A Horse with No Name

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain

~ America

Okay, I never said my choices would be restricted to GOOD lyrics, did I?  My nomination for worst line ever written is 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain.  There are so many things wrong with that line, I wouldn't know where to begin.  Yes, I find that line worse even than Someone left the cake out in the rain (from McArthur Park).  How odd that those two lines rhyme!  Coincidence?

But I'm not here to bitch about that bad line.  Dewey Bunnell was only 19 when he wrote the song.  I know his type . . . he slept through English class for four years, then woke up to song-writing.  All is forgiven, Dewey.

Dewey was an Army brat living in England and wrote what he originally titled Desert Song after a visit to the California desert.  Although the contemporary wisdom in 1972, when the song made the charts here, is that "horse" is slang for "heroin" and that the song is about drugs, Dewey says that's not true.  He insists that "horse" represents a means of entering a place of tranquility, and this tranquil place was best represented by the desert.

Now I would not disagree with that, and those of you who have spent time in the Southwest wouldn't, either, I think.  At the risk of sounding trite, I find the Southwest, with its mesas and deserts and hot springs, to be a very spiritual place.  When in Sedona this past summer, my companion and I hiked up to the Boynton Vista Vortex.  Those energy fields did not provide me with an other-worldly experience, but the sheer beauty of the red rocks was enough for me to claim a sense of peace and tranquility.

On that same Southwest road trip, we visited Arches National Monument in Utah.  This was my second visit to Arches, and it was my goal to  tackle the hike (designated "difficult" in the park literature) out to Delicate Arch, made known to many from Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.  Difficult, yes, but so worth the time and effort.  Once in view of that majestic natural structure, it is clear that one has entered "a place of tranquility."  We may not have been riding a horse with no name, but we remember much more than our names from that experience.  We remember serenity and awe and an overwhelming gratitude that the landscape of America, with its deserts and rivers and mountains, is there for us to experience.