the map of getting lost

outward bound

I have always longed to be a part of the outward life,

to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint

wash away in emptiness and silence

as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water;

to return to the town as a stranger.

Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

~~John Baker, The Peregrine

As the story goes when I was a baby my mother would place me on a blanket under the big poinciana tree in our backyard, leave me there, and when she returned from whatever task she’d needed to do, I’d be happily waving and cooing at the leaf-sky above me.

In her words, If you were outside, you were happy.

I’m not one to sit still, but my roaming isn’t just about movement: I want to experience what’s out there. On the river there was out there a~plenty, though with the inherent problem in river travel, as I saw it, of its blink and you miss it because now it’s upstream behind us reality. I wanted to pull over to shore, get out, and have a ramble. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I waved bye as my curious crew mates drifted past, giving me the everything okay? hand symbol, which looks exactly how whatthefuckareyoudoing looks like when pantomimed.

But there was, still is, my need to be alone. Alone it’s easier to sift through to the narrow openings of discovery so often spackled by conversation, or blurred by the human noise of people breathing as they walk. No filling in the blanks: find the blanks and come what may. A meandering hike up a camp’s dry wash gave me fifteen minutes watching a *burro eat dried grass after following the sound of muffled nibbling. A before-dinner stroll on a bench above the river interrupted by raven’s cackling to see a very large cat’s paw print in the black crusted sand under a mesquite tree.

A hike away from our damp sand spit perched above the on-ramp of a helluva rapid to have to run first thing in the morning, a no good night’s sleep camp if ever there was one, led to a wheeling spiral of white-throated swifts flying in a unified curl around a single dangling tendril of sun. They encircled the ray climbing higher as the canyon’s shadow dropped, until the rope of light was suddenly yanked skyward and the entire flock disappeared with it, into the dark.

A research trip’s January day off was spent climbing up Clear Creek; no way to get lost, just stick by and to the streambed. In fancy-talk it would be called labyrinthine. In my thinking it looked gouged from granite the way an ice cream scoop carves a furrow through a carton of vanilla chocolate swirl. (Apologies. Ice cream dreams are a desert-dweller’s thing, even years after). I watched a trout wedged neatly into a crevice between (I’ll just say it) a slick rock and a hard ain’t~going~nowhere place, its tail feebly waving adieu to the nose-end of a migration. I wondered that existential question of saving it or if maybe fate had notch-stuffed trout on the menu that day, for the eagle or coyote that would eventually yank it out.

I’d had my own conundrums in need of a gentle hand swooping out of the blue to pluck me up and guide me back into the current, so who was I to take a swig of tepid Gatorade and just keep on trekkin’? I found a bunker of shade, nodded hello to a fishhook pincushion cactus, and fell asleep.

I have a recurring dream where a teacher is explaining math (for me this = nightmare) and a group of students is diligently working complex problems and listening to his methodology. I am also a student in the class. I stop the lecture and remind the prof that, while his methods eventually solved the problems, they are not what is needed for the test: we just need to know the correct answers.

You see why me + math = lit major.

In my hellish mathscape I look at my paper and see that I had been following and getting the answers right up to a point but realize I’ve crossed the threshold of no longer having a clue how to continue solving the problems. I’m stuck knowing I can’t move forward through the next problems, wondering if I’m supposed to go back, retrace my steps to where “I know this” magically re-appears, like that lemon juice invisible ink game we played as kids, holding our paper close enough to a heat source so our message could be read, just not too close for it to catch fire.

When I awoke the trout was gone. The creek burbled its contours. I was one small speck in a wilderness that I had become to think of as home, a home I haven’t been to in a long while.

I’ve seen it, though, from behind venetian blinds slicing white sun into exactly one hundred-thirty strips. From the what~next kitchenette of a small gray hotel room, and while staring at the wall of an unfinished basement with the inked repeat Owens Corning Owens Corning across foiled mattresses of insulation. Bighorn sheep scrambled the yellow corner of a bedroom; on a Puget Sound island a bank of windows with a slender shelf of ever-shifting clouds smelled of rain on rabbitbrush and sage when I opened them.

