CENTRAL Travel & Lifestyle VOL 1
Part One SPECTRES OF DUST 06
Part Two IN MY SHOES 14
Part Three A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE 25
Part Four YOSEMITE 38
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Part One
SPECTRES OF DUST There are more ghost towns in Nevada than towns occupied by the living. Those who are prepared to tear themselves away from the glitz of the strip, can confirm the captivating detritus left behind.
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‘From this arid earth that bares no life, there is less charm than a graveyard, at least those are places built out of sentimentality and love.’
T
he two hour drive from Vegas, cuts through the desert and the Paiute reservation, delivering me to this settlement, just outside of Rhyolite. Forgotten entirely, it lies under a sheet of silence with no conceivable right to exist. Built in a shallow basin, that bores internal grudges, it would be relegated to a minute black dot on an ageing archived map. My only welcome is the grass yellowing in the constant smoulder of the sun. From this arid earth that bares no life, there is less charm than a graveyard, at least those are places built out of sentimentality and love. Forsaken without a backwards glance, this ghost town was built in belief that people would come and industry would follow. They just never did. Proving to be less rich than claims, it was left in bitterness. Dwindling to the last holdouts of fourteen lonely souls that came with the allure of gold in the hills, now only a few remnants remain as a testament to their undying folly. My shoulders hunch, as their spirits shroud over me. Once hinged shutters hang eerily, aligned with windows that have long shattered in the fragility of their formation. Groaning with pain at every sway, these are the tear downs that no-one had any incentive to demolish. As I dust off my boots and the encroaching spectres of the past, the still air is painfully dry. Disintegrating stilted structures, which have step by step succumbed to gravity are beautiful and melancholy hanging in their desertion, without a witness or person to mourn their passing. The only building to remain eminently erect amid the decay is a house made of bottles; a subdued sign that they were rather more plentiful than wood, in a town which once had fifty three saloons. The town shares its land with ghostly hollow figures huddled on a wooden platform. Draped in flowing white robes, they stand prominent in an sinister plaster sculpture rendition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous fresco. A large mosaic couch overshadows anyone who sits on its brawl of bright colours, incongruous against the burnt umber of the desert. Other sculptures are a nod to the deserts customs, taken together a disjointed and surreal blemish against the landscape. As I stroll down the cracking asphalt roads, they lead past abandoned cars tarnished by rust, laying feral against the desert beyond. I begin to question if these places will ever become spirited again?
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Part Two
IN MY SHOES
A Journey Along the Bright Angel Trail
I
woke with heavy eyes in the cool morning, the stale smell of my clothing nudged me off the sleeping mat and out into the fiery star-punctured skies overhead. Yet something else also lay there in the tent beside my anguish, it was the smaller, nagging seeds of excitement. I had longed restlessly to poke my head out of the tent to see a glorious fresh world, but just as every other morning my view was veiled by heavy immutable shadow; the soil made soft by the rain that had descended overnight, like dancing children’s footsteps on the flysheet. Nursing a severe headache, all I yearned for was a glass of fresh water pressed against my dry, cracked lips, not the soil-laced stuff that filled my Nalgene bottle. I hadn’t slept well. The sun hereabouts gets intense and the heat intolerable, so I needed to make headway as soon as possible. Getting up, already dressed as a barrier against the countless mosquitoes, I lived and breathed at their mercy. They shrouded my vision, peppered my food, and laid in wait at the bottom of my sleeping bag until I fell asleep.
