This blog entry was published on July 28, 2011, on AJ Tanek’s Blogspot Blog.
On the morning of our second day in Nevada, my husband, son and I left the glittering replicas and showy sin of Las Vegas and drove to Hoover Dam. There we spent a few hours paying homage to that extraordinary feat of engineering that tamed the Colorado River. We marveled at the tons of cement and huge machinery that help provide electricity for parts of the Southwest. We stood in two states at once as we straddled the Nevada-Arizona border on top of the dam. When we had our fill of sightseeing, we drove over the dam to Arizona and continued on Highway 93 through Lake Mead National Recreation Area. I had never given thought to what lie on the other side of the river, so I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Everything disappeared. There were no more buildings, no more trees, the road was the only proof that man had ever been there. We were in the desert–the stony, parched, not-a-green-plant-in-sight desert.
From my seat in the air-conditioned rental car, all I could see was dry earth covered in red-brown rocks. Dead plants were scattered everywhere. I didn’t even see cactus. The blue sky bowed low to touch the horizon in spots; a few barren hills stood in the far distance. It was vast, empty, and dead.
I became anxious as the minutes turned into hours with no sight of a building or rest stop. Visions of calamity flew through my mind as we sped down the smooth road into no-man’s land. I imagined what I would do if the car were to break down or if I were to be left out there alone. They were unpleasant thoughts. There was nothing for miles. I sat on the edge of my seat, wringing my hands and sighing with worry.
I was scared. I had grown up in the Appalachian Mountains of Central Pennsylvania. If not for the farms and small towns, the area serves as a fine example of what Eden might’ve looked like. I had lived in a valley of fertile farmland. My sky was framed by green mountaintops. They surrounded me on all sides, they protected me from what lie beyond. They were always there. I had relied on the mountains to put my life in perspective; they towered over me, overshadowing any problem, if for only a minute.
In the desert, there were no babbling brooks or thick leafy forests, no rivers that I could see. There were no mountains to shield me from the emptiness. There was nowhere to hide. There was nothing there to keep me from falling off the face of the earth, nothing to hold onto, nothing to look to for safety and sustenance. It hurt my eyes to look at it. If the word “God-forsaken” was a fitting name for any place, this was it. It was as if the desert had put itself in God’s hands and He turned His back on it.
I didn’t begin to appreciate the desert until late the next day. After ooh-ing and ahh-ing around the rim of the huge eroded crack in the earth that is the Grand Canyon, we drove through another desert. It was flatter, dryer and lonelier than the first. At dusk the sky filled with a show of colors on a low stage of brown earth. Pink, purple, orange and dark blue danced across the full expanse. The colors weren’t hemmed in by mountains or trees. Night fell. The darkness was blacker than I had ever known. The glow of the dash and the headlights shone before us, but everywhere else was pitch black to infinity. There were no streetlights, no small towns glimmered in the distance.
I still sighed and wrung my hands. I sat wide-eyed and ready to react to crisis. Except this time I embraced the experience as thrilling, like being frightened while riding a roller coaster or watching a scary movie.
Since my experience in the desert, I’ve come to understand that by it’s stark nothingness He made it truly His. Man finds no worth in it. We have to bring so much into it and tame it, strong-arm it with tons of cement and machinery so we can live there. There are no safety nets, no natural abundance for a person to cling to or believe in.
Like the Canyon, the desert is a vast behemoth of nothing–an environment so much more empty than I’d ever experienced. It didn’t shelter me like the mountains’ gentle immensity, it wasn’t a nurturing splendor. I didn’t understand it at first. I saw its simplicity as death, want, thirst, and a lacking of the highest degree. I had to feel its power through fear before I could see. The beauty was breathtaking.
Not I 