Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2 page)

We dump on Nevada because Nevada seems so useless and empty, because it seems that there is less there there than the there that Gertrude Stein couldn’t find in Oakland. That, of course, is an illusion. Any couch turnip who’s caught
The Wonderful World of Disney
knows that the desert is teeming.

There aren’t a lot of
humans
in Nevada, relatively speaking, but considering the lifestyles of those who are there, considering that the thickest crowds are in the barrooms and that the barrooms are open around the clock (prevailing custom among the rough ol’ dudes is that if you strike it rich, you get drunk to celebrate, and if you don’t, you get drunk to forget), considering that the chief complaint in those barrooms is, “They didn’t let us win in Vietnam,” considering that the average Nevadan resides in a mobile double-wide with nothing in its grassless yard except a satellite dish as big as a moon, considering that the majority is poised to get the hell out the instant it strikes it rich, and, finally, considering that the rock group Men Without Hats is permanently barred from the Nevada Top Forty, it’s doubtlessly a blessing that there aren’t more citizens around to further mug the countryside and zap its small creatures.

The trouble with Nevada is that it thinks it’s Alaska. It thinks it’s the last frontier, at a time when the last frontier has moved beyond Anchorage to the other side of Jupiter. Regardless, Nevada is permeated by the frontier mentality, with its love of guns and booze and its hankering for bonanza. Much of it is nutty and most of it is crude (the Nevada state song is the exaggerated belch), yet Alexa, Jon, and I were quick to agree that even these ersatz Kit Carsonisms radiated authenticity when compared to the gentrification that is sugaring the bowels of urban America.

For example, it was strangely refreshing to read in the
Tonopah Times-Bonanza and Goldfield News
of not one but two recent ax murders. In our more chic towns and cities, killers no longer address victims with axes. They use sushi knives on them. Or shove baby bok choy up their noses.

Actually, before my pilgrimage was over, I wouldn’t have minded a leaf or two of bok choy. Aside from the iceberg lettuce mailed in from California, there’s not a fresh vegetable in all of west-central Nevada. The state bird of Nevada is the chicken-fried steak—and the labored flapping of its gravy-slathered wings (admittedly delicious) only fans the flames of frontierism. An organism running on brussels sprouts probably isn’t as inclined to shoot up road signs or to share its habitat with bombing ranges and plutonium dumps as one that’s running on hammered beef.

At any rate, the Goddess of Destruction dances on in Nevada, fangs dribbling steak juice, the desert sun aglint on her necklace of skulls. In tantra, she is loved not one smooch less than her benevolent twin. Your pilgrim is slowly learning to love the Dark Dancer as well. Yes, but it was her flip side, the Good Witch, that enticed him to Nevada, where natural beauty struggles to hold its own against the treacherous ticky-tack spawned by the greed and fear of men. Surely, at the Canyon of the Vaginas, the Mother of Creation would prevail.

Alas, on that May afternoon when finally we neared the canyon, Ms. Destruction appeared to be directing the show. The wind was gusting at 70 miles an hour, and with every windshieldful of sand and snow, the chiropractic Mercedes whined as if its back hurt. Visibility was so poor that we asked Alexa to drive. At twenty-five, she was far less experienced behind the wheel than Jon or I, but she happens to be, first, female, and second, a gifted psychic. We reasoned that it would take more than a spring storm to prevent those sacred yonis from showing up on her radar.

She rewarded our trust by turning off the main highway and onto an even more lonesome road, a one-lane, unpaved car path that stretched across the sagebrush flats like a chalk line on the tennis court of the buffalo. For nineteen miles we followed this lane, seemingly into the Void. As pebbles pinged against its underbelly and juniper twigs clawed at its precious Prussian paint, the Mercedes sobbed for autobahns, crying out,
“Die Stadt! Wo ist die Stadt?”
One might say that we were in the middle of nowhere, especially if one were the type who believes midtown Manhattan to be the center of everywhere.

Through rents in the curtain of snowy dust, we could see that we were entering the foothills of a low mountain range. “According to the map, we’re only a pubic hair away,” said I, and moments later, Alexa stopped the car. Well, if there was holy real estate in the vicinity, it wasn’t exactly advertised. Nothing caught our vision beyond the boundlessness of space. The silence was so deep that even the gale seemed to be wearing moccasins. And when we opened the doors, a great essence of sage rushed in. It smelled as if every grandmother in the U.S.A. was simultaneously stuffing a turkey.

We stumbled about pessimistically in that Thanksgivingscape for a while. And abruptly, there it was! There was no mistaking it. We couldn’t make out details, but the site was so charged it practically had an aura around it. The three of us glanced at one another knowingly, then, bucking the wind, took off at a fast trot. And we didn’t slow down until we were surrounded by a plenitude of pudenda.

I looked one of the specimens right in the eye. “Doctor Vagina, I presume?”

The official name of the place is innocuous: North Canyon. It’s quite narrow and fewer than two hundred yards long. The entire canyon is rather vaginal in shape, terminating in a scooped-out basin of white alkali that those so inclined could read as
uterus
or
womb
. The canyon floor is hirsute with juniper and sage.

According to Jon’s compass, North Canyon lies on a perfect east–west axis. The entrance is at the east end, where it’s most narrow. Obviously, there’s a strong solar connection. When the sun rises each morning, it passes through the natural gateway, moving up the passage to the “womb.” The volcanic-ash-flow walls are a yellowish orangish reddish tan, which is to say, the palette of the sun.

