Other Ways of Seeing
The Twentynine Palms Highway snakes its way into the southern edge of the Mojave Desert through the Little San Bernardino Mountains. Angled at a low incline, it ascends gradually to high desert country. In Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, the journalist Ben Ehrenreich writes that every time he traversed this route, he would feel the tension fade away.
When I first drove up the road a few years ago, I too, in a way, felt at home. Driving through the foothills of the Little San Bernardino Mountains, I was reminded of a similar spot on a desert highway at the other end of the planet, in Pakistan’s southernmost province of Sindh—the place I call home. It was a site I had driven past all my life, on the long journey from the port city of Karachi to my ancestral village. There was nothing melodramatic about it: two hillocks flanking the M9 motorway as it curved through them. But the scene caught my attention as a child and continues to fascinate me to this day.
I encountered the same uplifting feeling, subtle beauty,
