Would one of you California bloggers please stop by and help Grandma get in to AOL? She called here for help, but since I don't use AOL (I wasn't here when she called), I doubt I could be of much help.

I stumbled on the following from Ed Abbey's Desert Solitare today. I read the book when I was about Sam's age and loved it. Abbey spent three seasons in Arches (before it became Arches) National Park, living in a trailer as a ranger, and wrote about his time there. By the time I read the book, I'd already spent a month of my life living primitively in the same area and developed a lifelong attachment to it's unique beauty and solitude. Re-reading this reminded me of why I love it there.

"What is it about the desert that distinguishes it from other landscapes? Is it the color, the grandeur, the spaciousness? Is it the silence, the simple clarity? Or is it the veil of mystery, the sense of something unknown, unknowable? The desert seems to be waiting---but for what? There is something about the desert that the human mind cannot assimilate. The best artists and writers have failed to capture it....Under the vulture-haunted sky, the desert waits---mesa, butte, canyon, reef, sink, escarpment, pinnacle, maze, dry lake, sand dune, and barren mountain. Even after years of contact.... this quality of strangeness in the desert remians undiminished."

"One can see, then, why 26 year old Everett Reuss, the author of On Desert Trails, disappeared into the canyon country of Southern Utah, never to return. Although living in cities has its advantages, and I do fine there, however, once I catch a whiff of juniper smoke, or a careless word or poem calls the desert to mind, I become as restless as a wolf in a cage."

On Monday, Cristie, Valerie, Ed, David and I are heading to a very different desert from those I'm used to. Stay tuned.