Alvord Desert. Middle of the lakebed. Bright moon.
I was hoping I could write by moonlight, but not quite. I was also hoping to sleep, but only dozed for a few minutes.
It's cold--would obviously be a lot warmer if I closed the damn hatch but it's so fucking beautiful out here and I don't want to miss any of it so I'll suffer through it. It's not terrible. Probably about 42.
In the distance I see a bonfire.
I hear geese flying over in the dark. Headed south. I wonder if any of them are from Portland.
Every few minutes a cow goes off near the mountains. Sounds like a phone on vibrate. Text message. Your package has been delivered.
It's so open. So clear. So safe.
Excerpt from a journal entry, 11.13.21
Earlier that day, much earlier, 4am, when I had crawled out of my bed in my apartment, I felt nothing. Not anxious, not excited. I loaded the gear and the dog into the car. Headed southeast toward Alvord like it was just another task on my list of things to do.
Time flew by. Seven hours on the road is but a blip when there is so much to behold.
The days are short up here in fall and winter. It was nearing sunset when we finally turned onto the road that would take us to our destination.
The road became gravel. We slithered through the grit and dust for another half hour.
I didn't know what to expect. I'd seen photos and read reviews of Alvord Desert by other travelers. I saw lakebeds to the east. They were small. They weren't dry.
Was I here?
Was I lost?
The uncertainty of the gravel road rounded a bend and opened up to the absolute certainty that I had never before, in this lifetime, experienced the true sensation of vastitude. Such stark and breathtaking beauty certainly does not translate to a photograph, but one can hope that these images will at least give you a taste of the splendor of the lake of clay solitude that would be my home for the next 24 hours.
We pulled onto the playa and drove into the sunlight. I parked the car. Pilot and I got out and ran and ran and ran, in love with the freedom of the great wide open and its unreachable horizons.
I took off my shoes and walked barefoot across the the dried lakebed. The cracks pinched my feet. The dry spots pinched the hardest. The damp spots were gentler. It hurt, all of it, but the sensation was new and fascinating and I needed to know it.
The sun sank behind the mountains. We walked back to the car.
Pilot and I are lucky to be little enough to sleep comfortably in the back of my car, so there wasn't much setup we had to do before going to bed.
We watched the slate blue of the northern night sky push the pink down behind the southwestern edge of the earth.
Then we ate dinner and put on all kinds of warm layers.
One of the reasons I had sought desert refuge for this journey was to see the Leonid meteor shower. I'd brought my tripod along in the hopes of trying my hand at some astral photography. I set it up, along with a mat that me and the little guy would cuddle on at 2am when the earth started her trek through the ancient trail of comet dust. I got ready for bed, then climbed into the car with dog and journal and hot cocoa and prepared for a dark desert nap.
The moonlight reflects off the cracked white clay of the playa. A mirror. A mimic.
I dozed in and out. It was cold, but the frisky wind that blew in was warm. And sweet. So sweet. For hours I sailed a desert sea of hypnagogic embryonic bliss. It's possible that the accidental ingestion of a small amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (yes, it's possible to accidentally take acid) along with my other bedtime herbs contributed to my euphoria, but I'm confident I would have felt the magic had I been stone cold sober.
How could I not?
This desert was enchanted.
The alarm went off. Had I been asleep? I peeked up at the sky. Cloudy. Moon still too high overhead. I dozed off. Woke up. 2:40am. Hazy. Dreamy. Mystical. I closed my eyes. Opened them. 3:15am. Clear.
I should get up.
But it's cold!
But the meteor shower!
But the wind and the little warm dog!
Eventually I argued myself into an internal compromise. I rolled onto my back and scooted my head as far out of the car as I comfortably could. Gazed blearily up at the stars.
None of them fell. Nothing fell but me, back to sleep.
I awoke to an icy dawn. To a luminous salmon east over the mesas. To an affectionate breeze that, the night prior, had danced about in a barometric frenzy when it thought nobody was watching.
When I saw the sunrise on the Steens Mountains, I had no regrets about missing the meteors.
This was what I had come to see.
Dawn. Then sunrise. Chai, breakfast, yoga, shit, dog, pictures, nap, write.
Time has less meaning here. It flies by, it creeps by, it stands still. Looking at a clock would be pointless were it not for an eventual need to return home.
