I am walking through the Wave. The Wave is a maze of swooping gullies and swirling towers cut from the Painted Desert of the American Southwest, where edges, corners, angles of any degree do not exist. It is the antithesis of that other place, that so-called “civilization,” where hard edges predominate. “Walking the Wave” is an antidote to the present, a respite in a different dimension.
To get here, I accepted an offer I couldn’t refuse. My good friend Joe Kayne is one of those pros whose stunning photographs appear in nature calendars and magazines from time to time. Too often, however, his forays into the wild are cut short by the particular constraints of his medium: volume and weight. His 4×5 Wista camera (all of polished wood and gleaming metal) fills his backpack alone, and his tripod, which he slings over a sagging shoulder, weighs more than a carbine. So the deal’s been struck: In return for me wrecking my back carrying camp supplies and film over miles of shifting sand and slick-rock, past rattlesnake coils and the sole-piercing blades of the yucca, Joe will guide me to places he claims will “blow me away.”
Joe sets up and doesn’t move for three hours. I lack that kind of patience. I’m all over the place, climbing over any formation offering purchase to my boots, setting up my tripod and clicking away with my vintage Pentax K-1000 as if I can bottle it all.
Despite my baby-format camera (or maybe because of it) I think I’m getting some pretty good stuff. Large-format lenses get you the resolution, the contrast, the depth-of-field–but I’ve got the zoom. The rock is a symphony of composition; as I focus I am astounded by these patterns of color and striation, this rampant asymmetry and geometry run riot.
I once thought the Southwest consisted of little more than retirement communities and golf courses. Now I’m worrying expectations may run too high for what follows–The Wave is but one stop on our itinerary. The Southwest, as it turns out, is a treasure-trove of secret beauty where one can find hidden grandeur that transports the soul–if you know where to look.
The Wave, which is cleverly hidden in an airy cove among nameless mountains high above the desert floor somewhere near Page, Ariz., is marked on no store-bought topographical map. Nor will it be, at least by my doing. The nature photographer’s canon, inspired in equal parts by simple selfishness and the moral imperative of preserving that which is still wild in the world, is clear on one point: Exact locations of places like the Wave may be disclosed only unto those who can stand my company. All others must find it themselves.
One hundred fifty miles to the east, in a remote corner of the Navajo Reservation (your only clue: the nearest town is Bluff, Utah), Joe and I struggle to keep pace with our guide, a mercurial Navajo named Jimmy. Head bowed, hands stuffed in pockets, Jimmy leads a traverse across the interior of a box canyon. As we come around the other side, a magnificent Anasazi ruin comes into view halfway up the opposite cliff-face. The village could have been constructed no later than 1300 A.D., the year of the pueblo peoples’ great and terrible abandonment, when Europeans were just emerging from their own Dark Ages.
It’s time to get down to business: I break out my Pentax 6×7.
Later, Jimmy approaches Joe and me. After an hour and a half he’s itching to move on. My heart sinks: An impatient guide is every photographer’s nightmare. Before we can object, however, he opines that we’d probably make it back on our own. Translation: We have the place to ourselves. Being caught on tribal lands without a guide is a risky proposition, but Joe and I need not discuss how often such opportunities come along to pasty-faced Chicagoans.
Looking over the crumbling walls at the silent, sweeping vista beyond, I recall a benedictory promise made by desert sage and provocateur Ed Abbey that somewhere something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than our deepest dreams waits for us. No, I think, we are neither crazy nor stupid. Just dreaming.
