Deserts and Forests

I'm losing my ability to think coherently. The desert is dazzling and endless; it fills my mind as much as my vision and as a consequence, words and thoughts I previously relied upon are leaking away.

This morning we took in the Petrified Forest National Park here in Arizona. It's a bit special. The desert is literally littered with semi-precious stones, like agate and jasper, quartz and amethyst. Most remarkably, these minerals lie about the place shaped like fallen tree trunks. The trees were part of a swampy tropical forest two hundred and twenty-five million years ago. They fell and became submerged in a mineral-rich sludge ejected from volcanoes. The trees sucked the silicate inside themselves where it crystalised. Eventually the tree trunk's living tissue became replaced by stone and slowly the landmass rose and became eroded, revealing the petrified trees. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

Eventually, when we have sufficient Internet, I'll post pictures. But for now you'll just have to believe me: it is hauntingly and gobsmackingly beautiful.

Then there were the views across 'The Painted Desert' -sweeping vistas of pink rock and dry green grass, as bright and colourful as any spring meadow. The air is the purest in America apparently and allowed us to see the tops of the San Francisco Peaks, a mere one hundred and twenty miles away.

Several hours later, having ignored the first signs for Los Angeles, we were climbing the shoulders of those mountains, driving up out of Flagstaff and into a living forest of silver birch and Ponderosa pine. At eight thousand feet (three thousand higher than the Petrified Forest) there was snow on the ground. The simplicity of green pine needles and white snow was restful after the colours of the desert, but we were soon heading back down again.

There was just time to arrive at the Grand Canyon itself and have a shufty at the rim before bed.

First impression? I'm terrified.

The Beyond

I must be tired: I have written up a lovely day in a sneery, grumpy way and this will not do. So we shall start again and I will say that the road was good and that the landscape was amazing; that Santa Fe was charming; that even the scary truck stop and the kitsch nostalgia of 'historic' route 66 were pleasant distractions along our way. Yes, even the novelty motel cones of Holbrook, AZ, in which I am writing this, are perfectly lovely.

We started in Tucumcari, NM. In the night, the panhandle prairies had turned to a kind of desert. The morning was bright and chill, the sun shining on a dry landscape of yellow grass and pink rock, dotted with thousands of scrubby green bushes.

We set off, the sun behind us, and the road climbed amongst the mountains of New Mexico, red or black, sometimes even flecked with snow.

We had a few hours in Santa Fe. It's a charming place. The narrow streets are jammed with boutiques, galleries and restaurants. We crashed the jolly Catholic cathedral (built in the 19th century although the city is 400 years old) and pointed out all the saints and transubstantiation to the boys before retiring to a nearby crêperie. If that's not japes, I don't know what is.

Then it was back onto the interstate and foot down all the way into the most remarkable landscape I've yet seen in America. Almost a desert, certainly a desolation, it made yesterday's panhandle plains seem like Piccadilly Circus. Utterly empty, just pale white scrub and occasional distant cliffs of dark red stone. The horizon was so impossibly far away that it seemed ridiculous not to see a glint of sun on the ocean beyond it. But there is no end, the land simply continues, forever.

How did people cross this void? I can't imagine making this trip without an iPod, let alone before the inventions of road or rail. We are passing through this abominably vast landscape, hurrying to move on to the next stop. Trying to cross it on foot or by wagon must have been a feat of psychological endurance more than anything else; surely those seemingly infinite spaces would have ground relentlessly away at certainty and perspective, until you went mad?

In Santa Fe there was a gallery of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and one struck me in particular. A bold composition of horizontal layers of blue and black, it is called 'The Beyond'. She painted it in 1972, when she was in her eighties.

Even before this afternoon's drive, it seemed to me to be a flat landscape: a black foreground with dark bands of turbulent blue cloud above it. In the middle is a very narrow line of almost white light, as if the setting sun were knifing through a low break in heavy clouds. The colours are cold, almost funereal and it is difficult not try and guess which 'beyond' she saw in those dark skies and those vast horizons.

It is a hopeful painting I thought, not about endings and finalities but about moving on, moving through. Beyond this great space, beyond the setting sun, there'll be another, bigger, wider, emptier. It never ends, not with the desert, not even with the ocean.

The Other Edge of Texas

We didn't do much that was new today, but we did break some new ground eventually, once we had peeled ourselves off of the familiar Dallas road and struck west towards the panhandle. Everything changed after that.

Before then, the journey had all been previously seen bits of Texas. Houston glowered under dark skies, the towers of downtown broken and smoking with cloud. As we inched our way out of the city, the morning grew darker and the sky pressed lower, eventually fragmenting into a ferocious storm in which both thunder and lightning were lost above the vicious rain that fell like beads against the windscreen.

Houston weather that we were glad to leave behind - it stayed, tangled in the city, and we broke free of both. The sky lightened, the sun came out. We drove through the trees, a mixture of green leaves and bare limbs, blossom and brown, all the seasons jumbled as usual.

By the time we'd reached the Dallas/Fort Worth conurbation, we'd been driving for five hours. It passes quickly enough. The roads were quiet, as were the boys in the back, and we coasted along.

