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CANADIAN LITERARY AWARDS

Welcome to the 2001 Canadian Literary Awards. This year marks the first time the awards are being handed out alongside the Grands Prix littéraires Radio-Canada. It is also the first time that the winners of both awards are being published in enRoute, Canada’s premier lifestyle publication.

These prestigious competitions, held in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, present awards in three categories: poetry, fiction and travel literature. This month, enRoute introduces its readers to some of Canada’s most original creative voices by publishing the first-prize winners in the Travel literature category.

David Tycho is a writer and painter. He lives in Vancouver.

A DESERT ROMANCE

"This is my spiritual center," came a whisper from behind me at a gas station in Fields, Oregon.

I released the gas pump lever to see a bearded ascetic with an eclectic sense of fashion standing a few feet from my car.

"I beg your pardon?"

"This is my spiritual center," he repeated.

His declaration of faith seemed premature in our seconds-old relationship, and his glazed expression suggested extended stints in the desert sun. Years later, however, the only differences between us are our wardrobes, and our expressions – mine being the unglazed one.

In the days following our meeting, after I’d ventured out into the Alvord Desert near the Oregon-Nevada border, the gas station guru’s abstract confession began to take form. It wasn’t that I doubted his sanity – it was very simply that I hadn’t seen what he had seen.

Now I know. There are places to which we must return to soothe and restore ourselves. I’d always believed that peace of mind was not contingent on place, but the sensations I experienced on my first and subsequent trips to the steppes and deserts in the rain shadow of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada have planted a new idea in my mind: place is important. And I go.

I often wonder how this arid landscape seduced me, with its callused and weathered hands. It has successfully repelled most visitors with an arsenal of insects, reptiles and weather. The locals aren’t exactly bent on claiming their share of the tourist market either. There are strong arguments for avoiding this quintessential nowhere, but as Paul Theroux mused, nowhere is a place – and to this place I must go.

My courtship of this ugly step-sister of the more colourful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico began quite innocently, through a period of correspondence of sorts. One sopping wet Vancouver evening in November, I was leafing through my dog-eared Rand McNally, running my hands over maps of dry places hoping for illusory relief from the rain. My finger followed a highway into an area not yet defaced by the graffiti of geographers. I was David Thompson looking at an early fur trader’s map: one on which the lines fade and disappear into expanses of yellowed paper. To Rand McNally the area possessed nothing worthy of mention. This struck me as either an embarrassing cartographic blunder, or a grave reality.

Flipping to a bigger and more detailed map revealed little more than a sparse sprinkling of rather intimidating names: Crack-in-the-Ground, Devil’s Garden, Carson Sink, Stinkwater, Rattlesnake Creek and Coyote Dry Lake to name a few. The larger scale only magnified and emphasized the expanses of uninhabited space, increasing both my interest and apprehension. A trip to the library turned up brief entries in otherwise thick guidebooks, and geological and meteorological data guaranteed to put even the most enthusiastic armchair traveler into a coma. The less I found, however, the more I wanted. So into the yellowed paper I went.

Rather than drive the hypnotically uneventful and congested Interstate 5 south from Vancouver, I plotted a course east over the Cascades and into the Similkameen and Okanagan Valleys, from where I would head south through the parched coulees of central Washington, before finally penetrating the unloved expanses of my ultimate goal: the Great Basin. I would ease myself into the void.

Coming over the Cascades into B.C.’s Okanagan Valley is to leave a virtual rainforest and enter a region that gets as little rain as Phoenix, Arizona, and often tops 100 degrees. But alas, technology has replaced the region’s desert benchlands with viticulture and water slides. Although charmed by this desert Cinderella, I still desired her nasty step-sister.

Leaving the orchards and vineyards behind, the valleys spill out onto the Columbia-Snake River Basin, a desert-like environment in its own right. Sadly, however, damming the Columbia for power and irrigation has taken the desert out of the desert, and wheat farms, hydro lines, roads and reservoirs now compete with sagebrush and prickly pear cactus for domination of the landscape. The odds are stacked against the sagebrush.

Exiting the dammed Columbia Basin and heading farther south to the northern reaches of Great Basin is to sail onto a sagebrush ocean bereft of development. The counties hugging the Oregon-Nevada-Idaho borders boast the fewest residents and visitors in the lower 48 states. I go for hours on paved roads, and days on dirt ones, without seeing another vehicle.

Saturated with the country and western twangs that monopolize the airwaves, I turn off the radio and sing my old favorite blues tunes until my throat is dry and my repertoire exhausted. Farther along, I resort to songs I make up as I go, a trick my four-year-old son taught me, but I stop when I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. A glazed expression tells me it’s time to pull over and set up camp amongst the greasewood.

Note to self: bring a warmer sleeping bag next time.

