Maui's famous road to Hana was everything I thought Hawaii would be: verdant rainforest, waterfalls, vistas of undulating coastline and azure ocean, bright tropical flowers and hidden swimming holes.
Yes, that was nice. But it was the road that stretched beyond Hana that swept me off my feet.
Here was the inverse of everything that had come before, a barren and empty land of rocky soil, the occasional windswept tree, and very little evidence of human presence other than the rutted road. There was almost no living thing out there - just gold, grey, brown, and sun-bleached stones. It was like I had eternity all to myself.
Why is it the barren landscapes that move me the most? I was reminded of our first cross-country drive, through the humid overgrowth of the deep South and the bayous of Louisiana. Everyone warned us that the drive through west Texas would be the most tedious stretch of the journey - but it was only after we cleared Austin that I felt a weight lift from my heart. The absolute emptiness of west Texas, the beauty of lonesome trees, the endless horizon framed by rocky outcroppings, here there was room to breathe, to feel empty and expansive at the same time.
The sun was setting as we reached the border of Texas and New Mexico that night, having turned from the Interstate onto a perfectly flat and straight two-lane highway that felt like a road to nowhere. Solitary oil derricks bobbed slowly in the distance, reminders that we were not alone in the world but also perhaps reminders that we really are. Jeff and I stopped to take pictures of ourselves on the yellow strip in the middle of the highway - just because we could.
I am not alone in finding some communion with the infinite in these barren places: Alain de Botton describes this feeling as the sublime, the coming face-to-face with the "strength, age, and size of the universe" and realizing that one is "merely dust postponed."
That may sound depressing, but in truth it is freeing. So much of life, de Botton explains, defies our will, frustrates us and makes us feel inadequate. Sublime landscapes remind us of our frailty and insignificance, but not in a mean or petty way. Through our awe of a universe so much greater than we, the sublime teaches us to accept what we cannot change - a spiritual moment when, despite all the noise and worries of our lives, we experience our immateriality and find it brings us peace.
Or maybe it's just that these barren places, in the words of my Grandpa Nels, "blow the stink off."
I did not expect to find such sublime places on Maui, a tropical paradise that seems to assure us instead that the world was made for our comfort. Yet the day after we followed the road beyond Hana, we found ourselves again in a barren world, descending from the summit of Haleakala into a desolate landscape of red rocks and volcanic cinder cones. Our progress felt dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape; we were envelopped by the mountain's subtly shifting colors and curves.
Indeed, much of the American West is a close encounter with the sublime. "Barren" describes the high mountain pass of the Beartooth Highway between Montana and Wyoming, where the wind blew the stick off us and the prospect of mountains unfolding below us left us feeling expansive, even giddy.
Or the startling white desert of White Sands, New Mexico, where a flaming sunset left me feeling not just peaceful, but somehow safe in the impersonal hands of the universe.
Driving back across the country this June, we detoured through the Badlands of South Dakota: a sudden gash in the prairie, bare stone cliffs stretching for miles in the midst of green grasses. We were not prepared for the rawness of this land, or its surreal stark emptiness.
We camped that night on the edge of the Badlands, backing up against the broad prairie that sent wind whipping unbroken across the campground. We were woken in the night by lightening and booming thunder, the sky a flat mass of black cloud, our tent and campsite lit by white flashes like a series of still photographs. The universe was angry, raging (not at us, we just happened to be there). For hours that night, we huddled in our little car, watching the wind flatten our tent again and again, each time in a different direction, the rain spitting down, the lightening unrelenting. Three storms rolled through, one after the other, before I finally fell asleep.
When I woke, it was shortly after dawn. The sky was a pale blue, the air was fresh and soft, the grasses of the prairie rustled in a gentle morning greeting. I crawled from the car back to our tent, which was somehow still dry inside, and curled up to sleep just a bit more to the chirrups of birds and the distant sounds of other people stirring.
When we drove out of the Badlands that morning, heading east to the farms and the cities of the Midwest, to the people and industry and third-growth forests waiting on the other side of the Missouri and Mississippi, I was reminded of a beloved poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
[I've discussed Alain de Botton's essays from The Art of Travel before, in this introductory post and also here. It turns out I've also used this poem before in a prior post - logically, in talking about the love of the American West that I inherited from my grandmother Pearl.]
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