returned

I sit here at my desk. My passport, my Chanel sunglasses, my cell phone charging. The faint smell of paint and still boxes everywhere. I've returned. There's nothing like a few days in the desert, no shower, the rare campground with running water, no journal even to record my thoughts. The silence of the desert. The sounds of quail, coyote, buzzing insects at noon. The wind bobbing the heads of the flowers. The rough surface of eroded rocks. Pressing and stemming up eroded mountains. The hiss of a rattlesnake in a small meadow filled with grasses. Swallows imitating the nearby airforce airplanes buzz runs as I sit in a slight indentation of the rock. Inhaling the wind at night as I look in awe at the soup of our universe. Pinpoints of light, the moon long set. I'm sucked into the night. The wind, the flowers, the plain. I take no light, no water, nothing but myself. I walk into the desert at night, alone with no supplies. I have everything I need. I climb the rocks. I listen to the wind, but her voice is elsewhere. The power of this place has gone. It is a wonderland of rocks. A delight of wildflowers, but the raw desert power, the stuff that makes one wild and mad is not here. The power that pushes one to experience beyond the known experience. Or else, that raw wild power is like a familiar caress on my cheek, as the wind blows my hair into my face. And I feel that caress whether I am in the desert late at night or on the Los Angeles freeway.

Comments

[Will Campbell]

Beautiful post. Not sure if that's where you were this time around, but I was last in Death Valley in November (http://www.wildbell.com/1115.html) and hope to get back there at the end of May to camp out and climb up to the top of Telescope Peak for the first time.

[Will Campbell]

Beautiful post. Not sure if that's where you were this time around, but I was last in Death Valley in November (http://www.wildbell.com/1115.html) and hope to get back there at the end of May to camp out and climb up to the top of Telescope Peak for the first time.