Fox, William L. The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin.

Reno, NV: The

University of Nevada Press, 2000.

You can lay Valerie Kuletzs The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the

American West, Rebecca Solnits Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the

American West, and William Foxs The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin

on a continuum from left to right and map their respective focuses as they shift from the Native

American denizens of the Great Basin to the Great Basin itself. In The Tainted Desert, Kuletz

takes environmental racism through the operative of nuclear colonialism as the primary focus of

her book, whereas the effects of these racist policies on the local ecosystem, while more than an

afterthought, takes a backseat to the local population. As we move on to Solnits Savage Dreams,

the focus gradually shifts to where the Great Basin and the people who populate it, both Anglo

and Native populations, are equally represented. A further shift to the right and the Great Basin

itself becomes the primary focus of Foxs Void, Grid, & Sign. Along this very same continuum

we can also chart the subsequent disappearance of Native Americans in each work. With her

focus on environmental racism, Native Americans and Native American interests dominate

Kuletzs work. And while Western Shoshone anti-nuclear activism and struggles to regain their

homeland occupy a significant portion of Savage Dreams, Solnit not only spends a great deal of

time and effort documenting her own struggles and those of her fellow non-Native activists, she

also dedicates space to non-Native Downwinders; moreover, she allows these individuals to

speak in their own words while choosing to speak on behalf of her Native American counterparts

for whom she recants the stories they tell her rather than quoting them directly. Continuing to our

right, Native American presence is everywhere while Native Americans are nowhere to be

found. Two-thirds of Foxs work is devoted to hunting, discussing, and analyzing Native
American petroglyphs. Despite over a thousand petroglyphs peppered throughout the Great

Basin marking a profound Native American presence throughout the ages, Native Americans

make only a brief intervention in Foxs text when two elders are asked to come and examine

what is believed to be a newly discovered work of Art.

Not surprisingly, petroglyphs also make a brief, albeit important, appearance in Kuletzs

work. Kuletz is engaged in making Native American presence visible within the Great Basin.

Petroglyphs are one way to document the long arc of Native American habitation here, but

Kuletz shows how they can also be used to silence or make invisible the local indigenous

population. She cites official Navy publications documenting the fiftieth anniversary of the Coso

Military Target Range that proclaim, By the time the United States Navy chose the ancient

valley as a rocket laboratory 50 years ago, most of the Valley Shoshone were diluted into the

white mens lifestyles. Yet it was the United States Navy that preserved the haunting rock art

petroglyphsthat, at the end of 1993, no living Shoshone has been able to decipher. They are

kept as a guarded shrine deep inside the Navys 1.3 million acres (63). The Tainted Desert,

however, is a study in multiple viewpoints; countering this official Navy narrative, Native

spokespersons argue, But now it looks like theyve done bombing out there too because the

shells are out there still. We didnt get to see the petroglyphs but they say that from the

bombing that the rocks with the petroglyphs are breaking down (63-64).

Petroglyphs also make the briefest of appearances, about a paragraph to be exact, in

Solnits text. Whereas Kuletz draws on competing discourses and values of the land to make a

case of environmental racism perpetrated against the Native peoples of the Great Basin, Solnit is

interested, even tasked with documenting her own story. As such, the petroglyphs that Solnit

writes about are the ones she encounters personally, in Hot Creek Valley. At the mouth of the
canyon, Solnit writes, there was a whole wall of them, and there were more within. They were

beautiful complexes of rusty pattern on the pale face of the rock, strange figures and lines and

jagged bolts and circles. One of them looked like a man with antennae, like a butterfly or a

radio (89). Solnit tries to make sense of them, a project that occupies and ties two-thirds of

Foxs Void, Grid, & Sign together. And like Fox, she resigns herself that they exist at the limit of

imagination. Ultimately, though, she believes that they speak to a long historical Native presence

in the region.

Foxs own methodology is closer to Solnits than to Kuletzs. In fact, Fox cites Solnit as

one of his central influences in his book, and calls Void, Grid, & Sign a work of creative fiction.

Like Savage Dreams, Void, Grid, & Sign is written in a first person narrative, and marks Foxs

various passages into and through the Great Basin. As stated above, The Great Basin itself is the

protagonist of his book and Fox uses three primary road trips or crossings under the headings of

The Void, The Grid, and The Sign to tell its story. And like The Tainted Desert, Void, Grid, &

Sign represents a map-making venture. These road trips and ventures allow Fox to recreate a

cognitive map based on his experience and memories. I cant begin to inhabit the territory we

circumscribed, Fox intimates, until I re-create it in the indefinite territory of my imagination

through the act of writing it, relying on memory and constructing a narrative (51). In order to

comprehend the vastness of the Great Basin, Fox argues, one has engage it directly, physically.

