It is the rhythm, a certain cadence that wakes them. Tapping on hardpan. Bouncing off rocks. Dripping from waxy leaves. Penetrating desiccated soil, vibrations percolate downward as raindrops patter the surface which is hardened and cracked by months absent of precipitation. The cumulative drops aggregate. It takes their multitude to resonate deep enough to reach the dormant animals three feet, four feet, ten feet underground, ensconced in soil insulated from the dry desert air. Soil that can retain scant molecules of water which are sipped slowly, osmotically, through mucus coated skin. Palm sized creatures with long patience and sensitive skin listening for the murmur, a barely perceptible but unmistakable frequency of raindrops. The earth is initially resistant to moisture as if being so long denied water it has forgotten how to drink, receptive pores tightened and unyielding. Pools form from this reluctance, spreading across low topography into vast but shallow swaths of ephemeral lakes. This too is communicated downward. The spadefoot toads know that this microscopically percussive song, when played through enough verses, tells the story of ponds and puddles with their connecting rivulets. The soil will eventually yield and the water will find its way deeper into the ground, but this takes time. This tiny song conveys an urgency, the biological reminder that time can be short and opportunities rare. The toads climb up towards this urgency. They don’t wait for the water to come to them. Once patient bodies accustomed to somnolence are now compelled upward, scratching through dirt, returning to the surface as a resurrection of community. Sensitive skin adapted to rationing subterranean moisture craves inundation, craves the bacchanal of shared company, craves the collective joy of intertwined and overlapping amphibian bodies drawn to the nearest mud puddle. Guttural resonance spreads across the newly saturated landscape. A quiet desert transformed by overlapping serenades, another story told in song of relative fecundity and reproductive opportunity. A single toad croaking could be a curiosity. The collective sound of hundreds is evidence of primordial worlds beyond true comprehension, visceral evidence that is not so much heard as it is felt, low wavelengths with a rasping edge, a throat singing chant reverberating from the moist edge of a desert playa.
It is a long drive through basin and range, a rough blacktop highway with no shoulder, just a sandy edge fringed with rabbitbrush and Great Basin sage (Artemisia tridentata). Late September means that both are in bloom. All afternoon I’ve been chasing seasonal thunderstorms, virga and rain curtains in the distance, scattered from mountain to mesa, dressing the terraces of Pleistocene lakes. Subtle horizontal lines form stair steps on the hillsides unseen by most travelers but easy to imagine once you learn that this land was once filled, thirteen thousand years ago with a vast glacial lake connecting each long valley, fjord-like covering over 8,500 square miles. The windows are down and the fragrance of the wet shrubs fills the cab of the pickup. Dusty, evocative, the scent fills my brain with mystery. These plants that I so love, plants that define one of the largest ecoregions in North America, were they common those thousands of years ago? Would they have been so dominant in that colder, wetter landscape of lakeshore and wetland? The space of blue water now an ocean composed of a trillion pale green leaves crested with slight yellow flowers.
The sky has cleared, the sun has set and the pavement is dry as I near the access point of the Black Rock playa. The exit however is frozen into two foot deep ruts, hard as concrete. Vehicles exiting during the previous rain must have been clambering out of the glutinous mud to reach the highway, mud that has dried into a nearly impassable and chaotic surface. I manage to get this high clearance four wheel drive truck onto the dry lake bed and follow a well worn two track headed northeast. This landscape is the flattest surface that the earth can create. The periodic flooding dries relatively quickly, settling the fine silt, gently leveling a basin stretching about 10 to 15 miles wide and 100 miles long southwest to northeast. Traveling on this is more akin to navigating water than the proscribed routes of roads, rails or trails. In the fading light I put the namesake Black Rock a few degrees to my left and venture out on the seemingly blank surface.
The sky’s smooth gradient of light sienna to umber has imperceptibly shifted down to a far median of the deepest blue to black. By the time that I cut the engine and let the truck roll to a stop it is dark and moonless. I pull out my bed roll and tarp laying them out next to the truck. I then lift down my road bike from the tailgate. I really feel like I need to take it for a spin. As I ride away from my impromptu campsite I quickly feel the darkness expanding outward, the darkest skies in the country, maximum starlight, the band of Milky Way, unnamable constellations offering the only illumination, scant but somehow enough on the zero topography. I quickly lose orientation to my campsite. I haven’t ridden far or fast but in the blackness of the desert night the only features are a vague horizon and the tactile surface under my tires. I feel like an astronaut untethered from their capsule and at the whim of the void. Speed and distance are obscured to nonexistence, it’s a freedom but fearsome, a stomach dropping thrill. Dead reckoning and my strong sense of direction guide me back.
