Happy Sunday 🍵☕
I've moved my newsletters to a new home! To make sure you keep getting them, please move this email to your Primary tab or add this address to your contacts. Even better, send a quick reply, just saying you got it or letting me know if you enjoyed this email. I'm excited to share this journey with you! I've been working on it for 10 years.
I almost missed it entirely.
I found White Sands the night before I got there.
I was in Tucson, visiting a friend, with Santa Fe still seven hours north. Too big a gap to drive straight through. So I did what anyone does: opened Google and looked for something along the way. White Sands came up, 250 square miles of white gypsum sand. I’d never heard of it. “What even is that?” I didn’t know we had anything like it in the United States. I bookmarked it as a stop and went to sleep.
Upon arrival, there was no grand entrance. No big sign. I just drove in, and suddenly there were walls of white sand on both sides of the road, massive and silent, and I had no idea what was ahead of me. I pulled over at the first safe opening I could find and got out.
I drew right there at the entrance. There was a shrub and some yellow grass growing straight out of the sand, some impossibly alive thing in the middle of all that white, and I couldn’t figure out how it existed. “Is there dirt under there?” “What even is this place?” I set up and drew it while I still had light. That piece is called Sand and Silence. It’s not my most technically accomplished work. But I accomplished my mission: capture the moment.
Then I walked up.
The dune was enormous. I climbed until I could see the horizon, until I could see the sun going down behind a range of mountains silhouetted in dark purple. The sky had turned that soft, deep blue that comes right before everything goes black. And it was so quiet. I have never been anywhere, before or since, as quiet as the top of that dune. The sand absorbs everything. It’s the loudest silence I’ve ever not heard.
Then someone appeared in the distance. They asked to see the drawing I was sketching atop the dunes, and asked if they could take a picture. I said yes. Thank God they were there, because that photo is the only one I have of myself in one of my most memorable moments on this Earth.
As the soft blue turned navy, and the bright white sand dulled to a warm gray, I left. White Sands is enormous, miles and miles in every direction, and I saw maybe the first quarter mile. I wasn’t going to risk driving deep into a place I didn’t know with no light left and no idea how to get out. The kid from the suburbs knew his limits.
I got back in the car and started driving north toward Santa Fe. Two hundred thirty-five miles through the New Mexico dark.
But that drive, and what the sky looked like that night, is the next issue.
That’s what this newsletter is. One place at a time. Where I have been, what I have seen, and what personally moved me.
26 states down. 24 to go.
Want more from this trip — Photos, recommendations, stories that didn’t make the cut? Just reply and ask. I’ve got plenty.
Just an Easel and a Dream is Cody's ongoing plein air pastel project: drawing in all 50 states, one landscape at a time.
Reminder: If you enjoyed this newsletter, go move this email to your Primary tab or add this address to your contacts to make sure you keep getting them. Or send a quick reply, just saying you got it or letting me know you enjoyed it. Whatever is easiest.
Thank You!