Peeling Back the Strata

I can only catch glimpses. There are two people between me and the window and both are pretty grumpy, but I look out anyway: craning my neck to see over this lady’s shoulder and outside of the plane. It looks like another planet, with the dry, desert hills flowing into dusty mountains. Alien, foreign. Sunlight moves differently across this kind of land. I’m entranced.

I get off the plane and walk across shiny floors into the Las Vegas baggage claim. There are walls lit up with screens, billboards glowing with manicured women and the twenty-foot-high twinkling curves of perfume bottles. It seems so much in contrast with this desert, but maybe that’s part of the appeal. An oasis of luxury in a sea of sun-bleached heat. I feel like the odd one out; my face is one of the few without layers of makeup coating my skin and I have no brand-name plastered to my body. No heels on my feet or two-inch-long nails gracing my fingers. What I do have is a desire to get out from under those neon lights and flashing, laughing faces. Painted lips dole out pasteurized smiles like coins dropping out of old slot machines; they tell me to buy, buy on credit, buy with interest free installments, buy their games and buy their bodies. I shake my head to clear it of all these plastic promises. Focus, I tell myself, focus. The glamour is a distracting fiction. My suitcase rolls by and I swing it out and away from the lineup. Off I go.

Vegas rolls by, too, outside my car window. It is dried up: a husk of a city cored out by fear of the pandemic. Trash blows past. By the time I get fully out of the city, it is well past dark. I see silhouettes of mountains taller than skyscrapers begin to block out the sky and the air feels different out here, somehow. It feels wide, clean.

I sit on the front porch, mesmerized by the dawn light painting the sky. It is morning and misty and the sun gilds the brush, makes the desert sand glow, lights up the contours of the mountains in ways that make them seem like they’re moving. Maybe they are. I had thought everything was just uniform brown, but I’d been wrong. The desert is shades of gold when the sun hits it, shades of white when the sun burns everything else away, shades of red, sometimes; clay red soaring into the bluest of skies and geological strata painting lines into the mountains like the earth is an enormous canvas.

I came to the desert for a lot of reasons. Practical ones. They gave me excuses to validate going after dreams, and I’d dreamed of these areas for so long. I thought about what the air would feel like and how the wind would move. How the quietness of it all would wrap around me, how I could relax into the stillness, how I could sink down into my body when nobody else was around and have my facial expressions be whatever I wanted them to be. “Smile more, look inviting. You have to seem friendly. Not like that, friendlier.” Their assessments move through my thoughts on a persistent undercurrent and I want to be rid of that phone voice monologue. I want to be in an area where things are real: outside of the customer service face mask that gets dropped as quickly as it takes to walk back into the breakroom, past the carefully honed happiness that emerges as soon as the client walks in the door, and far beyond that required smile and vocal uptick. You’re here! We’ve been waiting and are so excited to serve you. Amusing then, that I came here. Maybe I needed Vegas to serve as a bridge into the openness of the desert; a transition to allow me the contrast I needed to remember how silly it is to pretend to be things I’m not.

It was an odd, tingling feeling in initially leaving the town boundaries. The sign tells me to 'travel safely' and going into a place called Death Valley— I felt that well wishing. It became necessary to travel safely. No cell service for directions or maps other than hardcopies, no water other than what I brought. No aid if I did break down or break a bone. The visual harshness of it all left little option for impetuous decisions or silliness. I can understand why people are drawn to doing marathons and ultras here. It seems like it would try to strip a body bare— not out of malice, but just because that comes with its territory. An intense test of self-awareness and resiliency in an environment that leaves few other decisions available, outside of quitting the race.

And now I am here, standing in the bleakness of Death Valley. I found the silence I've been looking for. I feel it in the middle of this great swath of land with tiny mirages shimmering in the distance, surrounded by mountains so enormous they seem close. Bone-white grasshoppers springing off the hazy, cracked desert floor. Wind sweeping the tree branches clean. The quiet comes in the brief lulls of the wind and the space is so extensive that there is every bit of room for the widest of openness. The sun pounds down: a dull and relentless pressure. It would have been piercing, too, if I didn't have a long and fringed fabric covering my skin. The heat feels so close to the ground: the soil reflects it, bounces it back up and away. A sky sun above and the heat of an earth sun below. The harsh, blunt air feels like a kind of truth that emerges out of hours-long conversation in the dead of night; no masks here. There’s no point to them really, since they’d just burn away. I feel open. There is enough room here for me to expand, to feel emotion, to release emotion, to be something new, and something that is true to myself. I am grateful for it.