After lunch we took a new road. Fort Worth, with its own distant towers and thickly applied frontage road stores, dissolved under the sunshine. We headed north-west towards new places, strange yet familiar sounding: Wichita Falls, Amarillo.

The trees were gone too, replaced by a messy rise and fall of grass and pasture. Like the jumbled trees, the grass was also confused, blending between scrubby brown, bright green and faded yellow. It began to feel very different. The fields were oddly ornamented with small nodding donkeys, or rusted brown boxcars.

Suddenly we were way out, somewhere else.

The towns changed as we went, strung out along the road like knots. Some, like Decatur, announced desperately there was more to see if only we'd stop and look. Others, like Memphis or Claude, seemed to have fallen long ago into a dusty despair, tattered and tiny. They all felt isolated, as much from each other as from anywhere else, and some even had their 19th century ribs poking through their modern trappings. With their General Stores and local banks, these were clearly old western towns. One, Clarendon I think, even had a small stone square Sheriff's office, with iron bars across the windows and patrol cars tethered up outside.

And now, around these dusty islands, the grass became a great ocean of pale green. The land and sky stretched and stretched, pulled impossibly far in all directions, skewing perspective so that objects, the odd silo or wind vane, looked either too close and vanishingly small or, like the silhouetted combines, enormous and distant. The sun began to set, sucking colour from the world as it settled before us, bright and menacing and low in the sky. We stopped for dinner in Amarillo, but before we could see anything of it, night fell abruptly, like a dropped curtain.

We had nearly gone far enough. Another hundred miles or so down the road was the border with New Mexico. We ploughed through the darkness. The boys grumpily tumbled into sleep in their seats. Outside the beautiful, ghostly desolation of the plains was lost, replaced with eerie fields of flashing lights.

We crossed the border into Mountain Time and allowed the last few miles to roll away until the jolly lights of Tucumcari rose over the brow of a hill.

I know absolutely nothing about this place other than that we are leaving it first thing in the morning.

In the Face of Disaster

Today's events are staggeringly awful. The violence of those energies unleashed underneath Japan will continue to devastate lives for many years whilst we, hopefully, are merely overwhelmed by images and stories that have the power to threaten only our notions of security. The lives, families, homes and work places of those directly affected are imperilled. For the rest of us, watching, we are forced to confront the tenuous illusion of permanence we afford our own daily affairs, our own loved-ones.

But despite all this, I cannot help being heartened. Natural disasters like this strike with little warning and devastating consequences. But the response, the wave of compassion that travels all over the world, is perhaps even more awe-inspiring and should reassure us that nothing, not even something as awful as this, is wholly bad.

Resources are dispatched; organisations are mobilised; the brain power of scientist and engineers are employed; governments and charities race to assist. Suddenly, and with great resolve, our own mighty forces of help and healing are unleashed. It's an amazing thing, proof of the achievements our civilisation is capable of when shocked into action.

It's a stark contrast to how we approach the slow-burning man-made calamities of poverty, preventable diseases, war, tyranny and ecological threats, all of which blight generations of lives but somehow seem less shocking to us, simply because they are ongoing.

That is for tomorrow. Today we again we find ourselves shown how small our world is, how connected and interdependent our communities are.

Carry on Blogging

Argh! This is me agonising over the fact that I don't blog. Confusingly, it's the same noise that I make when I agonise over the fact that I do blog.

Sometimes I get asked why I don't blog more. The truth is that I do blog more - I have developed a sad habit of writing but then just not hitting the 'publish' button. It's a confidence game, I guess. In an effort to be bold, I'm going to try and write more carelessly. If you see what I mean.

So in that spirit, some ancient drafts have been brought into the sunlight - rather like those Chilean miners. Remember them? Well now you can find out what I thought about that all those months ago - my blog on their rescue has spent more time underground then they did I think. Well worth the wait, I'm sure.

And, of course, I have ditched the tank. To be honest, I have always been a little embarrassed by it and this has increased once its audience extended beyond people I knew in 1991. I suppose this might have been an impediment to self-promotion (I have enough of those surely?) but in any case I have a nice shiny and friendly robot now (what am I going to do with the space to his right?) and you may be surprised at how much happier this makes me.

That's a whole other post I suspect and one I'm loathe to do, it being navel-gazing of the most self-absorbed kind. Perhaps, if I can pierce that navel, so to speak, with some self-deprecation I might explain my thinking some other time.

It's likely that I'll get distracted and write about something else. Next week is Spring Break and that means a Road Trip. There will be blogging and pictures of that for sure.

The Bigger Picture on the Small Screen

You might not know this, but Britain is a small country and America is a huge one. It's not immediately obvious because one can only see a little bit of either at a time, but I am slowly getting my head around it. It is a shock.

This gulf in size is being exaggerated though I think because it is no longer merely geography that makes a country diffuse. I have accidentally moved from the UK to the US at a time when the very idea of national consensus is being shredded, and any sense of shared cultural cohesion is falling by the wayside.

