A Thousand Words

They say a picture is worth a thousand words
Embed one in another
And the words surely multiply

Old friends join me in the Black Rock Desert
A place of bleak, inhospitable sand and rock
Blazing summer heat
Numbing winter cold
Air so clear
The horizon clips off thunderheads
One hundred miles away

Lake-settled silt beneath us
Rests on bedrock ten thousand feet below
A cradle of graben and horst
A node of basin and range
Superheated water burps up at its edges
Earth’s fire at work

The flat ground disorients
Surprising vertigo
Perspective skewed
By tremendous open space
A blinding mineral surface
Only parallel grooves of other wanderers keep us focused

We find the shore and stop

Engines off, we step into stillness so profound
An exhaled breath is a violation
Yet, eighty thousand recently found unbridled revelry here
With Brigadoon regularity
A pop-up city that came and went
Only earth and silence remain

A quarter century before
We were a different group
Circumstance had provided a key
I opened the gate
To soak in the healing pool
To watch the dance of waters
To marvel at the rainbow of heat-loving algae
On the flanks of the famous geyser

Andy took a photo
We begged him to join us as he worked
One more, he said,
Then snapped another
His magnum opus

To close the loop
I went back to the desert
To deliver a print to playa guardians
We pose for our own photo
With Andy’s photo

Rich, late afternoon light spills over the playa
Reds and yellows deepening on distant mountains

Click
Embed one photo in another
A thousand times a thousand words

We settle into the evening
Sky blue becomes indigo
Then inky black
The first star
Then myriad others
Stipple the night sky
A dusky Milky Way wheels overhead
Smearing the cap of night to each horizon

We lie on our backs
Scan the heavens

With no words
We watch eternity unfold