Atacama Deserta

“I have seen a number of desert cyclists in the Southwest, and talked to some – the ‘California or Bust’ type with bulging backpacks, or a memorable couple of tough-talking girls from Chicago fettling their ten speeds in a gas station forecourt outside Cortez, Colorado. And – something I would have dismissed as hallucination did I not have a witness to bolster my grasp on reality – an elderly lady in a print dress and wool cardigan riding a tall dignified English bicycle that looked about the same age as herself, the sort that has an elaborate tracery of cordage to keep Edwardian skirts out of the back wheel and a wicker basket on the front of the handlebars. She was headed south about ten miles out of Shoshone, California, in a direction in which there was neither help nor habitation for another seventy miles. To astonished to do anything else, we said, ‘What was that, for God’s sake?’ And looked in the mirror and there was, already almost a hundred yards astern, pedaling peaceably onwards with a background of bright green creosote  bush (it had been a wet season) and rounded, striped, salty hills beyond. Wherever she was going, I have not shared her experience of cycling on the desert roads, even though I am a dyed-in-the-wool cyclist, and bike to and from campus every day under normal circumstances. But I do not have a kind of desert cycling experience, not on the roads but on the salt flats; something which started as a stunt or a joke with a folding cycle we had brought with us in the back of the four-wheel drive, and finished as an exhilaration quite outside any pervious cycling experience. Given a really hard, smooth soda surface like that of Silurian lake, north of Baker, which is almost glassy and without crackle patterns over much of its area, one can move with a completeness of freedom a cyclist cannot enjoy anywhere else. Swinging in wider and wider circles or going head down for ever-retreating horizon, the salt whispers under one’s wheels and nothing else is heard at all but those minute mechanical noises of the bike that are normally drowned out by other traffic. Swooping and sprinting like a skater over the surface of Silurian Lake, I came as near as ever to a whole-body experience equivalent to the visual intoxication of sheer space that one enjoys in America Deserta.”

Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 99

Reyner Banham at the Silurian Lake, California

Photo Credits © Tim Street-Porter, 1980

Riding Banham's Bickerton at the
Tebenquiche Salt Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

Photo Credits © Tim Street-Porter 2011