Willcox Playa

Author's Comments

The hour I care about here is the one that arrives slowly, after the last band of blue has drained from the western horizon and the eyes have finally surrendered to the dark. Astronomical twilight ends late on the playa in a way it does not end elsewhere. There is no town glow on the periphery, no distant interstate, no ranch light catching the underside of a cloud. Just the Sulphur Springs Valley going black and the sky filling in above it, layer by layer, until the Milky Way is not a feature but a structure - a spine arcing from one horizon to the other with weight and dimension. I came out here the first time in late October and underestimated almost everything. The cold after midnight. The disorientation of standing on a surface that reads, in the dark, as nothing at all. The way the cracked mud at your feet only reveals itself when you finally turn the headlamp down and let it go red. Those polygons are the foreground that makes the photograph work. Get low. Get close. A wide lens at fourteen or twenty millimeters will pull the cracks into the frame and let the galactic core sit above them like something the ground is remembering. Come in spring or fall on a new moon, and check the weather twice. The playa after rain is not a place you want to drive onto. Bring more water than you think you need. Bring a chair. The sky takes its time, and you should too. Stay until the core sets, or until the cold wins. Either is an honest ending.

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