Barren land stretches into the distance. But there is no horizon. Rather, the expanse of desert seems encounter a silvery shimmering wall. A sort of mural moves on the wall, the simulacrum, I suppose, of a motion picture. A group of elongated figures, shaped a bit like Giacometti sculptures, float in the air. Next to them is a white bus. The bus moves erratically, creeping away from the floating figures, then, reversing its direction, backing and turning to return to the assembled people. The wheels of the bus are also untethered, floating on ribbons of pale, lunar light. The figures begin to move, slowly advancing toward the white bus, but distances are foreshortened and make no sense – it seems that the bus, hovering over the figures in the desert occupies an entirely different space than the people. They will amble toward the white bus forever without reaching it.
I saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana in the auditorium of an art museum many years ago. The bus and the apparitions of people standing inexplicably in the empty desert was a mirage, as the film’s title suggests, a fata morgana. Herzog used his camera to capture something that was visible but not real. The film’s narrator (I think it is the German critic Lotte Eisner) says that Herzog and his camera crew drove across the Sahara desert in the direction of the bus and its stranded passengers. But there was nothing at all where the image had appeared floating in featureless sky. In the movie, the narrator tells us that barren desert extended for hundreds of miles in all directions around the place where the camera documented the mirage – there was absolutely nothing anywhere near. Later, Herzog provided a commentary on the film. He amended his account of the distances involved – “maybe, these people and the bus were standing twenty miles away,” he says in his later remarks. He tells us that the day was an inferno and that he and his crew were desperately thirsty. Buses in the Sahara deserts carry coolers full of ice and soft drinks and Herzog and his cameraman hoped to catch up with the white vehicle to get some ice to cool their tongues and cans of Coca-Cola. But there was absolutely nothing in the place where they had sighted the mirage.
When I was a child, on rainy afternoons, I used to explore the old 78 rpm recordings stored in stacks in a corner of our basement. Some of the ten-inch wide disks were kept in a sort of loose-leaf album, the records protected by clear plastic sheaths. The album was a bit like the books in which photographs were kept in the late fifties and early sixties. When you turned the pages carelessly, the records slipped out of their protective sleeves and fell onto your lap. (This wasn’t different from flipping through a picture album – often, the polaroid snapshots detached from the page and fluttered like moths spiraling down to the floor.) Other 78 rpms were simply stacked in piles on a shelf next to where my parents kept stacks of National Geographic magazines. I recall the dim light in the unfinished basement room, the bare light bulb over the washer and dryer with chain drooping down from the socket, tool-boxes and sacks of nails, and the ominous drain in the floor, about the same dimensions as the records that I was examining. In the paneled part of the basement, we had a cheap record player, designed for LP records, but there was an adapter that could be inserted over the spindle so that 78s could be played – of course, you had to adjust the turntable speed.
Most of my father’s 78 rpm recordings were jazz tunes by Louis Armstrong. But there were also some stacks of classical records: the third movement from Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, some Beethoven as well – a 78 RPM record will play about three minutes of music and, so, you had to stack the discs on the spindle to listen to the longer classical selections. Sometimes, this worked and sometimes it didn’t. The old 78s were thick and heavy to hold; they had a raw mechanical quality, like the nails and tools and fading National Geographics kept in the basement storage room. (People reading these words today may have trouble understanding the dense, almost ceramic, quality of those records. They were colored like shards of stained glass and not fragile, in fact, robust and cool and durable. You could pitch the 78 rpms like frisbees across a room and they wouldn’t break. The loud parts of the music were visible in the striations grooving the records – volume was made manifest in the thickness of the grooves. There was a synaesthetic quality to the records; you could feel the sound with your fingertips – the grooves in the vinyl made the music audible even before you played the 78.)
