Breathless and breathing

I can recommend it. At least, I can recommend the experience.

Just the way you should at least once see mountains, you should at least once see desert.

Not because you’ll be able to describe it: not because you’ll be able to remember it, at least, not completely.

I know that whenever I get to see the Rockies, I will be completely unprepared — it’s the nature of a thing that is so big that your head can’t really hold the concept of it all. You can only trust that, when you see it again, it will stagger you.

I hadn’t thought that the desert would be the same: after all, what is it, really, except the empty dry ground, the horizon, the sky? Isn’t that all a picture you could put together in three colours, the big blue bowl of sky on top, the dark shimmer of the horizon as a thin line, the dun or sedge of the sand below?

Well, practically speaking, yes, and, in fact, so much, no.

In Nevada, the desert is a couple of things: its endless ranging blue-green sagebrush with its particular smell, the other yellow, low, burnt-looking plants, and the cactus always ready to wound you or coat you with thorny hitchhikers. In that desert, there’s still life around, with snakes and racing lizards and rabbits, rabbits that explode from cover just when you’re not looking exactly straight at them. There are snakes and road potholes filled with dusts as fine as flour, so that what you drive into them, the dust explodes out from under your wheels in a great and billowing cloud as the car smacks down into the hidden hole.

That desert goes on for miles, broken only by the sharp green of trees and grass that mark water sources, springs or buried streams. It’s a place where it would be easy to be lost or to lose someone: the heat, the snakes, the sameness, all of it limiting your chances at every turn.

But that, though powerful, is the baby desert.

There are more serious sandlands.

In the Black Rock Desert, even the near-indestructible sagebrush gives up. There’s only the hardpan bottom of a salt lake and a smell like you’d expect brimstone to be like. The plants march down through the shattered sharp rock to the edge of the bake before they simply peter out and disappear.

Then, it’s just flat, yellowed alkali, stretching out in front of you for miles, even the horizon lost in the roiling coils of the heat-shimmer. And dust devils: maybe you’ve seen them for an instant on a dusty road, but when they travel across salt flats, 30 or 50 or more feet high, not just glimpsed but standing there — then curving along their way — for as long as you care to watch them, like tornados in training? It’s almost frightening, certainly awe-inspiring.

There are footprints along the edge of the salt flats, and scat: elk and antelope and rabbit again, the tracks stretching out so that you can watch them disappear from sight. And there are leftovers from humans, because things that have been thrown away, just stay: whole and broken beer bottles, for example, making their own small promontories. Pieces of wood and castaway metal, provenance unknowable.

And none of them ever look new: you notice right away that the sand does what the sea does to broken glass, the shards etched to smooth cloudiness by the endless motion of the sand and wind. Rocks that dare to dot the flats are surrounded by their own architecture: the wind carves there, too, indenting around the stones with gentle but deep curves.

Yet at the same time, you have to look so close to see if anything is even moving.

It is a magic trick: everything in the desert is stationary.

Yet everything in the desert moves.

Everything in the desert seems breathless, but the desert itself is breathing.

I can’t possibly explain it all, except to say I’ll know again implicitly when I see it. And I want so much already to see it again.