Those places are special to me, too, but for me, the place that really touches my soul is the desert. Yeah, I know. What’s in the desert? Sand, cacti, scrub brush, lizards, ghost towns. Not nearly the grandeur of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. But the desert speaks to me like no other place.
It might be because of where I was raised. I grew up in Corcoran, a small farming town in California’s central valley. No hills, no rivers, just a checkerboard of land planted with cotton, barley, alfalfa and safflower. All of my summer jobs were out in the farmlands — a surveyor’s assistant, a row boss on a cotton-chopping crew, painting cotton trailers, running parts at an equipment repair shop. I came to see beauty in a perfectly leveled, plowed section of land. Out there in the middle of nowhere, miles from anybody but your work crew, there was a serenity that took me to a thoughtful place.I vividly remember a trip to Death Valley in my mid-teens. Death Valley is like the Yosemite of deserts, so many natural wonders, strange formations of rocks and minerals, ghost towns that held more secrets than they revealed, a place of austere beauty and mystery. God often speaks to us in silence, and I think it is this very quality of the desert that I find especially spiritual.
In the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to spend several memorable weekends at the Tubac resort south of Tuscon, Arizona (they have really low summer rates, ‘cause it’s, well, summer in Arizona). These weekends reminded me how special the desert is to me. Yeah, the resort is a draw, but it’s the peace I feel when I’m there that is the real attraction. I hope I can go back again soon.
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