Tag Archives: travel

November 6, 2016, North Arizona Landscape

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Arizona landscape driving east from Flagstaff to Santa Fe: a flat plain interrupted by shallow ravines, the occasional wash, plateaus, mesas; dotted with pastel, mute, sagey green shrubs large and small. The occasional tree. The colors of the land, various and multitudinous: greys, siennas (burnt and raw), ochres, umbers, oranges, reds. On the whole, unsurprisingly warm.

Ahead, something that lies visible but which I can never reach, tantalizes with its unknowns, its questions: the horizon, a flat line like that which separates, yet holds together, ocean and sky, as if without it they would burst apart and anything and everything would be flung off, ejected, torn into the vacuum of space.

Very much a ranchers’ landscape and, once a wilderness where buffalo freely roamed, and the Navajo with them (or so I might imagine).

Railroad tracks paralleling Interstate 40, and a miles-long train, its individual cars bound together with an invisible string stretching from coast to coast, like a necklace encircling the throat of our mother, Earth.

Signs for Indian gifts, moccasins.
Earlier: “Petrified Wood From the Forest”
“Rugs”
“Indian Ruins Gas This Exit Save”
“Indian Ruins Exit Don’t Miss It”
“Indian Center”

Here is one of the loveliest, most enchanting landscapes I’ve ever experienced. Today the air so clear. The horizon crisp.

Does a horizon have a beginning or ending? Does it simply go on forever, an arc around a human body? A halo played like a hoola hoop, as well as a symbol of divinity, rather than just worn as a crown?

October 30, 2016, Nogales Borderwall

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So, I’m in Nogales, AZ. Came down here to see the spot where José was shot across the border and killed by U.S. Customs Border police. A sad story, as so much of what regarding the United States’ border with Mexico is, particularly in light of the politics of the day, not least because an innocent boy lost his life and a family lost a son. To add to the family’s pain, it’s nearly impossible to prosecute an officer for an incident of this sort. In fact, to my knowledge, the prosecution, and the found guilty verdict, of the officer who shot José was a first in history. This took yearssss, however. Anyway, just being over by the wall was such a singularly surreal experience. I’d never been anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border before, and yet there I was standing beneath the wall, peering up at it, and sighting along its length: a twenty-ish foot steel wall, slatted so that one can see through it. A monstrosity which dominates the town because it is so very hilly here, and so it rides those undulations of the hills so that no matter where you are you never lose sight of it. I can only imagine the feelings of the residents on either side of this… thing. I can ONLY imagine, and perhaps my imagination differs from reality. Do they feel like caged rats, subjects in someone’s science experiment? A remarkably sentient tropical fish swimming back and forth along the glass of an aquarium?

This is just the silliest thing in the world to me, that we create these barriers around each other, because, really, we’re all humans. We’re all the same people, essentially. And when one travels over land, either by bicycle or by car, you see that the land continues, and animal and plant life continues, and it all bleeds and blends together, and fluctuates and changes with climate zones, terrain, soil types, etc. And the fact that we create these borders… I mean the idea of countries is utterly ridiculous. Yes, culturally we might be different, but again, that’s something to be shared, and there’s some of that going on, but at the same time the idea of sticking a huge wall up, like that clown Trump insists, is utterly insane (particularly because there already exist walls along this border where it’s been deemed necessary). That money could go towards countless more beneficial social/industrial/environmental projects rather than trying to divide us further as human beings.

October 29, 2016, Nearing Algodones Dunes

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Just passed a citrus grove a bit back. Lemon trees or orange trees, some date palms around: this lone green spot in a landscape of tan, brown, sand, taupe. How queer and lush and so removed from its environment it seems.

This is what humans do when they feel foreign to the land, the environment in which they find themselves; they transform it into a place that is familiar and comfortable to them, hospitable to their needs, instead of appreciating, respecting it for what it is. In effect a judgement is made, and that judgment is usually that the land has no value, because we all want things that produce for us, and if the land doesn’t do that, well, we can’t for some reason see that the value of the land is in its uniqueness, that it is valuable simply as it is because IT IS, and so by claiming that it has no inherent value we are actually devaluing the very real value that it does have in being what it is in order that we may turn it into a machine, basically, that churns out things that we say are valuable (namely goods to be sold for cash, because in the world of humans very little is more valuable than money).

