Horsetail Falls and Desolation Metropolis

Cyrus heard them and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects.  Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil."

                                                                                                                -Herodotus, The Histories                                                                                                            
Roy’s no Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife.  Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your bodily offices, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses’ aides – the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned.

                                                                                                                 -Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 

If you take Route 50 past Sacramento, the four-lane freeway begins to rise above the arid Central Valley – the fastest growing region of California – near the town of Folsom.  Construction crews are doing their part in the great and ongoing human project to maximally terraform planet Earth by gradually developing housing tracts, strips malls, and business centers among the paved-over hills, expanding the urban wasteland in this water-starved and dusty climate.  The homes are huge, requiring immense amounts of resources to build, and will require massive amounts of energy and water to maintain.  The energy and water will presumably be provided by the Folsom Dam and Lake, fed by the American River and sourced from the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  While I’m not quite sure how one could bring themselves to live in the Central Valley under the stable conditions and normal circumstances of the present (no offense to any readers bearing an affinity toward Sacramento and Folsom, but aside from the historic districts these places are what James Howard Kunstler would call ‘places not worth caring about;’ driving through town is like being in a cartoon with the same redundant wraparound background – plazas, gas stations, apartment complexes – revolving by block after mundane block), if the water were to ever stop flowing for more than a month then these residents, like millions of other Californians relying on the melted snowpack of the Sierras for drinking water, would have to leave or face death.  Until then, Sacramento and Folsom will continue to grow.  The houses on the hillsides will shelter the residents, and those people will need cars to drive on the packed freeways so they can get to work in order to make money to spend at malls and plazas which will multiply in correlation to the burgeoning suburbs in a positive feedback loop of capitalism, consumerism, and suburban sprawl - the American Dream on life support.  In the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom sums up the purpose behind this push for infrastructure expansion:

Life in these areas is spent largely indoors, increasingly in front of big screen televisions that offer temporary or illusory escape from the tedium of middle class life to other lands where they can experience vicariously an adventure or dream which is no longer attainable yet perhaps once was.* Their forefathers having broken ground to embark upon an era of electronic and internet-based discovery, the contemporary generation of humans are now immersed in the exploration the world online via their smartphones, and people across the globe are trading in their outdoor time for a Netflix series, have replaced reading book for a playing video game, and would prefer to be spectators rather than participants of a sport.  If the cities and suburbs of the Central Valley are thought of as a person with pathologies, then their symptoms would include obesity, attention deficient disorder, and other neuroses caused by addictions to fast food, smart phones, and television, festering ulcers and vitamin D deficiencies related to shitty diet and lack of sunlight, atherosclerosis and clogged blood vessels brought on by lack of exercise and spending too much time in traffic jams on congested freeways. Despite the abundance of material wealth inundating households, many in society seem desperately unfulfilled and lost – as though something critical (intangible, metaphysical) is missing from their lives but they just cannot put their finger on what it may be.  Perhaps there is nothing missing, and that this is just the way life feels.  But to those who feel trapped in a spiritual death spiral, there is no better place to begin searching for a way out and reconfiguring ones priorities than by unplugging and going outdoors.  For those in Central Valley, follow the water. 

From Sacramento and Folsom, Route 50 continues east through the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and after Placerville the elevation signs begin to read 4,000 feet, then 5,000 feet.  Soon after entering the El Dorado National Forest, the parking lot for the Pyramid Creek trailhead can be found on the north side of the road.  A short hike along Pyramid Creek will take you to the base of Horsetail Falls in Desolation Wilderness.  If you hike beside Horsetail Falls, scrambling up the granite cliffs, you will eventually find yourself at 8,000 feet amongst the alpine streams and lakes and sequoia forests of Desolation Valley.  The air is crisp and the water is clean and cold.  The water will eventually flow into the municipal aquifers to slake the thirst and power the homes of the six million Central Valley residents who seem lightyears away from the top of the waterfall.  Yet here the only animals that seem to claim the water are the ducks that peacefully float on the surface of the clear mountain ponds. Theirs is a simple and beautiful world that does not concern itself with any of the superfluous material bullshit that we endured day by insufferable day.  At the top the waterfall I sat down at the bank of Avalanche Lake and wondered what it was that the ducks did all day anyway, and so I ask them.  This is what they said: quack quack quack.

*None of these criticisms are exclusive to the denizens of the Central Valley or suburban inhabitants in general, for this lifestyle I’m describing can just as easily be adopted by the residents of any area – urban or rural – in any pocket of Earth so long as there are people there willing to turn their lives over to decadence, interfaces, and machines.

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