Igneous Range

Soundtrack: Jethro Tull, Locomotive Breath

Armen walked aimlessly through Slough City, his hands stuffed in his pockets. Occasionally, something would distract him, and he would pause for a minute or thirty. He stopped once while walking past the Greyhound bus depot, and continued. In time, he came home, and picked up his pack. He walked out, and walked toward downtown.

He heard a lone piano singing through an open window and the heat. The piano, like the moon, seemed to follow him through town. He couldn’t tell if he was still hearing it or if it was just an echo in his head, but he didn’t really care. It wasn’t the only sound in his head. The night made a rumbling sound. The massive stone sphere rolled. The rumbling was low, steady, and everywhere inside the sphere. The road under the streetlamp felt the rumbling. The streetlamp felt the rumbling. The car parked along the curb felt it. The windows at the drive-in felt it, as the sphere continued rolling. He was quite accustomed to it. He kept walking.

He came again to the bus depot. He purchased a ticket, and dropped his pack and took a seat next to it.

He carried his pack out back and slid it into the luggage bay of a southbound bus. He walked up to the door and stepped aboard. The great wheels began to roll south, as he rested his head against the cool, tinted glass.

A dark glow spilled across the horizon. A bus roared down the whispering street, drowning out the rumbling, and the air was filled with foul, black smoke. The street rolled away under the bus. The street lamps rolled away. Slough City rolled away.

Grape vines. Cotton fields. Dusk. Alfalfa and orchard by freeway light. He folded his knees toward the outer wall and stared as the wheels turned and turned. They turned over miles and miles of simmering blacktop as an unleavened cake of flying beasts piled up on the plowing nose of the monstrous hound.

In the belly of the beast, he seemed to time his breathing with the monster. The bus exhaled its smoke, and Armen exhaled his. Each had its fire. Internal combustion and cellular respiration shared an intimate rhythm; mechanical and unreflective.

The air outside was dark, hot, and glowing like the inside of an oven. The wheels spun and spun with a growl. They never seemed to stop, as though the radiating pavement might melt them down if they did. Armen’s ears heard the diesel engine labor as it climbed out of the sink at the Grapevine, though Armen himself never heard it.

The hound ran down the mountains into the hills and valleys of lights. And then the concrete and steel canyons were upon it, and it growled and swayed to its den of diesel fume.

The hound turned and ducked into the old Los Angeles depot near 7th & Main, and bottles rolled and rattled across the back once more, signaling arrival.

Upon waking in his seat in downtown Los Angeles, Armen stepped into the city. He walked to the Republic Liquor Store, up to the Nickel, and then circled around to Skid Row and then walked along 6th to Wilshire Boulevard. He wandered west down Wilshire past Good Samaritan Hospital, MacArthur Park, and then Lafayette Park. He propped himself against a fence, and fell asleep.

A rangy, neglected tea tree reached through the diamonds. He heard something rustle behind him. He turned and leaned over get a better look. It was a small, sudden, squirrel-like sound. He smelled the omnipresent stale urine, but no particular body odor. Then he spotted a fat little animal. It looked like a little porcupine, or a hedgehog, only with a long narrow beak. It was dark in complexion, so he could barely see it, even as he looked directly at it.

He jumped slightly, and muttered, “is that a bird?”

“That’s a beud,” came the casual reply from under the tea tree.

“Sheesh, and it talks!”

“It talks.”

“What kind of b-bird? Are you some kind of parrot?”

“A beud of paradise.”

“That’s a plant.”

“Not this beud. This beud’s a beud.”

It spoke in a peculiar dialect of the Queen’s Commonwealth that Armen couldn’t quite place. He asked, “say, where are you from?”

“Paradise.”

Armen woke as someone tripped over his feet. He continued to Rancho La Brea, and waited for the tar pits to open.

That day, he visited all the ice age beasts of Pleistocene Southern California. After he bade them all farewell, he caught a bus to the Employment Development Department, and from there got on board at a supermarket across town.

Soundtrack: The Who, The Seeker (Edit)

Armen began to notice something peculiar about Los Angeles. There were plants everywhere—beautiful plants in a myriad varieties. He soon took to exploring that botanical variety, and he even took to collecting samples. There were lawns everywhere, and all kinds of flowers, shrubs, and trees. Everywhere he went, he wandered off sidewalks to capture samples, drawing curious looks from homeowners, gardeners, and children. He would stop, write on a little envelope, pull the sample, and put it in the envelope. He would come home with a daypack full of envelopes. Armen’s room was a great matrix of samples. The bed, too, was covered with samples, which was just as well. Armen had a hammock hung in the room. Rented mattresses made him uneasy.

