Long after the mud has been scraped and scrubbed from gear and dust and grit washed from bodies and clothes, still aspects of the desert stay with you.
Time spent there leads to an acknowledgement of life distilled to its necessities – shelter, food and most important, water.
Beauty lies in simplicity. The desert demands of its inhabitants thick skins and slow metabolism, where long stretches of torpor and economy are interspersed with brief periods of succor, survival depending on equal parts luck and tenacity.
One must get used to a certain level of discomfort when sojourning there.
Little is to be gained beyond mild, chronic frustration at any attempt to keep one’s body or clothing free of its infiltration.
Far easier to accept that, for the duration of your stay, sand in your sleeping bag and grit in your granola come with the territory.
Forget, too, concerns about personal hygiene beyond the occasional hand wash and application of under-arm.
What water you carry is for internal use only. Besides, if your armpits reek, so too do those of your companions. After a time, as much dirt accumulates as falls off, and an equilibrium of sorts is attained.
There is both fragility and strength to life in the desert. Seldom are there long periods of plenty, yet life has adapted to make last what is offered. While plant life might struggle for a foothold in whatever improbable cranny or crevice it can, the fact of its survival is proof of needs being met. Proof too is in footprints, left in sand and mud that attest to the presence and passage of other creatures seldom seen, moving through the countryside with an ease and economy borne of adaptation.
Aside from escaping from the day to day of modern life, much of time in the desert is spent searching for relief – relief from heat, relief from cold, relief from thirst. In finding that relief come the rewards. The delicious cool of morning, a cool that vanishes the instant the sun rises beyond the nearest ridge line. A gentle breeze down canyon carries with it the scent of juniper and ancient earth and the gentle lilt of the canyon wren, unseen, mocking our endeavors.
The crackle of a campfire as the cold night sky begins to sag earthward under the weight of an impossible number of stars. The presence of an occasional spring where life itself seeps from the earth, creating a small oasis of green and humidity. Even the cooling course of water into the gullet is a simple pleasure often taken for granted elsewhere.
Perhaps the greatest gift the desert bestows is the gift of its silence.
Wind and water have cut courses back to the very bedrock of time, while the totality of our hominid existence is measured in a scant few inches.
The slow-decaying cliffs scarred and pockmarked with age in their watchfulness speak of events and eons we can verbalize but little comprehend. Sit in such surroundings for a time and the words of the Bard come to mind, of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Hayden Mellsop is a Realtor with Pinon Real Estate Group and a former fishing guide.
