Carrizo is Spanish for “thin,” similar in its origins to the word caress—or so I thought until today, when another foray of research yielded a different and less satisfying definition. “Caressingly thin” is the perfect name for such a place: the land and sky mirror each other in one long open place, as if they were layers of each other, and everywhere else the clouds and hills are but pages unsheathed, crumpled, folded, torn in their stacks. It is not a lonely place. The hills hold on either side of the slowly-sloping space fifty or sixty miles long. They do not sit or stand, the hills—they hold, as cloth is held on table. They are constant rolls, like sets of waves in different phases, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not; sometimes breaking, sometimes lulling out to a smooth. It does not feel like a waste or isolation. Motherly rolling hills cradle you upon her lap with loving knees, elbows, bosom. They are living and smooth and young and shining—ordinary even, not magnificent or stunning. Smiles are private. As moments are moments, Carrizo places are their own places. With Winter’s water, she becomes lush grass-green, and brooklike warbling birdcalls musify the air layers. In Spring, her glory spindles up and out into a bright floral array, a brief window into her eyes’ irises. From April, she fades into a flaxen blonde tone, sunshine skin browns gradually, then shades crackling and dusting into ages until Winter’s water comes quietly. Carrizo is centered on a salt-shining lakebed that normally is dry, in the days of Nod when no wetness is refreshing her hills; and when wet, it is as if Sodom is let to turn and see Eden, to be her loamy and tearful reflection, revealing sky and earth are one, how the two become one flesh of cosmic fabric spread upon a gravelled earth beneath a reaching heaven.

     A great fault carves through the valley. Humans consider it fierce and fear, but here it is clearly calm and kind. Carrizo never feels like here-in-the-here; it is a here-in-the-there. It is away, quite far away, and yet it reminds us of a home we knew once, a place we left and loved and can come back to. People come in droves to photograph her flowertide overture in Midmarch. They come and act in compulsion, but Carrizo does not force any conviction. We confess our secret sins of blaring power there as to a mother, for she is lovely and shy. It is a simple confession we are usually not aware of. We do not know why her iconic gaze means so much to us. We want more than a few photographs of some grand chasm, more than a dropped jaw before some Big Sur vista. At Carrizo, we want to wrap ourselves in her, to leap and lay upon her floral blanket, to claim her as mother and live within her quiet sphere, to take her sweetly subtle splendor, so different from the world-washed frenzy, home with us. She is a here-in-the-there.

     Carrizo is unlike other plains: the vaulting expansiveness of Wyoming; the alluvial shoreline sky running above the undulating and ungulated Palouse; the aptly named great basin breadths of Nevada and Utah, and the eastward barren labyrinth of sunset tones; the glacially smooth and enormously wide-mouthed valleys of Western Canada; the scorched sameness between Southwest Arizona and Southeast California; the dusty, foggy, farmed out San Joaquin; the insected air and watery widths of the reedy Sacramento; the oddly forested volcanic spans of high desert in Eastern Oregon and Northeast California; the plainliness of Eastern Colorado and Nebraska, and the banality to their southeast; the horizons of Texas; and the hilly open farmlands of Wisconsin, Illinois, Western Oregon. Elsewhere I know not, though I can imagine: the deeply indigo-domed and set-apartness of Canadian and Alaskan tundras; the pristine and hypoxic transcendence of Tibet; the forgottenness of the open Siberian stretches and their southern lands; the vibrant Rohannin spaces of Mongolia which mirror those of the Palouse; the reverberant ruddishness of Australia’s Outback; European pastures are romanticized tropes for agrarianism; alpine meadows are all too easily idolized with Austrian maidens singing and frolicking like lambs; even Iraq is a plain, though now poorly irrigated betwixt and between the rivers Oil and Islam. All know of Africa’s Serengeti; few know of Brazilian Cerrados and cycling wetland-grasslands of neighboring Pantanal. What of Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina? What of Indian savannas? What of oceanic abyssal plains? Other plains are more a mystery. What of those past, or those future? What of that Californian Pleistocene or that South American Miocene? What of the grassless Jurassic and Cretaceous? What of the Permian badlands? What of the first plain? What of lava plains upon molten worlds and those fields of stellar dusts beyond?

     We came from a plain, in Africa, it is thought. Something far inside us draws us to them. We want vast open spaces, bowled by ascendable hillsides. Even when we do not look for these things explicitly, they draw us. For Americans, we went west, farther and farther, across the rolling fields east of the Mississip’ and on across those great lengths to its west. When mountains bounded us, still we sought another open frontier, an ocean. What was it we wanted then? Mormons wanted an open desert. Now we reconstruct little pastures in our front yards with no real purpose other than for display, for children at play, and for dog legs splayed. We pay more money to live in high places beside flat places, whether that is overlooking an inland plain or beside a broad body of water. We take highways as if evading lions and hunting gazelle, along unidimensionalized savannas, driving what appear to be sporty cheetahs, antelope coupes, wildebeest sedans, zebra and buffalo SUVs, rhino vans, and big elephant-like rigs. We purchase emotional animal spirit-costumes for our transportation—we turn our physical movement into spiritual transport—, and we subconsciously take on their roles, projecting the expressions of our facelike headlights and grills, alluring with the follow-me marks of flashing rear red, their hips distinguishing the wide make of a vegetarian female rump or a predatory cat ready to pounce (all unnecessary engineering features). Our fixation on faster and slower while driving show we are relying upon predator-prey instincts. (It also undermines the morality of how speed limits are enforced: if the evaluation of one’s own speed is based on a culture of competition, then our policing of speed is not reducible to objective truth. Traffic laws should be used and understood in context of safety, but greed’s anxiety and punishment’s fear make us more concerned with sorry semblances of survival than the good. Depending on where you live, driving is a coward’s contest of pumping and deflating self-worth, hidden behind windshields, participated in by civilians and officers alike. I absolutely hate it. Almost no one drives on the roads to and from Carrizo.) The roads and the homes are where we act out our unused savanna tendencies.