Coming up on the Algodones dunes now. The name implying what it is: a vast tract of sand…. Just sand. Mounds and mounds that go on for such great distances. I can see them from this hill I am driving along. It’s a beach that stretches out into nothing but more beach rolling, rolling along like great ocean swells. It’s, it’s an incredible sight. Mountain peaks in the distance. It does remind me a bit of Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, but I think this is on a vaster scale, though the mountains aren’t nearly so terrific and awe-inspiring.

Sort of a martian landscape, but up ahead it looks like there is a convoy of RV’s camped out in the desert. A common thing for retirees to come down and escape the cold winters, but I could be wrong. I can’t exactly tell what these are from here as its a good distance.

They’re trailers. Part of these dunes are used as a recreational area. The highway splits the area into two parts, left is the wilderness which I’ll be able to access further down, and to the right is the recreational area. Lots of people with ATV’s, dune buggies, lifted pickup trucks, etc. tearing around out there. It’s basically one big party, especially along the highway where everyone is camped out. There’s a party going on out in the desert too. Just a different kind of party. One fueled by adrenaline and gasoline. It’s not what I came for, but I’m interested….

October 29, 2016 Driving (Near Algodones Dunes)

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Mountains brown and black. Not even mountains. Just jagged, ragged hills, like the earth had been wounded some time in the past and the stuff of her oozed out and dried, hardening into thick, ugly scabs—sharp peaks pockmarked, harshly eroded, carved out—not by rain (which never comes)—but dissolved in acid.

There is a rawness and a primalness to this desert landscape that is hellish and unforgiving. It takes life without a thought, desolate and emotionless, dead eyes staring, bloodshot. It cuts one to one’s soul. Painful (nearly) to look at.

October 23, 2016, Route 1 Somewhere On

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To the left of me are mountains, their naked bodies showing, and looking just like the flatirons in Boulder, like bare-chested men bronzing in the sun (such little sun, though), and to my right the spot-lighted ocean, overhung with dismal clouds, and pricked with a few oil rigs far out near its horizon, and the occasional splash of sunlight sparkling on its wave crested surface.

I don’t know what to look at. I am dazzled. My visual sense overwhelmed by riches and extraordinary beauty in abundance in all directions, even on this dreary day.

And around a bend I come, peering at an arm jutting into the steely-grey waters like a creature crawling into the ocean, or out of it (Golbez’s arm crawling across a crystal floor searching, searching for something), smeared with starlight in places.

Smeared with starlight in places.

October 23, 2016, Around Santa Maria, CA

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California and her rolling hills. Eternally rolling along the 101. Trees sprouting from these hills like spores on a mold. A prehistoric landscape untouched by the hand of man. I see some fences of course. A cow here and there. But otherwise it’s nature, nature in its unaltered original form. Some of the tops of the hills and those in the distance are veiled, obscured in a mist: mere soft silhouettes. Appropriate, because I’m looking far, far into the past…

And I think back to yesterday along Big Sur. About people trying to capture moments and memories with a camera (like clawing at the air, trying to grab it, grasp it, hold it in one’s arms), and watching while driving along the highway, watching the waves hammering continuously against the rock walls, and after we go to bed at night this living world continuing to hammer against these rock walls which will continue to deny it, absorbing blow after blow. And this goes on eternally. After we sleep. After our deepest of sleeps.

California is a magical place. What must settlers have felt when they first arrived here to this bounty? This impossible world where it is spring and summer year round. It is very much an Eden, like that from which Adam and Eve were tossed out I imagine. And here I am, rediscoverying this lost land buried in antiquity and legend. What right do I have to be here?, for surely I am no better than Adam or Eve (though I might have wisdom enough not to take advice from a serpent or snake, unless he was a very tricky and persuasive one, even if I am in the habit of trusting easily).

These hills remind me of bread dough a little bit: in their smoothness very much uniform. Like agglomerations of soil covered with a smooth, even carpet of grass, like a table cloth thrown over a dining table, then stuck with trees like a pin-cushion.

