When I started this trip, I thought I would be doing more camping. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I got wrapped up in the convenience of hotels. While I am writing this, I am camping, and though camping alone can be lonely, it definitely lets you think (and want to kill the little kids that can’t stop yelling in the RV next to me).
I chose well for this short stay. Lone Pine, the Alabama Hills where many cowboy TV shows were shot. Where people like Carry Grant and Gene Autry did their thing. This is also an area I surveyed with the fire fighters when I was working for the Forest Service. It is beautiful and hot during the day. The area is seated just below Mt. Whitney (the tallest mountain in the continental U.S., I think it is a fluke…Mt. Rainer is clearly bigger) and all the hills here are stacks of orange boulders that look like any minute will stand up and walk around.
I have found that anywhere in the Sierra Nevada is the most beautiful around 6 p.m. The shadows melt on the ranges allowing every crevice to be highlighted, giving depth to the most meaningless ridge.
This year the desert is green. Even now in August, the sagebrush and rabbit brush still look alive and vibrant instead of brown and dreary. In times past, by August, I was ready to high-tail it out of the desert and back to the trees. I am sad to leave it’s beautiful ranges and endless valleys. I love everything the desert has to offer and have appreciated it fully.
I love it here. It has made me happy. It has made me feel alive.
I love being an archaeologist. It is an extremely exciting and exhausting occupation. This summer has made me angry, excited, sad and proud. I met unique and awesome people who got to know me better than most of my friends at home. Out here you get to know your co-workers better than anyone could at an office job. I will deeply miss these people and hope to be able to see them again.
This summer is something I have needed since my grandmother died in 2006. A chance to remember who I am and that life goes on. I am independent and fun, spontaneous and stubborn, understanding and blunt. I have the ability to be free.
All of these things are important for an archaeologist. The job can be infuriatingly frustrating because you don’t know when or where the next job will be. When you get the phone call you are whisked away to a secret, beautiful location (ok, I am playing it up a little bit…you are whisked away to some God forbidden, middle of no where valley in the middle of the desert…you say ‘tomato and I say tawmawtoe’) that allows you complete internalization of your thoughts and feelings (go a head, let it go, the person 30 meters away will never know) the best psychologist in the world. This can be imprisoning or enlightening and some days downright annoying if you have the wrong little ditty that loops over and over in your head for 10 hours.
But the conversations with your crew-mates are the best part and the final touch on this ‘desert therapy.’ Thrown together in a car with no radio reception allows a plethora of conversation and you get to know these people maybe more than they would have meant.
I wish I had camped more.