Among the 78 rpm recordings, I found a couple of discs by the Sons of the Pioneers. I recall these records as turquoise in color, a little scuffed with frequent use, but playable. My memory is haphazard and plays tricks on me; memories are like mirages. I’ve always recalled that the disc played “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on one side and “Cool Water” on its inverse. (Research on the subject persuades me that this was unlikely. In fact, I now know that “Cool Water’s” B-side was “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” – the disc was pressed in 1947. However, for the purposes of this essay, I’ll describe the 78 as I recall it: heavy, thick, the color of Navajo turquoise, cold as ice to the touch, and pressed with “Cool Water” on one side and playing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” when you turned the disk over. This is a fiction, most probably, although who knows for sure – the actual 78 rpm recordings are lost in the abyss of time.)
My father told me that my grandfather (his father), a Lutheran pastor in a small-town in central Nebraska had once preached a sermon taking “Cool Water” as its subject. How exactly this was accomplished, of course, I don’t know and the anecdote seems improbable. I never knew my grandfather but he had been educated in a seminary in Germany – at least, that’s where he completed his training in theology – and seems to have been a rather dour, formidable man. He died when I was very young, too little to have any recollection of him at all. But, it seems that bending the scripture to the text of a Sons of the Pioneers pop song might have been out of character for the old preacher – however, people are surprising and I suspect it’s not easy to preach, once in German and twice in English, every Sunday with other pastoral duties, visiting the sick and baptizing children, marrying couples and burying the dead, and, even on occasion, traveling out into the dark country on Prom Night or New Year’s Eve to administer last rites to the victims of car crashes on the narrow, lonesome highways and, so, I suppose the popular tune (it reached number 9 on the charts in 1947) might have offered itself as a convenient subject for a sermon on God’s grace and the temptations of the Devil. Albion, where my grandfather was called to Zion Lutheran Church, is on the edge of the Sand Hills, a vast terrain of dunes clad in green and yellow grass, rolling like waves on the sea to the horizon. People living in that village were either farmers or ranchers and, I would guess, that the cowboy tunes performed by the Sons of the Pioneer were likely very well-known and beloved, canonical, as it were, for that time and place.
“Cool Water” begins with an ambling rhythm, a clip-clopping figure that imitates the gait of a mule making its way through the desert: “All day I faced the barren waste without the taste of water – cool clear water.” The mule’s name is apparently “Dan” and the cowboy riding the animal under the blazing sun addresses his mount. In fact, the song is a dramatic monologue addressed to Dan, the loyal long-suffering mule and the cowboy’s only companion. The singer laments the heat of the day and finds himself deceived by mirages of “cool, clear water.” (In a high tenor voice, one of the trios singers keeps repeating over and over again the word “water” – the effect is plaintive, the high echo suggesting the cowboy’s overwhelming thirst.) Of course, the cowboy is tempted to urge his mule forward in the direction of the watery mirages on the horizon: “Oh Dan don’t you see that the big green tree where the water’s running free? cool, clear water...” But there is no “big green tree” and no overflowing spring at its base. Rather, the devil “spreads the burning sand” with the mirage of water. So the cowboy admonishes his faithfully plodding donkey: “Keep a movin’ Dan, don’t you listen to that man, he’s a devil not a man who spreads the burning sand with water.” As the song continues, the cowboy becomes more and more desperate. He prays for night fall and respite from the blazing sun and, at last, hopes that the dawn will bring them closer to “cool, clear water.”
The song is haunting and has a nightmarish quality; there’s something hallucinatory about the melody and it’s lyrics – the song seems like the last words of a cowboy doomed to a thirsty death. The conventional and prosaic clip-clop of the mule’s hooves and the echoed refrain “water” sung in a voice that is nearly falsetto contrasts with the increasing panic and desperation of the cowboy crossing the desert. Once you have heard this song, you’re not likely to forget it and, in fact, the tune has a fascinating quality and has been recorded by many different artists. Bob Dylan and Burl Ives are said to have sung versions of “Cool Water” and there are many country-western recordings of the tune. Fleetwood Mac released a nice rendition of “Cool Water” as side B to “Gypsy” in 1982. Sometimes, Jimi Hendrix covered the song in concert. Joni Mitchell sings a duet of “Cool Water” with Willie Nelson in 1988 – she changes the lyrics to give the tune an environmental theme: “Some devil’s had a plan / Buried poison in the sand / Don’t drink it, man / It’s in the water – cool, clear water.” Joni Mitchell’s version is characteristically ethereal and her voice remains as cool and consolatory as water sipped from a metal canteen in the desert.
