Over winter break, my family took a trip to Arizona to visit my grandparents. We have been taking trips to Arizona every winter break for the past five years, and every year, my highlight is the same: the desert hike. Find a trail. Follow it up a mountain. Take in the view. The experience consistently excites, amazes, and moves me in ways that my local Midwestern geography simply cannot.
The Sonoran Desert is a desert in that it receives less than ten inches of rainfall per year; however, from green-barked trees to the famed saguaro cacti, life flourishes in the region. It heavily freckles the dry, pale floor with relative vibrancy. From this floor emerge great mountains, shooting upward and piercing the sky with their jagged claws. These mountains extend for miles and miles in every direction, gradually dissolving into the distant blue. In the Sonoran Desert, you find yourself surrounded by a silence uninterrupted by anything unnatural. You find yourself at the mercy of the open space, the vastness of the world apparent in the horizon. In everyday life, our worlds are reduced by the literal walls built around us. We know that the world extends far beyond these walls, but only in an abstract sense. Visceral knowledge of the vastness begins with sensory encounter. So, when my family reached the climax of our hike, we sat in silent humility—at the peak of a mountain but at the foot of something much greater.
Moments of overwhelming beauty encourage photography. They appeal to people’s artistic impulses and sentimental cravings. When we see something beautiful, we want to remember it, to preserve it. I think this is a very natural impulse, one which I often act upon. At the same time, the very act of capturing a moment alters it. When confronted by vastness, photography is reductive. Photographs fail to encapsulate the entire visual range inside their rectangular bounds. The view from atop that Sonoran mountain cannot possibly fit on the screen of a phone, on that palm-sized electronic canvas. Cameras and eyes see the world in very different ways. The fact is, we cannot capture the moment—not in its entirety anyway. And our efforts to capture the moment can prevent us from experiencing it at all.
I am not trying to say that everyone should stop taking pictures, not at all. I am glad that I took the cover photo of this article. I am just reflecting on the hike and on the fact that I value what happened after all cameras were pocketed far more than the photo. Feeling adventurous, my family decided (after much parental reluctance and apprehension) to abandon the trail in pursuit of our own route up the mountain. We ascended slowly, carefully weaving our way through obstacles. Eventually, we arrived at the peak—and with a couple of cactus pricks to show for it—as if to verify the authenticity of the off-trail trek. Then, we each found ourselves a comfortable sitting stone, grew very quiet, and looked out at the expanse of open space. No cameras. No pictures. Just ourselves and the world.
I remember looking out and seeing another group of hikers. They were so tiny, slowly moving specks of neon on a distant, earthy trail. And I remember thinking, we are just specks on a distant mountain. The world is so big, and we are so small. The feeling within this thought is not one of insignificance, but rather of the greatest possible significance. We are just another piece of the expanse, like the hikers, the cacti, the mountains, and the sky. That is pretty awesome.
