If you truly want to honour a spot, leave no trace

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/06/2024 (480 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Driving the stretch of pavement in Nevada that claims to be “America’s loneliest road,” Route 50, near Fallon, there’s an archeological site known as Grimes Point.

It’s an inclined plain filled with basalt boulders, the stones marked with petroglyphs pounded into the rock in pointillist patterns, marks made as far back as 8,000 years.

At times in the past, the desert in that area had been the bottom of a massive lake, Lake Lahontan, and the petroglyphs were on the edge of it, marking routes and directions and detailing possible prey.

They provided useful information, in a time when shared information was in short supply.

If only the information sharing was so scant and difficult now.

From the petroglyphs heading east and south, the road is two thin lanes, with both sides boasting the beautiful empty as far as the eye can see.

Mountains, great berms of bare and shattered rock, desert plants in late spring bloom: It is a tableau almost impossible to capture in words. You can grip small parts of it — the sweep of acres of orange wildflowers all the way to the horizon, the dabs of bright white snow still hanging onto mountain peaks. But the immensity of it slips away almost as soon as it’s out of sight.

Mountains in memory aren’t everything mountains are, until you’re looking at them again.

Nor do the stretches of four-bar horizons stick: alkali lakes at the bottom, the green sage in the middle, the beige of hills topped with the blue of sky.

Alkali lakes have their own particular beauty — from a distance, they’re bright-white, while up close, there’s much more variation. There’s white, for sure, but there are also streaks of beige and brown, the occasional bright green that hints of oxidized copper, and even swirls of pink and bright red.

Fully dried, they are vast plains of ruler-flat crystals that can crunch evenly and noisily underfoot, or have enough combined strength to drive on. Try to cross them when they’re not fully dried, and you sink into an alkali slurry that is more than difficult from which to extract yourself.

They also are a slow-motion tableau, carrying the marks of past impressions, from footprints to car tires, sometimes for years. A rusted and annealed piece of metal can protrude from the same spot for a decade, barely changing.

But back to leaving Grimes Point.

There’s a stretch not far after the petroglyphs where an alkali lake stretches for miles along the road, sometimes on both sides with the pavement a black ribboned spine between white shoulders. There are ditches between the road and the white dried lake, and that’s left a small-shouldered roll of a bank, facing the road — into which, for miles, people have stopped their cars to collect black stones and pound them into the alkali, leaving their names, words or images.

Messages that simply and unnecessarily indicate someone was there.

I can hear some people now, suggesting this urge to insert yourself into a place is functionally the same as crafting petroglyphs.

It isn’t.

It’s not sharing potentially important information — it’s pointless static, the sound of the desperate fizz of proving one’s existence.

Does anyone need to read “LSD” or “PEACE” or consider whether “Monica loves Mike”?

Does it matter in the least that “Don” was there?

It’s as though, seeing a blank slate, humans are functionally unable to resist making their mark and leave graffiti, in the mixed media of whatever happens to be available.

I feel the same way about going to an otherwise untouched place and finding people have ripped up stones from sensitive earthen banks or beach edges to build small legions of Inuksuit or rock cairns, doing real damage to the roots of already-stressed plants while searching for that perfect stone.

Now, there are even internet videos that demonstrate how to build beach stone arches to create the illusion of floating rocks — a construction that can, and does, injure or kill wildlife that can bring down the rocks by passing under the unstable arches. Congratulations, your monument to you has built a deadfall trap.

Don’t do it. Any of it. Don’t teach your kids it’s a cute or admirable pastime. Let them dig in wet sand where waves or the rain can erase the slate within a few days.

Don’t carve your name into the bark of a huge pine in the coastal mountains, don’t excavate your initials into a sandstone bluff, don’t mark up the water-retaining wall of a barrel cactus with the point of your pocketknife. Just don’t. I’ve seen all of these, and each one is a little heartbreak.

There’s a simple brutal truth that anyone who has a near-irresistible urge to leave a mark has to know — it’s that no one needs to know you were there.

To be blunt, no one cares you were there.

No one cares, Don. And they never will.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca