Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

My trip has ended and what can be said now but so long and see you later, and thanks to this planet for its beauty—sometimes hidden, more often in plain sight, always within reach. 

I’m sorry I had to drive all over you to see as much as I did, but you can’t blame me for desire. I did, in my defense, buy a lightweight trailer and the most fuel efficient truck I could afford to pull it with. But 13 states and 7,200 miles is no joke.

In Texas I saw the hills of Monahans, a windswept land that piles sand to staggering heights. And farther south the borderlands in Big Bend, where some of the animals looked different from those I see where I am from, while the people here and there and across the border all looked the same to me—like people. 

New Mexico held sand absent any color—the gypsum fields of White Sands National Park—fine and firm with dunes like ski slopes, a whisper forever drifting in the wind.

In Arizona I saw canyons cut by the sharp edges of water, so deep you swore the earth had been ripped apart by forces more violent and sinister than time, as if anything could be more sinister, in the end, than time. I toddled my way between the walls and sang softly a song of human awe and wondered how, all this, in just these million years? 

And through this great southwest I sat in turn with each of North America’s deserts, breathed their dry air, still cool in the winter. The Chihuahuan, full of pointy things that want to stab you. The Sonoran where the friendly Saguaro grows, whose “g” is silent and says hello with a wave while its ancestral husks lay about, all the life they might give they gave. 

The dry Mohave as well, its finicky Joshua Trees (hello Dr. Suess!), and there also, I said goodbye to the thieves. And even the high Great Basin Desert—I brushed up against it and shared its memories of lakes that left us long ago. And then again I met these three once more in Lake Mead, where dams dam water and water is damned and not enough of it there is in the way we use it, so we lose it. 

Dune sledding and dust storms, stone arches chiseled by wind and all the desert life—the prickly pears and the ocotillos, the cholla, agave, and yucca, the beauty of the barrel cactus, the meaning of color and water in a sometimes waterless, colorless land that waits… and suddenly bursts in the warmth and the repeated promises of the sun that I am here for you again, and again, and again, show me who you are. 

Eighty-three nights I spent in my little camper, where I wrote more than 20,000 words, some worth more than others. I showered in the sunshine. I grew a mustache. 

There were Valleys of Fire balanced against Walmart Parking Lots, the Navajo Nation and its sandstone formations, hoodoos and goblins of stone. The mud people. And I remember wringing dirty socks in the warm water of my camper sink as well as I recall anything at all. 

I saw mountains where I didn’t know there were mountains and whose names I forget. If your name isn’t the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas, the Appalachians, well then, you’re not on the map of the conscious mind. But no matter, because time forgets everything—even, eventually, mountains. 

Three months is so little time and yet it is spent and how you spend it is a choice and you can call it an investment—those experiences, the warm sun on your face in the morning, a lemon picked from a tree, the yipping and howling of coyotes in the Canyonlands, the Anza-Borrego Badlands. California. The sun.

I forget so many things as fast as I learn them, but the feelings I remember. 

And now it is spring, and nearly time for a garden. 

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After this post my blog will transition back to me mostly writing about whatever is going on in my life, random things and thoughts, until it’s time for the next trip. Thanks for reading.