“By the time it was finished, it seemed that the restless Henry Woods had stumbled out of one of those songs and found a kind of home, if not peace, in this valley.”
Nothing is infinite. in a lifetime a man’s heart will notch up somewhere in the region of 2,500 million beats, a woman’s maybe 500 million more. These are big numbers but not infinite. There is an end in sight, no matter how far off it seems. People don’t think about that. They talk instead about the sublime beauty of nature, about the insignificance of human life compared to the time it’s taken to shape these rocks and mountains. Funny how time can weigh heavier on the soul than all these billions of tons of dolomite and dirt. A few years back a ranger found something squatting against the base of a mesquite tree at the mouth of Hanaupah Canyon. It was something dead, he saw, and the shape of it suggested a man. Curious, the ranger crouched down and touched it. The body, or whatever it was, had been so dessicated by heat and wind that it started to crumble and when the desert breeze caught it, the whole thing fell away to dust. No way to tell what it had really been, or if it was heat alone or time that caused its naturalization.
Fifty-year highs for July average 116 degrees. Anyone caught out here in that kind of heat without water has a couple of options. You can try to find shade, which, if you get lucky, will cut your rate of dehydration by about fifteen per cent. Or you can just rest instead of walking, which will save you something like forty per cent. But the ground temperature out here is half again higher than the air. Ideally, what you want is a shaded spot elevated above the ground. If you’re lucky enough to find such a place, and if you’re smart enough to keep your clothes on, which will cut your dehydration by another twenty per cent, then you might last two days at 120 degrees max without water. If you’re out of luck, then just keeping still you’ll sweat two pints in an hour. If you don’t take in the equivalent amount of water, you’ll begin to dehydrate. At five per cent loss of body weight you’ll start to feel nauseous. Round about ten per cent, your arms and legs will begin tingling and you’ll find it hard to breathe. The water loss will thicken your blood and your heart will struggle to pump it out to your extremities. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent dehydration, you’ll die.
Which goes to show that there is, after all, one thing that is infinite: the length of time you stay dead. There is no real correlation between what I’m thinking and the SUV that heads slowly south along the dirt road. Even when it pulls over and stops beside the dry lake running along the valley floor, I can’t say for sure what will happen. I’m unwilling to speculate. Even when nothing happens I don’t feel any kind of surprise.
I scan the oval playa with my binoculars. Indians are supposed to have raced horses across it, which is why it’s called the Racetrack. There’s an outcrop of rock at the north end which they call the Grandstand but I don’t see any spectators up there. Never have. Below the ridge from where I watch, there are clumps of creosote bush and the odd Joshua tree. Further north, there are stands of beavertail and above them, on the high slopes of the Last Chance Range, are forests of juniper and pinyon pine. A glint of sunlight catches my eye and I glance towards the vehicle. But nothing has moved down there. I shift my gaze back out on to the playa, trying to pretend I don’t feel the cold chill that settles on my bones. I look away at the last moment and wipe the sweat from my face. Thirst cracks my lips and dust coats the inside of my mouth. There’s plenty of water in my Expedition, parked a half-mile further south along the road, but I make no move to return to the vehicle. Whatever is happening here I have no choice but to see how it plays out.
A shadow moves on the playa. When I search for it all I can see are the rocks scattered across the honeycombed surface of the dry lake. I scan them closely, looking for a lizard or rodent, even though nothing lives out there. The air is still and quiet, no breeze at all to rustle through the mesquites. Then something catches my eyes and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A movement so painfully slow I doubt it happened at all. Until it rolls forward another inch. From this distance, I estimate its weight at eighty to a hundred pounds. I glance at the rocks nearest to it but none of them have moved. Only this one, its shadow seeming to melt in the harsh sunlight as it heaves forward again. There’s no wind, nothing to explain its motion. All the stories I’ve heard about the rocks have some rational explanation but there’s no reason at all to what I’m seeing here.
Except maybe that SUV and whatever’s inside it. I look back to where it was but it’s not there. I scan the dirt road to north and south and still don’t see it. I search the playa in case the vehicle drove out on the mud but there are only scattered rocks. The sun is at its highest now, yet I’m not overheating. I don’t feel nauseous and my heart isn’t struggling. Maybe it’s because I’m barely breathing. I stare along the dirt road for an age, looking for something I might have missed. But there’s no trail of dust, or anything else to signal they were ever here.
The guy wore jeans and a loose-fit shirt, the woman had on shorts, T-shirt and a baseball cap. He was leaning over beneath the open hood of the Japanese SUV. A rusting stove lay on its back beside the road and beyond it two lines of rubble were all that marked a building which had long since gone.
The woman’s face creased in a smile as I pulled up in front of the Toyota Rav4. I got out of my vehicle. “You need a hand here?”
“I think we’ve overheated,” she said. I didn’t recognize her accent.
The guy stood up and wiped his face on his shirt. “Bloody air-conditioning,” he said. “I guess I was running it too hard. We’re not used to this kind of heat.”
I nodded. “How long you been stuck here?”
Before the woman could answer, a young girl stuck her head out the back window. “Henry Woods,” she said, reading my name tag. “Are you a policeman?”
“No, I’m a park ranger.”
The woman leaned over and tousled the girl’s hair. “Ranger Woods, meet Cath. I’m Sophie Delauney, this is my husband, Paul.”
I shook hands with both of them and asked Delauney if there was anything they needed. He frowned, then laughed and said he doubted it. “I suppose you’ll tell me I should have hired an American car.”
“No. You just had bad luck, is all.” I leaned in over the engine, saw there was nothing I could do. “Could happen to anyone.”
“Yeah, well, it happened to us.”
I got some bottles of water from the cooler in the Expedition and handed them around. Delauney went back to fiddling with the plugs and points, unwilling, I figured, to accept that all he could do was wait for the engine to cool.
“How’d you find us?” Sophie Delauney said.
“We have a plane that patrols the Valley. Must have seen you here and called it in. I was up at Zabriskie Point, twenty miles north of here.”
“I didn’t see it,” she said, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the cloudless sky.
“I saw it,” the girl said.
“Did you, baby? You never said.”
“I did. You weren’t listening.
“Where you folks from?” I asked.
“ England,” she said. “We live outside London.”
The girl frowned and shook her head. “No, we don’t — we live in Elstree.”