Believing In Place: A Spiritual Geography Of The Great Basin

12. Believing in Place

✹ The convergence of science and spirituality is on my mind as I head out into one of the most forbidding locales in North America. Craving silence, I’ve driven my white rental car out onto the porcelain-like surface of a dry lakebed in northwestern Nevada. There is no shade here, and the brightness of the light is both ethereal and overpowering. I rarely venture out onto these isotropic surfaces that remind me of thin ice and starched bed sheets, but when I do I am always aware that I can never get farther from civilization. Bone dry now, this playa could be covered by a lake of turbid, muddy water if the weather changed. There is something delightfully eerie about a place that seems so eternally dry yet can become aquatic in no time. I ponder the irony of having technology whisk me out to a spot where I can so readily commune with nature, and in turn think about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Standing next to the rental car in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, I feel the sun pound down on my face and bare arms. The breeze has shifted slightly; it’s now coming out of the southeast, and I sense that the weather may be changing. It’s hot and dry now, but at this time of year—the nether zone between late summer and early fall—thunderstorms can move in or build up quickly. Brushing my face on the sleeve of my t-shirt, I accidentally touch my tongue to the hot skin on my upper arm. Although I’m not aware that I’m perspiring, I taste salt. My tongue instinctively reacts with ambivalence , repelled by the salinity yet drawn to the sodium, magnesium, and calcium salts that I need to replenish my metabolism. It occurs to me that these salts on my skin are similar in composition to the salts on this dry Believing in Place 12 As science breaks out of its narrow mechanistic view and approaches a more holistic view of nature, fruitful interaction between science and the spiritual will become more possible. —rupert sheldrake, biologist, 2001 228 Francaviglia/207-250 6/9/03 7:29 PM Page 228 believing in place | 229 lakebed. I take comfort in this reaffirmation of the similarity between the inorganic world of geology and the organic world of physiology. Our ambivalence toward salt is revealed by the fact that wages were once paid in it (as in “worth his salt” or even the word salary) and that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of it—the ultimate tribute to desiccation—for defying God’s command and witnessing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Salt figures in storytelling here, too, as these dry lakebeds are legendary in their desolation: picture someone dying of thirst and a place like this pancake -flat playa will come to mind. Out here on the Black Rock playa, I can never forget another image that keeps returning like the replay of a favorite film that I can’t resist watching on video from time to time. The image is of the crystalline sterility of a salt lakebed, and the film is Vanishing Point (1971). At one level a tribute to the self-absorbed, drug-centered (or is it self-centered and drug-absorbed?) late 1960s, this film resonates as a serious spiritual drama. Like a number of quirky, even risky American productions, this film is pretty much forgotten in the United States but has a passionate following in Europe. It even has a dedicated worldwide website1 that keeps it from complete obscurity and total oblivion in the land of its making. The premise of Vanishing Point is simple enough: a driver named Kowalski (“no Christian name”) accepts a challenge to drive a souped-up (but street legal) 1970 white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco at breakneck speed—about 1,300 miles in less than sixteen hours, which translates into an average speed of over 80 miles per hour. As he breaks the speed limits in the process, Kowalski is chased by highway patrol officers of four states (Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California). During this chase, he attracts nationwide attention as “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul.” In a not-so-subtle play on words, the speed here refers to both Kowalski’s rapid pace and the methamphetamines that he consumes like candy along the way. As...