Road to Delamar

There is a better way, a truer way, the old way — the proud highway, the rolling road. —Paul Theroux

The desert and the hourglass.  —Albert Camus

 

The highway from Willamette Valley Oregon to Lincoln County Nevada runs about 800 miles. That's if you go by Tulelake, Honey Lake, the reservation of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, the US Army’s Hawthorne Ammo Depot, on to summit at Tonopah. Soak at an abandoned hot spring pool then straightaway down The Extraterrestrial Highway to find yourself — and a few others — in Rachel, Nevada. Some say you've arrived. Others, you are simply beginning.

Natural perspective reestablishes when across sand and dust and out with the boulders, listening to the voices of the petroglyphs. Slowly, turning to witness the silent desert, the hum of duration.

All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,
    car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,
and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.

— Ada Limón 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

— Henry David Thoreau

NOTES

—Paul Theroux, from Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2013)

—Albert Camus, from Notebook VII, 1951-1954, in Notebooks 1951-1959, trans Ryan Bloom

—Ada Limón, from Notes on the Below in The Carrying (2018)