'Where are the Camels?'
'That's what Peter Reyner Banham wanted to know in !889 when he set foot on his first American Desert.' 1.
'Many of the early Spanish documents from the New World read pretty much like what they are: reports by greedy bureaucrats to their greedy superiors concerning the possibilities of fleecing the land of it's resources.' 1.
"For bringing us the horse, we almost forgive you for bringing us alcohol and disease."
Lakota Sioux upon encountering the Spanish Europeans 1550's
'In 1876, General George Armstrong Custer, 200 miles off route, under manned and under powered, encountered the largest off-reservation gathering of Great Plains Indians, and gave them the last really good time they ever had.'
Peter Mathiason 'In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse' 1992
Through much of our recent history, we Americans have looked to nature, both physically and spiritually, as a place of escape, as our "geography of hope", in Wallace Stegners's words. In our ever more crowded world, what the pioneers once despised has turned out to be, by virtue of the very fact that is was shunned and therefore lightly settled, our last refuge for quiet and contemplation. So it is that the deserts are refuges not by choice but by default. If "the Desert is where God is and Man is not" as Frank Lloyd Wright says, what better place to find , if not God, then ourselves?
Those who have long and carefully studied the Grand Canon of the Colorado do not hesitate to pronounce it the most sublime of all earthly spectacles.
[1] Peter Wilde, 'The Desert Reader' 1991
'"We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown. Our boats, tied to a comman stake, are chafing at each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river. We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth and the great river shrinks into insignificance. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.
Two rifles and a shotgun are given to the men who are going out, I write a letter to my wife and give it to Howland. They entreat us not to go on, and tell us it is madness to set out in this place. Some tears are shed, it is a rather solumn parting, each thinking the other is taking the dangerous course."
John Weslly Powell 'Exploration of the Colorado' 1875
"Much of the time I feel so exuberant I can hardly contain myself. the colors are so glorious, the forests so magnificent, the mountains so splendid, and the streams so utterly, wildly, tumultously, effervescently joyful that to me, at least, the world is a riot of sensual delight.
I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear."
Edward Ruess 'A Vagabond For Beauty' 1932
"With enough power and money, you can make water run uphill."
Mark Reisner 'Cadallac Desert' 1986
"...the journey goes on forever, and we are fellow voyagers on our little living ship of stone and soil and water and vapor, this deli-cate planet circling round the sun, which humankind call EARTH..."
Edward Abbey 'Down The River' 1980
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And Wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that collosal wreck, boundless and bear
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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