Travel: Desert reflection in Death Valley

The early morning sun crawled across the floor of Death Valley, illuminating the pond scum at Badwater, where mules once dropped dead of thirst. It pulled the darkness off the whelks knuckled up at Devil's Golf Course and the alluvial fans of the foothills, carved years ago by flash floods.

My car thrummed down the white-hot asphalt, the satellite radio cranked to Bob Dylan singing "All Along the Watchtower." No other cars in sight.

No people, no houses. So I stopped for a moment just to see it: Nothing.

Door open, Dylan singing, I walked into the desert. Then I felt him.

Eyes, watching.

I looked south. Heat wobbled off the pavement. Then north: a small figure, head down in a crouch as he ran along the shoulder toward me, picking up his pace.

I was coyote prey, and even Dylan's plaintive wail would not deter him. I scrambled back to the car. Dejected, he ran off down the road.

Later, at the Death Valley Museum, park ranger Bob Greenburg smiled when I asked him if people really die in Death Valley.

"All the time," he said. "Recreational Darwinism. There's a term for you."

That's what I love about America's largest national park: An almost mythical presence. A feeling of great beauty with the undertow of potential tragedy. The Europeans come in the dead of summer and wander off for a hike. The rangers find them later. "The sun sucks the water right out of them," said Greenburg. "They're like mummies."

It's a yawning, lonesome place where giant crows sit atop gas pumps and even the park rangers talk with dialogue provided by the Coen brothers.

Where the devil can't find it

Walter Scott, who came to be known as Death Valley Scotty, was a rowdy and a roustabout, a cowboy, a con man and a storyteller. People love snakes and scoundrels in the desert, and like his reptile cousins, Scotty was ectothermic: cold-blooded.

Fired from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Scotty persuaded rich businessmen in Chicago and New York to fund him in a gold mine buried "where the devil himself can't find it" in the early 1900s. One of those suckers was a man named Albert Johnson, who bankrolled what turned out to be a scam. Scotty continued to lure big-city money by spending cash in town like it was his. It wasn't. Instead, in what appears to be a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, he simply used investors' money to lure more into his fanciful Death Valley mine.

Despite having been taken, Johnson took to Scotty, and eventually the two built a castle in the sand, an improbable Gothic monstrosity surrounded by cacti and mountain lions. Johnson went looking for gold, but found something more precious: solace.

His wife, Bessie, grew to love the valley, too: "I close my eyes and forget the restlessness of the world," she wrote.

Today, you can take an amusing hourlong tour of Scotty's Castle. It's one of the few "tourist attractions" in the valley, besides nature itself. So instead you look for the thing that kept Johnson and Scotty here.

Coyote Ugly

Night in Death Valley is for coyotes, and park workers. A small group of buildings at Furnace Creek includes a steak house, general store, café and bar.

At the Corkscrew Saloon, the pool table was pushed back in case karaoke broke out. There are no real residents of Death Valley, only workers and visitors, and they mix here. The bartender showed up one day and stayed for 10 years. He raised two kids to be honor students and go off to prominent colleges.

"It's a very different kind of place," he said.

In one corner, three college girls from Vienna sipped frothy pink drinks, chattering as a row of park workers watched across the room. I was suddenly reminded of the coyote.

"They want to buy you girls a drink," said the bartender.

Before long, everybody was buying drinks and swapping stories. One young guy put money in the jukebox and let one of the Austrians pick the song. She punched "Sweet Home Alabama," and they turned it up loud. Time for me to go back to the hotel for a swim and bed.

This is no country for old men.

Bad water, good drink

I was at the low point of my trip, and it was a high point: Badwater, the lowest point in North America, a slate of endless salt plains 279 feet below sea level.

The story goes that a surveyor got to this point, hoping for a place to rest and drink. But when even his mule would not drink from the pond, he wrote "bad water" on his map. It wasn't poison, just very salty. You wouldn't like it, unless you are pickleweed larvae or a badwater snail. (Later, at the bar, I ordered the Miner's Margarita while I studied my map. The rim was crusted with salt. "Bad Water," I wrote on my map. "But a pretty good margarita.")

For three days I hiked the dunes and canyons, drove through Artist's Palette and took a dawn drive to Dante's View. It was November, shoulder season, and at many stops I was the only person around. Each night, I crawled back to the lovely Furnace Creek Inn, a stone building surrounded by the only vegetation in the area -- thanks to a spring that feeds this small oasis. A large, refreshing swimming pool was surrounded by arches that framed the vast desert and mountains beyond. There, I met a New York psychiatrist who has treated white-collar criminals involved in stock fraud and Ponzi schemes. We were not far from where Charles Manson once lived, so it seemed the perfect setting for a long discussion on psychopathology.

The anti-Vegas

I savored the names of doom here. Furnace Creek. Last Chance Mountain. Funeral Peak. Deadman Pass. I had been in Las Vegas for a couple of days, and Death Valley is only two hours away. Death Valley is the anti-Vegas, and to have America's counterpoints so close together is magical.

In such a continuum, there has to be a nexus. I found it at the Amargosa Opera House, a seeming apparition at a lonely corner somewhere between the two points. A Broadway dancer, Marta Becket, stumbled upon the abandoned adobe theater in 1967 while waiting to get a tire fixed, and looked inside.

"Peering through the tiny hole, I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. The building seemed to be saying. ... Take me. ... Do something with me ... I offer you life," she wrote.

For more than 40 years, Becket has been doing shows, dancing and singing, to small audiences, and I planned my trip around it. Turns out I saw one of Marta's last shows, but she still inspires a performance by Sandy Scheller.

I drove through blackness for nearly an hour before I saw the theater glowing in the distance. Inside, Becket had painted a Renaissance audience on the walls to keep her company. The walls were lacquered, so that it felt like you were inside a jewelry box in the middle of the desert.

Becket had to be helped onstage. The performance consisted of shaky a cappella songs, odd bits of memory, charming stories of life in the wilderness. There were 12 people at the show, including two Japanese tourists who sat dumbfounded. They frequently looked at each other and shook their heads, as if to say: This America, it sure is something.

As I left, the doors to Marta's adjacent apartment were open. Inside I could see a merry-go-round horse and a player piano, which was belting out, I believe, John Philip Sousa.

I drove down the highway a little ways and pulled over, then shut off my lights. It was so dark I couldn't see my steering wheel. But I could still hear the player piano echoing off the mountains. I thought about what a strange and beautiful world it was. And I thought of the matron of Scotty's Castle, who talked about the allure of Death Valley, where "I close my eyes, and forget the restlessness of the world."

jtevlin@startribune.com • 612-673-1702