Sitting on the tailgate I marvel at the stars. I feel my ignorance of them. I can easily find the Big Dipper and from that guide myself to the North Star. Following the long stretch from the Northern horizon to the Southern horizon, the Milky Way, our home Galaxy seen from our unique angle, brings me to Sagittarius, my birth sign marking the Galactic center. I think with awe and envy of Pacific navigators who for a thousand years have known these stars, and so many more. People who are able to look up and instantly know their exact spot in the universe with a confidence that I can barely comprehend.
My eyes have maxed out their sensitivity. It can take an hour. Perhaps this is part of our disconnection from night, from the stars, the reason we have doused the heavens like an abandoned campfire and never looked back. Our cleverness in bringing light to staunch the darkness has been doubly clever in diminishing our focus primarily to ourselves, what we can fit under our narrow lamp or what reflects back to us on a glowing screen. Our cities and suburbs bleed light out into the wildlands and can be clearly seen from space. Inversely this has blotted away the infinity of the cosmos that has always been, paradoxically, both the antidote to our own sense of insignificance and a primal source of humility.
I soften my vision. My hope is that with a wide aspect of the night sky I’ll catch any shooting stars that may happen. Instead of a meteor, I catch something moving low in my periphery to the right. Out on the playa are flames and they are moving, rotating. I have no scale to judge distance until I see the headlights, perhaps a couple miles distant. Far enough that I can just barely hear the motor, they’re not driving fast, but they are spinning donuts then chasing the flames. This goes on for some time, my sense of remote seclusion broken. It’s not that I object to that but there is a foreboding of sorts. What is burning? Why is it moving, again not quickly but steadily and rotating, a lopsided circle glowing red and flickering? Relative to the car I can see that it is low across the desert floor. This is how I realize what I am seeing. It’s something like a car tire, set ablaze then sent rolling along the playa. I can even see how, as it loses momentum, it wobbles to a stop like a played out children's toy, flopping to the earth. I go to sleep, thinking of this strange game being played, certain of my anonymity, but restless with the anxiety that it may roll closer to me in my dreams.
In the restless night I had made a plan. I rise at first light and set off on my bike to catch the sunrise. It is impossibly quiet and there is no sign of whoever was active last night. The playa is hardpan, the earth baked in the relentless Nevada sun, but there is a velvety texture from the fine silt remnant of an ephemeral lake. I can put my bike into its highest gear and there is just the slightest extra friction as if the ground will remind me of its existence. I aim for the brightest part of the horizon which, close to the equinox, should be due east. On this flat surface I can move pretty fast but with the lack of features and the stillness across the wide landscape I develop a strange sense of detachment, as if I am not moving, even though I must be going 25 miles per hour. I also realize that I have underestimated how soon the sun would rise. I’ve probably gone ten miles when I see the crack of light as the sun breaches the mountains, a sharp glare that prompts me to turn slightly then stop. Oddly I notice an abandoned car tire randomly lying nearby, the only thing larger than a pebble that I’ve seen this morning. I prop my bike against its mud caked tread, balancing it with the pedal. I stand and slowly turn a full circle. In the middle of such a pure flatness I am solitary to the ground but surrounded in the distance by the cragged mountains and undulating ridges that cradle this basin. The curvature of the globe has swallowed my truck and anything else that might lie hidden out there, invisible from my ground level view. I know that I will find my way home, make my return from this space, but right here I feel small. I also feel grounded, I’ve removed my shoes and spaces between toes take up the playa dust. The sun is warming the landscape. By midday it would desiccate an unwatered body. This is not a place to linger unprotected so I turn around and ride back. I don’t find the tracks that I made coming out but I fix a place on the horizon and keep my eyes out for the spot that I came from.
Great Basin Spadefoot Toads (Spea intermontana) often have only a few weeks to thrive above ground. Spring and summer rains come sporadically and the arid interior west dries quickly. Migrating, drawn to water, singing, mating, laying eggs, this all happens in quick succession, the short life of high creeks and scattered ponds is the time they have, an end-of-the-world party. And the end comes. Eggs hatch in just a few days, tadpoles might have just a month to be ready to abandon their muddy nursery. Before the land dries completely they burrow. Scattering once again they back into the ground watching the sky disappear as they use a hardened toenail on their back feet, the spadefoot, to dig, wiggling downward. They reverse the upward journey. Once drawn frantically to the surface, anticipating the activity, feeding quickly and coupling ambitiously, they now retreat. The return is more subtle, alternating kicks clear the moist sand creating the burrow that will be their home. They may continue digging as the soil dries, seeking moisture held deeper down. There is no way to know when they might find their next chance to crawl back out, two years or so has been observed. Settling in, using a lower metabolism and a state of torpor, it is the counterpoint of the energetic burst of rain inspired activity. They quietly return to a place of deep patience.