“Cool Water” was written by Bob Nolan, a singer born in Winnipeg in 1908. Nolan wrote the lyrics in High School. At that time his family was living in Tucson, Arizona and so he had some familiarity with the “burning waste” of the desert. Nolan formed the trio, “The Sons of the Pioneers” in 1933 with Leonard Slye, better known by his stage name, Roy Rogers, and Tim Spencer. It seems that the “Sons of the Pioneers” began performing “Cool Water” around 1937, but the song wasn’t recorded until ten years later when it was released with “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” on a 78 rpm disk.
“Cool Water” describes a mirage of the “lower” or “inferior” type. In the taxonomy of mirages, there are “inferior” images – that is, optical effects that are displayed below the horizon – and “superior” mirages. “Superior” mirages include the fata morgana in which the illusory image is projected above the horizon and appears as a shimmering band floating in the sky.
Most “inferior” mirages arise from a hot layer of air immediately above the ground. Light encountering this stratum of warm air is bent downward. By virtue of this refraction, the blue of the sky is deflected into an image shimmering under the horizon. Since this sky is bright and luminous with blue-grey light, the mirage appears as a body of water, a lake, glistening in the remote distance. Mountains or copses of trees or, in the Midwest, grain elevators hover over this lake as if they are islands in the quivering expanse of illusory water. “Inferior” mirages of this kind are called “the picture” (chittram) in Rajasthan where such phenomena are common. In Sanskrit, “inferior” mirages are named Mrigtrishna meaning “the thirst of the gazelles,” the notion being that gazelles drawn by the promise of water will wander into the parched desert and die of thirst there. Not surprisingly, in Islamic and Hindu literature, “inferior” mirages are commonly invoked as metaphors for the vanity of human desire – we yearn for something that is merely illusory and, perhaps, perish in our vain pursuit of that phantasm. Probably, my grandfather invoked the song “Cool Water” is that context.
“Superior” mirages are more flamboyant and alarming. These kinds of images appear over flat terrain when there is a temperature inversion. Ordinarily, the air immediately above the earth is warmer than at higher levels. But, when there is a cold stratum of air, squashed to earth by warmer temperatures above, a fata morgana may arise. These mirages appear above the horizon, stretched out across shimmering ribbon of sky. Often the fata morgana are phantom cities, strange cubical towers and ramparts, or the reflections of objects on the horizon duplicating themselves in distorted form overhead. Indeed, some of these mirages seem bound by wavering threads, shadowy pulpy excrescences, to their originals below. The air refracted upward, above the horizon, acts as a magnifying lens and, in some cases, the images projected into the sky are much larger than their (real) earth-bound counterparts. On other occasions, the projection tilts or topples the objects at the horizon together forming strange and grotesque chimera in the sky. Fata Morgana can have an eerily precise and lifelike aspect – the name alludes to Morgan le Fay, a siren who appears in the Arthurian legends, luring men to the deaths at sea. Some spectacular pictures of “superior” mirages exist: of course, Herzog captured one of these illusions in his film Fata Morgana and the first photograph ever depicting any kind mirage, a “superior” apparition, was published in June of 1885. The picture was taken at Madras and shows a sort of dinghy with a high hull rowed by a eight men across a busy harbor; in the distance, a steamer with masts rides on the ocean horizon. The photo when taken, “quite by accident” it is alleged, shows a ghostly dinghy, a so-called Massula boat hovering directly over the real vessel with the apparition of the more remote steamer to its side. Temperature inversions are more common in cold climates than warm and, so, the Arctic skies display this phenomenon frequently. There is an 1888 (or 1889) photograph taken by one Professor R. G. Willoughby named “Silent City” sold for 75 cents a print when first published and much-reproduced. The picture depicts a city of gabled house-tops and shingled roofs studded with chimneys emerging from the mists of the Muir Glacier; behind the foreground of the city as seen from an aerial perspective, there seem to be some grandiose structures, government buildings with white columns or some sort of northern European palace, dissolved partially in the acid of foggy distance. (I think the city may be represented to be St. Petersburg or Bristol or something on that order – certainly, no city of this magnitude existed anywhere near the Muir Glacier in Alaska in 1888. The picture isn’t convincing to me and seems to be a double exposure of some sort and, although the image is supposed to depict the “silent city” protruding from the glacier, for the life of me, I can’t see any glacial ice in the photograph.)