Neither painting nor photography can communicate its scale, and architecture, Fox notes, can

only imitate it. Fox draws on the landscape art of Michael Hiezer and particularly his City

sculpture in the first part of his book, The Void, because according to Fox, it articulates the void

and allows us to enter it (52). In the second portion, The Grid, Fox delineates both the evolution

of cartography and exploration of the Great Basin, which allowed the United States to grid the
void, rationalizing it for individual ownership and exploitation. Fox then turns to language and

metaphor in The Sign to complete his journey and make sense of his experiences through the

Great Basin.

Void, Grid, & Sign, like The Tainted Desert and Savage Dreams, is also about visibility

and invisibility. For Kuletz, growing up in a militarized landscape meant,high-wire fences,

radar antennae, massive satellite communications dishes ... sonic booms, stealth aircraft, well-

maintained roads in the middle of nowhere earth-shaking explosions, military trucks and

personnel, unmarked trucks carrying explosives, jet trails guard towers, fencing and more

fencing, and everywhere government signs that read DO NOT ENTER (40). Fox also charts

the ubiquitous presence of the military within the Great Basin noting the hyper-visibility of

invisible and classified landscapes hidden from public view, like Area 51 and the Nevada Test

Siteinvisible lands bordered by very visible fencing and warning signs, armed helicopters, and

ground patrols. On multiple occasions Fox writes of invisible radio frequencies jammed by just

as invisible military operations, silences punctuated by nerve-wracking sonic booms, as well as

the uncanny silence of stealth fighters, which make themselves known by buzzing mountain

ridges while playing cat-and-mouse games with other Air Force aircraft. Even more alarming

were the warning signs: Danger/ Rockets May Land in this Area During Tests/ No Tests Today:

Road is Open in Case of Emergency/ Call __ or __ (169).

For Kuletz, China Lake Naval Weapons Center was an invisible spot on the map. For

Solnit, it was the Nevada Test Site. Fox, on the other hand, delineates the early history of the

Great Basin when the entire basin was a mere blank spot on early explorer maps. These explorers

encountered a disorienting spacea voidlargely uninhabited, undifferentiated, and devoid of

any significant landmarks upon which to form not only memories of the place, but internal
cognizant maps as well. The Great Basin was an internally draining land where the rivers flow

inland rather to the see. This was very confusing to these earlier explorers who set their minds

and tasks to finding the mythical San Buenaventura River, which supposedly ran from the

interior to the Pacific Ocean. To these early explorers, the Great Basin was a blank slate, emptier

than anything they had been accustomed to. Fox argues that the imagination transforms it into a

literal void where we can populate it with our desires and mythic inventions. Citing the June

1957 Life magazine article The Big Empty of the West, Fox argues that this notion of the void,

this emptiness or wasteland, made it easier to detonate nuclear weapons, expose the land to

nuclear fallout, as well storing nuclear and toxic waste. While various effects of nuclearism and

militarism are peppered through Void, Grid & Sign, as opposed to Kuletz, who puts it front and

center, Foxs primary concern is with our attachments to space and place, and specifically, the

Great Basin Desert. Where early explorers only saw the vastness and emptiness of the void, and

the military saw only exploitable wasteland, Fox touts the necessity and importance of big empty

spaces. Only in the void, Fox writes, a disorienting space we conceive of as being vacant and

thus a landscape of open possibilities, can we imagine ourselves to step outside of the boundaries

of what we know (4). Fox goes on to argue that we cannot mentally handle to void so we fill it

with our imagination and desires, we manipulate it and try to rationalize it with rectilinear grids

and make sense of it. We make mental representations of the world we experience and turn the

memories into cognitive maps. Thus, he writes, we turned land into landscape, space into

place (99).

Methodologically, Fox draws on art and art criticism to address the big empty through

Michael Heizers landscape art sculpture City. Interestingly enough, Solnit too, draws on art

when explaining with Richard Misrachs Canto series photographs of The Pit in Fallon, NV,
where all the livestock that die of unknown causes are discarded. Misrachs photographs, she

says, eliminated both horizon and distance with bodies, which had literally been thrown away

(40). In Driving by Memory, Fox will later expand upon how City also obliterates the horizon of

the Great Basin. In Void, Grid, & Sign, Fox notes its remoteness and scale. Only in photographs,

he claims, can anyone see it in its totality. Fox describes City as monumental sculpture, with its

vastness and enormity bordering on ancient Mayan cities. City, for Fox anticipates our

relationship to the void and to the Great Basin. The desert requires a full-bodied sensory

impression of it not limited to vision. This includes both the smell of sagebrush and the sounds of

not only silence or the wind, but also the singing dunes of Sand Mountain. To make sense of it

and for it to become meaningful, one has to embody it, to feel it, be in it. Immersing oneself in

the colossal constructions of Heizers City, Fox argues is one way to approximate the desert.

Architecture is one way to relate to the nature and visibility of space, which Fox further argues,

is socially constructed.

From the Void to the Grid to the Sign marks Foxs progression through the Great Basin.

