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Desert: Love

9th Nov 2024 in

I wrote this when I was in my early 30s. I remember taking the trip described below as though it happened yesterday. The campground, the entire desert was so full of thought and so empty of other people. I usually went camping with friends, but this was a solo trip that I hoped would wrap my mind around some of the problems that were happening in my life at the time. On the way back home a few days later I considered my life to be trouble-free.

 


Desert: Love

by Kent Duryée

 

Heat glistens and shimmers on a lonesome ribbon of desert road about two hours east of Barstow in the eastern California desert. It’s July, and at 2:00 in the afternoon, I’m the only one on this particular stretch of Historic Route 66. I chose this all-but-abandoned route instead of the high-tech, high-speed, high-traffic I-40, just a few miles to the north, out of a sense of nostalgia and yearning. Nostalgia for simpler, not necessarily better times, which I never saw, and a yearning to lose the fetters of techno-industrial society. I drive at 70 MPH across the patched pavement, feet first into the anarchic heat of the desert summer.

The shimmering, 120-degree heat produces mirages, (Arabic for “night visions” or dreams), of water pooling across the asphalt in the distance ahead. I can almost hear the Creosote and Brittle Brush cracking under the pounding heat. Vultures soar overhead. A long train makes its lonely way eastward, toward the middle of the continent, matching my route, but at its own speed, that of turbines, and diesel. The train itself seems dwarfed by the magnitude of the distances yawning all around it. The vast vault of crystalline blue sky that reaches above everything from the sun-scorched, varnished hills in the east, to the black, sinister volcanic cinder cones that rise above the dry lake to the south, only enhances the insignificance of the mile-long freight.

From north to south, east to west, there is not a single habitation, save for some ghost towns left behind from the decades of the Depression and Dust Bowl. These towns have names like Amboy, Cadiz, Chambless, and Essex. The names have a certain, solitary ring to them. Having never seen them in their heyday of the early portion of this swiftly waning century. They are named, uniquely, in alphabetical order from west to east. During the era of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and through World War Two, these towns provided the venue for the second great westward migration. Today, the train, the vultures, and I, are the only visible forms of ambulatory life. Gettin’ our kicks on Route 66.

Why I came to this desolate place isn’t as important as what I found. Or rather what might be there to find. I haven’t decided yet whether I found it, or indeed found anything at all. We all go down to our own desert. For some of us, the desert is found in shopping malls. For others, it is found in fast cars, furs, luxurious cruises, or other forms of entertainment. Others of us find our desert in a vista of rugged, ice-carved mountains, gained from a considerable height and climb. Still others of us find the solace of the desert in the up and down rolling swells of the sea, with wind billowing in the fat belly of sail above, and others find it in their own living room within a book, or watching the Tee Vee, gawd help us.

But we go there. We go in search of ourselves, and what lies beneath and inside our minds. At least we all should. And when we go, often what we encounter scares us. Sometimes what we find in our own, personal deserts, is too awful to look at and we back away in horror.

Other times, we find love. The capacity of the human heart for love is only matched by the infinite stretch of the Universe.

Always though, there is something in the desert that leads us to peer within, under the gaudy overlay of our daily lives, and to try to catch a glimpse of ourselves as we are basically; naked and small under the eternity of the sky.

Pounding my vehicle through the intense summer sun, I wondered exactly why it is that I return, and what it is that I am looking for. I love the desert in any season of the year, from summer heat to winter snow, autumn chill to spring bloom. I love the vast openness and silence that mirrors the soul, that same, ineffable fullness of empty space that rests in the eyes of a newborn. Anything is possible, and everything is waiting to become. The incipient moment of birth and the finality of death are encompassed in an immense, rolling plain punctuated by buttes, mesas, and mountain ranges. The journey of the soul embodied in time and space and rock. If I’m looking for my soul, it must lie just over the next mesa, just beyond the furthest mountain range, or around the next bend in a white, sandy, dry wash. I always return, but find joy in finding what waits for me next. Next in the infinite, isolated heart of the desert.

In this place of boundless thought, I wondered about my life, and where it was that I was going at the time. I needed time and space to once again ground myself in the reality that slips by us in our day-to-day lives that are so often overcome by intrusions of man-made interference, the artificial, and the technological; e-mail, websites, computers, and the infinite array of things that denude our individuality. My mind drifted, languishing among the vultures, while I glanced repeatedly down at the gauges on the dashboard to ensure that I was not destined to become dinner for those circling, black-robed, philosophic, long-winged birds. Slim chance of that, actually; plenty of water in the back, food, shelter, light; but a needless inconvenience breaking down, so far from help…and the nearest bar.

I drove on. My destination was a familiar camp in the mountains that tower above Kelso, yet another ghost town of the wild and woolly free market expansion days of the Robber Barons with their steel rails and steam engines, and the forced migration of the Dustbowl. My camp is safely lofted above the furnace of the desert floor into the pinyon-juniper woodland at almost 6,000 feet. I’m a desert rat, but I like my creature comforts as much as the next person.

When I reached camp after driving 30 or so miles of seldom-used dirt road, I set up my tent and went for a walk. I came to the edge, a precipice of volcanic rock that demarcated the void from solid earth, and gazed into the sunset flaring orange and red and yellow in the west, across the valley so far below. Bats began their nightly reverie as I looked out, and I wondered where the closest person was. I saw, as if in answer to my question, a set of headlights appear on a road that must have been 50 miles away by line of sight. I watched these lights slowly moving across the desert floor as the shadows continued to lengthen and darken, until night enfolded me in its great, good arms, with stars unleashing their silent yet somehow audible, white noise above. I was decidedly alone.

Why is it that I love this place of extremes so much? It occurred to me that part of the answer might lie in why we love another person. I considered what it is that makes a person fall in love, and what it is about people that attracts us to them in such an intimate way. We meet a person and grow to love them through shared thoughts, attitudes, and experiences, but there is more. Much more. The spark of love, so ill-defined, lies within us all. Sometimes it’s buried so deeply that we can’t see it, but it’s still there. In others, love is like a badge worn on the sleeve, unmistakable and burning with a steady, even light.

My own experiences with love have been equally as intense as my love of the desert. I have loved the glance over the shoulder, the fall of hair down the feminine back, the turn of an ankle, the stretch of skin over the pregnant belly. I’ve loved the anger and tears, the laughter and happiness. I’ve been in, and fallen out of love, but that emotion stays the same from one to the next, and someday, maybe I’ll find the last one, that Ultimate One, but that lies in the future.

For the moment I sat and wondered how this love of ours, for people and places, can be as profound as it is, and yet we haven’t a clue as to the how or why of it. And then, the word “sacred” drifted into my mind like a faint and silent meteor, falling through the night. Terry Tempest Williams says, “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found.”

Maybe that’s something like what love is, as well. By opening yourself up to someone else, and in the act of not hiding from them, you are found. I sat on my rock with my legs crossed and allowed the beat of my heart to rock my body back and forth, as I watched the stars in their journey across the night. Doing what it was that I had come to do in the desert, I looked within myself at a deeper level than is possible in our manufactured, technologically industrial world that we call our day-to-day. A shooting star arced high over the valley that stretched below; bats continued to swoop around me making their sonar, clicking noise, finding themselves, pursuing their day-to-day habits in the world of rock and stars and space. No final answers to the great questions of the Universe occurred to me, no great epiphanies. However, I was there in the midst of it all. I was simply myself, under the stars in a silent place without intrusion.

Across the valley below, the car’s headlights dimmed and evaporated in the heat waves of the cooling Earth. There was no place to hide.

 

 

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