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 The Absence of Color
by Patrick Clapp
Hearsay and the honey-tongued assurances born over the tops of half-drunk beer bottles have led me to believe either the population of Phoenix has swelled to surpass the city of brotherly love, or Philadelphia has withered and shot itself until its seething masses hover in numbers less than the city of eternal summer. A dislike of disinformation compels me to note that the city motto of Phoenix is "the valley of the sun", however, after four consecutive days of mercury measured above the one hundred mark, the eternalness of the sunshine is palpable enough to warrant a petition for change. Regardless, escape and adventure, now so thoroughly linked in my mind, are upon me again.
A timely slide out of the clutches of the sun valley translates serenely into an effortless glide south and then southwest through the grasp of the old pueblo. In the juggle of media and materials preceding the first book on tape selection, the radioman announces temperatures on the cooler side of the century mark. A glance at the digital readout near the forward dome light disputes his assurances. One hundred and eight bearing south. There are three choices for this journey, a spy novel, a mystery, and Dracula. The spy novel promises action from the start and is given priority. Time slides smoothly as with the mountains in the distance. There are clouds, but they are in dog show mode, strutting their weekend best and preening for the blue ribbon, no threat to the weather conscious. The spy novel craps out on tape two, someone has demagnetized the tape. The skip of five chapters makes the book a bit more mysterious, but still able to be followed. Tape four craps out the same way and the book gets the hook. The Dick Francis mystery takes center stage and for hours the ride is consumed by the struggles of his protagonist.
The route past Tucson takes on a pleasant familiarity, emphasized by the birth of dust devils seen in the distance. Imagine water swirling the drain, or two sheets of air passing each other shoulder to shoulder then simultaneously turning to follow the other. Dust devils look like two dogs each chasing the other's tail. The column of brown smoke rises thirty feet into the air before dissipating like smoke too far from a fire. These are not the pitiful dust clouds of my youth, tossing dandelion fluff and dry mud with the limp wrist of a half-hearted drunken pitcher. These are sub-classes of the monsters that eat the Great Plains. These dust devils move in a spastic cascade of inevitability. Their physical presence carries with it a sense of near consciousness, derived from the appearance of purpose in their destructive meandering. A sense of otherness and power with unfathomable purpose inspires claw-like tendrils of horror to creep up from the base of my brain. These devils take no notice of my passing, or even my existence; I am trivial and that clashes strongly with a deeply ingrained homocentric sense. There are odd sights to be seen out on that plain. It is the home of maddened air devils, trapped forever by weather and mountains, belting out their fury and frustration upon water starved earth.
My mind returns from its wanderings to find Texas passing behind me to the south. The secret pass through the mountains near El Paso has once again saved me from the minutia of El Paso's evening traffic patterns. The New Mexico border guard, the first line of our country's defense against West Texas, passes me through with little more than a cursory glance. Carlsbad from Phoenix in nine hours subjective time; a knock on the host's door opens a portal into the world of sleep longed for by weary travelers at the end of their road. It is one in the morning, but I believe it to be only midnight, not remembering the time shift until morning.
With the sun's arrival, hunger holds the door for consciousness with a "you first, I insist" smile of a force that always gets its' way. Buffets, by my reckoning, are cesspits of buy-from-the-lowest-bidder food troughs, ripe with a collector's edition of designer germs from the myriad selection of humankind. That aside, all you can eat for eight dollars on a Saturday morning preceding a Saturday afternoon filled with strenuous activity is not an opportunity to squander. The Golden Corral has all manner of griddle-fried dough and sizzling pork, up to, and including, sausage gravy. All caution built into my being over years of resisting expeditions to the greatest cesspit of all, Ponderosa, become vapor in the breeze as my senses convey to my growling stomach the presence and possible quality of the sausage gravy and fresh biscuits laid out before me. In the steaming bin beside the biscuits are piles and piles of greasy sausage links. In the pork-glorious distance is a mountain of bacon. A thought slips through my mind…pork hell…because no heaven would contain the shredded, stuffed, chipped, and fried remains of a devout species. No, this must be the sacrilicious fate of the sinner pigs. I place a modest amount of each upon my plate and return to the diet-coke-with-surreptitious-lemon-wedge that marks my place at a table. After a few targeted returns to the food troughs, each plate containing fewer items in ever shrinking portions like some carnivorous survivor variant, it is time to begin the true purpose of this expedition.
