My Desert

How many times have I been in this place? How many times have I imagined it when in need of escape? Here, the sky surrounds me like water. If I tilt my head up just a little, blue is all that I can see. I could be floating but for the bedrock beneath me.

I sit on the top of a hill, rocky, sandy, and prickly with barrel cactus, ocotillo, lechuguilla and sotol. The landscape all around me is rocky, sandy and prickly, an extension of my hill in an endless desert of soil and sky without end. The only break in this scene is the Rio Grande snaking through my view, cutting me off from a land that looks exactly like this, but is Mexico. I could swim there, easily, if it was legal and I was willing to spend some time in a Mexican prison.

Actually, what is more likely, I would arrive at the other side without anyone noticing me at all. I would find the other side to be exactly like this side and swim back because I know that this side has a trailer with a cold shower and warm beer.

The sun’s movement changes the whole aspect of my view by the moment, shifting shadows so quickly it looks like a time lapse recording. Time moves much more slowly here than in the city, but the sun moves faster. I put my hands on the limestone beneath me and feel the cool hardness under my skin. I sit beside a ring of broken and reddened stones.

To another they would be rocks, inconsequential, totally unnoticed. But through my eyes they hold so much meaning. They ground me in this place. They ground me on this planet. They ground me in humanity, which aside from myself seems to be absent here, but I know better. These stones were used by ancient people to build an oven. In that oven, they cooked otherwise inedible yucca hearts to make cakes of mushy, fibrous carbohydrate-rich sustenance. Four thousand years ago people stood on this spot and used these very rocks, broken and reddened not by time or geographical mechanism but by manmade fire and human use.

I love the desert. You can send your soul in all directions and it will find no resistance. The ground here is ancient. The same ground that prehistoric people walked on. The desert feels primeval, but it also feels new. There is something mystical, something fundamental about the desert. As I watch, the sky begins to change color on one side, the blue slowly giving way to gold, orange and crimson, then purple, deep cobalt and finally black, milky with stars. The air turns cold and I have to go find shelter, just like thousands of generations of people before me. It may be prickly and seem inhospitable. I certainly wouldn’t want to subsist on yucca hearts and snared rabbits. Nonetheless, to me the desert feels like home. Its beauty, for me, transcends time and space rooting me in my world and in myself.