The person attached to the feet behind you attempts to sing. That gesture (camaraderie? sunstroke? off-kilter humor?) brings on a desire to kick a prickly pear, but it’s a National Park and your livelihood depends on renewing your guide’s license next spring, so you won’t. Halfway there has turned out to be not sure where, right about the time You Made It! was supposed to unfurl across the horizon just above the rock art panel you were looking for. The reality of being lost has the blinding light subtlety of a flood lamp.
Eight, ten, who’s counting? hours back when the morning had nicely pie-splatted the canyon walls in a creamy meringue glow, the day scampered it’s just-born frisky self so far ahead of the bad things can happen to good people fine print, you missed it chasing the sunny light of adventure. It was early, so all you were thinking was not busting your ass in the creek as you rock hopped over the neon-pink willow roots streaming in the current. One leap caught a reflection: the tan streak of a leg just shy of its destination, the other lost in a white cloud of splash.
Did you actually bitch about the cold for the next soggy half-mile?
The notion of seeing something not everyone can see had been a lure. The slightly stunned (or was it beer-dimmed) silence in the bar when the plan peeped it’s not yet fully fluffed self out of the new girl’s offhand comment provided another reason: the boyz think we won’t/we can’t/we will never. No problem snapping up that bait. There might have been a teensy side eye the f she said? and some freshly plucked eyebrow raising, but then, you’d been the new girl before too.
A napkin appeared, a map was scuffed onto it, a lime wedge sloshed the part you wouldn’t have paid attention to anyway. Never mind the round of shots while searching for a pencil, because lines drawn in the desert are never straight. The X marking a backcountry ranger’s station made it seem foolproof, though that time a ranger told you There’s only two kinds of people in the desert this time of year: the fools who are lost and the ones sent to find them made more sense when you saw that note thumbtacked to the door of said backcountry ranger’s trailer, Gone for supplies back on Saturday.
Both of you had called dibs if he’d turned out to be a looker and just like that now both of you had other plans and would never speak to him.
About those plans. The question how hard can it be? isn’t rhetorical, it’s a 50-page incident report disguised as a cautionary tale about a Tuesday hike to a place you’re not sure exists, despite the napkin map.
A few hours later and the only thing coaxing you and this other person you thought many songs earlier might be your BFF, to keep scrambling up and up is most likely a pinky swear of stubbornness you can’t recall making. Hindsight is for parents and people with 401ks and you are neither of those. You are young, determined, not afraid of going out on a limb or traversing a trail that crumbles into oblivion.
You’ll come to realize later, sitting down to this memory as if you could just scoop up a handfull of past oblivion, and by gulping as fast as you could the important parts wouldn’t leak through your fingers, that you have a certain relationship with obstacles.
Maybe, a thing for stepping past one when most folks would poke a stick at it first, prod it to gauge the potential. Not talking about you the Girl Scout who defied the uniform (a dress!) to wade deeper into the creek, or the time you stole the canoe at church camp after lights out and paddled it into the middle of the lake as the moon went behind the clouds. Not about you listening to Rod Stewart sing Maggie May on the drive to the stable where for ten bucks they let you and your friends climb into the saddle and roam the pine barrens by yourselves; you thinking jumping a fence on a horse was just something anyone who wanted to do, could do. How, not seeing an obstacle (preppy college of your dreams, writing poetry in the 80’s when everyone else was flipping through Cosmo, taking the raft paddle then oars into your own two hands, shall I continue?) became your dharma of scaling self-doubt.
Of course, what goes up, and you know the rest. There will always be a scramble downhill across scree, a word not used often enough, and is exactly as it sounds: a scream eclipsed by a tumbling fall over a cliff at worst; at best, a painful bone-splintering slide with a tourniquet at the end. At the bottom the same jokester (was it you first or her?) starts singing Horse with No Name and this time it soothes about as much as something smoldering just before bursting into flames. Take me lord, right here, right now; I’ve been through the desert and don’t know my own name. One of you says let’s give up which makes you both shriek with that scary giddy This is the End kind of laughter until a dead quiet with arms locked and panting face to face to keep each other from more talus tumbling, you realize your tears are powdery dotted lines mapping a shared demise across each other’s face. Nice earrings, you think. Cute bandana, she thinks.
If we’re gonna die we look damn good doing it. You rock-paper-scissors for the Park helicopter pilot in that sexy orange jumpsuit who flies the backcountry rescues. Unless it’s weeks later, then prayers to the canyon coyotes to find us first.
One of you chokes out a ‘K, let’s do it, a two-way answer to which the other croaks, Are you crazy? Something you can agree on: circling the drain, no matter which direction, requires more water than you packed.
