Joshua Tree National Park | The Path to Salvation

We arrived at our Joshua Tree Airbnb around 11pm. I looked around at the vast nothingness that lay beyond our instagram-worthy cacti collection and said a quick, panic-stricken prayer: “Please god (er whatever?) don’t let the entire cast of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ come down and murder me tonight.” 

I was in the thick of what ended up being a months-long mental health spiral. Anxiety. Paranoia. Delusions. Whatever was happening, death was, undoubtedly, imminent. 

So, I did what any sane person would do: Half-heartedly booked myself in with a therapist then quickly planned a week-long desert-getaway so that I wouldn’t have to go back.

This is where people go to be inspired, I thought to myself. This is where girls with fun hats go to find cool thrifted blankets and cut-off shorts. 

THE ANSWER TO ALL OF MY PROBLEMS LIE IN THIS BLEAK LANDSCAPE. 

THERE IS NO OTHER PATH TO SALVATION!

And, as it turns out…I wasn’t totally wrong.

I’ll be honest: the first night was rough. Our quaint little murder-shack didn’t have enough beds for my entire family so we just sort of shifted shit around to create a makeshift bed for me on the floor. 

While not generally one to fear nature, I was certain that tonight would be the night that a desert serpent slithered in to steal my soul, the night that a half-man, half-scorpion dangled me from it’s attack-stinger and fed me to a sea of fire ants. 

Against all odds, I lived to see the dawn.

Waking up in Joshua Tree was waking up in another world. Had I even seen the sun rise before? Had the light ever touched anything with such intention?? It hit me fairly quickly what people find appealing about this place. In the light of day, the landscape feels less like a barren wasteland and more like a waiting canvas, a palpable feeling of possibility filling the limitless space.

No longer preparing for death, I explored the surrounding terrain, paused to take eleven thousand selfies by a rusty old truck and set off for the National Park.

To enter Joshua Tree National Park you must first remember that you are a human on earth. If you forget this, you will almost certainly think you’ve landed on an alien planet. (You may panic.) Impossibly large boulders framing perfect skies? Flailing trees that look like they are caught in hysterical fits of laughter? Girls in hats everywhere? Just….everywhere. (It’s very close to Palm Springs.) The feeling of wonder is pressing. Ceaseless.

Joshua Tree’s unique landscape, diverse wildlife population and awe-inspiring flora is due, in part, to the fact that it is actually situated at the convergence of two distinct deserts, the Mojave and the Colorado. When settlers first happened upon the land in the late 1800s, I can only imagine that it was Springtime. Had it been summer, they would have all burst instantly to flames. With temperatures often topping out at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, this landscape is not for the faint of heart. Once summer did hit, I imagine the settlers must have been like, “Oh my god. We just put up the fences for the cows. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” (but I cannot corroborate these claims via any brief google searches.)

Thankfully for us, our first visit was in March. Flowers blooming, roadrunner scurrying, other typical springtime activities all in full effect. GLORIOUS.

Our first stop (after winding down the long road from the northern entrance) was Skull Rock, a formation of rocks that have been worn down by sand and wind and occasional torrential downpours to resemble what I can only describe as a kindergartener’s rendition of what a skull *might* look like.

Everything was perfect. Beautiful. Serene. Adrenaline pumped through my veins as we neared the shoulder to park. My anxiety did not give a fuck that conditions were ideal. The flurry of fears rattled off faster than I could register them.

What if I catch sight of a lizard and wander off path as it leads me, across the the waiting desert, to my inevitable death? 

What if I go to check out the skull and slip right through the eye socket, violently falling to the earth below, snapping every bone in my body? 

What if a fellow traveler decides, suddenly, that I look highly-murderable? (A pervasive, unyielding thought that has dictated the bulk of my decisions over the last six weeks.)

I get out anyway.

I snap pictures.

I smile and wave and encourage my kids to climb and play, doing everything I can to convey body language that suggests ‘this is safe, we are safe.’

I’m in a shaded crevice on a diverging path when I look to the skull and see Munch’s ‘The Scream’ staring back at me. I wonder how long it’s taken this rock to become art. Wonder if 10,000 years ago it was just a mushy pile of rubble that no one could fathom caring about. 

I snap back to reality (or some version of reality that I’ve constructed) and something tells me to choose the path leading up, to start climbing (and it’s not that nagging, OCD-type feeling that I’m used to, but something on the opposite side of that spectrum…something good, some driving force that knows more than I could know about what I need and where I should be going). When you’ve spent much of your life trying to quiet the voices in your head, it can be hard to allow yourself to trust them, even when they seem honest. But I’m already here and my heart’s already pounding, so I might as well. There are worse ways to die.

The ascent isn’t terribly difficult, but I think about the placement of my feet and hands and I force myself to climb up the steeper slope. Every slip is a small rush. (Is this how people re-brand treacherous things? I wonder.) When I make it to the top, the view takes my breath away and I’m struck with the first of many epiphanies I will have on this trip: 

I LIVE on this planet. I LIVE on this fucking planet with these massive boulders and blue skies? I live on this planet with these curious people and these endless expanses of land? I live here, and all I’ve been doing is hiding?? What the fuck.

It was like suddenly—instantly— it all hit me: 

Avoiding death is not the same as being alive. 

And in a world filled with so much beauty, the real ‘death’ is in hiding from it.

And that was it. On top of this massive rock looking at another rock that sort of looked like art but mostly just looked like another rock, I knew I’d gone too deep, too far. And I couldn’t do it anymore. I did not have the energy to spin the stories and re-write the narratives. I did not have the energy to live in fear of everything around me. It was simply too exhausting. 

People talk a lot about life-changing experiences, experiences that are intense/emotional/scarring/earth-shattering, but I don’t know that anyone talks about the power of quiet, or calm, or beauty? I’d spent a lifetime trapped in the intensity of fear and panic, and it had never once motivated me to seek help, never once allowed me to imagine what life might feel like if the veil were lifted. But there was something about Joshua Tree…something about staring into the face of overwhelming beauty, that made it hard to imagine why anyone would waste their time ruining it.

I’d like to say that all it took to heal was frolicking through the Joshua Trees, marveling at Jumbo Rocks, laying under the stars, convinced that this sky could not possibly be the same one that has always floated above me…but that’s not really how life works. 

Joshua Tree was not the wonder drug that cured the laundry-list of mental health issues I’d spent a lifetime procuring…but it was the catalyst to seeking help, and is still the place I mentally return to when I’m feeling overwhelmed. And after returning home, after completing one year of therapy, after my psychologist told me “You’ve graduated!” (and I cried and said, “Are you sure??? Can I just keep coming back???”) I returned to Joshua Tree to sit atop the same boulder and look out at the same massive expanse of land. I was surprised to see that this time, while beautiful, the view wasn’t quite as breath-taking as I’d built it up to be…but then again, I suppose nothing is quite as bright as when you’re first emerging from the darkness.

Website www.nps.gov / Instagram @joshuatreenps