Armen opened the pack and inserted envelopes at various locations. When all envelopes were inserted, he then began regrouping envelopes around the room.

One day Armen found his friend Geoff napping by the 5 one morning, and he sat next to him and offered him half his sandwich. Geoff accepted the offer and sat up.

“Geoff,” Armen began.

Geoff nodded as he bit into the subway sandwich.

“Have you noticed all the different things that grow around here?”

“The s—,“ Geoff began, and then thought the wiser, and finished chewing. “That’s the sun, dude.”

“Sure.” Armen paused. “But it rarely rains around here. How do they do it?”

“They water the plants, dude!”

“Oh.” Armen thought. “Where do they get the water?”

“Shit, dude! How should I know?”

“Sorry, man. What was I thinking?” Armen got up and left.

Armen stood gazing at the dry concrete channel of the LA River. A foul smell overcame him as he heard a voice behind him say “beautiful, isn’t she?” Armen twisted around to see an old homeless man in a fedora. “Yes. I guess.” Armen’s answer encouraged the old man, who elaborated. “That is the City of Los Angeles, right there. That’s what she’s all about.” The old man kicked an iron drain. “Los Angeleez Department of Water is Power.” Armen looked down to see a slightly different phrase embedded in the iron. He looked up and smiled in return. “Is that what it’s called?” The old man showed Armen his broken grill and answered. “That’s what them that matters calls it!”

The incident with the old man piqued Armen’s curiosity, and he began to spend his spare time reading about it, which of course meant maps as often as books for Armen. He began to ride his bike up along the LA River on his days off.

The River follows Ventura Boulevard to Sherman Oaks, where it crosses under the Ventura Freeway and then under the San Diego Freeway. Armen stuck to Ventura Boulevard till Encino, and then turned right on Balboa Boulevard, and crossed the San Fernando Valley to see the terminus of the LA Aqueducts. When it rained, he would pedal through the rain to see what became of the River on rainy days, and then he would return to see how soon the channel would dry out.

Soundtrack: America, Ventura Highway

One day in late April, Armen quit his job, bought some saddle bags and a second daypack to wear on his chest, and pedaled west on Ventura Boulevard with grander ambitions. This time he continued into the mountains. He pedaled under the Golden State Freeway, and then under the Antelope Valley Freeway and into Santa Clarita Valley, and continued to follow the aqueducts up San Francisquito Canyon, and he pulled his bike off road near the power plant to spend the night.

In the morning, Armen continued over the pass. The Range loomed in the distance over Antelope Valley. The valley itself displayed the slight color of desert wildflowers in bloom. Armen stood with his bike leaning between his legs, soaking in the landscape. There was something about this that he needed.

He sped down the road to the San Andreas Fault, then crossed the hills beyond. As he coasted down into the valley, he crossed the California Aqueduct, just where it plunged into one of its subterranean channels. He didn’t know where the LA pipelines were, but he didn’t doubt that he would find them out in the valley.

The Antelope Valley was a sea of orange and pale green. Golden poppies were everywhere.

Armen came to Lancaster Road and followed it west. He came to the new aqueduct, or so said the maps, and he followed the buried pipeline across Antelope Valley.

Armen would occasionally pass a Joshua tree or a California juniper amid the sage. He admired the pale blue berries of the female junipers, and he thought that he might have named the Joshua tree the “yucca tree” had he been the first to name it. He thought on this and decided that he was happy to leave the naming to others.

He watched the Range come imperceptibly nearer and nearer as he coasted and peddled across the basin. He passed some farms in the middle of the valley, and could see there wasn’t much sign of water down the road, though the colors of distant wildflowers carpeted the valley. A man cannot drink from a wildflower. He found a spigot by a farmhouse and filled his bottles to prepare for the dry country ahead. As he began the gentle ascent, Armen came upon an orchard. It was blossoming with the desert, but was under assault by what resembled a dune on its windward side. As Armen came nearer to the orchard, he realized the dune was made of tumbleweeds.

Before Armen got to the foot of the Range, the aqueduct made a sharp right turn and from there began to flank the Range. As the afternoon wore on, the aqueduct came nearer and nearer the foot of the Range. Armen found himself pushing on and on to get closer to the foot of the Range. Because the pipeline followed a level course, the pedaling was not hard. He continued to do so well after nightfall. Even had he wanted to stop, he would have felt naked lying down for the night on that expanse of naked ground. If he could reach the point where the pipes met the Range, he would at least have a wall to lie down against. And there was more to see at night. He could look down upon the lights of Mojave at night, and there’s no sunburn at night, and the drinking water lasts longer.

