A Love Letter to the Desert
In Baja California, I stumbled sleepily from an overnight bus as the sun rose over my first desert, silver in the morning light and white hot within the hour. Everything I had gone to Mexico to escape receded like a dream as I stood, mesmerised by the vast blankness and a peace that seemed tangible, a gossamer blanket of calm hanging over the cracked earth.
Since then, I have always been pulled towards deserts, those hot, scrappy places where coyotes call through the night and everything that grows has sharp edges. The desert is inhospitable by default, a desolate place where tumbleweed rolls, the wildlife is lethal, and the wind has kitten-sharp teeth. Yet I find it curiously soothing. It's as though the bleakness, the scorching heat, the extremity of it all skews perspective and shifts the state of mind.
Part of the allure is simply otherness - if you live in a damp, northern city, where buildings encroach on the sky and clouds conceal the sunsets, endless baked dry emptiness is a shock to the senses that will either pull you in or send you scurrying back home.
The city, with its crackling energy, its crowded streets, its billboards and its traffic is thrilling but demanding. Even if you walk alone down a quiet street, advertisements at the bus stop dance in your peripheral vision and cars roar through your daydreams. In the desert, when you're, alone you're alone, and modern life, with all its demands, retreats.
As London lurks under its cold, cloudy blanket, never still, never quiet, I long for that empty, bright silence.