I just returned from a trip to Arizona. It was magnificent. It was as I thought it would be - hot, beautiful, stark - but it was also much more than that though, since it's still fresh in my mind, I can't quite pinpoint how or why. I just know that it'll affect what I read in the coming days, weeks and months, and it'll undoubtedly affect what I write in the near future as well though, again, I'm not sure how or to what extent.
What I do know is that I love the desert. Having been born and raised in Washington, where the rain flows here as much as the sunbeams beat down in Phoenix, there IS no desert where I live. Sure, there's Eastern Washington, but that is more of a pastoral landscape, a landscape already tilled or harvested, a land of immense apple orchards and field upon field of wheat or lentil. In Arizona, the landscape is otherworldly, utterly devoid and yet...and yet it's not devoid at all. That's the reason I love it. You look at a setting, say a vast valley between jagged mountains long since blown in volcanic activities eons ago, and you shrug your shoulders. "That's utterly devoid of life," you might think. "Some rock, some scrub, no shade or shadow for miles." And yet it's as full of life as the think forests near my home.
So, again, what I'll take from the trip through my reading and writing is as yet to be determined. Perhaps I'll read more on Frank Lloyd Wright after visiting Taliesin in Scottsdale - a place he spent his winters until his death. Perhaps I'll pick up a novel by Zane Grey (a native Arizonan. I must be honest - I don't think I've ever read a western novel, a la gunslingers and ne'er-do-wells). Maybe I'll study Georgia O'Keefe and her luminous works, or read the tales of the Navajo. Perhaps I'll do all this while eating ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery (based in Scottsdale).
Perhaps I will. I guess you and I will have to find out. Until then....
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