Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing By

Monument Valley, Arizona. A vast desert landscape, desolate, sweeping, abandoned. I am sitting at the butte's edge, admiring red plateaus that rise sharply from the valley floor.

Above, arcing sky, impossibly blue.

The wind blows, a cold presence from the east.

I understand there are empty places such as this, landscapes filled with brutal silence, whose drama unfolds daily to an audience of none. This place existed before the Navajo settled here, and will exist long after the last human footprint has been wiped away by the incessant wind.

Even now, in the thousand square miles before me, the only movement is twitching sagebrush and slow-rolling clouds, wispy, fibrous, gathering on the horizon. By day's end they will have become majestic thunderheads, ash-colored, wrathful.

I close my eyes, and I too am suspended above the land. Floating, I'm suddenly and powerfully connected to a network of places, times, and events. Bahia de Los Angeles, Baja California Norte, 1999. Ollantaytambo, Peru, 2001. Mattole Road, Cape Mendocino, CA, 2003. Grey's peak, Colorado, 2006. Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 2011. The Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Bouvetøya, 2023.

I think of a road, not far from here, where we drove a dilapidated truck into the desert wasteland, up through New Mexico and into Santa Fe. It was winter, February. The air was crystalline in our lungs as we walked the cobbled streets that frigid night, past the concealed gaze of Catholic saints and through the boisterous wash of revelers' noise.

I am awakened by the cold rain against my face. The storm is coalescing. I watch as it sweeps in, thinking: may my body be pulverized here atop this monument, smashed into dust, scattered into the wind, and allowed to freely roam the evanescent, cascading, unfolding catalogue.