Both facing walls of the canyon entrance are covered with petroglyphs. No, somehow “covered” doesn’t do them justice. They are
singing
with petroglyphs.

A petroglyph is a drawing that has been pecked, incised, or scratched into stone. Frequently, as is the case at North Canyon, the rock exposed by the pecking is appreciably lighter in color than the outer surfaces, which have been patinated by millennia of oxidation. This affords the design excellent contrast, although as the centuries hop along, the uncovered rock, too, gradually darkens.

There are innumerable examples of petroglyphs in the western U.S., some of them ceremonial in intention, some mnemonic, some totemic (clan symbols), and some, it would appear, just an outburst of pleasurable doodling. The majority of the drawings are concerned with game, for the artists who chipped them were hunter-gatherers, and they may or may not include human figures. In addition, there are highly mannered petroglyphs and examples that are completely abstract.

The rock panels at the portal to North Canyon support a smattering of curvilinear abstractions, including the mysterious dot patterns that are characteristic of Great Basin rock art. There are a goodly number of enlarged bird tracks, apparently the symbol of the Bird Clan. And there is a rendering of a European-style house and a miner’s charcoal kiln, proving that Indians were still pecking at the site well into the nineteenth century. By far the dominant motif of North Canyon, however, is the stylized vagina.

The vagina glyph is not exactly rare on the rocks of the West, but at no other site is it found in such concentration or profusion. In an old shaman’s cave on nearby Hickison Summit, there’s a lone yoni of great loveliness, but North Canyon, oh mama! North Canyon is a
festival
of female genitalia, a labial showcase, a vulval jubilee, and clearly the wellspring of our indigenous tantra.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, to coin a phrase, and neither was this vaginal display. Worn, overlapped, and overlaid, the drawings were pecked over a long period of time. Human habitation in the region dates back ten thousand years. Volcanic ash is too soft to hold an image for such a lengthy period, but one of the few archeologists to give North Canyon more than a passing nod has estimated that it could maintain a vulva in fairly good condition for about five centuries. Shelley Winters, eat your heart out.

Although the Paiute may have had a finger in them, the best guess is that North Canyon’s murals are the work of the Shoshoni, a seminomadic civilization of underestimated complexity. The question is, Why? Why did they adorn the sun gate of Nevada’s high desert with scores of mannered pudenda? Perhaps North Canyon was a fertility motel that Shoshoni couples checked into in order to ensure conception. Perhaps it involved a type of coming-of-age ritual. Perhaps—and your pilgrim favors this theory—it was intended as an homage to that feminine principle that the Shoshoni recognized to be the genesis of continuous creation: Earth herself; mother of deer, mother of trout, mother of grass seeds, bulbs, and roots, mother of the ground on which they walked and the cliffs that sheltered them. Maybe, on the other hand, North Canyon was purely sexual, a horny pecking of individual lust into the enduring dimension of stone.

It’s reported that there are heterosexual males who can stare down a vulva, real or rendered, and register not an erg of prurience, but, honestly now, do you trust these guys? Would you want your daughter to marry one?

At any rate, many of North Canyon’s vaginas are bull’s-eyed with holes that have been “worried” by sticks. Assuming that the sticks were surrogate penises, there definitely was some sort of copulative magic going on. The energy of the place is openly erotic, and at the same time keenly spiritual. Presumably, the Shoshoni would have found no contradiction.

We stood there in a whirl of white flakes, eating a full ration of grit, letting the wind paint our ligaments blue, feeling somewhat sexy and somewhat religious, feeling a little like laughing and a little like weeping, until we got so cold we could no longer feel anything but the necessity of a steaming bath. Since the nearest public lodging was more than a hundred miles away, we set out for it at once, saving a closer examination of the curious canyon for a more hospitable day.

That evening, in the dining room of Tonopah’s Mizpah Hotel, the chicken-fried steak was delivered to Alexa, a vegetarian, while Jon, a raging carnivore, received the bowl of iceberg lettuce. The aging waitress grinned at the mistake, and tugged at the lapels of her dotted-swiss uniform. “Does the right table count for anything?” she asked. Apparently not, for the hot turkey sandwich that your pilgrim ordered (all that sagebrush had awakened a most nostalgic craving) landed on a table across the room, where it was instantly devoured by a man wearing a hat.

While our waitress labored to correct the mix-up, the lights went off. Then, on again. Off. On. Off. On. At least four times. “Happens all the time,” said the waitress. “Not to worry. It’s just the wind knocking two wires together.”

Jon found the explanation less than plausible, but as I suffered the long wait for a turkey sandwich to call my own, it occurred to me that here was a pretty good metaphor for west-central Nevada: two wires knocking together in the wind. In the high desert, the present knocks against the past, development knocks against nature, repression against indulgence, reality against dream, masculine against feminine, the Goddess of Destruction against the Goddess of Creation, the Atomic Proving Grounds against the Canyon of the Vaginas.

For two blustery days, we holed up in the hotel, chasing fruit around the cylinder of a slot machine and watching garbage-can lids UFO past the leaded windows. On the third day, the wind fell over dead and the temperature rose forty degrees. When we drove back to North Canyon, the sky was as blue as our waitress’s beehive, and a silky calm lay upon the land. Inside the canyon, the peace index tripled. It struck us as a haven, a refuge, a place where even the undeserving might be safe. Small and sweet, the canyon was nonetheless so powerful that its vectors held one’s soul upright, afloat, as if in metaphysical brine.