In North America, the most famous manifestation of a “superior mirage” or fata morgana is the “ghost rider in the sky.” In the deserts of the Great Basin, Indians claimed to see colossal ghost riders trotting through the clouds. The ghost riders are terrifying in appearance, said to be a giant White man writhing in agony on his horse and a Native American woman, shriveled and cadaverous. A story accompanied these visions and explained their origin: an Omaha warrior named “First Thunder Falls” lived in the mountains of Oregon with his beautiful “Bird Woman” (Zecana). (It’s not clear why an Omaha warrior has wandered into the alpine meadows of Oregon but the story is supposed to be a legend and so disbelief must be suspended.) A Spanish trader visits the couple and, unbeknownst to First Thunder, rapes Zecana. The trader lures First Thunder to a “boiling spring” that, like the hot springs and vents at Delphi, has oracular power. First Thunder pays obeisance to the bubbling well by throwing some beads into the water as an offering. But the spring belches the beads back onto its surface and refuses to accept the tribute. In the water and steam, First Thunder beholds the face of Bird Woman, now distraught and wild-eyed with madness. She mutters that the Spaniard raped her. First Thunder bides his time. He returns to the high meadows of Oregon with the Spaniard, disables the man, and, then, straps him naked to a wild horse. Zecana, the Bird Woman, has committed suicide and, in a macabre gesture, First Thunder binds the decaying body face-to-face with the Spaniard. Then, driving the horse with the Spaniard and Zecana’s corpse coupled in grotesque embrace, he trots across the deserts of the Great Basin, sometimes pouring a trickle of water between the White Man’s lips to keep him alive in this torment as long as possible. It is this apparition, the Ghost Riders in the Sky, that haunts the Great Desert wilderness. (This tale was printed in 1837 in the British periodical Bentley’s Miscellany, entitled “Nights in an Indian Lodge.” The story was published anonymously but the probable author is Charles Fenno Hoffman. Hoffman wrote a number of stories of this sort and was admired by Edgar Alan Poe among others. He went mad in 1849 and spent the last thirty years of his life and spent the last thirty years of his life confined in the Harrisburg State Hospital. The tale of Zecana and First Thunder bears a passing resemblance to Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, particularly with respect to the motif of the tortured victim tied to a horse and driven endlessly across the empty land – in Mazeppa’s case, the steppes of Ukraine. Tchaikovsky wrote an opera on the subject of Byron’s 1819 poem and there is an alarmingly grim canvas by Gericault showing Mazeppa’s torture.)
Of course, everyone knows the Sons of the Pioneer’s song “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. The song was written by man named Stan Jones and has been recorded innumerable times. Jones was the son of a doctor and raised in Douglas, Arizona. Although he presented himself as a simple cowpoke, Jones had a Masters Degree in Zoology from Berkeley. Jones knocked-about the West for a few years, worked as a prize-fighter and cowboy, and ended-up as a Park Ranger in Death Valley National Park (then Monument). When John Ford, the film director, was working in the Park, Jones met him and became drinking buddies with the irascible movie-maker. (If you wanted to be friends with John Ford, you had to drink with him.) Ford recognized that Jones had an agreeable squashed-looking face, probably the result of boxing, and that he was photogenic. And so, Ford cast Jones in several of his movies and used him as a Wild West consultant on The Searchers. Jones later went to work for Disney Studios and stars as John Wesley Powell in Ten Who Dared, a yarn about the exploration of the Grand Canyon, generally thought to be one of Disney’s very worst movies.
