A fact about the Mojave that many people don't realize: its elevation varies wildly, from a low of 282 feet below sea level at Badwater to a high of 11,000 feet in the Panamint Mountains. Much of the Mojave is mountainous, and when it snows the elevation differences really stand out. One moment you can be walking in a snowstorm, and a moment later you can be walking through a sandstorm, each grounding in their own ways. When people think of the Mojave, it's the aridity and heat which almost exclusively comes to mind, but it's so much more besides that. The contrast is surreal, especially to those who've experienced the desert's more typical weather patterns.
Joshua trees, with their twisted, outstretched limbs, their alien forms, wear snow almost as a blanket, which makes their shapes even more striking amid the landscape, but in a manner which projects a sense of peace despite this. The cactus spines glitter with ice, and low shrubs and yucca are traced with frost, the crystalline, delicate outline. Red and ochre rock formations—so familiar in the blistering sun—peek through the snow with more contrast than usual, practically directly visualizing the symbolism between warmth and cold.
Above all, I think, it's the silence. It doesn't deafen as you'd think; it envelops. A blanket beyond the cold and the clothes on your back. Snow muffles the usual dry crunch of footsteps and the skitter of lizards. There’s a stillness, broken only by the whistle of a cold wind or the distant croak of a raven. Animal tracks—coyote, jackrabbit, maybe even bighorn sheep—dot the snow, and even then their presence feels surreal and immaterial amidst the silence. It brings clarity. Serenity of the mind in a perfect match with the beauty of the outside.
Nestled underneath a set of rounded but tall dune-like rock formations, there was a small campground consisting of a well-built tent, a bag and its contents, and a small campfire. Leaning against the base of these rocks, enveloped in as many layers as it took to keep herself safely in and all the frigidness of the world out, eyes lidded and half-focused, yet entirely in tune with the earth and the nature which surrounded her— Céline Sharpe came back to herself.There's nothing here but you.
[Céline Sharpe - Pregame Start]
A deep breath through the nose in this weather was most of what it took to bring Céline back to life. The air, plain and wintry besides its typical tint of desert freshness, sent that shock through her system which reignited all her senses, besides the basest which let her put down what she did in her journal. As her dull eyes blankly scrolled the freshly scribbled contents of paper, her brow furrowed ever slightly. She felt like she'd gone off-script, somehow. Waxed a bit too poetic here or there. She reasoned, in her own defense for lack of any other, that it would be difficult not to in such an environment. Her head turned up to the sky, the horizon and its falling sun, shawled all in demure white glory completely belying its typical nature and contrasting the setting orange of its aerial counterpart. Her eyes, now wide, almost shined as a strand of her hair fell to her face from the wool hat it was put up in, bringing her back down once more. She'd only gotten to write about such an environment a few times in her life, and the first, she'd nearly gotten herself a horrid cold she would have likely attempted to power through and promptly made it worse. Not this time. She knew what she was doing.
She hobbled her way up, weighed down lightly, not by any encumberment but by the sheer volume of layers she wore. Didn't matter how it threw her off. She never did well with the cold. Imperceptible crunches in the snow marked her march to her tent, and she brought herself back down once more to fumble through it for her bag—and through the bag for its contents—to make for her map. Even though this trip, station to reception to trail to turn to landmark, was a trip that she'd made dozens upon dozens of times, her typical path practically marked in and of itself at this point, she didn't want the snow to throw her off any more than it already was. If she tried to go at it raw, even just one wrong turn or wrong step could set her marching off somewhere she wouldn't realise was the wrong way until it was too late.
Until Danika was home and she wasn't.
Céline shuddered lightly, the edges of her map crinkling alongside her tightening grip at the thought, even though by all logic it shouldn't have been anything worth caring about. A question, one that had more than likely come to the forefront of her mind more times than any other, arose within: realistically what would Danika do upon learning? Nearly instantly, Céline arrived at the same conclusion she had every time that question was posed: The woman she called her mother wouldn't have it in her to care. It was sickening to think about, but Céline didn't have it in her to care either. Willing it to change, she'd learned a while ago, was about similar in potency to willing some fundamental law of nature itself to bend. It was apathy. It'd been apathy for years now, and it would remain apathy.
But even so... this was hers, Céline thought. She looked up and around at the landscape she'd seen and been to time after time again as she packed the tent back up and put out the fire as safety standards required. This was incontrivably hers. No one could come and poison this, or come to put her down or make her feel like nothing. It was far enough from everything else that it was assured in absolute safety, or it felt that was at least. Her own sanctuary, where she could come and forget humanity.
Nothing here but her.
She reflected on this as she closed her journal and heaved her pack over her shoulders with map still in hand, taking one last long look at her home away from home. Every time, it was with a solemnity, as if it was the last. It felt like it brought her ever closer to something. That something that made her feel alive. That made her feel hopeful, despite how life pulled her back each time. She clenched the map again. Soon, it could never have her again. Soon, this would be her life. Where she could be free as the birds among the quiet as she wrote. And it would be perfect.
[Céline Sharpe will return.]