We stood in the sand. A lot of sand. So much sand. More sand in one place than I’d ever seen in my life. More than the beach, and hotter too. But beyond the sand, far in the background of the shaded ups and downs, was a pile of sand. I’m not talking about a pile of sand you’d use to build a sand castle; this was a huge, mountainous pile of sand. Larger than a castle and more majestic too. Geoff and I stood in the Mojave Desert, on September 22, 2019, just a few days after my 25th birthday. We were about to hike a sand dune.
What’s a Sand Dune?
A few days prior, we sat on the couch bouncing ideas back-and-forth for our next hike. He asked me if I knew what a sand dune was and proceeded to hand me his iPhone 7 with some visual examples. There’s a significance to be said about a friend passing you their phone to see what they’re seeing, as opposed to them texting it to you. It’s a moment of urgency where they can’t wait for you to receive the text or image or article, so they pass their phone from their hand to your hand, delivering humor or information, as they wait for a response that will display on your face in just a quick moment.
With this gesture, I knew the sand dune image was something to take note of. Not only was this a prospect for our next hike, it was also a type of landscape I’d never seen in person before, so getting a first glance was double important. When I examined the scroll of Google Images, I can only imagine how my face must have looked. My eyebrows certainly raised, a widening of the eyes, finding out I’d soon be in heaven.
The day we went out to Kelso Dunes was only my 9th day living in Las Vegas. I told myself I wanted to commit at least one year in my new state, on my new adventure. That’s how I rationalized what getting up and moving across the country could be in my life: an adventure, a journey, an experience. I told myself, “I’m committing to a year and then I’ll take it from there,” because in my mind, a year didn’t feel too long or too short. A goal of one year gave some structure to a wild ride I framed as personal growth. With my experience, I knew I wouldn’t ever see a better version of myself without a plan, and one year was the start to that plan.
Documenting Our Journey
Kelso Dunes, located outside of Baker, California, is a little over 100 miles from Las Vegas. As Geoff drove his van through the two-hour ride via I-15, it was my job to record our vlog, which we would edit later and post to YouTube. Geoff and I share an interest in recording videos and documenting journeys, a staple of our friendship that we’ve never torn off. Paired with video editing, another staple of me and Geoff’s friendship is our interest in the outdoors.
Geoff and I met in 2013 at a small public liberal arts college just north of the Adirondack Mountains. My first experience hiking took place with Geoff at Stone Valley Trailhead, a recreation area in Colton, New York, often covered in muddy snow and ice throughout the academic year. Down the trail, past a tiny footbridge and a thin stream, we would arrive at a bed of boulders sitting alongside the Raquette River. This trail in the North Country is at the center of my sense of belonging to the outdoors.
At the start of the Kelso Dunes vlog, you will see both me and Geoff in our kitchen at 6:29am with the Vegas sun peeking its way through the window. I was shirtless, making sandwiches.
I’ll start off by saying that the Paul I see in the vlog is fatter than the now-Paul (the Paul who’s writing this). I don’t mind saying fat, as opposed to large or heavy, because fat is how I saw myself. This is similar to saying someone is dead, as opposed to “passed away” or “in a better place.” When someone is dead, they are dead, and when I look at the Paul in the video, there is no doubt in my head that he’s fat. And I’m allowed to say that…because I’m me. From my widened belly to plump chest, my weight was the barrier I built that led me to believe I couldn’t climb the dune.
But beyond that, there was a happy guy making ham and cheese sandwiches with a delicious honey mustard, excited to climb a “pile” of sand.
This dialogue represents how Geoff and I speak to each other as best friends. The emphasis I make on the word literally points to our constant joking of redundant language. Our irrelevant banter often holds an underlying commentary of how meaningless some everyday phrases can be. Other times, we’re just being silly friends. For example, when Geoff and I became roommates, he quickly caught on to some of the ridiculous phrases I use, such as “No, no, no, yeah.” Despite three “No’s” and one “Yeah,” this phrase always expresses my agreement to something I’ve heard.
