Raymond Abril

I love the desert and the mountains. I was born here, and as a child I was fearless among the cacti and other living creatures whom I shared the open space with. As a man, I have come to respect the desert and admire it for its beauty and charm. I share my appreciation for the Sonoran desert through my pictures. I have no conquered this mountain, for I was only a visitor who came to climb its peak and read poetry.

Piestewa Peak was just recently named for the heroic, fallen Native American soldier while she was in Iraq. She also came from the desert, a member of the Hopi tribe, and her name will live on in maps and memories of politics rushed to forget the old name of this peak. I remembered her on this climb, that which I knew from the news reports; each conflicting another with sparse details and quasi facts concerning her last few moments of life. I imagined that if the name should be connected to the physical world, then being a physical being I could discover through tactile means what it feels to be immortal.

The pain I may have felt from those jagged rocks or the sweat pouring from my brow were nothing compared to bullets and shards of glass on a lost, back road in the middle east. I knew that only the heat could compare, but that would not keep me from the peak. The heat is a driving force. The heat reminds me that I am alive.

With my tripod, camera, backpack, headphones, and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I had at last found peace in the middle of the megalopolis.  At the elevation of 2,200 ft, the noise of the adjacent freeway drowned itself in the magnificent view. I could see the sky as blue as I imagined the Hohokam had, before they abandoned the Valley of the Sun; a necessary event for the City of Phoenix to be born from its ashes.

Maybe all spiritual knowledge requires an abstraction layer from the ordinary. Perhaps anything I learned is in itself a layer imaginary. The arbitrary experience may be a temporary distraction, however I can say that I learned that by distracting the reality of the accomplishment I came away with one important detail.

The price of immortality includes having inquisitive people often misspell your family name and climb all over you asking questions. I wanted to give SPC Lori Piestewa an answer in return. Thank you. If I had the water left in me to shed a tear in the 110F afternoon, I would have. All I could do, was to say thank you and take a self portrait to forever remind myself that jagged rocks, deathly sunshine, and almost falling over the edge by tripping over my tripod are nothing.