This week, a true road trip spanning hundreds of miles across state lines, has been a long time coming. In some ways, its genesis was in the Western landscapes of my youth, when I longed to escape the muted grey sprawl of suburban Los Angeles, the safety of childhood and home. In those halcyon days, climbing the chaparral hillsides behind our family’s house, I could look out and see, beneath the strip malls and golf courses and housing developments, just a glimpse of the majesty of the American West: open desert. Sage country. Mountain plateaus. The sweet fragrance of mesquite and yarrow, pinyon and ponderosa. Years later, the beautiful aspects of that landscape became the basis of my love of place - a desire to feel and live and connect genuinely with my surroundings, no matter where I might find myself. That yearning, in large part, has informed why I travel and photograph.
In 2019, wanting to return to the desertscapes of my youth, I planned a Spring 2020 trip across the Colorado Plateau, which was ultimately cancelled. At the height of the pandemic’s initial surge, self-isolating in a motel room between shifts at a nursing facility, I read everything I could find about the region: a book of Navajo oral traditions; archeological studies of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization; the journals of Everett Ruess (another self-absorbed young desert itinerant, writer, and artist with connections to Brookline and Los Angeles, who disappeared in the canyons of Utah in the mid-century). This milieu - the contrast between the changeable and the eternal, the known and unknown, the placement of self within a cosmos both orderly and chaotic - eventually developed into my second collection of poetry, a painful and emotional collection about love and loss heavily informed by my work during the pandemic. And meanwhile, the mesas and canyons of the Colorado Plateau continued to beckon like an old friend.
Two years later, in April 2022, Jane and I set out on a trip much like days of yore: a sprawling driving route across the Four Corners region of the Southwest, passing through four states and the Navajo Nation (Dinétah: “among the people”); a return to form for us, after many years of quiet, basecamp vacations. For a week, we caught sunrises and sunsets, wandered the desert, visited ancient homes and pueblos, and photographed one of the most beautiful and profoundly human landscapes in the country. The photographs, grouped by state, are presented here without further editorialization.
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April 9, 2022: After an incredibly early start in Boston and a brief layover in Chicago, Jane and I land in Albuquerque, New Mexico at 10 AM in the morning. We drive to the suburb of Bernalillo, where we eat lunch and shop for the week’s groceries. We stop at the Paleta Bar and get ice cream popsicles dipped in chocolate and fruit, just behind a mob of high school choir girls. After a afternoon nap in the motel, we drive to La Cienega and hike up to Cerro Seguro to catch sunset over the mesas and open plains just west of Santa Fe.
April 10, 2022: After breakfast and a long, early morning drive north from Bernalillo, we arrive at Chaco Canyon, one of the most significant sites of ancient architecture in North America. We walk around Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl before taking a long hike through the desert to see the Supernova Pictograph. We end the afternoon by climbing the cliffs overlooking Pueblo Bonito and circling the Great Kiva at Casa Rinconada. After a long drive back out to the highway, over desert washes and gravel roads, we eat dinner at Tequila’s in Farmington and settle in for the night.
April 11, 2022: Another early morning drive through the darkness of northern New Mexico. From the road, we watch the first light of sunrise hit Shiprock (Tsé Bitʼaʼí: “winged rock”) before crossing the Chuska Mountains into Arizona.
