Right before dawn, every morning, a rooster begins to crow. I mean I don’t hear roosters in Mississippi. I really didn’t expect them in the desert.
Starlight Mesa Road, Yucca Valley, California
I figure there is a reason the rooster is trying to wake me up and each day just let him. The dawn is beautiful in the desert and I want to see it, like Christmas morning or a concert. And it’s different each day, maybe not different like a different song but maybe the same song in a different key. Some days I swear the sun just comes up quicker than on others.
I find myself making mental notes of where the “best” place would be to watch the sun crest over the mountains on the horizon. I shouldn’t say best because each day is a gift, and I mean that, but of course I am looking for photographs. What I really mean is “where is the best place for me to set up and make a Polaroid of the silhouette of a Joshua tree as the sun rises in the desert,” which is what I have decided the rooster wants me to do.
I never run out of places. They just keep adding up in my head; I don’t write them down, because that doesn’t feel right. I just drive down the dusty roads and think oh that would be a great place to stand, and look in the distance is that hill that looks like God just threw down some square blocks, but I have to remind myself that I can’t ever seem to get a mountain down onto a Polaroid.
I spend several hours one day driving through the Mojave listening to just Elvis albums from 1969 to 1971. I run out of color film. I get so cold one night I start to shake. I am no longer 100% sure of what I look like, but it doesn’t matter anyway. I never see a coyote, but cross paths with:
A desert fox, at dawn, while taking the Polaroid up above
A jackrabbit who stares at me, boldly
A roadrunner
Two lizards (in retrospect, it might have just been one lizard who was really fast)
A honeybee romping in the purple flower of a cactus in Joshua Tree
Right now I don’t have any of the photographs scanned; maybe I will rush to do it, and maybe I will wait. Sometimes I need to just let them rest.
I hope to see you soon and I will bring Polaroids of dawns and sunsets, a dang fine grilled cheese in Lucerne Valley, motel signs from Route 66, a ghost town, and the interior of a ‘57 Thunderbird.