In this post on Backpacker.com, Editor-in-Chief Jon Dorn, who raced in Team Yankee Scribes at ADAC2010, says:
Of course, the utter absence of orthodox natural beauty is part of the desert’s attraction. There’s no sound out there, save the wind and an occasional diesel rumble—think faraway train at low throttle—that emanates from billions of grains of sand sliding down the steep slopes of the highest dunes. There’s no color but the dun soldier khaki of the sand—except at dawn and dusk, when the austere sameness transforms from shades of tan into a terrestrial version of the aurora borealis: shape-shifting oranges and pinks and soft reds playing in waves along the crests and hollows of the dunes. At these moments, you can understand why writers have long used nautical and sexual imagery to describe the scene: There’s a languid, liquid camber to every dune—long curves bending abruptly into rippled buttresses and sinuous waves, like the sweep of a lover’s back spreading into a gracefully turned thigh or smooth, shadowed hip.I've devoured polar, mountaineering and other such adventure/expedition books for years. I'm moving into my 'desert phase'. I recently read a sweet fiction story, based in the Sahara Desert and I have just finished 'Lost Oasis' by Robert Twigger (a journo) about his forays into the Egyptian Sahara and stories about a lost oasis. He's married to an Egyptian lass and moved from UK to Cairo. Twigger, like me, has this overwhelming attraction to the desert.
But rocky deserts were not what I had in mind. To me the desert was about sand. Flat sand or sand in dunes, I didn't really mind as long as it was sand. Actually I preferred the idea of flat sand, endless to the horizon, even less to look at. The desert was about the void, the sero point, shrinking yourself and your concerns in the immensity and emptiness of it all. The desert was about a definite psychological need for vastness in the face of human confusion, brain fatigue. Mind-bothered Western man can take drugs, alter his lifestyle, turn off the television, pierce his body or run a marathon, it all amounts to just so much therapy to keep him loping along the same track towards the inevitable finish post. I saw the desert as a huge right turn, a different path, another way out of what everyone was into, the money, goods and attention conflicts of the current century. The desert cured the malaise, not just the symptoms. Somehow the vastness of the desert signalled the infinite present, nowness, headspace, instant immortality.I found this really cool satellite image of dunes and pans in the Empty Quarter, imaged by Terra. It's big-time high-res. This is just a little bit of it:
So, I'm now into desert books to feed my desert yearnings while I'm confined to the 'attention conflicts of the current century'.
2 comments:
I have to say that i absolutely agree with you - it is soooo difficult to describe why one would love something so arid, stark almost yet so incredibly beautiful. I have written in my book (well almost anyway) The Emotion of it... the following about the Atacama Desert - The Atacama Desert is described by National Geographic as the “Driest Place on Earth, it is a virtually lifeless plain that dips down to river gorges layered with mineral sediments from the Andes. The pampas bevel up to the altiplano, the foothills of the Andes, where alluvial salt pans give way to lofty white-capped volcanoes that march along the continental divide, reaching 20,000 feet (6,000 meters). There are sterile, intimidating stretches where rain has never been recorded, at least as long as humans have measured it. You won't see a blade of grass or cactus stump, not a lizard, not a gnat. But you will see the remains of most everything left behind.”
I struggle to describe it in words, probably because it is all this and more, the mountains swirl with colour from orange, green, black, red and pink yet the floor of the desert is as grey and arid as brittle concrete. If you look long enough it as if the mountains merge themselves into the desert floor and then rise up out of it as if they were a three-dimensional oil painting, completely still yet alive at the same time.
WOW i can't wait to get back!
Thoughts - you are soooo right ;)
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