This dialogue also circles back to how much we enjoy video editing. When Geoff says that we’ll later “flash cut” to an image of what I’m describing in the video, it reminds me of how filming is only half the fun — and how much we look forward to spending time mastering a finished video.
The Selfie Guy
When Geoff and I arrived at the Kelso Dunes parking area, we spotted a man who was also about to begin the hike along with us. Walking several feet ahead, we eventually passed him as he paused to take a picture. We took note of this. The man stood at the beginning of the trail, the dune field standing behind him and his smartphone in front of his face.
A lot of people do this: they drive all the way to a nature spot to take a picture of not only nature, but of themselves in nature. This rubs Geoff the wrong way. He finds it bizarre that someone would drive all the way out to a sand dune field to take a picture of themselves as proof that they were there. They will snap a selfie and tag the location on Instagram, attaching a romantic quote-caption to worship the landscape they didn’t explore. As we walked further, we looked back at the man walking back to the parking lot. Geoff was right.
Seeing that man’s flaunty visit to the sand dune begin and end in less than 15 minutes reminded me why I was there. I admit, I was just as attached to my phone as the selfie guy was, but what was different, I thought, was the intention behind the attachment. Taking photos and recording videos wasn’t the problem — ever hear of National Geographic? Right. Because it’s rewarding to document nature. It didn’t bother me that I was about to start recording again; I wasn’t hiking Kelso Dunes to get validation from a social media video like the selfie guy. It felt good to take photos and videos in the way Geoff and I were doing it. It felt allowed. I just didn’t know why yet
A Commitment to Climbing
At the end of the day, my commitment in the Kelso Dune Field was to climb the dune. That’s what I was there to do and if I didn’t do it, I’d already be off to a poor start on my journey.
I don’t remember the heat bothering me too much. Given it was mid-September, the temperature could have ranged between 60 and 80 degrees fahrenheit that morning. The dry heat both in Las Vegas and on the dune field felt foreign to a lifelong New Yorker, but I wasn’t complaining. What stood in front of me wasn’t a dune, it was a challenge. Even if the heat bothered me just a little bit, the newness of living and hiking in an unfamiliar part of the country, surrounded by an unfamiliar climate, brought so much oompfh that I couldn’t care about the amount of physical exertion this challenge would take.
As the vlog continues, viewers can see the path ahead of us over on the dune field. It is a long narrow path with shrubs on either side. In the background, you can see a tall mountain of sand waiting for us. I still hadn’t comprehended how — or if — it was possible to actually get to the top of that thing. I knew we were going to, but it just looked so far away; a real castle of sand that I doubted I’d gain entry to.
It’s interesting to look back at this moment in the video and hear what was important to me about the start of my journey in Las Vegas right then and there. It makes sense that I talk about the outdoors as I’m recording a hiking vlog, but even in nine days, I already seem to hold a sense of accomplishment about my decision to move across the country. That feeling was rooted in the outdoors, in the freedom of sleeping outside without any tent on Mt. Charleston. It was rooted in the geology of Red Rock Canyon and the heat of a never-ending sun. Everything surrounding me felt real and so did I.
Here’s the thing about casually documenting an outdoors experience — for me, anyway. Most of the time that I’ve tried to do it, I somewhat fail to document the good part. By that I mean, the exciting part. In this video, you see me hiking only to the base of the sand dune, and then a cut to me at the top. We miss the entire hike up the actual sand dune, largely due to the fact that I didn’t have the energy to hold a camera anymore.
But that’s the part we miss. That’s the part that isn’t shown in the video before we see me at the top, feeling like I had just won the olympics. Geoff and I even point to this when we include a “twenty-five minutes later” transition, reminiscent of SpongeBob. And that’s the problem with the video, for the viewer at least.
