My Landscape Take II

Georgia O'Keeffe on the Southwest: "Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the 'Faraway'."

My trip to the desert was wonderful, poignant experience. I didn't quite expect to enjoy it as much as I did when I was a little kid, but it turns out that I'm only more in love with it now. The way O'Keeffe described it is perfect, and I like that Edward Abbey  says that the desert is "clean". Even with all the colors of red and the persistent dust, the Southwest remains a stark, strange and bone-dry landscape. Ancient but elusive. You'll die of thirst or exhaustion out there before you find even one good word to pin it down with. Maybe someday I'll come up with a good way to explain my feelings about the desert (I never expect to explain the place itself), but for now I'm satisfied letting older, smarter, and sometimes deader people do it for me (O'Keeffe, Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams). But I love it. I really do.

Right now I'm looking into getting an internship with the SCA sometime in the next few years at a national park in Utah or Arizona (Canyonlands please!!). Maybe I'll try to do it while I'm in school for credit, maybe I'll try to do it after I graduate, or maybe I'll try to do it instead of studying abroad. I don't know. But it seems like an opportunity I would be sick to pass up.

My landscape, somehow

WOW. Earlier today my parents insisted that I come up with a list of places I would like to go over the course of our trip West, so that we can determine our routes there and back and spend our time accordingly. So for the past half hour I've been looking through all the different national parks out in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. I'm looking at Alaska, Wyoming and Montana too, not for this trip but for my possible road trip next summer. I don't come by "proud to be an American" moments often, but right now I feel incredibly lucky to live in a country with so many vastly different, beautiful and strange landscapes somehow all packed together between one ocean and another. I want to go everywhere! It's so overwhelming.
My list so far is:

• Bryce Canyon
• Arches National Park
• Grand Canyon
• Capitol Reef
• Mesa Verde
• Petrified Forest
• Zion Nation Park

I don't expect to get to all of them on this one trip (though that would be so, SO great!), but they're all so amazing I don't know how I'll ever choose. I'm a little startled by how desperately I want to go to these places and how deeply connected to them I feel; I don't know if it's just because I spent time there as a little kid or if it's something else, but I know that there is nowhere else in the world that I find as beautiful or as compelling as the desert and I can hardly wait another day to get there.