A contemplation of the timeless desert.
This desert feels like a time machine. If not for the distant rumble of trucks on the highway, I could imagine native people coming over the ridge at any moment. I wonder if the saguaros remember. They grow only one inch every ten years and most of them in this spot tower far above me. How many decades have they seen?
The wind is blowing, constant as the sun that beats relentlessly down. As I sit here outside my rig and soak in the warmth, I look out over the desert and feel a sense of timelessness. Did someone standing here fifty years ago see much the same scene I am looking at now? A hundred years ago?
Creosote bushes sway in the breeze, bone grey and black striped branches waving at each other in greeting. A few yellow blooms sprinkled among the white puffs of spent glory clinging like ashes after a brush fire. Palo verdes bend to mark the washes where rainwater gather to form rushing streams, life-bringing and fleeting. Their bright green trunks bely their inch-long thorns as they grow from the bones of their ancestors. Saguaros rise with stately calm, pocked with holes that could be from birds or musketballs. Each one marked with injuries around the base that would have felled a weaker being, cuts and even whole chunks missing.
What is remembrance in a place like this? The memory of a growing thing stretching back to its birth versus that of a mountain, aged beyond counting but slowly diminishing over time with wind and rain.
Several vehicles and RVs have passed my campsite already this morning. It’s the end of the weekend, so they head back to their normal lives while I sit here and watch the desert. Did these other campers sit like this, soaking in the sun and wind and just exist?
Probably not. Vacations are such a short window of opportunity. The most common reaction is to fill all of that time with things to do and see, cramming in as much as possible. It’s a trap, though, to pack in so many experiences that you don’t experience any of them. It takes a special kind of person to be able to face that scarcity and still manage to find stillness to just be a part of the world.
What will they remember when they tell others about their time here?
I saw my first wildlife aside from birds yesterday. I was practicing one-handed tosses with my fire sword and something tugged my eyes to look outward. A black-tailed jackrabbit was watching me, so still that it blended into the rubble except for the black tips of its ears. What did it think I was doing? As soon as I stopped to watch in return, it scampered away. I caught sight of the tail and immediately put my sword down. Too excited to continue practicing, I had to identify it with my field guide before the details faded from my mind.
It was one of those moments when I wish I could capture an image from my sight alone, knowing that reaching for my camera will break the spell.
I took a walk up one of the washes next to my campsite. I found bends so magical that I expected to stumble on tiny fae at any moment, for all that they would have heard me coming a mile away. Perhaps if I wait very still, they might come back out to play. If I rested there, dreaming under the arching branches, would I wake up in another time? Transported through a portal, a weak place in the fabric of time in this timeless place where all the ages of the world come together.
Are these places a memory? It is said that deserts used to be lush and green. Is this spot a memory of nature, offered up to the present as a reminder of what came before and what might come again?
What about places more naturally desolate, starkly beautiful than this? Does time exist there at all?
Can memories exist of such a place if we never leave, or do they only take form after we have left, returned to a place where each passing moment reminds us that we have exiled ourselves from that glory, hoping someday to return.
