Rochambeau and the Mystery of Racetrack Playa
By
Terri Glass
By
Terri Glass
Something strange is happening on Racetrack Playa, a dry and extraordinarily flat lakebed in Death Valley California. Large singular rocks sail over the clay surface of the lakebed, creating a trail that is sometimes linear, but sometimes veers off in other directions as if Zeus has been playing shufflepuck. Some of their tracks are over hundreds of feet long, and the rocks can weigh up to several hundred pounds. No one has seen the rocks in motion. Once the rocks slide in to the middle of the lakebed, they look like randomly placed chess pieces. There is no rhyme to it.
Scientists speculate that after a rain and/or a thin layer of ice develops, the surface is slippery enough for gusty winds to actually push these rocks across the desert. Rain and wind. Water and Stone. Scissor and Rock. Rock and Paper. What trumps the other? Can wind and water really move a 400-pound rock?
When I think about getting anything heavy to move like my sleep-laden body out of bed in the morning, like my mind before coffee, like asking my father for the keys to the family car when I was in high school, we are talking about a force to reckon with. We are talking about some magic formula that breaks inertia like a lightning bolt. That cracks some kind of code like when the Muse enters a writer. Words spill out on the page similar to a sliding rock that skids across a lakebed, changes direction and then abruptly stops in the middle of nowhere.
This reminds me of the game, Rochambeau, another name for “Rock paper scissors.”
Rock breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Rock slides in desert. No one there sees the event. Rock slides in the desert. We catch the aftermath. Van Gogh paints the picture Starry Starry Night and it sells for millions after his death. The glowing stars still mesmerize us. The rocks still bewilder us, the secret remains hidden until….
Movement begins. Something is pulled from the universe that rearranges water, air, earth and fire. A volcano erupts, spewing debris and a large rock lands in the middle of a flat field. Or glacier pushes large chunks of granite and deposits them at the end of a valley floor. Or an asteroid crashes into earth causing climate change and mass extinction of brontosaurs and pterodactyls and other unwieldy creatures.
Perhaps a stone has a life after all. Something glacial inside my mind begins to push ideas horizontally across the contours of my brain, and the Corpus callosum connects intuition with logic, and a poem mysteriously appears. Or the Muse enters my atmosphere like a meteorite and shatters any preconception of what I was planning to say. Rochambeau. Go ahead, Muse. Shatter my plans, surprise me with something as strange as those large stone heads of Easter Island.
I read Aku, Aku, the Secret of Easter Island when I was in high school. The author, Thor Heyerdahl, tried to explain the mystery of 887 large stone heads carved between 1250-1500 that stood upright like mini skyscrapers on this Chilean Polynesian island. These stone figures called moai were huge, some tall as 33 feet and weighing up to 86 tons. They are thought to represent living faces of deified ancestors. How were these massive stones positioned strategically along the coastline?
Heyerdahl theorized the moai were moved from the original quarry to the coastline by swiveling the statue on its corners, rocking it side to side in a walking fashion. However, when Heyerdal attempted this experiment, it broke the edges off the statues. An archeologist named Charles Love experimented with a ten ton replica and found by placing the statue upright on two sled runners, atop log rollers, 25 men were able to move the statue 150 feet in two minutes.
The latter theory could explain why the natives stopped creating the moai. The island was almost entirely deforested by 1650, indicated by records of the disappearance of tree pollen. It took massive amounts of lumber to transport these statues. The islanders devastated the ecosystem of Easter Island and their civilization by consuming all their timber for fire, shelter and perhaps their desire to carve these monoliths and move them.
What remains on Easter Island is stone, not trees, not animals nor the original natives. Rock overrode paper and scissor here. A game that ended all games. A dead end to evolution, like the demise of the dinosaurs from a crashing asteroid.
Some rocks fly, some sail, some are carried across the land with the help of human intervention. But how do the rocks really move on Racetrack Playa and why do we want to know? These rocks may hold the secret to our continuation as a species, something that stretches our imaginations in a new way. “Think outside the box,” these stones are telling us, which humankind must learn quickly if we are to adapt to the forces of climate change and overpopulation. Meanwhile the universe keeps throwing us clues. Whether any of us can crack the code is unpredictable as the Muse herself.
Right now I’d welcome a 90-mile an hour wind and some slippery mud to sail me into the unchartered territory of the blank page. I could use a moonscape such as Racetrack Playa to heighten my senses, implode my neural pathways just as stars implode to create supernovas. Then maybe a little genius of Van Gogh could slip in and I could embody those bold brushstrokes that halo the stars.
