I like to stare at maps. It feels a bit like being somewhere, without being there. Topo lines are like an inescapable maze. Enter through colorado and suddenly you exit in the sonoran desert. Perennial creeks and springs always get permanently marked and lines are drawn between them. Cow trails, decommissioned mining roads and secluded ecosystems are highly sought after. Make it a loop, make it a lollipop, repeat the least amount, but don’t think too hard. A day, two, three, ten? The maps on my computer screen are engulfed in rainbow spaghetti. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m looking at. Squiggles contrived at late hours of the night, looking for an escape as I wait for the sun to rise. If a line follows a place I’ve been, I’ll replay each footstep over again in my head. I’ve been asked if I ever forget what I’ve done, and it’s a valid question. Years of existing in foreign and familiar spaces, moving under my own power. This is information difficult to quantify, but I imagine the hours I spend researching, going, being, photographing, note taking, decompressing and reminiscing nearly every time I go out is through the roof. I don’t do something just to forget about it. I don’t want to forget. Experiences are never the same and it would be a shame to lose what was given to me. I latch on to anything, to be sure it isn’t lost to time. A sleepless night thanks to a mourning dove, stone under my feet as I listen to a happy birthday voicemail, the way the light glistens on the lake below, a bloody nose from chilled wind in excess, yellow cottonwood leaves falling into my lap. Sitting at my dinner table one not so distant morning, aspen leaves gently twisting out the window with the predawn air, coffee directly under my face, I ritualistically checked the weather in various spots throughout the four corners. Not because I’d be going to any of those places, but because time had abruptly slammed into my chest. It’s October and all of that rainbow spaghetti was still sitting on my plate, uneaten. The list I had devised of things I most wanted to do before the snow flew was still just a list. This is my form of self torture. I’ve started to call my late season catatonia seasonal panic. It begins when the air is visibly different. All it takes is a day. You wake up and notice the tone of the atmosphere has become blindingly blue. The sharp fluorescence tends to leave me without much cognitive ability. A long stare and perhaps an audible OK! The next step in my panic is when the days feel too short. When you leave the house at 5pm and are quickly caught without a headlamp or any sense of what time it actually is. Suddenly 5pm rolls around days later and you question whether you go out at all. Time has a way of gnawing desire into a fine pulp. I haven’t learned to embrace the dark. The surface heated winds of spring turn my skin into a shell of hardened determination, determination to make it to summer, to char from the outside in. The early storms of fall bring bitter cold when you least expect it. They shear away the charred exterior, only to reveal the thing I never want to see. I’m burnt out. Unable to properly photosynthesis, my porous being sends beams of late afternoon sun scattering. This is seasonal panic. Learning to release the things I’ve been holding on to. They no longer have the ability to bring me immediate joy, so I move on. It’s the only way I know how to cope. Impermanence is a permanent consideration. To the desert, to soak my skin in pools of rock, to regain sensitivity to vegetation, to remember how fleeting life at my fingertips is, to calm my head and let the blood in my body flow freely again.