Where Solnit supplies a cursory account of the history of the Great Basin through the lens of the

first contact between Euro and Native Americans, past the Treaty of Peace and Friendship

(1863), which provided safe passage through the desert for Anglo Americans while maintaining

Western Shoshone title to the land, and onto the Indian Claims Commission verdicts that stated

the Western Shoshone lost their title to the land through Anglo squatting, Fox delineates a

detailed history of the basin through the lens of exploration and cartography. In the second part

of Void, Grid, & Sign, Fox charts the cartographic efforts of the U.S. Army Corp of

Topographical Engineers in the 1830s as they tried to find the mythical Rio San Buenaventura

that would tie the nation together, from sea to shining see. When this proved fallacious, John C.
Freemont was sent to map the western expanse for settlement, but as Maj. Stephen H. Long of

the U.S. Corp of Engineers intimated, this land was Wholly unfit for cultivation and

uninhabitable for a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence (153). This

wasteland discourse takes front stage in Kuletzs work as she argues that this kind of land

valuation results in degradation and environmental ruin as it is seen as worthless in the eyes of

both scientific progressivism and capitalist mentalities. Such land, while unfit for agriculture, is

fit for the testing and storage of nuclear waste and weaponry. While Fox does account for the

militarization of the Great Basin, he is more concerned about how we perceive and experience it.

For him, the Great Basin is so large that you cannot grasp it. You cannot see it in its totality,

therefore we misperceive it and misunderstand it. Anticipating what John D. Dorst would call a

Westward way of looking, Fow writes, You can see long, long distances, sometimes more than

a hundred miles if youre up on one of the peaks. But the air is so dry and clear on most days

that where you expect to landforms to be softened by atmospheric haze, theyre instead standing

sharply defined at thirty and forty miles away (11-12).

To understand this expanse, Fox argues, we can fill it with our imagination or break it

down into manageable pieces, or both. The grid, Fox says, breaks down or rationalizes this

expanse into meaningful (read useful) segments. Fox narrates the history of the U.S. Geological

Survey, which gridded the basin into 7.5-minute quadrangles representing 2800 square miles of

latitude and longitude lines necessary for carving the basin up for private ownership.

Technology, and specifically the altimeter was pivotal to mapping the basins contours and

providing routes through mountainous terrain, first for westward expansion, then for the

transcontinental railroad. With the coming of the railroad, Fox claims, the nation found its

mythical Rio San Buenaventura. Cartography, Fox argues, maps spatial relationships providing a
pictorial representation of the land. But with all pictorial practices, Fox warns, they are inflected

with individual biases and desires. Their point of view originates from a vantage point from

which to represent all other relationships; therefore, they are inherently hierarchical. Maps, Fox

articulates, attempt to square the circle. They overlay flat, imaginary, rectilinear grids over a

very real spherical world, but they sa[y] nothing about the flow of water or time, nothing about

how the grid of streets will interact with alluvial drainages, and groundwater with radiation

(62).

Methodologically, to interrogate the grid, Fox moves from monumental landscape art to

Native American petroglyphs, and specifically the named glyph, The Sun and the Net. Because

the actual dating of rock art is imprecise, dating requires the additional task of dating the context

around each petroglyph. Fox uses these petroglyphs as direct evidence of Native occupation in

the Great Basin stemming back at least 6700 years, whereas Kuletz draws on ethnographic

studies that suggest Native occupation of the basin began some twelve thousand years ago.

Neither anthropology nor archeology, however, has come to a consensus regarding their

meaning. Due to the harsh environmental conditions and the primary need to secure food some

scholars read the labor intensive gridlines of The Sun and the Net as utilitarian prayers and

magical totems for a successful hunt, while others see them as cosmological calendars for

marking the seasons. Fox prefers a more embodied explanation stating how certain

hallucinogenics produce entopic phenomena, which he finds consistent with these petroglyphic

carvings.

Over the last third of Void, Grid, & Sign, Fox switches to language, communication, and

visual signs while relying on Native American rock art as evidence of the visible signs we leave

behind. Fox explains Steven Pinkers theory on the Language Instinct arguing that we as
humans have an inherent instinct to create signs. I find this theory to be too anthropocentric as

other species also create or leave signs behind to communicate as well. Referring back to

Heizers City, Fox writes how its geometric forms are not only a response to the environment,

but also carve out of it. Its structure, he argues, communicates not only a presence on the land,

but also an immersive experience within it. Petroglyphs, on the other hand, communicate and

generate desire. Whether communicating magical or spiritual significance or even just the

mundane activities of everyday life, Fox notes that, We can see the glyphs only in terms of our

own time and culture (193). Part III is about preservation. The Bureau of Land Management

(BLM) markets these rock art sites as potential tourist. Their signs not only point to the existence

of rock art sites not visible from the road and highways, but ironically, as Fox claims, they may

also generate too much attention to these forgotten sites and thus accelerate their deterioration in

spite of BLM preservationist strategies. Ultimately, Fox argues, these signs represent our anxiety

to control the uncontrollable, our fear and incomprehension of the void. We attempt to wrestle

control away from nature through division, through gridding the void, and mapping it to make

sense of it. These maps represent our desire to rationalize the vast extent of the Great Basin.