THE BOOKISH DESERT

  

I can’t tell you exactly how much of a walker Alberto Manguel is.  Most photographs of him, as above, show him sitting or standing surrounded by books. But we know he certainly walked in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a terrific piece for the Guardian about Ahasverus,the Wandering Jew. 

Even as a child, says Manguel, ‘The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I didn't feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly … above all, to be able to read any book that fell into your hands …

‘And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong … it is hard to believe that a merciful god would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting-room without reading material.’

Here is Manguel, not walking but at least photographed outdoors, so I suppose he must have walked to get there.

 

In his book The Library At Night Manguel talks about the way in which, unless you’re a wanderer, you never have enough shelving for your books.  You find you’ve too many books and so you buy a new bookcase but the moment you get the bookcase, it fills up and then you need to buy another one and so on and so on.

 

I never doubted this was true but the point has been driven home since I bought myself a shiny new, and I’m quoting here, ‘Vasagle Bookcase, Bookshelf, Ladder Shelf 4-Tier, Display Storage Rack Shelf, for Office, Living Room, Bedroom, 80 x 33 x 149 cm, Industrial, Rustic Brown’

 

I hoped this would give me loads of extra shelf space and free up some room in other bits of the house, and now of course it’s full.

 

    Manguel also talks about the problems of arrangement, or perhaps more correctly classification.   I have a lot of books about walking and a lot, though not as many, books about deserts, so I thought I’d put all my books about walking in the new bookcase, so that I could put my books about the desert in a smaller case on the other side of the room, but then the walking books more than filled the space I’d allotted to them, while the desert bookcase still had a bit of room in it.

 

    Now, it so happens that I own some books that are about walking in deserts, so these made a move across the room out of the walking bookcase into the desert bookcase, which doesn’t seem ideal but it’ll do for now.  Reclassification is always a possibility, in fact a necessity.

 

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about walking and deserts is because I’m not quite sure when I’ll next be walking in a real desert. But recently, mostly by chance, I did find a pretty fair simulacrum of the desert in Norfolk, in the garden of the Old Vicarage in East Ruston, the lifetime project of Alan Gray and Graham Robson. This is them, suited up:

The simulacrum is an area they call the Desert Wash designed to resemble parts of Arizona, a place neither of the gardeners has been, apparently.

 

This was my favourite spot: the sculpture is by Ben Southwell.

 

And there, in amidst the rocks the cacti and succulents, keeping his eye on things was (unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am) Graham Robson himself.  He was not chatty, but why should he be? 

     Of course it wasn’t a walk in a real desert, but on a damp and chilly day in Norfolk it wasn’t bad at all.  

I bought a guide book obviously – now, where to shelve it?

 

WALKING WITH CACTI

As many readers will know by now, I really do like walking in the desert, for all kinds of reasons.  I’m not the world’s greatest animal lover and I certainly don’t go to the desert specifically to look at the wildlife, but even so, if you tread carefully and quietly it’s amazing what you can see. 

Still, it seems you rarely get close enough to take a really nice picture, unless as in the case below your faithful companion actually manages to (very, very gently) pick up the thing. 

That’s a horned toad, and certain species defend themselves by shooting blood from their eyes, but I guess this one was from another species, for which I was essentially grateful, though it must be quite a thing to see.

And recently I came across this from Popular Science, March 1931:

Arthur N. Pack, I discover, was a very serious and highly respected naturalist, but even so, I couldn't, still can't, believe that anybody could see him in this cactus costume without falling about laughing.  And in any case I wasn’t sure how it actually worked.  It struck me that both walking and seeing would be fairly difficult inside of that thing.  I assumed there had to be eyeholes but they’d surely give you a very limited view of the world.  And I had even less idea how you’d wield a camera.

Anyway, the Internet being what it is, I found this article (above and below) about Mr. Peck’s desert walking and photography, in an issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions, As with Popular Science, the magazine seems more interested in the apparatus than the end result: the cutaway image shows you more detail of how it supposedly worked. 

I still think it’d be pretty hard to take pictures from inside a fake cactus, especially since the camera looks to be fixed and immovable, though it does seem that Mr. Pack managed to take some pretty good, intimate photographs of desert critters.  But I absolutely don’t see how he could have taken those photographs at ground level.  Maybe he had a faithful companion, who perhaps dressed as a rock.

WALKING IN THE FUTURE

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that in a post-apocalyptic future there will be a lot of walking.  Admittedly, there will be a certain amount of driving around in very cool vehicles, but mostly it’ll be striding along, gun in hand, ready to kill or be killed. And it seems that very few of us will be dressed appropriately. 

There will, of course, be a lot of desert in this future.  If you’re going to make a post-apocalyptic movie, the desert is often the location of choice.  It’s pre-ruined in a way that, say, the Palace of Versailles isn’t.  And you’ve got to imagine it’ll be pretty hot in this desert of the future, but that won’t stop a lot of people from wearing a lot of leather.

You might argue that a Terminator can get away with it because he’s a cyborg and doesn’t feel the heat in the same way that real humans feel.

On the other hand, Mad Max is clearly feeling it in this picture, though you have to wonder if simply pulling one arm off your leather suit is really going to be enough to cool you down much.

If you’re Linda Hamilton you’ll wear an elegant little tank top, showing off your gym-toned arms, but this simply creates a different problem: she’s running a terrible risk of sunburn.  And if you reckon that in general women of the future will wear be wearing less than the men, you're probably right.

Milla Jovovich certainly looks well wrapped up in some respects in Resident Evil: Extinction but not so much that she can't show her stocking tops and thighs.

I’m not sure exactly what these boys from Star Trek are wearing in the episode “Desert Crossing.” It's not leather obviously: could it be polyester?   Clearly they’re sweating like SOBs.  Later in the episode they do strip down, though they don’t actually look much less sweaty or any more comfortable as a result.

And do spare a thought for poor Kyle MacLachlan in Dune.  Well yes, there are reasons to feel sorry all for the actors in that movie, but in the picture below it looks as though his sweat problem is so bad that nobody will come anywhere near him.  Wouldn’t he be much happier in a simple safari suit?

Finally (and I know you could go on about this stuff forever) we come to the movie of The Road.  Now that is one bleak future you’ve got yourself there, but it’s not the desert.  Instead, it’s a cold, grey, polluted world where the sun never shines, and walking is a grim and potentially lethal business.  But say what you like, father and son are certainly dressed for it.