I'm not ready to leave, not yet.
But leave we eventually did. Bade farewell to the playa and the Steens and the hidden wild creatures along the edge of the abyss.
Drove home into the sunset.
Two weeks later it was Thanksgiving weekend. Having no family up here with whom to celebrate, and no desire to drive down to the fast-paced plastic concrete paradise from whence I came, my holiday plans were simple:
Go back to Alvord Desert.
It was just as beautiful, but it was cold. So cold. The wind was harsh. It seems a lot can change in two weeks when your side of the planet is making the journey into winter.
It's so cold the ink isn't flowing. I'm already in bed in the car and it's not even 6pm.
Excerpt from journal entry, 11.25.21
My mood that night was not great. I had a lot on my mind. I was frustrated. I wanted the magical experience I'd had the last time I'd been here. I also had female issues that I was forced to contend with in the cold dark desert. I wanted to be mad but I had nobody, no thing to blame. Ultimately I decided that the healthiest and most benign thing to do out there in the desert was to direct my anger toward the males of my species, who, in addition to being blissfully ignorant to challenges like changing a tampon in a Listerine wind, don't have to worry about a lack of stream trajectory on a hard flat frozen surface and consequentially climbing back into bed with overspray on their ankles.
I spent 12 hours in the cold car.
When I woke up to this:
all was forgiven.
But I still felt moody. And painfully lonely.
I don't know if the solitude of the playa compounds or assuages what I would still be feeling were I sitting at home indoors on the couch.
I don't know if being here is fun. That's not to say I'm NOT grateful to be here, soaking in the blue white of the desert. I think an experience can be positive without joy, elation, happiness, and other such emotions generally associated with wellbeing.
Content to feel shitty, I wandered with Pilot in search of some individuality in this seemingly uniform and sparse wilderness.
I found plenty.
And somehow felt less alone.
These little outcroppings appeared in a group near the west side of the playa. They were composed of crumbly white powdery dirt that tasted like a mildly salty antacid tablet.
(I didn't die when I tasted it and I'm still not dead.)
The dust all around them was dry, but it caked onto surfaces easily.
On the northwest side of the playa we discovered some interesting muddy mounds.
They were dry, but they looked to have at one point been wet, drippy mud.
I'm not sure how they were formed. They were very unique.
And cute, with their little tufts of dormant desert scrub.
An autumn Alvord day doesn't have a lot to offer the senses as far as color, but it is an absolute cornucopia of texture.
Between its abundant textures and undulating shadows brought on by sunbreaks, Alvord is a black and white photography wonderland.
We wandered through the dry scrub forest.
Pilot found the fresh mud.
And I found the ice.
And the muddy ice.
We spent a long time out here by the mud mounds and their vegetation.
It felt nice to be near them.
To be near other life.
I come to these places because I am searching for something. Not just rays of light bouncing off the external beauty of the earth and into my eyes or the lens of my camera. I'm trying to find something inside. I've found something this trip. It's still buried, but I can see and feel a little bit of it poking out of the dirt. It's not pretty, but if I can just dig it out...
We laid in the dirt for a long time. Soaked in all the desert had to offer.
From my humble vantage point I watched the tiniest spider start a web on one of my shoes. Fearing I might forget about him when I eventually put them back on, I gently brushed him off. He caught a breeze with a sliver of web and tumbled away across the playa floor.
He was gone in seconds.
A cool way to travel.
I have a headache and I'm sad and I don't feel like digging in the dirt just so I can take a shit and miss the hole.
A thick cloud cover is moving in from all directions. I'm searching for an excuse to allow myself to want to leave. That I'm cold and want comfort should be reason enough.
We did leave, eventually, like we always do. I didn't regret leaving, nor did I regret the trip. It was a part of my internal journey made external. We travelers are always seeking something. It's not always profound, what we find. The profundity comes in the fact that we made the effort to find anything at all.
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and look at my photos. I have a video for you as well, featuring sunrise, daylight, and sunset in the Alvord Desert, accompanied by my own musical composition. The video is simple. The song feels like the desert.
instagram: @se_pdx_crows
Art in NFT Showroom
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All the stuff (pictures, words, videos, songs, etc.) I put in this post and any of my other posts is mine (unless otherwise stated) and can't be used by anyone else unless Pilot and I say it's ok.
