The Dead of Winter
How low can a man go? Well in North America it appears to be 282 feet below sea level. That’s the elevation of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California.
I mention this because I went there this week. I’ve lived my whole life within a few hundred miles of this famous location and yet had never gone. Of course there’s more places that I haven’t gone than I have; the world’s a huge place and I’m only a few feet big, but still, the name Death Valley is so evocative that I should have gone there before now.
But I never knew. I’d always sort of imagined Death Valley as this desolate, flat, ancient lakebed, with nothing much to do except stay out of the heat. It’s not. God set me up with the chance to go, then gave me every excuse in the world to back out, but I fooled him, I went anyway. The place is spattered with unusual geological formations. Salt crystals forming rocky divots across the Devil’s Golf Course, mountainsides painted by the minerals deposited therein, and other wonders of nature.
It’s not the sort of stuff that is endlessly captivating, but it’s more than enough to fill a weekend. But, then, isn’t that true of pretty much every place in the world? It’s not that wherever we live isn’t filled with interesting things, but that, somewhere along the way, we lose the ability to see.
I know it’s a cliche that we lose sight of the wonders that are around us every day, but at the heart of most cliches is a hardened lump of truth. So try and take some time this week to look around you with fresh eyes, to see the little things that once were wonders. It can be as simple as trying to find shapes drawn in the clouds. You don’t have to wait, like I did, till you’ve gone to Death and back.
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