The extremes in temperature (the record being a 100-degree difference on the same date in different years) keep the retirees and tourists in California and Arizona, and scant rainfall makes farming virtually impossible. So, except for the occasional rancher, hunter, recluse, new-age mystic or Bureau of Lands Management lackey, the area rebuffs humankind. But it’s the very lack of conversational opportunities that keeps me coming back year after year.

A sign at the base of Steens Mountain warns, "Storm area ahead. Weather may change from clear to blizzard in a few minutes. No shelter available." No kidding.

In August I’ve awoken to frozen water while camped on the fault block mountain, followed by daytime highs in the basin of over a hundred. In mid-June, I climbed up to 8,000 feet on Steens to escape the Alvord Desert blast furnaces 4,000 feet below. A snowstorm sent me scampering back down towards the desert floor.

On another spring trip, punishing winds and hailstorms snapped poles and ropes and tore my heavy tarps to shreds, forcing me to spend the night in the safety of my car. The next morning I awoke to the first of a seemingly endless number of successive days of blue skies, cute little puffy white clouds, and mollifying breezes.

When fear fades to respect, and respect to complacency, the desert often administers a meteorological spanking. I humbly heed these warnings, reminding myself that outstanding opportunities for solitude are also outstanding opportunities for death.

But it is out on the dry lakebeds, or "playas" to the initiated, that the Great Basin is distilled into its purest form. From the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, to the Black Rock in Nevada, to the Alvord in Oregon – these, the flattest places on earth, are where a profound silence permeated my marrow, a sensation I’ve been seeking ever since. Walking towards the center of a playa is to enter a still and reticent environment where not a single protrusion provides enough resistance for the wind to sound its presence.

Stepping out onto these vast, lifeless flats has been likened to stepping onto a stage. There is a feeling of vulnerability, and after walking a hundred yards out towards the center, the tendency is to want to retreat backstage – to return to the safety of "shore," although the lakes that once filled these basins dried up thousands of years ago. The total lack of things familiar is intimidating at first, although an hour later the void becomes almost comforting in its predictability. I’m tempted to remove a bone that mars the uniformity – a thought so absurd I break the silence with a laugh.

Miles out from the last stands of greasewood and iodine bush, the playa appears so vast it equals the sky in the visual equation of the landscape. I sense the expanses of cracked clay ever so slightly sloping away from me on all sides. For the first time in my life, the spherical form of the planet is no longer represented by a basketball-sized globe in a school classroom, or by television images taken from space – I can actually see it. And far away from the material accouterments I use back home to make a statement about who I am and what I represent, this world frames and accents my insignificance in massive and silent space, and it deeply humbles me.

I decide to eat lunch, but with no rock or tree to tie up to, my legs have to be told three times to stop before they obey. My luncheon on a five-hundred-square-mile billiard table is an image far more fantastic than any painted by Salvador Dali. But while Dali painted Surrealism, the ancient peoples of this land lived it.

Sagebrush sandals found in a cave near an immense castle-like caldera aptly named Fort Rock date human habitation of the area at almost 10,000 years. Today, a tiny reservation contains the Paiutes near the town of Burns. Here, last-ditch efforts to salvage their dignity and culture provide them with challenges far greater than surviving in the desert, which they did successfully for millennia. Remarkably the Paiutes haven’t disappeared as the early homesteaders had hoped, whereas broken down irrigation flumes and abandoned farmhouses mark the legacy of naively optimistic settlers. Roads meander out into the desert, only to fade and disappear like the men who built them. Respect came too late.

I cannot help but marvel at the courage of the early explorers and settlers (despite their catastrophic effects on native populations) whose will alone could not cajole a living from unsympathetic soil and weather. Burns, a town commemorating the Scottish poet (Robert), expresses an expatriate’s homesickness – his attempt to put a familiar and comforting mark on a land so unlike the misty moors and highlands of his beloved Scotland. In spite of enormous differences, however, a pervasive melancholy connects the two places, and perhaps Burns is a fitting name after all.

The current residents of the Great Basin are as varied as the spring temperatures. They range from Basque shepherds with dirty fingernails and manure stuck to the soles of their boots, to transplanted, manicured Portlanders with pressed white shirts and the latest edition of GQ under their arms. The general store in the hamlet of Frenchglen had served as a watering hole for local ranch hands for decades. The owner had to build an adjoining shack to sequester the cowpokes and their drinking habits from the occasional tourist making a pit stop en route to larger centers east or west. The store was sold, and the shack transformed into a restaurant serving sauvignon blanc and coq au vin. The cowboys have been banished. Time will tell if the restaurant is an omen, or just another case of foolhardy optimism in the desert.

