Juan's Thoughts on the Trip

These are my thoughts on the trip, in no real order.

My perspective of Albuquerque from it’s rim was of a vast, fertile garden overgrown with motels, waffle-houses, and Jiffy Lubes. And from the plane, it looked like an immense, charred cattle-brand on the desert. I didn’t get a very good look at Albuquerque.

I was eager to escape San Francisco and it’s paranoid reflex for irony. A road-trip across the American Southwest, or a road-trip in general, makes a good retreat from cultural snobs. Except that I’m an artist, I was going to look at earthworks, and I wanted escape from the culture of San Francisco. Cultural snobbery was the very reason I was going.

Camp is easier to endure with your own family, since with them camp becomes invisible, at least as long as you don’t step outside of their circle of influence and become an observer to your own family. But on this trip I often couldn’t see anything without the grainy filter of camp. It sucks to think that I could never fall for the romanticism of a place, and I imagine if I ever see Paris (France not the obscure California town with the boulders painted to look like fruit), my stunned rapture will be interrupted by that little voice saying “That’s What They Want You to Feel!”, “they” being the man I guess. The one selling souvenirs. Then I think “it’s always been camp. From the moment someone promoted it, sold tickets, set up a museum with colorful displays, and got people traveling across the country to stand in line, exhausted from heat, to see the amazing whatever it is because they’ve been told it’s amazing, it’s been camp and there’s really nothing you can do about it. And you fell for it too. You’re so gullible.” So I guess camp is just something I have to ignore.

The environment of the desert did set a beautiful tone for the trip. Like many of the cities I would see, Albuquerque felt subordinate to the desert’s natural characteristics. There were ads and franchises, but they weren’t crowding my vision, warring and screaming for attention. They stood still, at even intervals, and respectful of territory, giving wide berths and air to breath. Everything seemed in suspended animation, like a ghost town in a sterile, soundless chamber. This tranquility lasted almost the whole trip, and it made everyone more reticent. We were strangers but, the environment justified the silence.

The tight schedule we were on had us whooshing through that landscape, and the impression I took was of flipping through a book to look at the pictures, maybe reading a couple of captions. You glean information from nature by looking at it, but some places asked for longer gazes. The van’s claustrophobic, air-conditioned comfort made it feel like being in a capsule getting sucked through a pneumatic tube. We blasted the air-conditioner and pressed our hands on the windows to feel the heat outside.

What’s great about geological formations is that they are in constant flux, from time and the weather. That’s why Lightning field was the most profound experience. Being there for a day and overnight allowed me to absorb all the effects it produced as it changed with the environment. Everything that we saw was beautiful, but some things would have looked less like postcards if we had had more time with them.