Travel Photography > Great Basin > Escalante, Utah

At some point, I get the courage to open a book. Books in the desert lose their moisture and become thin, crisp. Their pages smell of pulp, like long-shelved tomes in libraries. In this manner, they are comforting. Soon, I am lost in a café in Tangiers, in 1922. I have forgotten my guests, who never showed. I read Edward Marriott, Edward Abbey, and an essay by David Ouammen, on Terry Tempest Williams, and a chapter by Terry Tempest Williams, on Edward Abbey.

The next week in solitude on a lonely mesa, I have forgotten my first night in Escalante. I am five miles in the desert, with guidebooks: geology, a bird book, a plant life book. Two books on reptiles, and one on cactus species. I am now familiar with the identification of globemallows, horsewhips, beavertails. The very blue collard lizard is easy to spot. I can distinguish the western from the eastern fence lizard.

I am on the edge of a great crevice in the earth; a desert canyon, with a harness and a rope attached to a smooth rock. One jump, one short rappel. I land on the sandy bottom, and pull the rope from the rock. When it finally slides limp into the sand, I feel a shock; the way my body reacted after my first earthquake. When I let that rope slide, I am cutting myself off from my fears - the solitude, the quiet, the coyotes. I have overcome this thing about solitude. I have books.

Solitude is a long paragraph; a rambling thought. It is also a complete book. Lonely people, I thought, cannot endure solitude. Lonely people need people all the time. But I need space; to reflect on my future, to reflect on back there. To make decisions. I also need the desert, because the desert is barren. Emptiness sparks the imagination; cleanliness and subtlety make thought clear. Every part of the desert has an evil to it: the barbs, the stingers, the armor, the bare stone. But the desert is subtle, and clean.

Charles Darwin once commented on this. In The Voyage of the Beagle (1836), he writes,

In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? I can scarcely analyze these feelings: but it must be parly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages, and there seems no limit to their duration through future time.

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