Never have we been more aware of the Earth itself - it's surfaces and textures, tectonics, and overall vastness. Death Valley is a place of many worlds, most of them seemingly primeval or martian. It is easy to imagine that a rivulet of salt-flat water, slick with brown algae, is the ylem that will soon produce the first single-celled organism; the precursor to life as we know it.Today we sought out these places as environments for our characters to wander through and attempt to understand.
On another note, I've been thinking about the term "landscape," a word I have been using perhaps too freely. The term implies taking in a scenic vista, representing a scene in a painting, or perhaps even sculpting your lawn so that it is more aesthetically pleasing. The intention of a landscape seems to be to keep the real place at a comfortable distance. Since our goal here is to learn about the place by actually being inside of it, and to ask ourselves how people from the past (without the luxury of cars, plastic bottles of water, and helpful park rangers) would have dealt with Death Valley, I think I need to find a new term. I doubt, however, that one term will suffice, nor be as mindlessly convenient as landscape is (or was).
