The Lightning Field

Part 2 of a sequel by Martin J. Goodman

"Quemado ..." we wonder. "What does it mean?"

In one way the answer is obvious. It means this little New Mexican town eighty miles back from the highway. A graveyard at one end, a scrapyard at the other, a single street of a motel, housing, a real estate cabin, a grocer's, and the shade of trees in between. We have a coffee at King Arthur's Court, a cafe lined in old timber, waiting for the vehicle to come and carry us away. It is a new sleek Chevrolet van, air-conditioned to chillness, its bodywork coated in mud. The driver, John, is a cowboy in his fifties with a ranch that borders the lightning fields. Quemado is a Spanish name. What does it mean in English?

"Burnt!" he tells us.

So we speed from the town of Burnt, turn onto a dirt road, and cruise through mile after mile of brown grassland. Gates are opened and closed behind us and we surge through pools of mud, heading further and further into the hinterland. The first of the steel rods of the lightning field appears, but no house. Just a derelict wooden shack.

The Chevrolet wheels us round to pull up at the shack's front door.

We will only be here twenty four hours. We can even survive that time in the open air if we have to. It doesn't matter how rustic the accommodation is, it is all part of the experience. My logic is in place before I step out of the van.

In fact it is a good house, simply not what I expect. Solid and commodious, this is my first experience of a log cabin. Tables, ceiling, walls, floor, chairs, everything in it is made of dark wood. No picture, no rug, no cushion, no cloth is allowed to spoil the effect. Just wood on wood on wood. Wooden rocking chairs on the back porch give views out across the grassland to a ring of distant mountains.

Between the log cabin and the mountains stretch the lightning field.

The house is wood, the lightning field is steel. The contrast of cabin, field and mountains, wood, steel and stone gives the first clue to the effect of the place. Visitors are encouraged to think of this as one of the world's largest art installations, placed here by the artist Walter de Maria in 1977. Four hundred lightning rods, shining steel poles that rise to a sharpened point, are set in a quadrant one mile by one kilometre, forty five rows of sixteen rods. Each is set so perfectly that if you stand in line with one and face the horizontal line of rods beyond it, they all disappear behind the foremost rod's four-inch width. The same trick works in the diagonal directions. Each rod is around twenty feet high, adjusted to the level of land in which it is set, so that the points form an exact plane on which an imaginary sheet of glass might rest in perfect balance.

We discover another element when we walk out into the lightning field: water. It skims the surface in many patches, turning the earth to bog. We tread through this forest of steel poles, feeling small and somewhat lost. The lightning field is on a scale beyond aesthetics somehow. No gallery could contain it. Instead of understanding where we are, we hunt for a missing element.

We look for fire.

We are in the peak of New Mexico's lightning season. From the balcony of my home in Santa Fe I watch it blaze across the southern skyline. Sheets of it fill the night and shape trees, mountains and clouds as sharp silhouettes. Branches of it reach from high, with multiple fingers that stab down across miles and miles of landscape.

I have learned something of the lore of lightning. Enormous winds swirl within thunderclouds to generate sparks of electricity. Bolts of up to a million volts shoot out at the speed of light, up to twenty six of them at a time fusing into what we perceive as a single lightning flash.

I know to stay away from metal objects. I know that these giant lightning rods are anchored into the ground in deep stacks of cement, and know a lightning strike spreads high voltage through the ground. Stand with feet together, I learned as a child, for the voltage is higher with feet apart.

Lightning strikes a thousand people off the globe each year, plus those beyond the reach of official record, innocents on some pampas, some tundra, some steppes or taiga or desert or grassland. Some two thousand thunderstorms sport themselves around the world at any one time. Just a small one contains ten times as much power as the atom bomb that flew from New Mexico to destroy Hiroshima.

Thunder echoes inside a cloud beyond the range of mountains to the south. Dark clouds begin to pile over to the west. The lightning field no longer seems the safest place to be.

We sit on rockers on the veranda back in the cabin and wait for the show to commence. Thunderclouds gather over the mountains but the sky above the plain remains fairly clear. Anticipation dims a little.

I take out a small plastic package. Inside is a mushroom, given to me by a friend for my fortieth birthday.

I've never shroomed before, taken the journey where magic mushrooms lead. I know the friend expected me to chew it on a dancefloor and let myself be carried away. For my first taste I prefer something subtler.

The package contains one cap and one stem, the length of my little finger from its knuckle to its tip. It is dry, a fairly dark brown, and as I say a prayer and pop it in my mouth I am surprised by its taste. I expect no taste at all, but here is the strong flavour of mushroom. It is pleasantly grounding and natural, that a magic mushroom just tastes like a mushroom.

I chew, activate the strands with my saliva, and swallow. Psilocybin, the mushroom's hallucinogenic ingredient, is now in my system. I am on a chemical journey with no turning back. The dose is supposed to be a small one. Some lightness, some sense of opening should come in its wake.

The company of others suddenly seems a little harsh. I wish to observe the mushroom's effects in solitude, and go to my room. My bed, single and smart beneath a bright red blanket, is in an annex built to lean against the cabin's rear wall. I lie down and close my eyes.

***

Then the visions begin.

The lightning field is several walls away, on the far side of the cabin, but I see it clearly. Eyes shut or eyes closed, it makes no difference. The same clear view displays itself. I tour the field from within it and from a distance, turning to view the rods in different formations, from different angles. Lightning slips down from the sky with exquisite accuracy to pass in through the points of these giant steel needles. As I study the sight, as I continue the tour, I note how the images also come with a variation. The rods absorb electricity from the sky, but they also spit it back. I watch twin forks of lightning shoot from steel tips to jag heavenwards.

I lie and watch the show for some time, absorbed in its wonder, before I suspect I am being ridiculous. I travel all this way, come out into the wilderness, and content myself with a vision inside a closed room. The scene is so real I presume it is happening in the outer world as I lie there. I get up to join the others and share the experience.

One person is reading. Others are chatting. Another is staring out across the field toward the mountains.

She jumps a little at the shock of the question, then smiles.

"No ...." She looks out over the landscape again. "I was just enjoying sitting here and doing nothing. It's not often I get to do that."

Next > The Mushroom Walk - part 3 of the sequel