Dirt

I’ve always had a soft spot for dirt.

As a kid, I spent hours wandering the fields behind our house - building forts in the tall grass, crawling through weeds, and coming home so thoroughly coated with dirt that it took a scrub brush to make me presentable again. Grass stains, skinned knees, and pockets full of whatever I’d found along the way were just part of the deal. Even then, I preferred being down in the weeds, close to the ground where things felt more real.

That instinct never left.

In 1992, on a camping trip through Cathedral Valley with author Ward Roylance, I hopped out of the truck to photograph one of the stone marvels scattered across that vast, painfully beautiful landscape. As usual, I dropped to my knees, trying to capture not just the formations themselves, but the texture of the earth around them - the grit, the patterns, the small details that most people step right over. When I climbed back into the truck, Ward looked at me and said, “I really love it when you get down in the dirt to take photographs, Bob.”

He meant it literally, but it stuck with me in a much larger way.

Because getting down in the dirt isn’t just how I take pictures - it’s how I experience the world.

Most people think of dirt as something to avoid, something that dirties the clean edges of our lives. But out here, it’s something else entirely. It’s soil. It’s foundation. It’s the quiet, unglamorous substance that holds everything together. It’s where life begins, even in the harshest places.

And in a way, it’s not just the land that’s built from it.

Life has its own version of dirt - the unexpected, often unwelcome things that find their way into our carefully imagined plans. Loss. Pain. Detours we never would have chosen. My own share has been a strange mix: the early loss of people I loved, years of chronic pain, my wife’s cerebral aneurysm - each one, on its own, enough to shift the course of a life.

Individually, they could have narrowed things. Instead, they deepened them.

Those experiences changed how I see the world. They sharpened my attention, stripped away assumptions, and made beauty feel less like something you passively admire and more like something you recognize with a kind of gratitude. Without that perspective, I’m not sure I would have found my way to the life I’ve lived - or learned to see it as clearly as I do.

I wouldn’t have seen the beauty without the dirt.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to spring in the desert.

Desert wildflowers don’t announce themselves from a distance. They don’t rise up in sweeping, obvious displays like they do in more forgiving landscapes. Out here, life clings. It edges into existence along washes, hugs the sides of roads, and finds improbable footholds in places that seem entirely inhospitable. From a standing position, it can all feel a bit… underwhelming.

But change your perspective - get down close, into the dirt - and everything shifts.

Suddenly there’s color where you didn’t see any. Intricate blooms tucked between stones. Entire miniature worlds thriving at ground level, quiet and resilient and easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.

The desert doesn’t hide its beauty. It just asks a little more of you to see it. So this spring, if you find yourself out here among the blooms, don’t just stand and look.

Get down in the dirt.