August 4, 2019
Sixteen hours seems a lot longer when you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving one way West on I-40. Anh and I drove halfway to the Grand Canyon the previous day, stopping only briefly in New Mexico, and then I stared straight ahead at the flatness stretching into the horizon.
We were entering the Great American Desert, if we didn’t already know it.
I don’t know what I was expecting out of the Petrified Forest, but what greeted my little Mazda at the edge of the park was nothing short of oddly beautiful. The Painted Desert stretched out before us, the vivid reds and blues and purples blending together into a a pool of color below us, invisible fingers raking lines through the Earth itself. There’s something about sitting on the edge of a cliff, with the blue of the sky above and the tinted earth below. A serenity and awe struck me then. It reminded me of home. Of the red dirt trenches. Of gravel and the kicked up dust on the road.
The road running through the National Park is basically a one way ticket into the middle of nowhere, and if some poor unfortunate soul takes the wrong one (like we did), you end up trying to pull a U-turn in the middle of a two-lane highway, screaming. The off-shoots of the road wind through different sections of the park, and we ended up deciding to visit the Badlands of the Petrified Forest, where many of the scattered trunks of hardened, crystallized trees lay baking in the sun. We only had one afternoon, right?
The Badlands are one of the most colorful parts of the landscape, but they’re nestled in between towers of clay that hold the road above them. We looked out at the dry, dusty expanse of desert in front of us before parking the car at one of the rest areas and descending into what had to have been a riverbed carved out by torrential rain. Stacked together, the layers upon layers of clay became exposed throughout the years of erosion, and what is left now has revealed the blues and purples, the myriad of browns and deep reds, of the earth beneath the topsoil. The sun had reappeared from the previous day, practically baking us in clay oven the earth itself had fashioned out of the landscape.
Walking on the trail (after carefully making our way down and practically frying in that very same sunshine), I wondered about how small our lives are in comparison to the life of the Earth we live on. It seems silly to say, but I hadn’t realized exactly how expansive the United States’ geography is until I stepped into an entirely different world than the ones I had already experienced. Many times, these middle states are ones very few people visit, though the National Parks service has reported an uptick in its visitation hours over the past few years. We wandered the trail a bit before climbing back up that hill with the weight of the afternoon on our shoulders.
I took in the badlands we just came from and the road to which we would return. In the midst of the turmoil of policy and arguments over the fate of our planet and the necessity of change, I want to believe places like this will still be here hundreds of thousands of years from now, outlasting us all. In reality, with the way things are currently heading, I’ not sure how much more time we have as a collective to enjoy what we’ve taken for granted for so long. On the way down the road to the opposite end of the park, I watched as other visitors pulled off of the roads to appreciate the sheer vastness of the countryside and the beauty left over from years of erosion and decay.
We left near the end of the afternoon, when the sky became heavy with storm clouds and the air turned humid and tacky on our skin. I was tired from the afternoon in the heat and ready to sleep off any of the soreness from travel, but mostly I was ready to continue the little adventure West.
Sam