In the metropolitan expanse that is the city of Philadelphia, there are operatives who thrive in painting scenes of amazing color and form, often in places that appear to require a radioactive spider bite to access. I have heard secondhand stories of the exploits of one of the more notorious graffiti artists in the Philadelphia area, Number One Terrorist, or NOT for short. NOT is an amazing artist and a talented and intelligent man whose skills have made him deliriously successful. The paint that he has laid down in Philly defies description. The paint laid down in the party-hole of a cave that I helped clean that Saturday morning lacked, in every way possible, the grace, talent, forethought, and beauty found in metropolitan graffiti of the likes of NOT. I think graffiti has a place, and I think that place is the city. The modern urban asceticism found at the hearts of our cities needs the expressionism pouring forth from the country’s talented graffiti artists. Rocks in the scenic wilds of one of our country’s most dominating cave-bearing landscapes is not the place for spray paint.
I place my safety goggles over my shades and fit my respirator firmly over my mouth. The microfine alumino-silicate glass beads with which I pneumatically bombard the affronted rock face is not a serious threat. The composition is relatively harmless from a biophysical viewpoint, however, the matter it painstakingly strips from the canyon wall contains everything bad in the world. And I mean painstakingly strip. Many things drift through my mind, the majority touch upon one observation and one burning question. The observation: it takes seconds to spray paint this rock and it takes hours to clean it…the world is just, it is the people who are scum. Beautiful, worthwhile things should take time to create. Meaningless garbage, professing misspelled love and the assurances that someone was here and when, takes seconds to call forth. There is no beauty here at the top layer of human ignorance. The beauty of this place lies below, beneath, and it takes hours upon hours to coax it to the surface. The second item, the question: Why? Why must you do this, why cannot you leave something be? I do not decry the perceived rights or freedoms of the defilers, I only question what twisted part of their brain sees these acts as necessary. Go paint a fourth and fifth dimension upon some cubist’s dream embodied in a city civic center. Leave the rocks under the watchful eye of the moon and the bats. The rolling expanse of Carlsbad is filled with browns and yellows and small spots of green; it all blends into a sepia wash. It is the absence of color that highlights the hidden beauty of these hills. It is the topography and the lay of the plants that shout the secrets of Carlsbad to the skies, not the colors. Reds and blues have no place on this dark canyon road.
In every Discovery channel show about an expedition in some remote location or on some expensive dive, always, towards the end of the show, pressure mounts as the mission runs closer to an unfathomable deadline. I could not be the only person to wonder why they cannot look for the giant squid for a few more days. Why must they leave the pyramid by sundown tomorrow, why are they forced to boat back downstream, now, when they seem so close to something-anything. Alas, people have lives to which they must return, people have other scheduling commitments, the gear needs to travel to a new project, and apparently, if you do not stop at a reasonable time you run the risk of breaking down the worksite in darkness and/or stormy weather. There is a deadline for this gig, and as it approaches I am filled, as I always am when a deadline is visible on the near horizon, with an image of the test taker from the movie Summer School who frantically writes “C” “C” “C” in every answer-sheet bubble as the test collector makes his rounds. I am fighting a patch of stubborn blue that is yielding, albeit slowly, to my persistent machinations. And as soon, it seems, as the project starts, my gun has jammed for the final time, my airline has been bled, and I can look upon my progress. The blue is gone in many places, not wholly absent to be sure, but reduced and defeated all the same. A victory for glass once again. I run a hand through my hair and immediately stop in disgust. I am covered in a grimy combination of media, dust, rock fines, and grit blasted paint. It feels like damp, ultrafine beach sand, the kind that gets into everything, the stuff whose last place of refuge after a day at the beach is beneath your toenails. There is light aplenty as the gear is broken down. The sky gods of Carlsbad roar and boom their approval, and spare us the reality of a real rain storm. The project is located in an area that was flooded under feet of water only a few weeks previous; the threat from the skies is not taken idly. Before long the gear is stowed, and I have returned to the host’s home for a quick and much needed shower.
The season is right and my timing is excellent for a just and truly deserved reward. Carlsbad Caverns, discovered much earlier in the century, is home in the summer to hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of bats. Weather permitting, and no flash photography allowed, spectators are allowed to view the evening bat flight at the big entrance to the caverns. It is another interesting spectacle involving entities that do not care about our existence one way or the other. The seating is proscenium upon stone benches facing the gaping maw of the caves below. Cave swallows dart, dive, and flit through the evening air, gathering enormous speed as the dive bomb the entrance to their home only to swoop back out a moment later. They cut and weave as if in an aerial dogfight with an unknown assailant. To dive the cave, they simply tuck their wings and plummet like stones before snapping them open again and trading that downward momentum into a streaking forward velocity. Many minute pass as I watch the swallows with envy. The sun trickles away to nothingness and suddenly there is not a bird to be seen. They have all gone, still, silent, and tucked away for the night. The cave entrance is no longer theirs for play. The night sharpens. As if conjured by a dust devil itself, a shadowy, nearly indistinguishable swirl of faint flickers rises from the face of the cave maw. In seconds it takes on body and definition; a swirling cone of brownish flapping, so tight and so fast that it can only be viewed as an entity itself and not as single elements comprising a whole. The bats of Carlsbad have awoke and the hunt has begun. The swirling column looks alarmingly akin to the dust devils of the plain, and, as if in acknowledgement, at the very top of the spiral a steady stream of bats begins to pour off to the west. In moments, a steady state condition has been reached of bats entering the queue, swirling the stack twenty or thirty times, and the leaving west in bursts and streams at the top. The night has darkened and once again it is shape, form, and sound that define the event, not color. This continues for minutes,…for ten minutes,…for fifteen minutes of a steady stream of bats zooming out of a swirling, forty foot column of their kind to hunt and devour millions of bugs. For twenty minutes…for twenty-five minutes I watch the bat flight of Carlsbad and marvel at the wonder that is “merely a sample” of the flights of later in the summer. Oh yes, I was certainly cheated as I only observed a mere two hundred thousand bats or so pour from the depths of the cave beneath me. It is early yet in the season, but it is a welcome reward to a day of tough labor.
