Sunday, August 13, 2017

Desert Solitaire


Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was very much on my mind tonight and my aimless mind composed yet another ignorable blog entry…

Leaving San Simeon in a few weeks and my beach friends will soon be asking me what I see in the deserts of Arizona.

Well, try to consider...

Life, Death, and Coexistence on a grand and immediate scale.

I’ve recently spent three days with a friend in the California high country and managed to drag my sorry butt to the higher 9000 foot lakes. 

We saw two deer, one or two squirrels. And a lot of dead trees.

In a month or so I will return to the city of Tucson and a backyard filled with roadrunners, doves, quail, multiple squirrel species, and the occasional snake, tarantula, coyote and a possible gila monster.

And so from Edward Abbey’s, Desert Solitaire:

The desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea.

But a better passage was provided by my brother Mark, a near- native Tucsonan:

The Desert:  Its brilliant colors, its diverse wildlife, its vast empty places and all its veiled beauty--grows on you.  No one comes here expecting to stay; the landscape is just too harsh, too barren and too unforgiving, not at all what we are used to or even what we imagine we would like.

 But the air, the silence, and the seductive encore of a thousand crimson sunsets, slowly and imperceptibly pulls us in, wins us over and holds us captive, to this steadfast celebration of life, in the most austere and inhospitable of surroundings.  If even the dry and dusty desert can bloom, then so can we.

You nailed it Mark.
Thanks.

 

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