Have you ever visited White Sands in New Mexico? It’s a vast desert basin engulfed with gypsum sand, sculpted by the wind into wave-like dunes. I’ve only visited once, more than 20 years ago. When it hits me — the memory of this place — I’m struck with a retroactive sort of déjà vu. I feel coarse grains of sand between my toes, searing the soles of my bare feet. Surrounding me is a sea of white, sparkling beneath the afternoon sun. Heat waves blur the horizon; the mirage makes distant mountains look like skyscrapers in a city, or perhaps vice-versa. The temperature — 102 degrees — is so intense that my body doesn’t know how to react. I’m drenched in sweat and yet I feel the urge to shiver. The landscape looks like snow-covered tundra, so where am I? A curve in the universe where one extreme overlaps another? A bridge between two worlds?
My only visit to White Sands happened spontaneously during a cross-country road trip in 2001. With an agreed-upon budget that amounted to $1,500 each for three months of travel, Geoff and I were always looking to stretch our tourism dollars. One of the best ways to do this was to purchase a $50 annual pass and travel from national park to national park, making use of their convenient services along with free camping in swaths of federal land surrounding the parks.
After leaving Zion National Park, we made our way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, and Carlsbad Caverns. Above the surface, Carlsbad was little more than a mesa rippled with shallow arroyos. Without the impetus of a national park, most people would never suspect that geology artfully carved out a colorful labyrinth of caves beneath this desert shrubland. I loved the long descent into the well-lit abyss but was less impressed with the placement of a snack bar 750 feet below the surface. National Park infrastructure is a great resource, but when it spills into blatant commercialism it becomes less palatable. Why not keep some of the mystery intact?
White Sands — a national monument at the time — seemed to achieve just that: The paradox of accessible mystery. We splurged on a paid campsite at the edge of the dunes, which allowed us the freedom to wander until sunset, our footprints drawing a meandering line through a blank slate of sand. A long-standing heat wave persisted, so there weren’t many visitors that afternoon. At times Geoff and I veered a quarter-mile away from each other, each choosing our own ridge to sprint to the top and tumble down. When I looked across the trough between us, his dark silhouette moved in stunning contrast with the white sand and white afternoon sky. This place was so empty that it would be impossible to disappear. And yet, it felt as though we already had.
When I think about White Sands, I feel wistful and wonder why I haven’t been back. It’s exactly my kind of place: A vast open space, beautifully sculpted and ever-changing — summer heat notwithstanding. However, extreme heat carries its own compelling mysteries.
When temperatures climb into the 100s in a place with no shade and no water, my mind senses the urgency of that hard edge. In the heat, with sweat evaporating almost instantly, there’s absolutely nowhere to run and no place to hide. As we walked up and down dunes, my mind buzzed with the simplest of desires: Water and shade. I searched distant horizons for any semblance of a stream, even as I wandered within a mile of our campsite while carrying a three-liter bladder full of water. This contrast between reality and desire also enhanced the allure of the place — a sharp, unapproachable beauty. In a world that will see more extreme heat waves in the coming decades, there’s value in cultivating an appreciation for the exhilaration of heat as well as respect for its demands.
The world of my day-to-day life often feels so crowded, so loud, so calibrated toward complexities, that I feel like I’m disappearing into the noise. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I find myself escaping to these places in my imagination. My mind usually takes me to the other, oh-so-different and yet complimentary extreme: The windswept tundra of Alaska. I dream about bundling up against a 50-below windchill, cocooned in a comfortable bubble of my own body heat and free to move through the ferocity.
Like extreme heat, extreme cold requires full attention just to survive and it only takes a small mistake to cross that hard edge. And yet, I feel safe here in my mind, in these places so vast that they swallow all of the noise, so fierce that they remove the luxury of self-doubt, and so empty that it’s impossible to disappear.
Sounds like an interesting place. After Riley and his fiancée move to New Mexico later this year, we'll have to visit. We've been to Great Sand Dunes National Park and loved it.
As usual, your writing transports me to an enchanting location. Thank you!