Michael Champlin's Journal

Dust Storm

2025-05-25T14:00:00Z

I do some of my best thinking on long drives.

On a whim a few weeks ago I found myself headed through the hill country of central Texas just on the tail-end of wildflower season, but as often happens on long drives I felt drawn onward into the desert. After sleeping in a cheap motel I headed south, stopping for lunch at the mostly-deserted Amistad National Recreation Area.

From my journal:

Having a picnic at a day use area at Amistad, but this area of the lake is completely dried up. There's a boat ramp here leading straight down into miles of dry thornscrub.

This morning I saw photos from a (thankfully very small) protest in Frisco where someone had a sign reading "Climate change is fake." As I walked down the boat ramp onto the dry earth that was once a massive reservoir, it felt remarkably tangible that things are very bad.

I drove west along the border, through mostly abandoned little towns and the seemingly endless scrub, and set my sights on Marfa for the night. Just before dusk I saw what seemed like weird clouds billowing on the horizon, and my weather app chimed with a warning: a literal dust storm. I sat and watched for about five minutes as the cloud grew, stretching ahead and behind me to the horizon, moving closer.

I tried to take photos and video, but they failed to capture the scale and intensity of what I was seeing...and then it was time to get in the car and stay there. The sky shifted as the cloud engulfed me completely, blotting out the setting sun and transforming the golden light of dusk to the black of night. The whole scene had a surreal, uncanny quality that brought to mind the total solar eclipse last year. I continued slowly through the blinding wind and dust for another two hours, and just before hitting town the air began to clear. I found Marfa eerily still and quiet in the way it almost always is, and drifted to sleep in a cozy bed.

In the morning light I found everything laminated with a fine layer of dust.

Notes:

Dry in the Rio Grande Basin features imagery taken by NASA Earth Observatory illustrating the extent of the drought in the Rio Grande Basin.
Steven Monacelli's coverage of the April 19th protest Frisco on Bluesky.

Things I noticed at the library today

2025-02-28T04:19:00Z

Stopped impulsively at the library and walked around. I realized that libraries are just good places for me. I feel good and safe when I'm there.

Afterward I wrote down the things I saw, in no particular order.

An endcap with materials on becoming a US citizen
The librarian’s homemade watermelon earrings
The section of books for teens on gender and sexuality
The section of books on Nazi history
The Diary of Anne Frank
A seed library
Cute moms in Fanny packs (2)
Librarians all wearing masks

San Luis Valley, Colorado

2025-02-11T19:30:00Z

On the roadside in Colorado, June 2020
35mm film

Just a quote that feels relevant right now

2025-02-10T17:30:00Z

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”

― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Chromo Mountain, 1:30am

2024-12-16T04:19:00Z

Driving through the American Southwest at night is an exercise in surrealism.

In February of 2019 I made an album* of generally not very good and probably relatively unlistenable music. With the benefit of time, however, I see a clearer picture: a weekend spent making a core few songs, especially the ten and a half minute “Chromo Mountain, 1:30am” followed by a frenzied rush to fill in around it with other music in order to complete the “album” in time.

Upon listening now I recognize that this song was a sort of singular act of creation on the project. There are others I ended up liking: Memphis, a downbeat pop song built around an 808 drum beat about an ill-fated road trip I took ten years ago to meet a woman I met on the internet, and Taos Hum where I just got lost in droning synthesizers and layered tape delays. But Chromo was me truly getting outside my comfort zone.

It was a song about a road trip conceived on a later road trip: one weekend in early February I left work, packed a bag and started driving into East Texas. I drove, aimlessly, taking pictures of old buildings by moonlight and listening to, among other things, The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 and Broadcast’s entire discography. I made audio sketches on my iPad, laying down synthesizer tracks and buzzes that I’d later turn into a couple of tracks on the album while sitting next to a campfire at a State Park while drinking whiskey and staring at the moon. It was freeing.

The next night, back home, I stayed up most of the night working on Chromo. I started by experimenting with making sounds with my guitar that didn’t sound like a traditional guitar: I ran it through banks of delay and distortion pedals, attempting to build feedback loops that eventually my software couldn’t or wouldn’t let me do. At some point I grabbed a bamboo chopstick with a glob of hot glue at one end and played the guitar like a sort of...dulcimer, laying it on my lap and pressing the fretboard with my left hand while thrumming with the right, bouncing the hammer off the strings gently, manipulating the speed of the bounce. I could close the distance between the stick and the strings to increase the speed. It sounded interesting (even if it didn’t sound good).

The weird guitar is perhaps what makes it a little hard to listen to now. It makes me feel self-conscious about it, but at the same time...I love it. The track ends up being one of the most weirdly creative things I’ve ever done, and when I listen to it I’m transported to that lonely, surrealist drive through the Rio Grande valley. It’s the farthest I’ve ever driven without seeing another car. It was magical and terrifying in its desolation.

*I made the album as part of the RPM challenge, where musicians make an album (write, record, produce) in the month of February.

I originally wrote this piece in my journal four years ago today, but it seemed like an interesting thing to post here. You can check out the whole album on my Soundcloud.

Piper Cub · Chromo Mountain, 1:30am

Sleeping Ute Mountain

2024-11-19T00:00:00Z

Sleeping Ute Mountain as viewed from Cortex, CO just before dawn, December 2018.

This particular morning is sort of a core memory for me. I woke before dawn and drove into the emptiness west of Cortez Colorado, watching this solitary mountain as the sun came up, painted in a million different colors before settling on a brilliant blue-white. It was so impossibly, blissfully quiet.

Daley Center

2024-11-08T00:00:00Z

The Daley Center Chicago, 2013

I could write a book about this particular odd trip.

Sometimes you "gotta go see about a girl" or whatever.

Pecos Station, NM

2024-11-05T17:24:31Z

On the roadside in New Mexico, Dec 26, 2022. I achieve a kind of clarity on road trips that I struggle to find otherwise. They force me to live in the moment.