     And when we cannot make a plain our own, we visit them. Yet there is too little excitement and resources in delimited spaces by themselves and too much clutter and confusion in hills. We seek plains that elicit the concept of plain: a bounded flat area. If it were not for heights, we would not see the plains for what they are: consistent and approachable. Heights nearby make them surmountable, containable, achievable. We lord over places never ours to own. The pride of glancing at mountains unnecessary to climb is also itself a thrill. We do not lose our sense of self if we behold something greater than us. If we lack greater heights, our prowess and individuality are given over to self-crazed wanderings through vacuums of narcissistic despair. Moreover, we need greater things than we for energy. As of yet, we cannot create or gather our own energy; we need something greater to collect what we can secondarily gather: as mountains collect the rains, we recollect them beside the plains. We wish to be beloved royal children: entitled to nurse from heaven in a gentle valley, free to exert power over earth from majestic heights. By visiting and inhabiting places with this explicit quality, as well as creating places with this quality implicit, we reinforce our self-image as children of heaven. In doing so, we deny our vital instability. Mountains are an entropic cline: the higher you go, the less predictable, the greater chaos and the richer rewards. Atop, what you find is nothing less than esoteric doctrine. Of course now we take such sacrosanctitude like party favors, advertising their high-definition contents in pornographic broad bands over those who will never love them firsthand. And when we popularize our ascent of publically accessible heights, we equate our efforts with the glory of the first ascent. We have done this so much that now anything we climb is absorbed by the enthusiasm of ascension. We are no longer interested in the substance of the mountaintop apart from an enthusiasm purchased or picked, and we are unwilling to refrain from marketing our enthusiasm, as if it were itself an accomplishment. Our socialization is becoming sheer advertisement. And the day will come when no one wants to buy us. Our entire economy and way of life is becoming increasingly entwined with the rhetorical trends of advertisements and how they have been conditioning us to ever emptier states of nature. Vainly desired substance became vanity. Vanity became expression of vanity. Expression of vanity became expressiveness of vanity. Expressiveness of vanity is now becoming impulsiveness of expression. What comes after mere impulsiveness? At what point will we recognize ourselves living in a spiritual depression swamp, far below any real value? Will we look into the alkaline mirror and see we are transitioning from noun and verb into adjective and adverb? We are less interested in seeing the mountains from the plains than we are with becoming the mountains over them, and of becoming mountainous regardless of our actual height. We would rather trade photos of reflections of mountains photoshopped to appease the most unrefined and hyperactive attentions than climb a real mountain. In fact, we buy and sell the semblance of authenticity just to keep the market going round and round. Our unrelenting striving shows something insurmountably mountainous haunts us. But at Carrizo, although it is one of these sites of heavenly childhood, something is different. There is a quieter and older interest there. The tall tales we use to summit and contain our inadequacy, our shallowness, our innate wormlike lowliness, somehow cannot memeticize the Carrizo. It is softly iconic, so that it in our experiencing it as an icon, the process caresses us and cannot be framed as we would figure possible. It does not cooperate in Yosemite or Grand Canyon or Maroon Bells ejaculations: “Yes! That!” *Click-snap!* It appears different from our looking and our expecting. Perhaps it is because the hills are diffuse and not so tall that our visions cannot soar to expectations. Perhaps it is because the colors are semiarid that our wanderlust cannot quench its thirst. Perhaps it is because the sky and land do not crash, they come as once thin, that the cosmic touch there is intractable. Eye can glut and camera can lust, yet such a living landscape can efface consumerism even by its being consumed. Her easing erosion and gradual growth planes us to her plain. To know the Carrizo as it requires, as all things in life do require, an open hand, a scanning and astute eye, and a quiet discipline to long trails. To know the Carrizo is to pass through it, to meander it, or to study it. And to love it can even mean to die for it. Struggles between commercialists and environmentalists have quietly torn the land asunder, so much so its true-boned BLM manager used suicide as the avenue for escape from their tension. Perhaps it is the Carrizo way to exist in a striking and a slipping. One cannot cast fault on such a loving and open land.


March 30, 2020
San Luis Obispo


Relevant Articles:
https://www.blm.gov/programs/national-conservation-lands/california/carrizo-plain-national-monument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrizo_Plain
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-20-me-carrizo20-story.html