Even after years of intimate contact and search this quality or strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted. One begins to understand why Everett Ruess kept going deeper and deeper into the canyon country, until one day he lost the thread of the labyrinth; why the oldtime prospectors, when they did find the common sort of gold, gambled, drank and whored it away as quickly as possible and returned to the burnt hills and the search. The search for what? They could not have said, neither can I; and would have muttered something about silver, gold, copper – anything as a pretext. And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? Hard to say – and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it. Ask Everett Ruess.
Where is the heart of the desert? I used to think that somewhere in the American Southwest, impossible to say exactly where, all of these wonders which intrigue the spirit would converge upon a climax – and resolution. Perhaps in the vicinity of Weaver’s Needle, in the Superstition Range; in the Funeral, Mountains above Death Valley; in the Smoke Creek Desert of Nevada, among the astonishing monoliths of Monument Valley; in the depths of Grand Canyon; somewhere along the White Rim under Grandview Point; in the heart of the Land of Standing Rocks. Not so. I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.
Edward Abbey, excerpts from Desert Solitaire: Episodes and Visions
(Click to enlarge image)
