There are still places in the desert where one can look out at many miles of landscape with no obvious human intrusion. True, you might have to face a certain direction, or carefully hide the railroads and evaporating pans you know are there behind a low hill, but there are still plenty of places to stand and look out at the world as it once was everywhere.
Is it ten miles across this plain, or a hundred? I could not tell, standing there. The pale range toward the left is the Old Woman Mountains, about thirty miles distant once I looked it up. Where were those low ranges to the right, almost invisible behind the earth’s curvature? The tall Harquahala Mountains in Arizona, 150 miles away? Something nearer? I could not guess to satisfy myself. No matter: 150 miles or 60, either one impossibly far off by foot. I imagined myself crossing that uncrossable distance. I would be swallowed up. I would be a pale fleck against an ocean of sand and lava.
Lava clinking beneath my feet, I grinned at the thought. The desert’s vastness solves all problems, reduces them to their true importance: the fleeting thoughts of an insignificant soul adrift in an immensity of jagged beauty.
Venture in or hang back and gaze in wonder, it is all the same to the wilderness. I have walked into these places far more often than most people I know, and they fill me with longing to know every square foot. I have not always felt this way. Twenty years ago this country filled me with not a little terror, and my longing was of a sidelong kind, stuck to the freeways and glancing out the side windows. Either way. Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
What would we be if we filled these places with artifice? If we tiled the seeming-endless planes with our roofs, our parking places? If we could no longer go up to the edge of a vast, living, unpeopled plain and peer into it? I am less than human when I am away from here.
In another fifty years, when I have turned 100, I want to come here and see the sky and earth unchanged except for new marks of wind and water. I want to gaze into it then, with what vision I have left, and see this same eternity. I want to hold the hand of a niece’s grand-daughter, point out at the long sloping view into Arizona, and tell her “This. This we saved for you. Now it’s your turn.”
hey chris. . .great reading you again. how are you? where are you? sounds like east mojave. i found this page from @AlterNet. it said “there are still open places in the desert.” i was going to say something dumb like: i hope so, then i saw it was you. looks like you are on twitter-i’ll follow you if i find you. i’m @verybrave (name of long-gone cat.) anyway, i’m glad to be in touch. i was going to go out there this winter but i’m too too broke. my last trip is w/pix on my blog: A Week in the Desert April 2008
http://leonardgreycloud.blogspot.com
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Howdy, sk! I see you found my twitter feed. (Anyone else wants it, it’s @canislatrans.)
Thanks, Chris. I’ve followed you for a long time… Always good. Always timely… On a geological scale… Thanks again…
Gosh, Chris, you really nailed this one. The power of these areas is so overpowering that they must be saved. I remember sitting quietly, watching the sun rise in the dessert, feeling both grounded and enlarged, becoming part of something ancient and ever-changing. It was such a powerful moment. Your writing brings it all back to me. Many thanks.
Chris…absolutely beautiful words (and image!)
Awesome post. I’m glad I read this one after I read the one about coyote lynching by the way, I agree with you on the use of that word).
It’s been so long since I’ve seen the desert or spent any time in Arizona. You make me want to go back. Thanks.
me too, man