They found their way down my shirt, up my pants and bit through my socks. I stood alone at the trailhead, as the last veins of lightning split the horizon. I tried not to dwell on the hunger that plagued the pit of my stomach, after innumerable days of eating very little. I distracted myself by concentrating on my return to that exact spot at the journeys end. Success would be getting back to where I had started. I had decided to take up the challenge on a whim of enthusiasm, solitary, and only using possessions I had accumulated from a lifetime lacking in outdoor activity, not to mention a discounted pair of boots. In truth, I couldn’t really afford anything more. Rising slopes meandered between forlorn-looking peaks and orange pathways snaked down their steep flanks. Downhill progress was sluggish, the consequence of a broken boot decomposed by the long mileage, rigid terrain and the ever-cloying, omnipresent morning wetness. The sky had opened up into a million shades of blue and the sunlight bounced off the barren earth. With no real objective or destination
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in mind, all that seemed to be illuminated was the distance to the gorge base, once eroded by the Colorado River. I had been travelling for a mere four hours, but already acknowledged a catalogue of planning mistakes. As the monotony of the canyon rim faded behind, it was my first taste of real remoteness. Carpets of rubble dropped away down the steep canyon walls ahead; the dust woven heavy in the Arizona sun. I’d learned by now that to accomplish my goals sometimes involved sucking it up and persisting, but nothing was more disheartening than looking back only to see where I had started that morning, after hiking all day in the withering heat. I continued with the same horizons, surrounded by the same buttes, spires, mesas and temples in the distance, for hours. In a landscape devoid of trees, I gazed out at a sky arched under its own magnitude. The sun was my clock; the weather forecast, my calendar. Past the point of enjoyment, I noticed a sizeable laceration in the side of my shoe. A hole was emerging as the glue between
the hole and the fabric upper disintegrated. The realisation vehemently hit home that the boot was unsafe, on the down-step it slid and I became anxious about spraining an ankle. They had proven themselves useless in the extreme, lightweight and comfy, but exceedingly impractical. It was over. Heading back, haphazard pathways were littered with debris on all sides. Some ramshackle fencing wouldn’t have gone amiss. With hostile thoughts and a thick tongue, my blistered soles scraped back and forth in the fabric, as they took me up, over the canyon pass. My feet were burning from their twelve hour walk and shoots of unbearable pain kept flitting across random toes. I started to worry about infection. Preoccupied with remorse at having walked away from my venture, I could not stand the thought of failure and yet, the despair dissipated as the canyon rim gave way to commonplace. Anxious to stretch my legs, I hopscotched along the inviting sea of flatness from which I had started. I wish I’d had the forethought of mind to have bought better boots.
‘In a landscape devoid of trees, I gazed out at a sky arched under its own magnitude. The sun was my clock; the weather forecast, my calendar’.
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Part Three
A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE Joshua Tree National Park is a vast protected area in southern California. It’s characterised by rugged rock formations and stark desert landscapes. Named for the region’s twisted, bristled Joshua trees, the park straddles the cactus-dotted Colorado Desert and the Mojave Desert.
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Part Four
YOSEMITE Yosemite National Park is in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s famed for its giant, ancient sequoia trees, and the granite cliffs of El Capitan and Half Dome.
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S
omewhat fatigued, I ponder over curious thoughts, but conscious of the every shifting weather, I return to the present.
There should be nothing here I don’t remember. Now as the white shafts of daylight pass, gone are the shadows of evening, devouring gnarled trunks that encase me in this woodland. The encroaching darkness fills me with fanciful terrors, I have never felt before. Peering deep into the black, long I sit here fearful, but dusk encircles and nothing more. It’s in the bleak September, when the wind blows bitter and unkind, hinting at wilder conditions to come. And whilst I nod, nearly napping, a glow comes filtering through the sequoia trees. Tonight we will talk about stories from our past, and dream of moments, yet to arrive. There is something about the flame that softens our hearts, rendering us with smiles, its intense smoulder painting yellow and orange kaleidoscopes. As the ashen debris ascends beneath the forest, the wrath of rawness is slowly healed, by the encompassing, yet comforting warmth. I have succumbed to motionless docility, giving ear to the pleasure of the whispering hiss, as each separate, fading ember, lay its ghost upon the brush. Wisps of silver grey smoke billow in dense clouds of musky scents, that embed themselves, in the threads of my clothes. Leaving the warmth of the sulphurous flames, sends shivers down my spine. Reaching out for my soft satin coat, I head for my tent. My coat wraps my skin, like black oak bark, that thick, intoxicating, smell of smokey pine needles, lingers in my hair, hanging in tangles of pallid wire. Now the silence is unbroken and the stillness entire. As I rest, my mind drifts, to the wandering dreams I so often covet. Let me see, then, what this is, and this mystery I explore, there should be nothing here I don’t remember.
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‘Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.’ IBN BATTUTA
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