Life being as it is, it turns out I’m in the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, writing a very short piece about walking in the American desert. The opening is below.
More than that they’ve got an illustrator (Jaqui Oakley) to do my portrait – from photographs not from life - a perfectly decent-looking man who only very very vaguely resembles me.
The first two paras of the article:
Geoff Nicholson
NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR
The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States —it was the 1970s —and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced.
I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle. That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did. I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction.
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