Google Nowhere

I dream of a place where the border between earth and sky is sharp and always overexposed, where cottonwoods exhale soft white fluff and their leaves flutter in the persistent sandy winds like hands clapping. This place, whether it be a canyon whose rock walls have toppled in like the forgotten stacks in some goliath library of geologic time, or just the end of a dusty road to an infinite nowhere but always limited nothing, is what I imagine when I start to feel claustrophobic.

            The mountains, with their savagely formed peaks all torn and pushed from below, the galaxy of trees and summer flowers whose names I’ll never know, are still home. Here at the base of the San Francisco Peaks all those cottonwoods and that library of stone are just over the horizon. I can drive east to the moon and north to that often visited but seldom entered canyon of the Colorado River. All those places I’ve imagined, all the sandstone labyrinths and water polished granite blocks shining white as light, they’re out there somewhere and Philip Glass wrote the score.

            It takes a certain kind of person to devote so many lonely hours to the dull buzz of washboard. They’re out there though, crawling across the wintery desert in search of the best weather and hard rock. But as gas approaches the pinnacle of five dollars a gallon driving aimlessly, flipping coins at intersections, (heads left, tails right) makes less and less sense. So I’ve taken to that thing considerably vast and headache inducing, the Internet.

            Like I am to the desert Southwest, I’m addicted to the Internet. It's a portal of glass and light, keys and chips, electricity and people, to those places where the road ends and the trail starts. Someone’s always been wherever the curser lands and taken photos to prove it. Those blurry satellite images are like heroin and like a drug, always seem to disappoint. After hours in the car whatever neglected scattering of boulders I finally pull up to is head high, the worst rock in the West, or balanced precariously in the angle of repose. But I don’t stop, I can’t stop, the desire to discover must be fed and kept alive because sometimes there are those rare moments where bags can be packed and a trip can be taken with no expectations. 

 I need wilderness and I need, at least sometimes to feel like a part of it. That’s one reason why I like to climb, and because it’s there, crouching in a cave or at the bottom of a murky pool, the wild that has shaped us all. I can’t find it, don’t know what it looks like or feels like, but looking seems like the right thing to do. After every trip, every new place, and every new climb, that wild feels closer but I know I’ll never find it, which is good. So I pack extra water and snacks and head to the moon.