Scientists speculate that after a rain and/or a thin layer of ice develops, the surface is slippery enough for gusty winds to actually push these rocks across the desert. Rain and wind. Water and Stone. Scissor and Rock. Rock and Paper. What trumps the other? Can wind and water really move a 400-pound rock?
When I think about getting anything heavy to move like my sleep-laden body out of bed in the morning, like my mind before coffee, like asking my father for the keys to the family car when I was in high school, we are talking about a force to reckon with. We are talking about some magic formula that breaks inertia like a lightning bolt. That cracks some kind of code like when the Muse enters a writer. Words spill out on the page similar to a sliding rock that skids across a lakebed, changes direction and then abruptly stops in the middle of nowhere.
This reminds me of the game, Rochambeau, another name for “Rock paper scissors.”
Rock breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Rock slides in desert. No one there sees the event. Rock slides in the desert. We catch the aftermath. Van Gogh paints the picture Starry Starry Night and it sells for millions after his death. The glowing stars still mesmerize us. The rocks still bewilder us, the secret remains hidden until….
Movement begins. Something is pulled from the universe that rearranges water, air, earth and fire. A volcano erupts, spewing debris and a large rock lands in the middle of a flat field. Or glacier pushes large chunks of granite and deposits them at the end of a valley floor. Or an asteroid crashes into earth causing climate change and mass extinction of brontosaurs and pterodactyls and other unwieldy creatures.
Perhaps a stone has a life after all. Something glacial inside my mind begins to push ideas horizontally across the contours of my brain, and the Corpus callosum connects intuition with logic, and a poem mysteriously appears. Or the Muse enters my atmosphere like a meteorite and shatters any preconception of what I was planning to say. Rochambeau. Go ahead, Muse. Shatter my plans, surprise me with something as strange as those large stone heads of Easter Island.
I read Aku, Aku, the Secret of Easter Island when I was in high school. The author, Thor Heyerdahl, tried to explain the mystery of 887 large stone heads carved between 1250-1500 that stood upright like mini skyscrapers on this Chilean Polynesian island. These stone figures called moai were huge, some tall as 33 feet and weighing up to 86 tons. They are thought to represent living faces of deified ancestors. How were these massive stones positioned strategically along the coastline?
Heyerdahl theorized the moai were moved from the original quarry to the coastline by swiveling the statue on its corners, rocking it side to side in a walking fashion. However, when Heyerdal attempted this experiment, it broke the edges off the statues. An archeologist named Charles Love experimented with a ten ton replica and found by placing the statue upright on two sled runners, atop log rollers, 25 men were able to move the statue 150 feet in two minutes.
The latter theory could explain why the natives stopped creating the moai. The island was almost entirely deforested by 1650, indicated by records of the disappearance of tree pollen. It took massive amounts of lumber to transport these statues. The islanders devastated the ecosystem of Easter Island and their civilization by consuming all their timber for fire, shelter and perhaps their desire to carve these monoliths and move them.
What remains on Easter Island is stone, not trees, not animals nor the original natives. Rock overrode paper and scissor here. A game that ended all games. A dead end to evolution, like the demise of the dinosaurs from a crashing asteroid.
Some rocks fly, some sail, some are carried across the land with the help of human intervention. But how do the rocks really move on Racetrack Playa and why do we want to know? These rocks may hold the secret to our continuation as a species, something that stretches our imaginations in a new way. “Think outside the box,” these stones are telling us, which humankind must learn quickly if we are to adapt to the forces of climate change and overpopulation. Meanwhile the universe keeps throwing us clues. Whether any of us can crack the code is unpredictable as the Muse herself.
Right now I’d welcome a 90-mile an hour wind and some slippery mud to sail me into the unchartered territory of the blank page. I could use a moonscape such as Racetrack Playa to heighten my senses, implode my neural pathways just as stars implode to create supernovas. Then maybe a little genius of Van Gogh could slip in and I could embody those bold brushstrokes that halo the stars.
Terri Glass has been active teaching poetry writing to both children and adults in the Bay area for over 20 years with workshops in schools, colleges, hospitals, wildlife and senior centers. She served as Program Director for California Poets in the Schools from 2008-2011. Her poems have recently appeared in About Place, ViVace, Adventum, San Diego Poetry Annual, Fault Lines, California Quarterly, Fourth River, in the anthologies, Back to Joy, Trees: Marin Poetry center anthology, Shadow and Light, What the World Hears, Mountains & In Between and Drumvoices. Her book of nature poetry, The Song of Yes, came out it 2011 and a book of haiku, Birds, Bees, Trees, Love, Hee Hee came out in 2015.. She holds a MFA in creative writing from USM.