Storming the Gates of Paradise Read Online Free

reflecting the turbulent sky. New Mexico is besieged now by a horrendous multiyear drought, and, watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I felt for the first time something of that beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky.
    Every summer I go to live in the sky, I drive into this vastness whose luminousness, whose emptiness, whose violence seem to give this country its identity, even though few of us live there. It’s hard to convey the scale of the empty quarter. The Nevada Test Site, where the United States and the United Kingdom have detonated more than a thousand nuclear bombs over the past half century, is inside a virtually unpopulated airbase the size of Wales. Nevada is about the sizeof Germany and has a population of a million and a half, which wouldn’t sound so stark if it weren’t that more than a million of them live in Las Vegas and most of the rest in the Reno area, leaving the remainder of the state remarkably unpopulated. At one point, the state decided to capitalize on this and named Highway 50, which traverses the center of Nevada, “the loneliest highway in America.”
    From Mono Lake, I drove about forty miles on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way; then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt; and another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first, the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful, stark, and treeless. Then the altitude climbed a little into piñon pine and juniper country, before dropping down into the drabness of most of the Great Basin, the color of sagebrush and the dirt in between. A grove of trees is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys—and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long—in which no such ranch is to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day, they pass like musical variations, with their subtle differences of color and form. One range looked like mountains, another more like cliffs, with tilted layers of strata clearly visible. One valley was full of dust devils, those knots of swirling wind that pick up debris and move it across the land, funnels that are the visible sign of the wind’s entanglement in itself.
    Most of California is west of the West: the vast arid expanses come to an end at the Sierra Nevada, the long wall of mountains on the state’s eastern edge. West of the Sierra, a dramatic change in scale takes place, and the infolding, the lushness, the variety of the terrain seem to invite the social density and complexity of California, with its thirty-something million residents from all over the world. The two coasts often seem to me to be a pair of parentheses enclosing the inarticulate, unspoken, inchoate American outback, this part of the country colored red for Republican in the voting map for the last presidential election, when the coasts were Democratic blue.
    The red lands are an outback, a steppe, a Siberia, far removed from the cosmopolitanismof the coasts. When I live out here, as I have for a week or so now and again over the past dozen years, it seems hard to believe in cities, let alone in nations, in anything but the sublimity of this emptiness. The Great Basin is wide open topographically but introspective in spirit, turned in on itself; and news from outside seems like mythology, rumor, entertainment, like anything but part of what goes on here, or doesn’t, out here where the sparse population is interspersed with sites for rehearsing America’s wars. A lot of people became preoccupied with Area 51, an off-limits part of the eastern periphery of the Nevada Test Site where aliens were supposed to have landed, or been captured, or had their flying