Most people get uncomfortable when they are taken out of their normal routine. When they don’t have their heating and air conditioning systems, hot running water, or just a solid roof over their heads. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate these amenities as well, but I am also lucky to be surrounded by people who recognize the importance of escaping this way of life: camping. The other weekend my friends and I went camping at Enchanted Rock for the weekend. I have camped around North Carolina, Colorado, and a few places in Texas… out of all of them nothing can quite compare to Enchanted Rock. I mean driving up to is just unreal, a massive rock right in the center of Texas, of all places. Naturally my phone went dead before I could take any good picture, but I managed to get a few shots around our camp site. It was farther back so it was a hike to get there, but the area was secluded and relatively to ourselves, which made it all the more fun. Its the feeling you get when you realize how big the world actually is, how much space we do and don’t take up, we haven’t destroyed everything quite yet.
It was sort of strange to have walked over essentially huge granites the whole hike. I’d look down and see the flicker of quartz shining under my feet, and I just thought wow what a suitable name: Enchanted Rock. As far as the vegetation goes, everything was still a bit brown, a lot of leafless trees, dry desert looking grass, but somehow it all went together, nothing seemed dead it was still beautiful. Plus, despite the fact that nothing was in full bloom, I was still able to recognize the diversity of different plants. Again, because my phone died, I was unable to determine the exact types of plants these were and had to just take them in with my eye and respect the fact that all of these unknown plants exist and seem to only really exist far from civilization. I mean, there were tall stalks of some type of grass, every type of cacti you cold imagine, and random pools of shallow water where the brightest algae I have ever seen.
Its interesting how such dry plants like cacti and wet plants like algae are living harmoniously in one of the driest parts of Texas. I wish I had better explored how the water gathers up here, where its really coming from and how the algae and grass in these small parts seem to emulate the color of a bright green highlighter. A bright green highlighter amongst all of these neutral winter tones in all the other plants, it amazed me. As an english major, something I commonly see people doing in most fields is to try and find a connection that unites everything as one. That makes sense of how this planet is filled with seemingly contradictory phenomena, and if we linger on these distinctions we forget how the colorful plants and the colorless plants are both just plants trying to survive in their respected environment, thats a notion human kind needs to hang onto.