You’re reading the first in a series of posts about travel and places, this one occasioned by Andy’s and my upcoming annual trip to the Anza Borrego Desert in southern California, northeast of San Diego.
Borrego’s two-and-a-half hours away; more than that, it is a place apart. As I drive, I always experience a sense of leaving ordinary existence and escape into another world. Yet Anza Borrego isn’t everyone’s world. On my first trip (over thirty years ago), I didn’t much like the place—the “differentness” of it got to me. Also, being crammed into a car with a disparate group of people and having to amuse a bored small child, is hardly the best way to experience any new place. And we went for only a day. How can you possibly take the measure of, let alone appreciate Anza Borrego (or any other great place), in such a short time?
Now I look forward to the desert every time I go; even starting to write this piece, several weeks before leaving home, I was already planning photographs and writing. I’m looking forward to tamarisk and palo verde trees, and what seems like a lifetime’s worth of great rocks in a few days’ travel. I’m reading up on what and where to explore this time. Always I hope for those things you can’t plan, such as the coyote a few years back who briskly trotted by a bench where we sat behind the Visitor Center, perhaps fifty feet from us. He went about his business; we watched.

Most of all, I look forward to the abundant paradoxes of the desert, starting with grand vistas, yet intimate detail. Everywhere. In variety of scale, the desert is rather like the beach, yet without the comforting element of water. However, thousands of years ago, this vast flat bowl of sand and plants and rocks used to be a sea; today the desert floor is essentially its opposite. People have found fossils of marine life left behind here when the Gulf of California drained out. In either place, I can focus on rocks or plants and miniature scale things, or look to the distance and feel myself part of a large open world. Trade the immersion of swimming for hiking and walking, breathing in the element itself, whether water or air.
Ironically, though, I’ve taken a few of my favorite water images in Anza Borrego. The Palm Canyon oasis, so hidden in a canyon-crack in the hills, is—oh, yes!—a stream. I didn’t wade but allowed rest and the vision of water to heal me before we turned back for the trailhead.
Another hike to Palm Canyon on a very hot day, though hardly summer heat, on May 1. On the way back, we spotted some desert bighorn sheep drinking, but I found myself fighting conflicting impulses: the joy of seeing these great creatures vs. my feet, whose soles felt they’d spent quite enough time on the hot sand grill, thank you.

“Out there” in Anza Borrego, I miss bright green, especially the foliage of broad-leafed trees, yet I love the lime green trunks of palo verde trees, and their yellow blossoms in the spring. However, here I’m voicing a classic east coast sensibility, as my mother also did on that first trip. It’s no accident that a major anthology of writing about the American desert is titled Getting Over the Color Green. I’ve learned to find richness in gradations of brown, gray, orange, even, yes, in shadings of gray-green; I revel in the occasional saturated color of cactus blooms and the paint-brush splashes of chuparosa or ocotillo blooms or sand verbena and desert dandelions, the latter as bright yellow as the ones that invade your yard. Except for occasional years when rain and perfect timing create vast blooms and draw thousands of people to Borrego Springs, color often comes in small doses, the flowers appearing as mini-splashes or single brush strokes, like this chuparosa.

Once outside the state park, where most of these images were taken, the town of Borrego Springs offers its own oases, and we often stay at a resort whose grounds were planned as a desert garden. There I wander among beautifully placed desert plants, or cross small bridges over a meandering stream which reflects sky and palm trees as it flows over rocks. I swim in pools or lounge under ramadas or on terraces created to relax the mind. A photographic paradise, the grounds are a healing place, referencing the surrounding territory, quite unlike one local motel with a broad expanse of manicured green lawn.

Whenever I go to Anza Borrego, I try to focus myself, my mind, as much as the camera. I tell myself, “Slow down, control your greedy consumption, kid! You’re back here again –but don’t curb your delight, either. Discipline yourself, Sally. This place is holy ground. Worship. Try to improve on last time. Breathe deeply, see hard.”
The desert stimulates me to truth-seeking, and a deeper-than-usual effort to capture and preserve what I can best discern out of God’s creation. Always I pray that my spiritual commitment will be borne out later at home, when I download my images
What paradoxes will I come upon this trip? And what fascination will seize me on this, my dozenth time in Anza Borrego? May I be as open as I can, find all I can, using all my senses.