The night passes and the morning again find me at the Golden Corral. Again I confront the wonders of dead pig laid out before me, and I eat my fill. The mission that day is one of pure adventure. The sand blasting is as complete as it will be given resources, timing, and volunteers. The leader of the project has already left for a three day excursion into a highly limited access cave, and the materials have been stowed for their next journey. I travel with friends into the wilds of Carlsbad, near to the border of the national park, but still on land legally accessible. The car is parked, gear is equipped, and a short trek is quickly underway to the foot of a sloping cliff. Two thirds up the modest climb is a gaping hole that does not look large until many minutes have passed in its pursuit and the true scale of the canyon face is taken.
The lead caver hop-skips-zips ahead a few feet with the highly appropriate “Whoa! Rattlesnake!”. The snake hisses its displeasure at being disturbed, and I, along with the rest of the team detour around the area. No other creatures are sighted and the cave entrance is reached without further incident. It is at this point that our guide mentions some interesting items about the cave before us. It’s dusty, at least in the first few rooms. This is because it burned once. It burned because it was probably hit by lightning. What burned was the vast amount of goat droppings left by wandering mountain goats. Also, there may be bat guano mixed in with the ash so histoplasmosis is a minor threat. Ick. Not good, as the only item I have forgotten on this journey is my bandana. The leader also mentions, “Oh. And there might be a mountain lion in there, too.” Wonderful. Histo and death by giant cats.
As I am going to have only my shirt over my nose, along with shallow breaths and a gloved hand, I get to take lead so as to not walk through clouds of kicked up ash from the other cavers. I think longingly of the two, top-notch respirators in the back of the truck a half mile down the road and sigh. May fortune favor the foolish, which happens to be the same phrase I utter before using superglue for any purpose. I slip into the cave first, my breath is loud in my ears as I have my gloved hand over my shirt over my nose and mouth. As I wanted to hold my breath as much as possible, I am naturally breathing more than normal. Ah the wonders of adrenaline and a dangerous understanding of physiology. Histo is not lethal, but it can leave a person with only two thirds of his previous lung capacity.
The cave is quiet, like a forest in a calm but heavy snowstorm. All sounds are eaten by the ash that is everywhere. The floor and most of the walls are a washed out gray. I am struck for the third time by beauty in the absence of color. Graceful, peaceful, quiet, and potentially dangerous. I pass a pile of bones, likely mountain goat in origin; also, likely picked clean by a mountain lion. This ash-snow landscape continues for about one hundred feet, the passage is large enough to stand in and wide enough for four abreast if they chose to travel in such a fashion. A twist, a turn, deeper into the cave, past the twilight and into the true dark. Suddenly the floor is no longer covered in ash, the walls take on a less menacing cast, and the threat of mountain lions feels laughable. A few hours are spent slipping deeper into the canyon hideaway. There is evidence of restoration efforts and signs of heavy harvesting of speleothems. There is a giant, glistening flowstone in the center of the main passage. We stop for photographs and water. The cave is decently decorated and must have been, once upon a time, an amazing site to behold. Harvesters and other cretins have chipped away at the ageless beauty of this place. After a while it is once again time to brave mind and body with the walk out. I peel off my shirt from under my coveralls and tie it in crude fashion over my nose and mouth. The journey out is uneventful and the climb down, this time with my shirt in the form of a turban, is snake-free. Goodbyes are made at the trucks and shortly thereafter I am on the road of return. The adventure has reached its final stages.
My mind travels over the many things I have seen and experienced over the past few days while leaving Carlsbad to face the road home. The book on tape reaches its denouement and music takes its place for a while. Dracula is given a shake and the first part is eerie and entertaining. The second part hits when the sun has slipped the sky and weariness has taken its place as the item of note burning before my eyes. Music quickly replaces the book and the journey continues without event, back to the land of the sun. The sky has darkened and the colors of the fading sun are once again, absent.
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