Scottys Castle after thousand-year flood, Death Valley, CA, 2015. | Photo: Osceola Refetoff. High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert. Together, writer/historian Christopher Langley and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development.
I think natural disasters have been looked upon in the wrong way.
Newspapers always say they are bad. a shame.
I like natural disasters and I think that they may be the highest form of art possible to experience.
For one thing they are impersonal.
I don't think art can stand up to nature.
Put the best object you know next to the grand canyon, niagra falls, the red woods.
The big things always win.
Now just think of a flood, forest fire, tornado, earthquake, Typhoon, sand storm.
Think of the breaking of the Ice jams. Crunch.
If all of the people who go to museums could just feel an earthquake.
Not to mention the sky and the ocean.
But it is in the unpredictable disasters that the highest forms are realized.
They are rare and we should be thankful for them.
-- Walter De Maria, On the Importance of Natural Disasters, 1960
Overhead power lines left hanging after flood, Death Valley, CA, 2015. | Photo: Osceola Refetoff.
Nature has always created altered landscapes. Through disruption and construction, nature recreates and thus renews the landscapes of our home planet constantly. With the naming of our present period -- the Anthropocene -- the realization is dawning on us that humans also create altered and disrupted landscapes. Some even argue we are the primary movers in that domain. It is a constant process and ineluctable. Sometimes human agents work quickly, other times it is a slow, almost imperceptible process. Humans are constantly and ever more persuasively changing our world.
When we visit Scotty's Castle in Death Valley we are provoked with a question: was the large-scale flood that rocked the iconic landmark in October 2015 a natural or human event? It was both. Just because we are in the Anthropocene, does not mean natural forces have ceased. No doubt several millennia ago, before human enterprise touched the area, there were floods. Once human activity impacted the area, each natural event was to a greater or lesser degree affected, even transformed.
No one was there to see or feel or watch this flood.
The conundrum of If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? is upon us. We are saved from this consideration simply by our imaginations. This flood lurks in our minds as we stand before the ravaged landscape nearly a month later. The history, presence, destruction, and rearrangement of the rampaging water are very real in our minds none-the-less because it lies before our gaze. At this point we do not think about the human causal element in the natural disaster. I imagine the flood event:
Blue pipe unearthed by flood at Grapevine Canyon, Death Valley, CA, 2015. | Photo: Osceola Refetoff.
The surging water roars angrily down the canyon as the storm cell stalls over Grapevine Canyon. The downpours pulse with the intensity of the pushing fluid through a narrow, channel made of compacted yet pliant soil. Then begins the frozen battle with bullets of ice the size of quarters, beating down where thermals usually rise heated from the desert floor. The sound is deafening and the water and ice tear at the underpinnings of a mobile home a few miles from Grapevine Canyon where the nearest human huddles with her husband, fearing the land holding her home safe from the raging waters is eroding away.
The cacophony of crystalline projectiles builds to a crescendo that just won't cease. On and on it goes unabated. What could possibly survive in the darkness? The war turns to a rout as the waves of mud, boulders, and silt rise like a wind-driven tide, mixed with grinding teeth of talus dragged down the incline. Gravity pulls irresistibly at this flow of slurry: mixing debris, dust, and expectation of total destruction. Soon a moving landscape of creation and natural destruction is sweeping on irresistibly in its seduction of the land before it. Human enterprise whether castle, asphalted road, swimming pool, or hacienda appear no match for this churning current of fluidity.
Interior flood damage at Scottys Castle, Death Valley, CA, 2015. | Photo: Osceola Refetoff.
The storm cell seething with moisture, as it rises higher and higher into the atmosphere, pumps precipitation out as it sits -- a meteorological machine on a decaying, leaf-layered wreck of desert countryside. The mud now has the distasteful odor of fecund and life-giving decomposition.
A dead tree trunk, killed in the fire a few years back that ravaged two hundred more on a hill, is uprooted where the rampaging flood gathers strength. As the outflow takes shape, riding over its banks, the gnarled tree crashes through and turning with desultory movement snags on the edge of a building in its rush to freedom. The wood alcove of the structure, aesthetic in its simple repeated designs, catches the heavy trunk and swings it around as if suddenly animated with conscious intention. The water and increasing soggy refuse crash over it, cascading on down into Grapevine Canyon, but in its madness saving the structure from sure destruction. The buildings are hydraulically blasted empty, and the furniture shredded to kindling.
Flood damage to Scottys Castle Road, Death Valley, CA, 2015. | Photo: Osceola Refetoff.
At first the wild current whacks away at the creosote bush, white bursage, brittlebush, Parish goldeneye, desert tea, and rubber rabbitbrush from high up. Then as the water drops lower, it pulls up catclaw mesquite, desert willow, burrobush, Mojave rabbitbrush, bladder sage, and adventurous riparian communities. Nothing stands in its
