Day 25

I drove before the sun was up to Badwater Salt Flats, the lowest point on earth in the Western Hemisphere. Just before Furnace Creek I saw a fox on the side of the road that had been killed by a car. It was a lovely animal, looking (aside from being dead) healthy and with beautiful markings. I inhabited a prayer for it and kept going. The sun was lighting up the desert floor here and there like spotlights that I could see for miles and miles to my left as I headed southeast.

Earlier in the morning, before I left, I looked up the Timbisha Shohone tribe, the Native American tribe of Death Valley on the internet, to find some place I might go to talk with someone from the tribe. I found by driving there is a small community that is about a 20 minute drive from where I am staying.

Keeping the fox in my mind I put some sad music in the CD player.

About 45 minutes after my departure I arrived at Badwater. Because it was so early I was the only one there. I parked the truck and walked for half an hour across the salt to the center of the basin. It felt so perfect there, at the bottom of the world. I sighed and let the fox go.

Walking back to the parking lot I noticed people had etched messages in the salt floor in many different languages. I looked ahead and saw pools of water, which appeared as a mirror through which the sky watched itself.

My map had torn.

My map is a grid of power; the fragment torn from the page, and the emptiness to which it alludes is a map of my desire, The signs written in the secret language in the rooms of my heart would still guide me to this paradise. Layered geographies and flags all becoming superfluous. Demon perception in love with it’s own desire at the bottom of the world.

At dusk I filmed my dear ravens. They fly from the hills in all directions into these three trees, and chatter quite a din until they are asleep not 45 minutes later. Right now the eventing stars crown them as they dream.