Oh wait…I forgot.

Yesterday I went to The Desert. (My mom asked, “What desert?” I said, “The Desert. Like if you drive far enough west and you hit sand.”) I had never seen the desert before, so I figured yesterday was a good time to do it. I needed to sort some things out in my head, so I hastily packed a bag late Friday afternoon and headed west. I made it to the very southwestern corner of Fort Worth around 10:30 before crashing in a hotel. It’s not exactly like I was roughing it. I got up reasonably early yesterday morning and drove from there to Abilene and Odessa, then to Monahans Sandhills State Park, on the edge of the desert. And I took lots of pictures.

I’m trying to spin it as a sort-of thesis research instead of the Jesus-Christ-I-need-to-get-out-of-town last-minute trip that it was, though I’m sure I’m not convincing anyone. Here’s my pitch: DeLillo loves deserts, right? Part of his first novel is set there, and his second novel is set at a college right on its edge. Then there’s Underworld and Point Omega (in its entirety) and so on. And whenever his novels aren’t set in the desert, they at least mention it. I love this part of Americana:

This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger’s sunbaked eyes. (349)

There’s also a big chunk of End Zone I’d like to post, but I know photos are more interesting, so I’ll get to them quickly. All I’m sayin’ is that DeLillo’s characters tend to go to the desert to think, to find some kind of purity, and so on. Which is what I did, and I was pretty successful. It was beautiful and totally worth going, even if most of the thinking I did happened during the twenty-plus hours I spent driving there and back.

Just west of Abilene. I realize this isn't the desert.

Odessa

A cactus!

The sky was perfect.

The Desert!

A huge wind farm near Loraine. I saw hundreds of windmills.

Bonus: Here’s a video of these windmills. They make a quiet hissing sound, and they totally creep me out.

Keep in mind that I shot all the pictures and the video with my sparkly new iPhone 4. Most of them look as good as they would have with my fancy Nikon, which I didn’t even bring on my trip.

Oh! And there are lots more photos. Here’s the set on flickr.