Sunset skies over Fort Churchill. I’m not much for settler artifacts, but there’s something about the stillness of this place, some reminder that these structures and everything they stand for are also, assuredly, passing to dust while the swifts build nests in their outlines.
“Still came the dune.
Still came sand in sheets, sand erasing the sun for hours then days, sand softening the corners of stucco strip malls, sand whistling through the holes bored in the ancient adobe of mission churches. Still came the wind. Still came ceaseless badland bluster funneled by the Sierra Nevada. Still came all the wanderlusting topsoil of Brigham Young’s aerated Southwest free at last, the billowing left behind of tilled scrub, the aloft fertilizer crust of manifest destiny. Ashes in the plow’s wake, Mulholland’s America.”
– Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins
Perhaps a desert only feels empty at the speed of hot howling blacktop and air-conditioned cruise control, of a certain blur-blindness where the beautiful appears barren.