October 22, 2016, Big Sur

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Driving Route 1, Big Sur. Pinned into the hillside to the right and the left of me, like the bristles of a hairbrush, are thousands of frondsy things, like cattails wafting in the wind; and the sun slowly sinking lower and lower, lower and lower to the pacific, glowing like a pearl, softly, embedded amongst gauzy clouds that drift in the sky like gossamer curtains lifted on a breeze. And around the bend of the road the shoreline rocky and rugged, like a brass knuckled fist limned in white, the water crashing up against it relentlessly, splashing hard and high, seafoam flying like spittle.

Signs for Vista Point. Cars and RVs parked, and people standing on the edge with cameras in their hands pressed to their faces, or their faces peering into a smart-phone taking pictures to commemorate a moment.  THE moment.

It’s difficult to deny oneself the pleasure of creating and holding on to memories like these (and really, why should one?). But the sun is dropping lower and lower. [These frondsy things are wonder incarnate.] The waves are always crashing against the rocks. The rocks are always there, pummeled by the waves. At times their jaggedness cloaked in secrecy, enveloped by a thick fog; other times poignant, acute, sharp enough to draw blood.

What can a photograph say? What feelings and emotions might one dredge up a year or more in the future?  Do these people grasp the magnitude of what they are seeing? Do even I with my words and poetic sentiment have an inkling? Are we not all headed into a night to which we will succumb? And yet this night comes repeatedly over the Earth, but always she experiences a morning, a new sun, a bright day, a warm wind….

91 – Lamplighter

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Outside is cool. I am sitting in the shadows but for my right foot which is resting in a broad patch of sunlight slowly creeping its way along the concrete to me. Its touch is a caress, that is it is soft and warm, slight, comforting. My back is to the building, and in front of me is an array of picnic tables where people are sitting—whole families, couples with dogs, single dudes drinking their coffees and eating their bagel sandwiches. The two dogs once squirming like antsy children are now sitting still as statues. Rather regal. They look like they could be carvings—sculptures in sandstone or granite at the ends of enormous ledges bounding long flights of stairs leading up to or away from some grand palace. The sky is a satiny blue with the airy fragrance of hazy white clouds. There is still some green in the trees mixed in with the reds, browns, yellows, oranges—not so pretty. But then, look at that damn clutter of electric lines….

90 – Streaking Through Tennessee

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Seen in Tennessee while driving forever the interstate, where bridges take one directly over the River Styx so that one doesn’t have to worry about potentially falling out of the boat which good Charon directs to and fro, back and forth across it’s mirrored surface (this is a very poor analogy because really it’s the interstate that is hell (or Hades) and not any destination that one might find at the end of, so really it’s the threshold crossed when getting into my car that is the figurative Styx, and not any physical feature of the environment itself):

bunches of orange and red, and burnt-orange, a brown, and a whole range of shades in between, some duller, some brighter mounded up as far as the eye can see, like great piles raked together, and the autumn-blue sky (because it is such a distinctive blue) complementing; fields and hills of golden-yellow grass, burnished and bronzey, anywhere there isn’t a forest or highway or gas station or sky. The colors are the colors of a life tempered in fire—they run in the blood. If you make it through winter you’re a survivor, you’ve run the gamut, and you can paint a picture, or many pictures, of all these experiences, and you can write about them and go to sleep with a contented mind knowing what you accomplished, and then maybe you will publish them in a blog, and maybe some people will read about them, or maybe no one will, but it won’t make much of a difference to you one way or the other because you were alive then to experience all that, and you’re a new you, alive now to new experiences, or reliving old experiences and perhaps viewing them in new ways because you’re a new person continually becoming a new person experiencing new things and experiencing old things in new ways (or is that just the supposed old things when recalled to mind are new in that instant?)

89 – Some Cheerio!

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November 2016
Arkansas is a magnificent state, broad with mountains and deciduous forests, whose trees are now loosing their leaves, or beginning to, this time of year, and the whole breadth and depth of the place glowing like a departing sun—orange, red, yellow, brown—a rich nugget of gold pulled from the loamy soil, and the highway cutting through them Ozarks like a river flashing silver and gold, sunlight and fish scales in a meadow.

It all came to an end as the sun came to a set, as the mountains and hills sloped down to the flat of the Mississippi River delta, eventually to the river itself and that gritty Tennessee city, Memphis sparkling with come-hithers, glinting with diamonds strung on a necklace beneath a face full of broken teeth.

Memphis: the home of William Eggleston.