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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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