FISHING MARS

It’s so dry here. Within a day your hair is like a bottle brush. You don’t sweat. There’s no humidity, so the bead of liquid suffering evaporates as quickly as it forms on your scaly skin. The only remnants are the salt in your mouth when you wipe your lips on your arm. It’s not overpowering, you just get ground down slowly by the sun, the boulder hopping and walking in the fine, velvety golden sand. the vastness, the abyss. Day by day, we drifted, we drove, we walked, it never ended. An infinite landscape of harsh and unforgiving pans and peaks. The subterfuge of a green plant near the river is almost comical, only within a 20m of the banks are there plants with soft leaves, after that there’s not much flora that grows taller than ankle high without constant water. There are no distractions of man made things here. Immense heat, the basilisk of a river that flows through the Mars like desert and winds have shaped this land. Primordial elements, gnawing away over centuries. Everything that lives here has not the intention to flourish, purely to survive. Nature has spent aeons, inconceivably massive amounts of time stating its purpose here. 4.543 billion years in the making. You would sooner think that in some distant parallel universe this could be a mild version of hell. Its polarizing, the rawness of it all, the beauty, the softness of the water, the grit of the sand, the contrasts, all on the extreme ends of our preconceived spectrum. I was fortunate to spend just over week here with 4 of my good friends, fishing, adventuring, but most importantly being mindful and engaged with the present. For the short amount of time we have on this earth, I would like to spend less time attached to things and more time like this. I think there are a lot of questions we don’t know we need to ask, but when you’re tuned in enough, and you slow down for long enough there is a certain clarity to be found in sacred places like these. @eugenevde shot all these photos on 35mm film.

Thank you Nic Schwerdtfeger for this awesome post & Massive shout out to Eugene van der Elst for the photography!