Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
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Athena was not always admirable, but then gods are notoriously proud. Arachne, a common girl from Lydia, now somewhere in western Turkey, was a weaver like Athena, and grew famous for her talent with the loom. In Ovid’s version of the story, Arachne was also proud. She did the unthinkable and challenged Athena, whom Ovid calls Minerva. The two competed, the goddess and the girl. Athena wove an image of the gods arrayed in all their majesty, and embroidered in, as a reminder, the fates of various mortals foolish enough to challenge them, transformed into birds or trees or icy mountaintops. It communicated all that power ever wishes to, seamlessly, at once propaganda and threat. (Ask Hunahpu and Xbalanque: the messages of the powerful are always invitations to submit.) Arachne, defiant, wove the gods as she saw them, as deceivers, rapists, thieves. The beauty of her tapestry exceeded even Athena’s, and it achieved something the goddess’s could not: truth. Athena tore it from the loom and thrashed her. Arachne, despairing, would not consent to be humiliated. She would not kneel. She hanged herself instead. The goddess, unyielding, turned her into a spider, that she might forever weave, and hang, in warning.
L. is home. She flew in yesterday. In June she got a job overseas. Since then we’ve been apart far more than we would like to be. Friday afternoon I drove into L.A. to pick her up. The sky was yellower than usual. The fires are still burning, and spreading. I spent the night at S. and D.’s. The timing was good. When I got there they were making tamales for the holidays. Their daughters hadn’t shown up yet, but D.’s mother was over, standing by the stove, monitoring one pot of chicken and another of pork. I helped for as long as they let me, taking a position on the assembly line, spreading masa onto corn husks, smearing the corn paste with a dollop of meat and sauce or a sliver of cheese and a couple of rajas, tying them shut. When I left for the airport, D. sent me off with a dozen.
L.’s flight got in late and it was nearly midnight by the time we made it out of the airport. I drove straight to the desert, L. dozing beside me, KDAY on the radio keeping me awake. When we had left the interstate I opened the windows and let the cold air fill the car. It smelled of creosote. L. woke up grinning. There was no moon. The desert was dark and the stars were bright. L. stared up through the windshield, pointing and calling out the names of the constellations as she spotted them, like old friends she hadn’t seen for years. I tried to lean over the steering wheel to see them too but the highway was twisting as it climbed up through the hills and she punched me in the leg so I kept my eyes on the road until at last we turned onto our street and passed the barrel cactus at the end of the unpaved driveway. I remembered to swerve to avoid the anthill and we got out of the car and stood in the cold, necks craned back, shivering a little, our eyes adjusting, holding each other when we got too dizzy to stand.
My grandfather, in his later years, developed an interest in astronomy. He bought a roll-up screen and a slide projector and whole carousels of images of the planets and the galaxies. He was a big, lumbering man. I remember him, well into his evening gin, shouting at my sister and me to shut up and sit still during a mandatory after-dinner slide show. Was he the one who bought me that little blue paperback astronomy primer that I have carried with me every time I’ve moved for thirty years? I still have it in a box somewhere. I never read it. He gave me a poster too, of a supernova remnant in the constellation Vela, wisps of brilliant pink and blue folding over and into one another, giving the blackness space, volume, and depth. As a kid it looked to me like a man, broad-shouldered, tall, and slightly stooped. Like him. It’s up on the wall of the office I still rent in L.A., faded, its corners scarred by the thumbtacks that have held it to other walls in other cities where I’ve lived.
I did wonder a lot, as a teen, when he was at his worst, how it was that he had let his world narrow so precipitously while at the same time directing his gaze to the outer expanses of the universe. As if there were a balance that had to be struck. After the last and worst of several drunken car crashes, his decline was quick. Within a couple of years he could not perform the most basic cognitive tasks. He couldn’t recognize his own children, or at least not the only one who still spoke to him, and couldn’t access the words he needed to ask for the simplest things. My mother lost him once at Denny’s and found him in a corner, pissing in a potted plant. Dementia eventually cured his alcoholism. He forgot that he drank, forgot that he had smoked two packs of Camels every day for the previous half century. When paranoia and confusion did not propel him into rages, he was gentler and more affectionate than I remember him ever having been before.
He had once been a man who valued intelligence above all other qualities. The greatest, grudging compliment he had known how to pay was to describe someone as “pretty smart.” Toward the end he took to sketching out the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, which had not yet been demoted—labeled, in order, and to approximate scale, with a spot on Jupiter and a ring around Saturn. At one of the homes in which he spent his final years they must have had an arts and crafts room because he gave me a stiff sheet of cardboard painted in tempera with the planets in their orbits against a light blue background. It’s possible that I still have it somewhere. But even when he couldn’t name them anymore, he kept drawing them in their concentric ellipses, in ballpoint or pencil on napkins or envelopes or whatever scrap of paper he could find, Saturn always with its ring.
For most people on the planet, for thousands of years, owls have meant only one thing. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser called the owl—though he called it an owle—“deaths dreadfull messengere.” Two centuries earlier, Chaucer had written, “The owle al nyght aboute the balkès wonde, / That prophete ys of woo and of myschaunce.” Balkès being a Middle English word for the beams that stretched from one wall of a house to another. Six centuries after that, the association between owls and ill fortune made it to suburban Long Island. I don’t remember ever hearing it from a reliable adult, or an unreliable one, but I grew up with the superstition that if an owl roosts on a house, someone within will die. Not that I ever saw any owls on Long Island.
Only once have I seen an owl roost on a building. It was in 2003, at an artists’ residency in the hills across the bay from San Francisco. One afternoon I spotted an owl perched on a dormer above a second-floor bedroom in the house where I was staying. I saw it there again a few days later. I remember feeling mildly alarmed for a moment, but that I know of, nothing out of the ordinary has befallen anyone who was living in the house at the time. Or nothing so ordinary as death. A little more than a year later, though, I got a phone call about a woman who had been staying in precisely that second-floor bedroom a week or two before the owl appeared. Perhaps it had been there then as well. She was in her thirties when I met her, healthy and strong. She was the girlfriend of a close friend of mine. They were planning to get married. He called me, distraught, from overseas. She had come down with what seemed to be a simple flu. Quite precipitously, her fever grew worse. She died before he could get her to a hospital.
The daily spiral. The Rhino’s ambassador to the United Nations held a press conference at a military base in Washington, D.C. She stood in front of a cylinder of rusting metal. It was, she claimed, an Iranian missile that had been fired by Yemeni Houthi fighters at an airport in the Saudi capital. “When you look at this missile,” she said, “this is terrifying, this is absolutely terrifying. Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin.”
Her performance was a shabby reenactment of Colin Powell’s 2003 speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as if we had all forgotten that one, and that the Bush administration had lied us into a catastrophic war. This time it read more as satire than sequel. “You’re going to see a rapid flow of other things,” she promised. It would be funny if it weren’t so frightening.
Another new study, this one predicting that the oceans will rise 1.5 meters by the end of the century, submerging “land currently home