Not for me, though. I know exactly what happened.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
You see, there’s a funny expression: “two steps forward, one step back.” I think that’s a commonly used phrase. This experience, however, felt more like “one step forward, two steps back,” which is something I’ve felt my entire life. Where you just keep moving backward, it seems. I even did the math on a number line; I’m almost positive you’d never get anywhere by going one step forward and two steps back.
But that was only how it felt. In reality, it really was “two steps forward, one step back.” It just felt so difficult.
I used my water bottle as a walking stick. I used my backpack as a pillow to lay on an incline of sand for two minutes just to rest. I used my breath to ground myself because at a certain point, that’s all I had left. At one point, when I looked up, as I was almost reaching the summit, all I could see in front of me — no, I really mean that: all I could see in front of me… As in, the only thing in sight. All I could see in front of me was an abundance of sand, the clear blue sky, and my best friend Geoff.
The easiest time to give up is when you think, “I’m so tired.” When you’ve tried so hard that you become lazy. That you think the incomplete work you put in was good enough. That when you declare yourself prematurely done, you won’t feel like a failure. That when all the other people get the job done, you won’t feel ashamed for not doing so. I didn’t want to be that kind of person on my 9th day in a new state.
There were plenty of people beside me who had already gotten the job done. There was Geoff. He was already at the summit. There were these two other guys hiking away from us — in jeans. They were already at the summit too. And then there was me, not quite there yet. There was a second when I almost asked myself why no one was cheering me on, especially those jean guys. Why wouldn’t they? They saw me trying really hard. Geoff was cheering me on, but why not more? Why aren’t people clapping me on right now? That was until I realized how ridiculous that was. Why in the world is it their responsibility to cheer me on? And then I said, “fuck.” And then, “God help me.”
Interesting…
The Song, My Endurance
Then there was the singing. The sand, singing. I definitely heard it before this moment, but I may have forgotten it from being so involved in my phone; or maybe I just felt connected to it now. The mysterious hum being emitted by the sand, the wind, and the hikers. The sand sang me upward like a congregation coming together in a chorus, longing for God. As a guy who loves music, this was nice to listen to. It soothed me, especially because I always play music in my ears when I walk. If I couldn’t have Miley Cyrus’s “Slide Away” — my favorite song at the time — I might as well listen to the sand. The song of the sand, bouncing around from hill to hill, grain to grain, ear to ear. Suddenly, I wasn’t so tired. I was so close.
That’s what anyone watching the video would miss. They also missed me eventually getting to the summit, dragging myself through the sand by my fingertips, not stopping until I felt no more incline. Suddenly I wasn’t so close, I was there. I was finally there. I just looked at everything in front of me. There was no more looking up. Just looking ahead. I saw other people at the bottom about to begin the hike. I saw what seemed like miles of shining, golden sand. I saw Geoff’s van. And then I threw up, another indication of how I overexerted myself and how fat I really was. “But now,” I thought, “I can do this again.”
This was a nostalgic moment. Sliding down a sand dune after triumphantly hiking to the summit almost felt like being a kid in my hometown on a snow day, sledding down the hill at my high school, celebrating something that felt so rare and so real at the same time. I did eventually stand up from my slide-down attempt, though. It turns out that hiking down a sand dune is just as challenging — using my legs was pretty necessary.
A Song for Everyone
When we got to the area of the hike that I had gotten on camera before — the field leading up to the base of the dune — we saw more of those selfie people. More of those people taking photos and walking back to their cars. Actually, this time, they were couples who had really nice DSLR cameras taking pictures of each other. Standing on a little lump of sand with the beauty of nature behind them, smiling broad, teethy smiles. They held their water bottles in one hand and their iPhone in the other, their arms reaching toward the sky. They looked really happy. They looked like they were having a great time and had just done something magnificent. They looked like they were standing on top of the world in a place they’d never been to.
For better or for worse, I felt the same way. I just hope they also got to hear the sand dune sing, too.