Stan Jones claimed he learned the legend of the “Ghost Riders” from an elderly Apache who lived on a mountain near Agua Prieta in Sonora. The song was first recorded in 1948. The most famous version is the 1949 recording by the Sons of the Pioneers. The song has a furious attack, a sort of sonic stampede. The music gallops wildly forward and a French Horn sounds a bugle call. The lyrics tell us that “(a)n old cow poke was riding out one dark and windy day”. Pausing to rest atop a ridge, he sees a herd of spectral cattle driven across the gloomy sky, and “up a cloudy draw.” The cattle have hooves “made from steel” and sharp black horns and their brands are still on fire, blazing overhead in the clouds. Ghost riders vainly pursue this herd of nightmare, stampeding cattle, crying out the iconic summons “Yippie ay a (as in day), Yippie ay o (as in woe).” The ghost riders are gaunt and their shirts are sweat-soaked. One of the ghost riders calls the cowpoke by name and tells him that he must mend his ways or be condemned to hell, and, like this apparition, “tryin’ to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.” Hell hangs over the dismal cobalt-blue ranges of desert mountains. (There’s another fine recording of this song featuring Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash – this version has spidery, high-pitched wails on steel guitar and a noteworthy guitar solo.) One wonders what Pastor Beckmann might have made of this song.
The most famous historical appearance of the superior mirage “ghost riders” occurred in what is now North Dakota on May 17, 1876. On that day, the Seventh Cavalry under the command of George Custer left Fort Abraham Lincoln, marching westward in pursuit of the hostile Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull. The column consisted of 150 wagons, Arikawa scouts, and, of course, the armed horsemen. Libby Custer, George’s wife, watched the column departing from camp in the morning. She recorded that the weather was uncommonly humid with mist covering the ground. Above the column of cavalry and caissons, Libby saw ghostly apparitions of the horsemen and their wagons, a duplicate phalanx plodding westward across the green, treeless plains. Mrs. Custer recalled that the wives of the Arikawa warriors accompanying the column fell to the ground wailing and, when she saw the apparition, she felt a premonition of “the fate of the heroic band.” The column marching westward was two miles long and the mirage in the sky encompassed half of the force, projected in giant form against the mist still swirling opposite the rising sun.
This writing imagines a fantasy artifact: a turquoise blue-green lens of vinyl, impressed with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on one side and with “Cool Water” on its inverse. The 78 rpm record is by the Sons of the Pioneers. “Cool Water” depicts an “inferior mirage” of the type of “the thirst of the gazelles.” “Ghost Riders in the Sky” presents a “superior mirage” like the “Silent City”. This exact record never existed. Like its content, it’s a mirage.
Note:
(I rely, in part, on The Waterless Sea, A curious history of mirages by Christopher Pinney, a Reaktion Book published in 2018 in London; the books are distributed in the U.S. by the University of Chicago. Curiously, the book was withdrawn from the public library in Richardson, Texas, a place that I once lived. My family moved to Texas and lived there for about 18 months in Richardson around 1968. The book has a curious, inexplicable to me, convention used in the captions to the pictures, but not in the text itself. In words like “construct” the “ct” and “st” letters are joined by a ligature, a curved diacritical mark, emanating from the “t” and linking that character to the preceding consonant; the effect is to treat the “st” and “ct” as a digraph. Apparently, ligatures of this sort were devised when moveable type was invented to keep characters from colliding in unseemly ways. The convention went out of currency in the 18th and 19th century, but seems to have been recently revived in some computer-generated orthography.)
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