Note sull'episodio
Chapter 11: Badlands National Park
In the darkness before dawn, the Green Tortoise Adventure Bus crawled to a halt along the curb of a dark empty parking lot in Badlands National Park. With the last breath of the engine came a profound silence. I arose from the back platform where British Sue and I had been sleeping. I gingerly tiptoed over the people on the front platform. Driver Brian was asleep with his arms resting on the steering wheel. Jewels had fallen asleep on the Buddy Seat leaning against his shoulder. He stirred briefly as I cranked the noisy swing-arm to open the door. I embraced the cool night.
The atmosphere of this strange new world stood perfectly still. Neither cricket chirps nor cicada songs desecrated this altar of silence. It was an alien environment entirely devoid of sound, like the ticking hands of time had paused mid stroke. I felt like I had fallen into the space between the notes on the sheet music of natural history, listening instead to a symphony of silence in the vast amphitheater of vapid space.
No light of human populations polluted the perfect pitch. No headlights haunted the horizon, no streetlights lit the landscape, no bulbs burned on buildings, no towns twinkled in tungsten, there was no synthetic light anywhere. I felt alone in the universe, like I was bearing witness to the primordial Earth at the dawn of time before the first random event started evolution.
The stars lit up the sky like the glow of a celestial city that stretched from horizon to horizon. With wide-eyed wonder, I followed the path of the Milky Way across the moonless night. The brilliant starlight illuminated a menagerie of giant white formations, peaking a hundred feet above me against a silhouette of stars. A short walk away at the edge of the parking lot, a metal handrail blocked the edge of a huge canyon of similar formations, stretching out below like a kingdom of white sandcastles.
There was so much light from the stars, that I easily found my way to a clump of desert bushes. My imagination explored the parapets one castle at a time. The mountain shaped fortresses in this strange old world appeared soft at the edges as if formed by a child’s playful finger. I happily imagined myself on a foreign planet and that the Green Tortoise bus was my moon buggy. I returned to the comfort of my sleeping bag and snuggled up next to British Sue. In my dreams I ascended towers of sand in an alien world.
A vision softly-creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping. On a lonely hilltop I stood face to face with my child-self. I had been trying desperately to recapture my youth and here I was face to face with a vision of my younger self. A combination of abuse and growing up too quickly had left me feeling empty inside. I felt disconnected from who I knew myself to be when I was young. In the yawning hours of my gentle child’s dream, everything seemed clear in the light of this astral vision.
As the sun began to rise, I lingered in bed, relaxing. I felt young and not at fault. I knew my eyes would open with a new world for me to explore. I thought, the sun will rise tomorrow, but I might not. I got up slowly as not to wake British Sue. I walked outside into the dawn and let the landscape flow through me.
The long angles of sunlight I witnessed that morning had the power to change my life and inspire me forever. The vast array of delicately colored layers that had built up over the eons, layer upon layer, color on top of color, were waking up from their slumber of shadowy night. The rays of sunlight illuminated the pinkish reds, purples, browns, yellows, oranges, tans, and grays like the layers of a geological layer cake. I was waking up too. I imagined myself returning to this place throughout my life. How could I not.