Down in Fields again, I stopped to blow off some dust and retreat from the mid-day sun, feeling neither like a mad dog nor an Englishman. Within minutes of sitting down on a chrome and cracked burgundy vinyl stool in a sun bleached and smoke stained cafe, an ex-rancher gone truck driver with sunglasses that pinched his large head informed me he’d done time in a state prison. Years before he’d brought his sweetheart to a bar, and some drunk buckeroo grabbed and rubbed her crotch.

"I kicked the bastard in the head until he stopped moving, and if some guys hadn’t pulled me off, I’d have kept kicking until he stopped breathing," he explained. "I don’t regret it, and I’d sure as hell do it again, too." Then he invited me to stay with him at his trailer on the east side of the desert. He didn’t litter, he said, and the place was pretty clean.

On the west side of the desert, my next stop, I came across a pair of motionless legs sticking out from under a 1947 Willys 4x4. I stopped to investigate and, after a minute of heel-gouging and squirming, a lanky red-bearded desert rat and two golden retrievers emerged. The rat had purple skin and a silver tooth that sparkled in the sunlight, and he had on the dirtiest clothes I’d ever seen, or likely ever will. I’d woken this family from their daily siesta (and they were cranky), but after shaking off the dust and cobwebs, the rodent offered me a slug of warm tequila and a cold beer. A few hours and slugs later, my resurrected friend was driving his Willys back and forth past a beer can set on a rock, taking shots at it with an immaculately polished silver pistol. In a moment of tenderness and trust, he offered me a few cracks at it.

The next morning, I spotted a rattlesnake in a pile of rocks and called my purple friend over to have a look. I watched him tease it for a few seconds, and then catch it with his bare hands. Too small for a meal, the serpent narrowly missed the frying pan. Instead the snake charmer carefully prepared a terrarium in an abandoned cooler and placed the rattler inside, a present for his young nephew.

"But before I give it to him, I got an idea," he said. "I’m gonna take this here cooler home, and invite my buddy over for a beer." He put the tequila bottle to his lips and tipped the bottom high in the air. "There’s a couple of cold ones in there," he giggled, pointing at the occupied cooler. "Help yourself!" His bloodshot eyes opened wide and stared into mine. Then he spat, laughed, and coughed uncontrollably for minutes while kicking up a cloud of dust all around him. And after three weeks in the desert, I laughed right along with him. The bizarre had become familiar, and chardonnays a distant, other-life experience.

Driving out of the Great Basin and up into the cool embrace of fir forests, I always wonder how and why these slightly masochistic adventures sustain my interest. Is it a romantic Hollywood or Nashville sketch of the Wild West I crave – a macho world of hard-drinking cowpokes who work backbreaking hours out on the range and eat beans and fresh venison cooked over an open fire? That might be part of the attraction, but given a choice, I’d be hard-pressed to give up hours at a word processor followed by scallops and pinot blanc.

Is it the potential for spiritual growth that can be gleaned from the stoicism of desert solitude? There are numerous stories of the faithful having revelatory experiences in the silence of barren wastelands. But for me to pretend I’m a mystic or a Paiute shaman is silly, and insulting to those on real spiritual quests.

Could I simply be attempting to find a peaceful place out of the rain? There are too many more hospitable places to blow some rust off for this to be the answer.

Rational thinking eliminates all arguments in favor of setting off for this void, and once there, common sense screams to leave it.

Some of my family and many of my friends can’t understand why I go. They act as if I’m betraying my west coast roots – as if I’m snubbing them and what they hold so dear for something far less worthy. They think I’m odd, and they worry about me. "Why do you bother? It can’t be fun," they frequently say, and I have no satisfactory response.

I feel like a man who has made a bad choice for a wife. She abuses, threatens, punishes and bullies me, yet I can’t leave her. She is rude, abrasive and inflexible to all who meet her, but I always defend her. My loyalty to her is constantly being tested and challenged by smug, head-shaking skeptics.

"You don’t know her like I do," is all the faithful man of a nasty wife can say. And everyone snickers.

Except men who have loved this siren. They know that she possesses an alter ego seen only by those with faith, patience and resolve. Scoffers have never seen her kiss my eyes in the morning with pink, luminescent light. They will never see her disrobe and reveal her sublime night skies, nor will they ever witness her caress my blistered flesh with tender evening breezes. They will never hear the wind of her soul, nor breathe the scent of her profound whispers. During these fleeting moments she shows her grace, and enraptures me.

As my old Dodge chugs out of the Great Basin and climbs back over the Cascades and onto increasingly congested and wet highways towards my home in Vancouver, I remember the words of the enlightened gas station guru. I clearly remember his unabashed statement of faith to me, a complete stranger, and how his glazed eyes told me they had seen things. It wasn’t that I doubted his sanity – it was simply that I hadn’t seen what he’d seen. But now I have.