I've liked the Eagles for as long as I can remember. In high school, my brother and I had a cassette tape of the Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume 2 album. I can't tell you how many nights we spent cruising around in the powder blue family wagon, singing along to 'Seven Bridges Road' and 'Hotel California'. Something in the music of this group spoke to me, back then, of continual motion and a freedom I dreamed of but didn't know I would ever be able to attain. Maybe it was the tempo of 'Life in the Fast Lane', such an easy companion to the thrum of the tires and the feel of the ground moving underneath the car. Or a wistfulness I picked up from Timothy Schmidt's vocals in 'I Can't Tell You Why'. Or it could have been the devil-may-care attitude of the lyrics in 'The Long Run'.
I was playing an Eagles CD the day I caught my first glimpse of the desert as an adult. Since then, I've associated the Eagles not only with the physical landscape of the desert, but with my internal landscape as I drive through it. Most of the time, that landscape is one of movement and restlessness.
You know I've always been a dreamer - spent my life runnin' round
And it's so hard to change - can't seem to settle down
But the dreams I've seen lately keep on turnin' out, and burnin' out, and turnin' out the same.
So put me on a highway and show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time.
- Eagles, 'Take It to the Limit'
But that's not always the case. In early March of 2002, my sister Jane, her boyfriend and I were preparing to camp on national forest land just outside Sedona, Arizona. Thirty miles away in Flagstaff, temperatures were in the thirties. Among the red cliffs near the Palatki ruins, though, there was only a hint of chill to the air. We didn't have a tent with us. There was no reason to drag one along, no one around for miles.
The three of us had hiked earlier that day, up to the top of Doe Mesa. We were pleasantly dusty and tired. We built a small fire, more for ambience than for warmth, while we ate dinner. I don't recall what we ate, what we talked about, or what time it was when we let the fire burn down and rolled our sleeping bags out on the sandy red slick rock. All I remember are the stars. I'd lived in Chicago for a decade. Life under the orange city skies had almost made me forget such things as stars existed.
Not that I'd ever seen so many at one time, ever. With nothing to dim or obstruct my view I felt as though I could reach out and touch every last one of the twenty billion or so stars that I could see. The Milky Way flowed unrestricted from horizon to horizon. The main constellations were nearly obscured by the sheer quantity of visible stars. Periodically a bright fragment would detach itself from the background and go whizzing across the sky: a shooting star. Up above it all, faintly, I caught a glimpse of a satellite moving along on its gravitational track.
I lay there breathless for what may have been hours, too exited and joyful to fall asleep. I felt like I couldn't open my eyes wide enough to take it all in. When I did doze off, I had bizarre dreams from which I awoke disoriented. I opened my eyes and there was this brilliant night sky, still whirling above me. I turned over and lay on my side, grounding my vision on the ridge to the west. As I stared, I could see the line of the horizon swallowing up the stars.
That was when I had, for the first time, the actual, visceral sense of the earth's rotation. Not as an abstract concept that I learned in a grade school science class ages ago, but as a real motion I could see and feel. The realization was dizzying. I closed my eyes and fell asleep again.
I woke in the pre-dawn. Jane and her boyfriend were still burrowed into their sleeping bags. As I watched the last of the stars fade into the light of the early morning the lyrics to an Eagles song - 'Peaceful, Easy Feeling' - were stuck in my head.
I like the way your sparkling earrings lay against your skin so brown
And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a billion stars all around
I've got a peaceful, easy feeling, and I know you won't let me down
'Cause I'm already standing on the ground.
For once I was content, right where I was.
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