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Testing the Limit of How Many Pictures I Can Fit in One of These

Nov 29, 2022

I had never been to White Sands National Park before and neither had Taylor, so we went out of our way to see it in our cross-country move to the East Coast. It would be the first major stop in a long journey. Most of our belongings packed in a metal moving cube and the car filled with only the essentials (plants and cameras), we drove for 5 days from Phoenix to New Jersey. We stopped along the way at numerous vegan restaurants, gas station bathrooms of varying cleanliness, a friend’s lovely house in North Carolina, one Taco Bell (in desperation), and of course, a few National Parks.

We arrived in White Sands on the first day of our trip after 8 hours of driving, the sun just beginning to set. There is only one road into and out of the park, so we just followed the mini-van kicking up sand in front of us until we pulled off at a particularly dune-y turnabout. We ran and slid and stumbled up the nearest dune, my shoes immediately filled with a few cakes’ worth of sugar-fine sand. Coming over the top was truly awesome. Pink and golden illuminated waves of silky sand extended as far as we could see in every direction, spotted here and there with a handful of people wandering around the open landscape. There weren’t any trails where we were, just dunes and yucca plants and the dotted-line tracks of those who had gotten there earlier. We wandered too, and I took I don’t know how many pictures. We stayed until the sun was well down. There were more colors than I’d ever seen in a cloudless sky, wrapping a beautiful gradient from horizon to horizon. We read an informational sign on the way out that said on nights of the New Moon, you can see the stars reflected in the sand. Wild.

The feeling I felt the most in White Sands was being inside a National Park. I wasn’t looking out at the Grand Canyon, or driving on a road around Yellowstone, or hiking a trail through the Tetons - I felt like I was really in the park. From up on the dune we couldn’t see any roads or parking lots or any trace of humanity besides specs on the horizon and footprints in front of us. The dunes for miles around were the same as the dune we were standing on. We were really right on top of and completely surrounded by what makes White Sands so spectacular. I guess this is what it feels like to raft in Grand Canyon or hike to the summit of Grand Teton, but the fact that I was part of one of the most mind-bending landscapes I’ve ever seen just a 10-minute walk from my car somehow added to the whole experience.

I’ll admit that some outside factors might have contributed to this intense sense of awe. After all, we had been packing and stressing and packing and planning and then driving for the past week. I might have been a little more vulnerable to the incredible calm and stillness at White Sands than on any normal day. But since then, I’ve also felt that there was a weird resonance happening between my feelings in White Sands and my feelings about moving. Moving really puts you right in the middle of things. For a bit, you can’t just cruise through a normal day-to-day (you don’t want to know how much time we spent actively deciding where to eat). You’re not thinking much about the past or the future, mostly because you don’t have the time or attention to take your mind off what’s happening right now. You’re literally in between two pretty important places, surrounded by God knows what on all sides (you also don’t want to know how many Confederate flags we saw). And it all happens instantly, from one day living in the place you’ve lived in for years to the next night staying at a hotel in Alamogordo, New Mexico. All of a sudden, you’re fucking in it, for better or worse.

And so maybe I was feeling all that in White Sands, presented with an enormous rolling landscape metaphor for what it felt like to be moving. Is that a bit dramatic? I could have just been exhausted. Taylor did convince me to ride a left-behind sled down one of the dunes with her, so I couldn’t have been that tired. And I did in fact completely eat it going down the last time, and I’m still shaking sand out of my shoes.

I’ve included all my favorite pictures from the whole trip below, along with some taken since we arrived. There are many (it was a long trip). If you can’t see them all, it’s because the email is too long for your inbox. Just open up this bad boy in a browser, or download the Substack app on your phone. The app is my preferred way to read newsletters, and it makes it easy to keep up with all my subscriptions. I hope you enjoy all the photos, and you’ll be hearing from me again soon.