The desert is made for heartbreak. It is the only place that can empathize.
The ocean is too vast and unyielding. The pound of waves on sand is reminiscent of blood pumping through living veins. The ocean breathes and swarms with salty life.
Forests buzz and squawk and shriek. The canopy of trees above is a smothering embrace. Pulling back any tree branch or rolling over any log reveals the wet underbelly of some other sensitive creature. The forest is quietly crowded.
The mountains are too young. A measly 80 million years ago they erupted from the earth, tearing the world in half so they could be born. They soar upwards to the sky, self centered, and calling attention to every living thing within hundreds of miles. Bringing brightly colored, bearded men from all over the world to test themselves against the snow capped peaks. The mountains are a battleground of pride.
The desert is made for heartbreak.
In the desert words fall empty and flat against the hard packed dirt. The silence of the open sky holds you while you grieve in peace. In the desert, everything is empty. The rivers are dry, the grass is dead, the skies are bare.
And it feels good to know there is a place in the world as empty as you.
I wanted to see what the guts of the earth looked like, so I drove to Utah. I sunk into the red entrails of the earth and found a family of patchwork people. Heartbreak brought us to the desert, and the desert brought us together.
I remember sitting on the floor of a van asking a woman with long dark hair and busy fingers why she first came to this dry wasteland. Words fell from her mouth like cool raindrops as she told me of her heartbreak. Her life had been blown apart and scattered to the wind by a man, everyone she loved had turned on her and she fled to the desert.
After a long day out climbing I turned to the scruffy profile of my partner and asked what he was doing here. He poured out his story into the sand at our feet and told me of passed on grandparents, of girlfriends left in Switzerland, and of pets riddled with cancer. He had turned his back on the pain and walked out into the desert. Now flowers bloomed where he left his footprints.
A friend lay curled up next to me in her sleeping bag, our freezing breath turning to icy swirling ghosts as she lay out the story of her pilgrimage. “As I traveled away from everything I had known, my fractured soul trailed out behind me. And we were both moving towards something better.” We watched the sun rise and the warmth soaked through our skin.
We’re all out here. Throwing our bodies against the rocks, looking for meaning in the meaningless, and bleeding for it.
The desert is not empty. It’s full of broken people looking for spare parts.
In the desert life persists.
If you take a second look at the dry river you’ll see that it flows strong every winter. The yellow grass isn’t dead, it’s hibernating and will bloom with brilliant purple flowers in the spring. The skies aren’t bare, the birds are just flying too high for you to see.
The desert isn’t full of death, the desert is full of life that knows how to come back.
