Distance and Vision — Nevada Humanities

By Michael P. Branch

Tennessee Williams wrote that “…time is the longest distance between places.” That’s how it feels as we wrap up our second month of coronavirus quarantine and wonder what the future holds. Time seems to stretch out before us, becoming distorted and malleable as the days blend together imperceptibly. We look toward a horizon that recedes before us, refusing to remain in view.

But even as the quarantine has rendered our view of the metaphorical horizon cloudy and unfocused, a miraculous change has been wrought in our view of the actual horizon. As 2.6 billion people have abandoned cars and factories to shelter in place, the global carbon economy has ground to a halt. And while this shutdown has been detrimental to economic health, it has also cleared the air. By early April Nevada’s Clark County Department of Environment and Sustainability had reported a 33% reduction in nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, dangerous pollutants that compromise public health and have been linked to higher coronavirus death rates.

Each year I walk at least 1,000 miles on public lands in northern Nevada, so I’m accustomed to enjoying spectacular views of the vast distances that are the hallmark of the western Great Basin Desert. This is an immense landscape, one whose distances are among the greatest gifts it has to offer. Distance, after all, is what gives us perspective—on ourselves, our culture’s values, our shared future. When we gaze across this endless sagebrush ocean, or out over the isotropic immensity of a playa, or into the star studded desert sky at night, we experience the liberation of inhabiting a world that, thankfully, remains larger than ourselves.

But if the view of Nevada’s distances is always inspiring, for the past two months it has been spectacular in a way I could never before have imagined. When I look out over the valleys, everything appears so sharp as to make me feel that I’ve just put on glasses with the correct prescription for the first time in my life. The undulating hills are engraved on the cerulean sky with unimaginable precision. The once blurry serration of a distant ridgeline now pops with distinct rock outcroppings and the silhouettes of individual trees.

We writers are fond of using the language of sight metaphorically: we try to write with clarity, to offer a unique point of view, to keep our focus, to forge sentences that enact our creative vision. But what I see in this strange time is the beautiful, sharply delineated world that inspired that language of vision in the first place. In this new moment of clarity I glimpse what a post-carbon future could look like. This temporary condition of heightened vision is unlikely to last very long, but for now it has given me new energy to face the distance we still must cross to reach a healthy and sustainable future for our planet.

Michael P. Branch is Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. His recent books of creative nonfiction and humor engaging Nevada landscapes are Raising Wild (2016), Rants from the Hill (2017), and How to Cuss in Western (2018). He is currently writing a book about jackalopes.