Death Valley Millennium

Jack and I were excited about the upcoming millennium in the last months of 1999. On December twenty-ninth, we set out in a trusty silver blue Honda Civic—my car loves adventures like this—bringing with us lots of New Year’s snacks such as roasted almonds, oatmeal cookies, trail mix, a wedge of Fontina cheese and sesame crackers, and some notebooks to sketch and write in as we awaited the hallowed midnight hour.

On New Year’s Eve day, we drove through the snow-dusted Panamint Range and then down into Death Valley. Hushed in its vastness, the valley stretched as far as we could see in either direction, contained on both sides by the mauve mountains of California on the west and Nevada on the east. In the fast-lowering sunset light it changed colors every minute, finally agreeing on indigo as we approached a long, deep green mesquite grove that stretches across the lowest part of the Valley, near Badwater.

We had agreed in advance there was to be no communal campground on the special night. Jack liked privacy, and he loved the idea of carving out our own special territory in the vastness of Death Valley. We were going to find our own special place to spend the last night of the old millennium, outdoors under the stars in the lowest point of elevation in the country.

“How about that little outcropping?” I asked. The hill looked like a Martian landscape—it seemed small in the deceptive dimensions of the immense desert—dotted with bits of maroon volcanic rock. Must be iron oxide, we agreed—how exciting. Even though midnight was hours away, we grabbed flashlights and scouted it out. The rocks were sharp and assertive, but the hillside facing the road appeared to be a welcoming and gentle slope of relatively soft sand. We walked back to the car, making a note of the mileage between our millennium spot and the dining room in the Ranch at Furnace Creek, where we planned to get a reasonable meal and while away some time.

Dressed for a summer evening’s hike even though it was the end of December, we stretched out our dinner of burgers, fries, and salad for as long as we could, poked around the gift store, bought a few bottles of water and some chocolate, and headed back to the car for our date with history.

We had a digital timer that would help us know exactly when the Hour had arrived. We sat in the car for another two hours, happy to be inside the relative warmth of the trusty Honda. Jack is just a few inches taller than I am, so we both fit neatly into the rather compact front seat. Death Valley was a balmy seventy-five degrees in the afternoon, but the temperature quickly plummeted when the sun went down. Putting on our second layer of sweatshirts and down parkas, we gathered our holiday supplies—emergency almonds, water, that special bottle of champagne, the timer, one sleeping bag, and each other—and left the sanctuary of the car for the appointed party spot in the rugged desert.

Once we settled in the sleeping bag—which was not made for two people (even two relatively small people) and refused to zip completely on one side—we looked up into the forty-minutes-til-midnight sky. I’m quite sure that my fingers had turned blue inside their cotton mittens. But we were humbled by what we saw above us: stars, in numbers so lavish we could practically read by their light. We recognized our favorite constellation Scorpio, the planet Mars, and the Big Dipper low in the sky practically touching the mountaintops. Stars pressed against our eyes, our lips, our hands. We were speechless with enchantment. All of this starlight, so close, powdering the mineral air of the desert. No city lights or passing cars, nothing to obscure all of this transcendent beauty. The millennium scarcely mattered. We gazed and gazed. We kissed, and then we fell asleep.

The cold woke us up a few hours later. I checked my watch. 1:30 am. No! Our timer had failed to go off. The millennium had come and gone.

“I can’t believe it,” Jack groaned. “I bought that stupid timer just to count down to midnight.”

We had missed the moment. One century turned into another while we were fast asleep. Too frozen and tired to open the champagne, we grabbed our gear and walked back to the car. Folding back the front seats as far as they would recline, we dozed until first light, covered by the sleeping bag and the sweatshirts. Then we headed up out of the vast valley as the sun rose on the first day of the bright new year, the year 2000.

We never opened that special bottle of New Year’s Eve champagne. To this day it sits in our refrigerator, still encased in its grubby red foil wrapping, a reminder of the night at the end of the century, the night our bodies filled up with stars.