Date: 2005-01-17
To: desert solitaire
Miles today: 0.0

6:30pm1.17.05¢the landscape never looks the same coming and going.¢ -- SolnitPerspective is everything. How, and where, and from what angle, and through whose eyes we view something shapes, influences, transforms how we perceive it.Having reached the chapter on pilgrimage in Wanderlust, I feel compelled to record an anecdote from my stint w/ the Park Service. I was a field archaeologist, which meant that every 2 or 3 weeks, I¢d pack my pack and be shipped off to another secluded, isolated National Park scattered across the southwest. My first project was in the Mojave Desert Natl Preserve. MOJA (the NPS acronym) is, as the name implies, a desert. Complete w/ tall, gangly, coat-rack-esque saguaro cacti, and short, spindly prickly pears. And mesquite. And sagebrush. And sand. Lots and lots of sand. And heat. Blasting, searing, heat-stroke inducing heat. My third day in MOJA, the temperature topped 115F. Now, I was not a conditioned desert rat. I had just relocated from temperate western Pennsylvania, where ¢hot¢ began around 85F. Needless to say, I wilted. I drank water. I guzzled it. My Nalgene became my constant companion. Gatorade, previously snubbed by me, was my new best friend. I poured liquid down my throat non-stop for the 8 hours the sun scorched me every day, as we trekked through the desert. And despite this, I literally had to squeeze the pee out of my bladder. My poor kidneys; my poor abused kidneys. Where did those gallons of water go every day? Lost through the pores of my skin, that cooling process of perspiration. But, b/c the sweat evaporates before it even forms, the only evidence is the fine layer of salt (the unfortunate byproduct of the process) coating your skin. Well, anyway, the upshot of this is that it was darned hot out there. And you needed water to survive. Lots and lots of water. So, about a week into out 5-week sojourn, we¢re jostling down the rutted gravel access road to reach our survey area. And then, in the distance, shimmering from the heat radiating from the exposed sand, we see the figure of a man. A man bearing a cross. Literally. Bearing¢¦a¢¦cross. A 10-foot tall cross, made from 4x4 posts. He¢s wearing no shirt. Only shorts and sandals. And that¢s it. Just him. And the cross. No food. No water. We slow down, but he refuses to speak, merely nodding in recognition. As we continue down the road, no one speaks for a moment. Was he real? Or just a mirage? A bipedal hallucination of the desert? Finally, the silence is broken. ¢Was that a half-naked man, back there, carrying a cross?¢ The tension is broken, we all laugh softly, relieved in the affirmation of our sanity, or at the very least, in it being a shared hallucination. Later that day, we hear the rest of the story. Another Park Service employee had encountered the brother of the young man we had seen. From Alabama, he was completing a 40-mile pilgrimage across the Mojave Desert. His brother met him twice a day, bringing him a 2-liter water bottle, and providing a tent for sleeping at night. When we saw him that morning, he was approaching the end of his journey, just half a mile from the interstate. When he reached his own personal mecca, he finally set his burden down, suspending the cross from the most convenient place -- a 65mph Speed Limit sign. The cross was still there, slightly askew, when we left, 4 weeks later.