Ashes, Ashes
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Driving to White Sands, the Southwest is the bottom of a dried ocean. The history of the planet in my rearview juxtaposes the semi-recent present before me. Spread sporadically, both the old and new. All of it the same. The new is so old that there is little to no difference between the two. It all highlights the same path to extinction.
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Chunks of black molten rock lay the foundation for dingy-yellow shanty trailer-homes that spring up like tin desert flowers. It’s the same scene as the Black Plague at the feet of white European children dancing in circles with nursery rhymes and pockets full of posies. Though the sight of it begs for wonderment, it’s haunting.
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This place is a mass grave. Decades in any direction it’s an empty scrapyard where even the remnants of things that once were no longer are. It’s a display of how all things come full-circle, the way prayers repeatedly make rings around rosies — the rosaries of Catholics that murdered and raped the indigenous and spawned a nation later sent to these lands after conversion to their religion. Now they’ve a heaven to go to … but first a reservation to rot on.
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Those of us from the godless future are tourists of time travel. Driving out here to White Sands, we pierce the gaps between space and time. Out here the railroads, dirt roads, highways, and interstates grind through these towns with one gas station and an empty diner on the corner of an empty Main Street. More tumbleweeds than vehicles line the curbs, and there’s not a soul in sight except the dust devils dancing in circles. I shut the engine off and listen to what I swear are devils chanting in nursery rhyme, “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
