Desert Interlude
Travel journal chopped & remixed until uniformly gelatinous
I had planned to put out the second part of the essay I sent last time, but between then and now I went to Arizona where my brain melted and my heart Kool-Aid Man-ed out of my chest, so we’re doing a little intermission about all that.
The car smells like summer (or I smell like summer - it’s me, hi) on the drive from Phoenix north to Williams, Arizona - the funk of unrinsed chlorine and sunscreen and sweat. We climb in altitude through the desert filled with saguaros until the moment when everything is different and the landscape opens onto a grassy plateau and we see snow-covered ridges in the distance. The saguaros have completely disappeared.
The energetic vortex we visit in Sedona is at the top of a bald, rounded, red rock. We climb to the top of it and the wind nearly blows us away - the weather report alleged gusts up to 70 miles an hour. I sit as close to the edge as feels safe and look out onto the sweeping view, the red rock buttes and formations jutting up from the ground that Sedona is famous for. The local vortexes are known as places where the vibrations are more intense, where the capacity for creativity, clarity, and meditation are heightened.
I’m not totally sure what that all means but I try to bring a willingness and an openness, I’ll receive whatever wants to come through, including nothing. The wind gusts ferociously and I start to well with emotion, tears leaking out of my eyes. The golden light bubbles up from inside. So many peaks and ridges and buttes in the distance. Three crows fly in formation below me and I hear that inner voice, strongly, firmly. I climb back down from the top of the red rock when it’s time.
There is a jackrabbit that lives in the brush around the house we stay at in Williams, which is striking distance from the Grand Canyon, the end goal of this journey. We are fascinated by this animal and how strange it looks compared to the rabbits we know from home - its ears are huge and stick straight up from its head, its legs seem longer and more active - perhaps it just seems more like a coyote than a rabbit. I try to catch it with my camera and only get unsatisfying flashes in motion. The inside of the house reflecting in the window, the jackrabbit already half-out of the frame.
It is snowing before 8 am when we leave for the Grand Canyon, an hour away. The closer we get to the entrance the worse the roads get - fine snow packed to slipperiness and treachery beneath the tires. The only car they could give us at the airport rental car center was an electric red sports car definitely not meant for this type of driving. “Oh you’ll be fine,” the rental car center employee had said when we told him where we were headed, minutes later confessing he’d never been.
Now it looks dubious at best - we start seeing cars spun out into ditches along the side of the road. Park rangers close the road in the opposite direction. Jordan is white-knuckling us through the entrance gate and to the nearest parking area, slow enough to get us there safely. He sits alone in the car while we get out to pee at the visitors center, to crumple and rebuild himself.
What can you say about the Grand Canyon? My brain isn’t equipped to process geographical information on this scale, it doesn’t know what to do with it. Pictures quickly lose all meaning. What could they possibly represent other than a shy token saying I was here, I saw it, I saw more than a camera can capture but less than is actually there. Somehow remembering the tiny frailty of my human body, the ability to acutely feel its borders, allows me to expand inside them, joyfully, gratefully.
The mountains all look like ridgelines that an ancient giant has taken a bite out of. Many bites all in a row. These geologic formations must have been delicious to giants. As we descend back down towards Phoenix we notice the sharp, distinct and absolute line where the saguaros begin again - full size and without hesitation or shyness, no graduation towards the height it takes them about 75 years to achieve. When they are there, they are really fucking there.
“The saguaros are actually considered trees, which is why the Saguaro National Forest is, you know, called a forest,” Nancy told me on the day of the wedding. I ponder this like a Zen koan and can’t begin to comprehend how this is possible. We learn more and more about saguaros as the trip goes on - Christa instructs with the correct pronunciation, swallowing the g right up into the throat. We ask the internet questions, we hear from long-time desert-dwellers.
Saguaros apparently have deep taproots that anchor them to the earth, and shallow, lateral roots that spread as wide as they are tall but only reach a few inches into the ground. They only transpire at night and photosynthesize with a specific kind of acid, both tactics that make them incredibly water-efficient. Woodpeckers carve perfectly round holes into their skins to make homes that other birds take up residence within - including bald eagles. Some birds like these nests especially for hunting the other saguaro-dweller: scorpions, which burrow corridors into their innards.
After the death of a saguaro, usually after a few hundred years, the Tohono O’odham people would use the bird-carved insides as water vessels because of the way the saguaro’s inner skin forms a tough, spherical callous after such wounding.1
We came to Arizona in the first place to celebrate the marriage between two friends and to see people we have loved without living near for many years, to adventure and see new things, to spend time, to make new friends. It was hard not to take the landscape personally in the best way: Arizona had received so much precipitation over the last few months that Phoenix was temporarily out of drought conditions. The Salt River was full and roiling and the desert bloomed - joyfully, for love, for us - is what it felt like.
Everything that could flower had flowered: yellow brittlebush in low fields as far as the eye could see, purple scorpionweed along the roadsides, tall ocotillo waving dusky-pink blooms at the end of spiky thin arms. Plants that Zoe had never seen flower after many years of living there.
It is easy to see why people romanticize the desert; why all manner of seekers find their way there or end up there. Maybe it’s true that something can be accessed in a place of such physical deprivation and difficulty. An ascetic’s dream. Of course the shadow follows, parasitically, peddling white sage bundles or peyote poached from a national park under the guise of “love and light.” What do I know about the desert? So easy to love when it’s blooming at the beginning of April. I don’t know anything about it except what I felt there - call it the energetic field or whatever you like.
We came for love - to be loved by people who have known us through so many iterations, so many tried-on and cast-off versions of ourselves. People who have continued to love us by whatever mysterious grace that has protected us thus far, a forcefield that does not require a key. The desert feels like another world but like the vortex told me: there is only one world.
One Unsolicited Recommendation
While I’m writing about Arizona, Nicole Antoinette has just published her Arizona Trail hiking journal in book form and I am so stoked for her! It’s called How to Be Alone, it’s about her solo long-distance hike for 800 miles on the Arizona Trail (!!!), and it is available to buy right now.
Nicole has been a huge inspiration to me for this newsletter and with my long-distance hiking aspirations, she’s been the host of some amazing podcasts over the years, and is the fearless leader of the Get Shit Done Club, the best co-working group on the internet. I absolutely *devoured* this trail journal in ebook form and I can’t wait to get my mitts on a hard copy!
Thanks for reading and see ya next time.
Mere
If you want you can read more about these amazing beings and their history with the Tohono O’odham here: https://www.nps.gov/sagu/learn/historyculture/upload/Saguaro-Fruit-A-Traditional-Harvest-Brief.pdf
I've been hanging out in Arizona for the last few weeks and really loved this. You described the wildflowers and saguaros so beautifully! I had a similar feeling while at the Grand Canyon. It was too much to even comprehend. Thanks for sharing :)