Deep time in California

The Salton Sea, looking west

The thing that strikes me most about California on this trip is how tangible deep time feels here. Obviously things were happening in geological terms in what is now the eastern United States millions of years ago, too, but the denuded landscape out here—especially in the central valley up to the Mexican border—makes it all so apparent.

As we drove through Joshua Tree and looked out on the Mojave Desert, every curve of the road revealed a new alien landscape; boulders the size of houses in piles, others dropped alone onto the desert floor surrounded by acres of nothing. The sight lines making everything seem immense and somehow walkable at the same time. Every hill and mountain seems to be just a short walk away, but on closer examination is an hour’s hike over the horizon. Time just doesn’t matter in a place like this. In fact it simply doesn’t exist on a scale that a human can perceive. Row after row of mountains disappear on all sides into the vertigo-inducing distance.

In the desert we saw very few other humans, but at the Salton Sea we saw none. It’s really unnerving to stand in a place like that and be essentially alone. Here you are on the rim of what was a desert only seconds ago in geological terms. A blink later this is the shoreline of an inland sea peopled with camps, alive with talking and the smoke from fires. Every time you shut your eyes and open them again you’re in a new landscape. The Colorado Valley used to flood and recede in 1300 year cycles, like the planet drawing a chest full of air and slowly breathing it out. I imagine the Colorado River itself swelling and contracting, alternately sparing or flooding Lake Cahuilla. At some point today I had to just sit down.

The sheer size and scale of places like the Salton Sea or the Mojave Desert just have a way of making one feel small; or at least like there are forces acting on us all and on the planet that we know very little about, or certainly are not in control of.