I'm planning on taking a little roadtrip over spring break. Kind of taking another crack at finding Nevada, just a little closer to summer this time. Hopefully i will get to bag some peaks and get some cool pictures, i will let you know when i get back from New York or when i get back from the desert.
Here is another cool Nevada quote that i found today, it is by John C. Van Dyke.
"Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this time not because they devleop character in desert life, but simply because they are beautiful in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death. Insublimity - the superlative defree of beauty - what land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains and its expanding canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. Never again shall you see such light and air and color; never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such fiery twilight...Look out from the mountain's edge once more. A dusk is gathering on the desert's face, and over the eastern horizon the purple shadow of the world is reaching up to teh sky. The light is fading out. Plain and mesa are blurring into unknown distances, and mountain-ranges are looming dimly into unknown heights. Warm drifts of lilac-blue are drawn like mists across the valleys; the yellow sands have shifted into a pallid gray. The glory of the wilderness has gone down with the sun. Mystery - that haunting sense of the unknown - is all that remains."
I know that is kind of a long quote, but i just wish i could talk about Nevada like some of my favorite authors can. I won't write about Nevada any more after this post, i promise, it is just that i sit inside all day and i dream about being outside, underneath the big sky. Even though corrie disagrees i think Nevada can be big sky country as well, but someday i will check out Montana and see what all the fuss is about. Everybody needs to go read something by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (i recommend track of the cat, the oxbox incident, or the city of trembling leaves) or Wallace Stegner, or any of the cool Nevada authors. One last quote, then i am done, and you won't see any updates for awhile.
"For nearly a half century after Lewis and Clark, we avoided, or hurried through, the dry plains that Pike and Long called the Great American Desert and thought unfit for human habitation. Buy by the 1860's we were pushing the agricultural frontier out into Kansas and out into the Platte Valley, and were misled by a wet cycle into believing that settlement improved the climate, and that rain followed the plow."
It is from Wallace Stegner's book about living and writing in the west, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but i thought it was interesting and the rest of the book talks about how the deserts of the west can't recover from the affects of people like the forests back east can, it can't reclaim its lands back to nature, it is permanetly scared by our actions. It is pretty interesting reading.
Posted by cmorton at March 10, 2003 09:55 PM