back to measuring the weight of the coin,” she said, “its arc and speed of revolution, the density of the tabletop for when it strikes and bounces, and the moon’s gravitational pull?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
The smile that had graced the banter between us dropped from her face, and she looked saddened. “If you have no agency in the world, if it is all pre-set,” she asked me, “why would you want to keep on going?”
“I believe I have choice,” I said, “and that seems like enough.”
I was reminded of the preceding conversation when I recently read an essay on alternative universes, most of which seem to be too freaky to think about without scrambling your brain. It’s like the 1969 movie Doppelgänger, in which two astronauts are sent to the other side of the sun to investigate a new planet that has been orbiting exactly opposite Earth and so was never visible before the advent of space flight. The astronauts land on the planet and find it has its own civilization that turns out to be a mirror image of Earth, literally. People drive on the opposite side of the road, read books from right to left, and have bodily organs such as the liver and gall bladder on the “wrong” sides of the body.
Sounds about like 1960s sci-fi. Or a Monty Python sketch about Americans.
In the essay about alternative universes, though, one of the people quoted in the article said, and I paraphrase: “The universe we know is so incredibly big — there are so many galaxies, constellations and planets — that the likelihood of there being another Earth out there that formed exactly as did ours and is still exactly like ours is well within the realm of possibilities.”
That’s not to ignore all the planets that might be very similar, but in essence, all the molecules, synaptic nerves and gravity affecting one other planet could be expected to respond exactly like those on our planet ever since the Big Boom. It’s like the odds of eventually rolling the same combination on two die if you roll them long enough.
At that point, the only question left is whether the space probe we send to investigate that other Earth will smack into the space probe coming from that other Earth at the half-way marker. The thought of such a collision gives me just a little bit of hope that we can’t determine where every single bit of matter is at any given moment.
Chronicles of the Little White Dog
By Mark Pennington
Last night my wife and I went to a concert. I've mentioned that she and the little white dog have an evening ritual of TV watching, which was obviously interrupted by this outing. And, of course, outings have been rare for the last couple of years. When we got home the little white dog was initially overjoyed, assuming that the evening could resume its normal and proper course. Consequently she was bereft when my wife went directly upstairs and to bed. She moped around the family room, under the coffee table, in her bed, on the floor. Eventually I took her upstairs and put her in the bed, where she continued to mourn — "What about our routine?" "What about our shows?" Fortunately for her I said something that irritated my wife and they both went back downstairs.
The Last Word
driparian | driˈperēən
First, a confession. This is not a real word. It is one of those words that The New York Times loves for its readers to invent: Take a real word, add a letter and write a new definition of the new word.
Well, two can play at that game. Er, actually, it only takes one.
Driparian is made by combining the word riparian — that lush, verdant section of the world bordering streams and creeks — with the letter “d” to form a new word. And its meaning?
I propose it as an adjective used to describe the area beneath a tree’s canopy that stays dry during a spring downpour. And that’s the last word. CEYA
then may we pronounce it dry-parian, or is it drip-arian?