Mojave view, by Katharine Jose

The emptiness was, of course, why I had insisted we go the dunes in the first place. Despite my resolve to be a tourist this time, I was back to my old tricks: avoiding the beaten path, dressing to blend in, and trying to learn something about a place through reading. I was sorely disappointed in my own penchant for circular self-examination. I didn’t quite know what had gone wrong.

Hiking in the desert is the definition of tourism in the same way that swimming with dolphins is the definition of relating to animals. No one hikes in the desert—doing so is beyond absurd, a comedic death march. Add sand to the equation and it is almost science fiction.

What crippled my relationship with travel was not that I was always a tourist, although I was, or that I had been taking the process of traveling too seriously, although I had. The crippling thing was the idea, held by so many people I knew, that tourism itself is bad, that there are somehow two or three distinct methods of traveling, with tourism being akin to skinning cat with a spoon. The crippling thing was my refusal to believe that there was any meaning in tourism. Traveling is tourism, no matter how it is stylized. Travelers who seek the obscure remain tourists, even off the beaten path. Our mistake has been to assume there is no meaning in the simple act of touring,

It was just lovely from the top of the dune. It was nothing more than foolish to climb up there, but it was very nice. And silent and empty and spacious and dry and all the adjectives that do not describe the Northeastern United States, which was really the point. The point was not to know the rainfall of Southern Wyoming or the number of cattle in Northern Arizona. The point was not to stubbornly set myself apart from other visitors by acquiring books and maps. The point was just to do something different. I departed to find the solution to post-modern tourism; I think now that maybe traveling should be kept away from any semblance of post-modern claws. I think I should stop worrying and love the Mojave.