Speculative Friction

Selection from “Disorientations,” a Travel Essay

by Claire Bateman

Excerpt from the section, “Castings Off”

“1. All throughout this trip, I experience internal pressure from the desire to leave my car by the side of the road and walk out into the prairie or desert until I can’t see any sign of civilization in any direction. This desire represents something more than a fantasy and less than a plan; the open spaces exert such a strong magnetic tug on some subrational part of my soul that I find myself worrying not about my personal fate, though I have no intention of carrying a water bottle or cell phone, but about what might happen to the rental car in my absence. Many times, I do stop and stroll a bit along the shoulder, shaken by the gales of passing trucks, to gather sage in plastic motel bags, or to take pictures of passing storm clouds. And a few of those times, I leave the interstate entirely and walk out into the flatness, finding places for my feet between sprouting scrub and pocked and burning stones, the sun roaring so ferociously around me that I can’t even hear it. No one’s watching me, no one knows precisely where I am—there’s nothing to stop me from walking on forever. Just one more step, I tell myself, and then I’ll turn back. But that’s just the phrase the little girl uses in my friend Ron Rash’s novel as she wades into the Tomassee River to her death. Still, everybody has to drown in something sometime, so why not drown in this desert, in these immense clouds dipping their heads down to sip the salt? If there were a fence, I’d climb over it, but because there isn’t, I turn away, disappointed.

“2. The editor of the magazine Desert USA has speculated, ‘Could there be more things lost in the desert than found?’ Not only has the equipment of pioneers, miners, and treasure hunters been swallowed up out there, as well as some of the pioneers, miners, and treasure hunters, themselves but, according to legend, there’s a 17^th-century Spanish ship laden with pearls buried deep under the dunes of Southeastern California, stranded there as her captain, seeking a connection between the Gulf of California and an inland sea, was suddenly cut off by a mud slide. However, I’m not tempted to unearth galleons or pearls but, instead, like the aged, wheelchair-bound Edna Hulbert known for hurling bottles containing tiny rolled-up messages into bodies of water around the world, I want to hide something human in an inhuman landscape, though I’m unclear about what that might be and whether or not I would want it to be discovered. A message in a bottle seems somehow inappropriate—perhaps a blank piece of paper in a bottle instead? If so what kind? I settle on an exquisitely thin piece of scrolled, cream-colored wrapping paper bound with a coral ribbon. My project would be the precise opposite of Christo’s, since the paper would not wrap, but be wrapped by soil, sand, and stone.

“3. It’s always a little chilly on The Golden Gate Bridge, a structure that aspires to be a giant wind harp, and may, if evolutionary forces remain favorable, someday become able to shed harmonic overtones like rain, though not, of course, in our lifetime.

It occurs to me that many of the cantilever bridges in this nation are slowly mutating into flutes. The farther along a bridge is in this process, the less likely anyone is to leap from it. The childlike purity of its spirit discourages the deranged and the solitary, who are attracted to the unearthly tones coiled within a suspension bridge, waiting to be released into the wild.

“4. Bridge temptations and desert temptations are kissing cousins. Both involve abandoning oneself to a mysterious and enormous unknown that is, paradoxically, both hostile and wholly impersonal—abandoning oneself either abruptly, as from a bridge, or in a more gradual manner, as with a desert. However, unlike the desert, the Golden Gate Bridge provides posted warnings against such behavior, as well as 13 suicide hotline phones placed at regular intervals (13 as a magical number to ward off evil?). Signs inform visitors that it is illegal to throw, not only one’s person, but one’s possessions over the railing; I find myself having to resist the urge to launch my cell phone—so compact, so ergonomic, so streamlined—into a graceful arc ending in the strait below. Also my car keys.

“5. I’ve read in Tad Friend’s much-quoted New Yorker piece, ‘Jumpers,’ that in the early 1970s, bridge and transportation officials considered constructing a suicide-prevention net of high-voltage laser beams, but the plan was considered too dangerous to implement because of ‘the possibility of severe burns, possibly fatal, to pedestrians and personnel.’ Imagining a web of lights below, a criss-crossing of hot gold threads that emit a barely discernible humming noise as they rest suspended, forever on the verge of vibration, it seems apparent to me that the aesthetics of this set-up would encourage leaping. Who wouldn’t long to plummet into such a shimmering nest?—wouldn’t one simply be caught and sent up again and again, as from a trampoline?—wouldn’t one dance, Gene Kelly-like, across the strands? No, in order to be functional, a safety net or barrier must be not only commodious but unattractive, even downright unsightly.

“6. The desert’s beauty is inseparable from its visible harshness. No one has suggested the installation of a desert-spanning bridge whose steel wires could encircle the earth three times. Any safety net or barrier would be completely inappropriate. Nevertheless, it occurs to me with all the force of a revelation that what the desert really needs is a boardwalk.

“Now in a mood to redecorate, I imagine the mysterious, possibly extraterrestrial lights of Marfa eclipsed by the pulse and strobe of the ferris wheel. What better place than the desert to get your tattoos, your taffy, your fossilized baby hermit crabs?

“And when you’re stuffed full of funnel cakes and Cherry Coke, you can lean over the splintery wooden railing to scan for mutated mermaids surfacing through a net of starlight. These are very small, narrow creatures with the heads, arms, and torsos of women, and the tails of scorpions and lizards, which tunnel beneath the dunes, coming up only to hunt insects with their forked tongues. Their vacant eyes communicate no sense of human consciousness; there is no evolutionary connection between them and the much more advanced ocean mermaids. They utter only a kind of dry hissing, unpleasant to hear and impossible to forget.

“7. I’m driving south from Santa Cruz on Highway 1 in the dark when over the radio waves of station KRUZ floats the voice of the Dream Doctor, author of Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams, offering me the opportunity to set up an appointment with him through his website if my dream is too personal to talk about on the radio.

“After the show fades out as I leave the listening area, I ponder the very idea of doctoring a dream, imagining at first that it must be delicate work, like mending the most fragile of parchments, but then it occurs to me that dreams may be far tougher than those who experience them, since they outlive us. The dream of falling, the dream of exposure, the dream of the house with an extra wing or room that’s somehow been there all along—generation by generation we pass over these narratives in the night on the forced march toward daylight. So mending a dream must be not unlike mending a bridge, with large, stainless steel pins, and trucks full of mortar and cement. I picture the Dream Doctor in a hard hat and coveralls, standing knee-deep in river muck. Most of the time he’s lost in heavy swirls of advection fog, but he doesn’t quit. Would the dreams endure without him? Of course they would, but it’s still worthy work, keeping them in the best possible shape after so much heavy use, night after night, by six billion people.”

—First published in “National Literary Review”

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/25/11—“From up here the sound of the river, until now a permanent part of my auditory background, is no longer perceptible, and the desert silence takes on a deeper dimension. The sound of nothingness? ‘In the desert,’ wrote Balzac, somewhere, ‘there is all and there is nothing. God is there and man is not.’” —From Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey.