The Beyond

I must be tired: I have written up a lovely day in a sneery, grumpy way and this will not do. So we shall start again and I will say that the road was good and that the landscape was amazing; that Santa Fe was charming; that even the scary truck stop and the kitsch nostalgia of 'historic' route 66 were pleasant distractions along our way. Yes, even the novelty motel cones of Holbrook, AZ, in which I am writing this, are perfectly lovely.

We started in Tucumcari, NM. In the night, the panhandle prairies had turned to a kind of desert. The morning was bright and chill, the sun shining on a dry landscape of yellow grass and pink rock, dotted with thousands of scrubby green bushes.

We set off, the sun behind us, and the road climbed amongst the mountains of New Mexico, red or black, sometimes even flecked with snow.

We had a few hours in Santa Fe. It's a charming place. The narrow streets are jammed with boutiques, galleries and restaurants. We crashed the jolly Catholic cathedral (built in the 19th century although the city is 400 years old) and pointed out all the saints and transubstantiation to the boys before retiring to a nearby crêperie. If that's not japes, I don't know what is.

Then it was back onto the interstate and foot down all the way into the most remarkable landscape I've yet seen in America. Almost a desert, certainly a desolation, it made yesterday's panhandle plains seem like Piccadilly Circus. Utterly empty, just pale white scrub and occasional distant cliffs of dark red stone. The horizon was so impossibly far away that it seemed ridiculous not to see a glint of sun on the ocean beyond it. But there is no end, the land simply continues, forever.

How did people cross this void? I can't imagine making this trip without an iPod, let alone before the inventions of road or rail. We are passing through this abominably vast landscape, hurrying to move on to the next stop. Trying to cross it on foot or by wagon must have been a feat of psychological endurance more than anything else; surely those seemingly infinite spaces would have ground relentlessly away at certainty and perspective, until you went mad?

In Santa Fe there was a gallery of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and one struck me in particular. A bold composition of horizontal layers of blue and black, it is called 'The Beyond'. She painted it in 1972, when she was in her eighties.

Even before this afternoon's drive, it seemed to me to be a flat landscape: a black foreground with dark bands of turbulent blue cloud above it. In the middle is a very narrow line of almost white light, as if the setting sun were knifing through a low break in heavy clouds. The colours are cold, almost funereal and it is difficult not try and guess which 'beyond' she saw in those dark skies and those vast horizons.

It is a hopeful painting I thought, not about endings and finalities but about moving on, moving through. Beyond this great space, beyond the setting sun, there'll be another, bigger, wider, emptier. It never ends, not with the desert, not even with the ocean.