Although we occupy the same streets and cities as each other, it is entirely possible for us to occupy a different world to our neighbours. We can use different shops, go to different churches, use different schools and hospitals to each other. Not only can we vote differently and hold different opinions to each other as we have done for decades, but we now we can draw these opinions from totally different news sources. Perhaps they use some of the same names, but there's little overlap between, say, the Muslim Kenyan Obama presented by Fox News and the Christian American President that appears on MSNBC.

News or entertainment, our media options are endlessly dividing and multiplying, like cells, so that we can now spend our lives in divergent realities, sharing only weather and a post code.

The same process is at work in Britain, but its very smallness mitigates against it splintering so quickly into parallel realms, as does having a non-political head of state. But even here, TV channels have proliferated and appointment viewing has become a Holy Grail, much sought after by programme schedulers.

But television still has an almost magic power to pull people together and last weekend saw a remarkable example of it, not just in one country but across the world.

Comic Relief, a charity founded by British comedians in the 1980s to raise money for people in Africa and the UK, has become an institution, entering the national consciousness at the same time as becoming, perhaps, part of the national conscience.

As part of preparations for its 2011 BBC telethon, Comic Relief staged a 24 hour marathon of panel shows over the weekend, with David Walliams (Little Britain) taking part in every one. The resulting episodes of classic (and mostly defunct) shows like QI, Give Us A Clue, Blankety Blank and Call My Bluff will be broadcast later, but a live feed of all the recordings was streamed over the BBC website. It was incredible and most importantly unifying television.

Because it was live, complete with audience rotation and set changes, it was unmissable in the way that television used to be before VCRs let alone TiVo and the internet allowed us to start mixing up our own TV schedules. But there was also something gripping about seeing the pauses or the calm hurriedness of Floor Managers and Make-up Artists as they worked. The tense silence of an audience behaving itself whilst presenters were given their marks or mics were adjusted gave everything a frisson that has long since dissipated from normal programming.

Being streamed, free, for 24 hours meant that the online audience was massive and global. The reputation of the BBC helped pull in and raise money from viewers across the world. And of course, being for charity, these viewers were politely, insistently shown the reason why everyone was doing this. Regardless of language or politics or faith or geographical location, in between the jokes we were shown the appalling and preventable hardships that blight the lives of people in developing societies.

For those 24 hours Comic Relief let us all see the bigger picture.

Regardless of where you live on the planet, you can donate money to Comic Relief here.

The Fog of Childhood

I have very clear memories of being five or six, if clear is the right word: the distinct impression I am left with of that time is one of experiencing reality through a fog, as if watching and listening from behind frosted glass. I can see now that I was incapable of completely engaging in the business of being myself in the world - as if conscious control of my own life was something I had not yet mastered.

This is something I need to bear in mind when I am exasperated by my children. Aged five and seven, they are always amazed when I know something.

"How do you know that!" they cry and I can only answer, "By being alive for thirty years!" I guess they'll get there one day, by which time maybe I'll have learnt to cut them some slack.

What prompted this thought? The long walk home from school. A time for them to pelt me with insane questions, or to terrify me with glimpses into the workings of their still-forming minds. Here is a near-as-dammit transcript of today's conversation.

Son 1: Dad, why is Valentine’s Day called Valentine’s Day?

Me: Well Valentine was probably a man who lived in Roman times who was killed for being a Christian.

Son 1: Why was he killed for being a Christian?

Me: Because -

Son 2: I’m a Crispian.

Me: Are you?

Son 2: Well, yeah because at Pre-K there was a kind of church thing and we sang songs and there was a lady who went on about Jesus ALL the time.

Son 1: So, why-

Me: (Suddenly alert) Shh 1 (To 2) That doesn’t mean you’re a Christian. Being a Christian means you believe in Jesus.

Son 2: Yeah, I believe in Jesus.

Me: You have to believe a specific thing.

Son 2: What?

Me: You have to believe that Jesus was the son of God and that he was killed so that everyone could have the chance to go to Heaven when they died. And you have to believe that when he died he came back to life.

Son 2: Seriously?

Me: Yes.

Son 2: Well, I’m not believing that. That’s silly.

Me: Well if you don’t believe it you’re not a Christian.

Son 2: Jesus died on a hill right? I do know that’s true because I saw a painting of it.

Me: You saw a painting? A painting isn’t proof.

Son 2: Yes it is.

Me: What if I painted a picture of you with an elephant on your head? Would that make it true?

Son 2: (attempting to balance his school bag on his head) What if there was an elephant on my head?

Me: That would be lovely but I’m saying that a painting isn’t proof that some thing’s true.

Son 2: (wistfully) It was awesome when Jesus died.

Me: Wow.

Son 1: So why was Valentine executed by the Romans?

Me: Because being Christian was against the law. The Roman government had its own religion.

Son 2: Well, I’m sure glad I’m not a Crispian! I don’t want to be electrocuted.

Me: No, executed. And it’s not illegal any more. Not here anyway. Maybe it’s best if you don’t make any decisions about this for a few more years eh?