First entry: The places I would like to know

 

Fragments from The Hollow Men (1925), written by T. S. Eliot.

I have never been interested in traveling, there are few places that have captured my attention over the years and that I have wished I could ever get to see by myself. Some of these places, to name a couple, were Iguazu Falls and the rural Russia, and in both it was thanks to a book or movie that captured my mind and my heart, forcing me to spend my days imagining buying a ticket and filling an plain suitcase, filling at the same time my head with delicious concerns... what should I bring apart from my toothbrush and some clothing? what will it be like to visit a place where no one knows me? what if I don't like it?

Doing a university assignment, reading a book and a poem, getting to know new music and returning to a movie... during the occasion the circumstances were no different, the trigger for my enchantment with the desert landscapes of North America was a series of coincidences that took place during the beginning of the previous semester. The assignment consisted of an analysis of the artwork Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2 by artist David Hockney. Soon I discovered that it had originally been commissioned to illustrate an article on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and that it was not enough to know the artwork itself, but in order to immerse myself in it, I had to read what had inspired it. 

Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2 (1986) by the artist David Hockney.

Inside the book I discovered motel names, restaurant names, pamphlets about the main and must-see attractions of the area, posters of new and not so new movies, traffic signs, roadside trash and vegetation, shiny chocolate and candy wrappers under the sunlight, small oil stains on the pavement, small offers for a continental breakfast, small tips, books in each motel with the personal info of each traveler, occasional and similar gas stations, occasional and similar trucks. In the dream of the infinite road, the wormhole road, the collage road, the road that never changes, navigated Hockney, Nabokov, Eliot's poem, the 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen, Gus Van Sant's movie My Own Private Idaho and also my mind. All that gloom, that feeling of orphanhood hypnotized me, led me to fall in love with those lonely roads and haunted cowboys, which, I must admit, I had once disliked.

Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho (1991). 

When I think of those austere landscapes, tumbleweeds, guitars and harmonicas, burnt smell, dark sunglasses, cities shining far, far away, cigarette smoke, sweat and saliva spilled on the bedclothes, dusty attics and cheesy folk and country songs... and maybe also conservative and hostile homilies come to my mind. If I can ever make a trip of this scale, I would like to walk through Marfa, the Mojave Desert, the roads of Idaho and the small Carcross Desert. I would like to feel the arid breeze on my skin and hair, to talk with the people who live in those small towns, to listen to their songs, read their poems, see their paintings and sculptures. I wish I could also be taken away by that lovely boredom, that exquisite monotony of the desert.

Photography of the California deserts.

Cattle Call by Eddy Arnold. Part of the soundtrack of My Own Private Idaho.