DesertBlog

New Year’s Wishes

Pipe Creek in Grand Canyon National Park, photo by Larry Hogue

The end of the year brings a time for reflection, and I’m finding myself reflecting on what endures amid this remarkable era of loss – personal, societal and environmental. With our society moving from one ill-managed crisis to the next, a world suffering a nearly unparalleled extinction crisis (only partly caused by the advance of global climate change), and more destruction planned for places we know and cherish, we know those losses will continue to mount. Perhaps the only way to maintain sanity in such times is to focus on what has been saved, on what will endure beyond the present crises. Even if by “endure” one means not that a place is “preserved” in some museum-like stasis, but that the natural processes of creation and destruction are allowed to continue at their own pace. And even if what truly endures, apart from human meddling, is getting harder and harder to find.

The Grand Canyon provides perhaps the best example of creation through the destructive, erosive power of water. The rocks themselves tell us that, though the forces that created the canyon have been temporarily blunted by dams upstream, this is only a blip in the time frame of the canyon, and the canyon itself is only a blip in the time frame of the Earth. The canyon within the park was spared the indignity of a dam within its boundaries (due in some measure to the efforts of the Desert Protective Council, along with many other conservation groups, decades ago), so now one can still feel that vital contact with a far larger, far older world that puts our human experience into perspective.

Going out into that natural world always seems to help, at least for some of us. Thoreau said he required four hours a day of rambling through the woods to stay sane. Today, with a trip to the desert temporarily shelved because my kids came down with the flu, I’m feeling particularly listless. But I know that in the next day or two I’ll get out into that desert light, and everything will seem to fall into perspective, however temporarily.

If you can’t get out into the natural world for your own sanity break, here are a couple of virtual escapes into that enduring world, ones that also focus on its ever-changing nature:

First, Tony Farley has a couple of desert spots in his “Beautiful Places in HD” video series, including this one on Arches National Park. It includes one of my favorite quotes from Edward Abbey (from which I stole liberally above).

And go here for Chris Clarke’s essay, with photo, on Beauty, focusing on Teutonia Peak. A sample:

“Whatever it is, the sight is a fixative. I am suddenly embedded in the moment, a fly in desert amber. The clichéd sensation déjà vu has a lesser-known complement, jamais vu, the sudden feeling that one has never before seen the thing beheld. The sundered rock before me seems wholly unfamiliar, a spectacular surround entirely new.”

Two pieces of desert light for short winter days.

Best wishes for the New Year!