On the third day, the aqueduct road began to descend, as the Range encroached upon the straight line it had been following to the Owens River. Armen decided to avoid the winding path of the aqueduct, and he dropped down to the Midland Trail to try a paved highway for a change. It was a welcome change for awhile, especially since it followed a moderate downward incline. By the time the highway turned up toward Redrock Canyon, he was ready for the challenge. He left the highway to get water. Instead of pushing on, he rested in a shady spot, then chose to take the rest of the day off. He took a campsite, and gratefully accepted an invitation to dine with the campers in the adjacent spot.

Armen felt recharged by dawn, so he got an early start. He stuck to the highway, so there were enough places to stop for food and water.

Just past the Dunmovin outpost, the buried aqueducts crossed the highway. Armen decided to resume following the pipelines. The map showed lakes coming up east of the highway, and he reckoned they probably had something to do with the two great pipelines.

So the pipelines led him to two reservoirs. Back then, the reservoirs were open to the public, and Armen followed the service road along the eastern shores of the two artificial lakes, taking his fishing pole out here and there to see if he could catch some supper.

Early the next morning, Armen caught breakfast and made a small fire for cooking. He was hungry, and the small fish seemed to take more trouble than it had meat on its bones. After daybreak, he loaded up his bike, and walked it northward above the shore of the reservoir.

Dust castles on Owens Lake (Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District)

After he ran out of reservoir, again he followed the aqueduct, only now it turned northwest. It seemed to be heading into the Great Wall. After a mile or so, the aqueduct passed under the highway. Armen stood under the late morning sun by the pavement and felt the traffic race by. After some unmetered span of time he was freed by his trance by a breeze. He crossed the highway and resumed following the water.

Several miles past the highway, the aqueduct crossed Olancha Creek. Unlike the aqueduct and its reservoirs, this creek fed the land along its banks as it flowed downward to the white, dry bone of Owens Lake. The shore of the old lake bed was green, though, with the runoff of the creek. Armen spotted the tiny, distant shapes of horses feeding on the grasses there.

Out beyond the horses, something like a fog rose from the lakebed.

The breeze grew to a strong but shifting wind.

The white mass above the lakebed continued to grow, but unevenly. It grew to points in places, with jagged steps climbing upward to the towers; like a phantom castle.

The wind strengthened more, and as Armen stood transfixed, staring at the ghostly castle, the wind took hold of it and began to whip it around, and the castle deformed until it took the shape of a white whirlwind.
The whirlwind began to spin randomly about the lakebed, and spun off toward Olancha, and it soon blanketed Armen. He closed his eyes and hit the ground to shelter himself from the saline dust storm. Armen couldn’t feel the sun anymore, and soon the air began cool, and cool more until Armen felts as though he were in a blizzard. He opened his eyes as he lay face down to the ground and saw: the salt-sand had transformed into snow.

Armen stood up and looked out into whiteout, binding himself against the cold. He saw sihouettes of exotic creatures through the blasting snow. A mammoth, several camels, and a big cat with what seemed to be fangs—all shadows in the whiteout. He began to follow the shapes, but he kept stumbling in the wind. Under the screaming and howling of the wind, he thought that he heard the cries of the shadow beasts, but then they were gone, and wind was all that he could hear. He fell to the ground and braced himself against the cold.

The whiteout seemed to darken slowly through a mayriad shades of grey.

Armen would waken from time to time, each time just realizing that he had lost consciousness again. Then he woke to find everything had become black, and it occurred to him that that everything was the snow that before been white. He folded into himself and hoped for sleep.

Armen woke to silence. The moon shone high above the desert, and everything around him shined white, but there was no snow. There was just a white dust on everything around him, himself included.

He looked for his bike. It was gone.

Armen came across another creek that night. He could see the creek’s alluvial fan spread out across a mile of desert before him. The creek was dry, but shrubs and a few trees scattered along its banks attested to the presence of water beneath the dry earth. The stream seemed to flow out of canyon that cut directly into the wall from where he stood. Something about the cut of that canyon in that pale midnight ambiance tug upon him, but he marched on.

The Aqueduct wound above the shores of Owens lake as Armen followed it through the early morning hours, past Hockett Hill, Bartlett, and the Alabama Hills. He finally came upon a road crossing the Aqueduct just before dawn, and followed the road into the town of Lone Pine.