Please note: if you are ever going to expire (just don’t) meaning perish (really?) in the middle of your lived experience (good god no) of nowhere, have the cajones to scratch and claw your way to the words that make you sit up and look at the beauty around you one last time, before it’s boots up and the ravens are pecking apart your turquoise beads. Also, the sun does not beat down; whomever first coined that phrase should have their MFA revoked.
The sun is slow suffocation disguised as a spent lover falling asleep on top of you, their heartbeat thumping your chest to remind you that too much of a good thing can crush the last pocket of room to breathe. You ponder drinking the squeeze tube of 500 spf sunscreen until you realize it’s 50.
Lipstick! you squawk, remembering a story of some mother Avoning her family’s faces when their car died in Death Valley. The new girl actually stops. Eyes open against the sting as they wither and dry, feet recognizable only because the third toe from the left is bleeding burnt sienna and has outlined a chipped coral-painted toenail. The sight leads to thoughts of ice clinking, air conditioning, crisp white sheets, breeze blowing through filmy curtains, shopping for new shoes. The new girl points to a shimmering glint, possibly the sun being its old asshole self richocheting off a metal What Were You Thinking sign.
A mirage will wrap a cord around your throat; this is page 1 of the chapter about straying off the beaten path. It will tug you toward nothing. You will follow and weave, waving your hands like a kid playing pin the tail on the donkey so far off course the other kids nickname you Christopher Columbus.
This is the test, and it’s a good one; they say when an animal is dying it goes to water. You, on the other hand, head for the nearest Half Dome. The question never changes: do you start climbing or do you let it stand in your way? Do you slide out from beneath the bell jar of your pink shag-carpeted bedroom knowing you see things in your own light, or will you never write down the lightning bug words of your thoughts? Ahead of you there is the forever-mirage that people, your parents, teachers and their red sharpies, kids on the bus, the sifters-of-the-slush-pile, anyone! will someday understand you.
You feel it tighten as a new thought yanks into the foreground (set crew: please add some seriously cheesy drama club backdrop) what seems to be a waterfall. For god sakes, death by melodrama is so not what you were picturing. You keep going; this is what you do, and what the not-so-new girl does too. There is no singing but the sloughing of a path as your feet push themselves forward, somehow faster as the mirage backdrop begins to have sound. All thoughts of cheese and crackers and showers and margaritas aside, once you plunged your whole selves into the clear blue pool, it was nothing, if not perfect.
So let’s talk about friends.
The kind you have that are with you come hell or high water or, god help us never again, no water, and on that trek that was some chick’s bright idea (years later still wondering over this point), despite the lack of GPS or the topo map one of you would find stuffed in their backpack weeks later. It did have a big rip and a bunch of wrinkles, water stains blurring what you’d realize later were the important parts, because of course. The kind of pal you call first, the kind that stays on the line and will walk the line if you send a sad face emoji and an empty beer glass emoji. Or the kind you’d brave a sand storm, wind storm, early season monsoon for, because they would do that for you, never mind they’re wearing your favorite puffy coat that you don’t remember loaning them.
It’s you and them and one last lonely nibble of something rock hard and not quite identifiable from the bottom of your backpack that smells ever so kindly, gently, of chocolate; they go first but break it and hand you the bigger bite. This my friends, is friendship, of the tried and true, from here to there and back again, hauling the long haul, fist-pumping every bump in the road, squinting into the sun and saying, The heck yes count me in, kind.
I hope you have a clan a tribe a gang a rolodex a contact list backed-up in a desert sky cloud somewhere, a crumpled fist-wad of notebook paper with the scribbled addresses of the chums you’d venture to the depths of all heck or maybe a canyon river with and back, just for the time together.
Just for the smile you get when they wave at what anybody else would point to and call a dead end, a no-go, can’t-be-done, hollering in that weird and kinda embarrassing (good thing we’re the only ones crazy enough to be here) way, Happy Trails!
To which you reply,
To the ends of the earth and back again, my friend.
So here I am the first commenter (or maybe not anymore as it’s taking me awhile to write this) on this amazing ramble and I can’t not comment. Here’s what I was thinking as I read this with glee- OMG I wish the old Mountain Gazette (circa editor M. John Fayhee) was still in existence. Your pieces are such a fit for that generation of that magazine’s vibe and attitude, which I miss desperately at times. Humor, satire, generally strong writing, writers and artists pushing buttons and boundaries. I hope you had a chance to read an issue or two and I hope you enjoyed them. Your writing is so crafted / ‘not crafted’ and so ‘muscular’ as my writer husband/rafting partner would put it. Such a ride, and this piece no exception.
Anyway, thanks! Always a delight to read.
An amazing piece of writing! I read it over three times to get the full spirit, and think I got it. In particular, though this is only a small part of the piece, I loved the use of "scree", a word I have used a lot, and whose essence I understand, having skated down many a scree slope. Talus, scree, and all the rest, this is a lovely essay, and you are a talented writer.