On A Horse With No Name

Embarassing Personal Photogaph: Me (really), on a bike, in the Sinai desert.I have to admit to an outsider's fascination with deserts. I grew up in the flat, green Midwest and then moved to New York at 17. Prior to that, my desert experience was limited to one family vacation to the Grand Canyon at age 14. But I am fascinated by the desert landscape, a term which indeed, Jackson notes, "conjures up a pleasant image of silence and mystery and strange beauty" (63). Since moving to New York, I've traveled through Texan, Mexican, and Israeli deserts, which essentially all look the same. I don't think my fascination with deserts stems from an interpretation of "the relentless progress of ruin and abandonment…as a kind of romantic growth, something to be recorded and perpetuated before it's too late" (62). The idea of what Jackson describes as "vanishing America" doesn't hold weight for me—the physical location of the desert, whether it be in the US or elsewhere, is not important. I am interested much more with the contradicting thoughts and emotions the desert lanscape elicits. What I want out of the desert is the opposite of progress: vast nothingness. I want the "panorama of endless range country with a rim of violet mesas and dark mountains" (57). What I see as one of the most interesting contradictions of my desert-fascination, and is clearly a tension that many others face, is the loneliness of the desert. Jackson describes Chihuahua's most striking feature, "exhilarating at first, then depressing, is its emptiness" (45). In the next chapter, writing on New Mexico, "it [was] the sort of landscape which (before the creation of the bomb) we associated with the world after history had come to an end" (57). Even though he then goes on to explain that this landscape may have existed more purely in the past, the concept behind desert fascination remains the same: many people like to live in shared spaces (i.e., cities, suburbs, towns), and then occasionally trek out to an empty place to see the difference. Is it that we want to feel humbled by nature? Do we like to imagine what it would be like to give up community, to “get back to the earth” and live in isolation? The desert is a challenge. I am enthralled by it, and afraid of it. Such is the case with many vast land or seascapes: the ocean, canyons, mountains, etc. Something so enormous, so entirely not created by man, and furthermore completely capable of destroying one, is both awe-and fear-inspiring. Perhaps the desert is so appealing to me because it represents a sort of physical Other, completely removed from the familiar geographic scenes from my life. Part of me worries that if I were to experience the desert more often, it would lose much of its significance. I am not a religious person, but to me the silence and mystery and strange beauty of the desert is something sacred.