How it all will end

There be may no better place on earth to glimpse the awful power of nature over us weakling humans than Death Valley.



Even getting there is an ordeal, though nowhere near as much so as it was 150 years ago, when pioneers tried to migrate its cracks and valleys to reach a better world.



I wonder how many of them ended up as simply another pile of bones here in Death Valley.



This is an awful, lovely place, where mirages and illusions lead you on, only to betray you cruelly in the end.



There is no potable water here, only "badwater."



All around, the austere beauty of the place mesmerizes. The patterns in rocks and the whiteness of crystallized salt urges you on, as if you face no mortal danger.



But you do, and something deep inside confirms that this is not a place to linger.



As he fierce sun burns into this place, raising temperatures above 120 degrees, your mind becomes confused, you start seeing things where there is nothing but a sweet siren, beckoning, urging you on. "Come to me," she sings sweetly upon the hot, dry dead air.

Your thirsty lips curl into the kiss of death.



Meanwhile the vultures keep a watchful eye, measuring your girth, imagining the meal to come. Their eyes make me shudder.



There are very few remnants of human habitation here, and none who tried to live in this place lived to tell its tale. They all died.



Rather, this is a valley of ghosts.



This is the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere, hundreds of feet below sea level.



There is no one here, only the echoes of what might have been.

***

Dear Reader:

And all of this time, you thought I was describing Death Valley? Come now, that is only the story of the picture, not the soul. What I was actually describing was Silicon Valley, where fools reign, where emotional idiots call the shots, where arrogant asses, full of themselves, carry on, oblivious that very soon, their world will come to ruin, just as did this, the deadest of earth's many dead places.

And who will mourn this unworthy class? Not I, my lord, not I. May their bones rot and whiten under the unforgiving sun, and may black crows gather to peck out their eyeballs, as the less privileged people move on, stepping gingerly over their rotting flesh as it devolves into the mere soil under all of our feet that represents the ultimate fate of all people, rich or poor, throughout all of planetary history.

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