Kelso Dunes

I find little use in speculating much on what a day might bring.  It leads to the equal errors of being dreadful or hopeful.  But in retrospect, today, as on the first two days here, I was thrillingly isolated.  As I review the pictures and memories of today (and I mean yesterday) I have a growing sense that I was learning things about myself that had never sifted into my thinking before.

 While hiking desert hills, there are brief times when I go totally without thought.  Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to things around me.  If a raven flies over, I note its blackness, but I don‘t seek analogy for it.  The bird is a type of nothing, not metaphoric.  It is a thing without comparison.  I believe those moments are akin to contentment.

I used to wonder if literature might lose some of its interest if my life were set on such a sure course that things I read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for my being.  Not so today, for sights and sounds on the desert are the alternate directions I seek—real  and happening out there, far from anyone who could find me if anything went wrong.

I could became proud of walking singular, of my oneness, my loneliness, my ability to predict and avoid trouble.  But I’m just a spec on the surface of this earth, made small when I looked up from my campsite at stars gushing forth from roman candles.  They were large and near and moved on a stately surface that surrounded me like a shell about the world.  The kind of utter darkness that falls on a desert like that is inconceivable to a Pasadena stay-at-home.

I guess it’s time to show some pictures and talk about the day’s tramping.

In my last post about Red Rock Canyon, I gave you this picture and said you were looking at sand that blew in the wind 150 million years ago.  Today I got up at 4am to drive in darkness to Kelso Sand Dunes to see a present-day occurrence of blowing sand.

I trudged for a mile through grass-stabilized sand to reach the bare higher dunes in long morning shadows.

Wind from the northwest folded gently over the dunes, but it was enough to send grains cascading down the leeward sides.

This picture, taken just a few inches from the surface, shows how similar big dunes are to tiny dunes on their sides.   

These close-ups show the surface as it might look from an airplane—interesting similarities between near and far views of the same thing.

On the left an artist, feeling unction in the breath of life, expresses her joy in geometric form, arcs of happiness.  On the right, another adds finesse to the basic design, curly cues that seem more like embellishments on a scene from the real world.  She seems to ask what is real.

Here on the left, you just barely see the artist, so consumed is she in her work, that the work seems all that matters.  And on the right she teaches art to a young student. (You might have to click on the picture to enlarge it and then click "back" to return here.)

Grass tries, and often fails, to establish itself on the moving sand.  But here a community of strivers has created a footing.  Sand on all sides has blown away, but their sand, the sand that they together claim, is firm beneath their feet.