I closed my eyes those days, every day, and see home in my writing. Kinda sorta see it (head scratching included) trying to decipher my mildewed river journals that were packed away with what I think may have at one time been a wet pair of wool socks; poetic justice is water stains on a canyon guide’s desert musings. I can wrap my hands around my old oar handles and feel the unworldliness of water. They seem heavier than I remember.

A favorite writer wrote that stories lead the mind to calmer waters. Like hell they do.

On the river I would explain what to do in case the boat flipped or someone fell out. Swim, I would tell my passengers, swim like hell. Don’t just float there. Practice self-rescue. Even now I imagine a river bend in the distance and that it is one worth pushing for, with all my might. I am Ed Abbey’s hoop snake; I am a river with my tail in my mouth, never letting go. I listen to my own advice and have been rowing and swimming like hell, but it has taken too many words dripping through my fingers and lots of trips to the recycling bin before I could open my eyes below the surface.

There are things we will forget but somehow manage to carry with us; stories lead the mind to someone we’re not sure we ever knew. Evidently one time I tried to fix my old Land Rover with duct tape: I was in Moab, back when Moab wasn’t yet Moab, roaming through some back of beyond place like I knew what I was doing. According to what I wrote I'd brought water, flashlight, peanut butter, whole wheat tortillas, and my camera. No cell phone because they hadn't been invented yet. I had my fat yellow plastic walkman, which probably held my well-worn Joshua Tree tape. No mention of the tape but when I see myself I’m pretty sure I am singing still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

What I didn't bring was a spare carburator screw. Such a tiny, inconsequential thing, a thing I didn’t even know existed until it disappeared. And such a loud, back-firing, bone-jolting, engine stuttering problemo, when The Thing I Never Knew I Would Be Looking For wiggled out of its place and hit the road. So, out with the duct tape. And it worked, sort of, and I limped along at a slower pace, mostly, only, too much slower because of course, I hadn't planned on being out there that long, and I began to run out of water.

Was I scared? Was there a plan B or C? That page seems to be missing.

It was immensely easier going once I'd found a phone booth, called Ted the Land Rover Mechanic back in North Carolina, asked him to mail a screw, picked it up in Flagstaff, and installed it. I could drive over 30 mph again, pull into a campground late at night and not set the local dogs into a frenzy, get where I needed to go. Small tool, big difference.

Maybe losing track is the point: on the map of getting lost tiny daggers of light pinpoint where we’ve been, burning holes of desire in the places we thought we were headed.

Someday, someone will stumble upon this map and declare the scratchings an artifact, from a time when wanderers shouted questions into a void, and the questions boomeranged back shaped like something you’d want to catch and hold onto, as long as you could.

But by then the void might long since be filled with AI fish. I hope there will be at least one swimming against the current, swimming upstream for all its worth, flinging itself toward the memory of a place that tastes like glory.

*The burro:

After an initial Park Service plan to shoot burros, they were removed from Grand Canyon starting on August 9, 1980. To avoid the 120-degree heat at the height of the day, the removal crews worked in the early morning and late evening. The Fund for Animals team, with Park Resource Management Specialist Jim Walters monitoring, began to round up the burros at three in the morning. As one crew on horse and muleback herded the burros inside the canyon, another crew set up a corral on the plateau, and a helicopter crew hovered overhead. After corralling the burros workers "threw a rope around their neck, then tied their legs together, then put them in a sling, and finally, under a frighteningly noisy machine, took them higher up in the sky than any self-respecting animal and perhaps any reasonably wise bird had ever been before." The Fund for Animals removed twenty-seven burros from the canyon on the first day. The crew repeated this procedure hundreds of times in August and September 1980 with between thirty and fifty animals removed each week.

"This is costing us some money to monitor the program," Jim Walters told a reporter in 1980, "but not nearly as much as it would to shoot them, so it's a beautiful compromise for us."

With the success of the Fund for Animals' removal, the NPS granted the organization an extension to the original two-month timeline. The Fund for Animals removed 577 burros from Grand Canyon in the two-year operation.For years after the removal, rangers tracked burro sightings, which grew increasingly rare.

"Feral burros are now absent from the river corridor," stated the ecologist Steven Carothers in a 1991 book.

Info, via The Journal of Arizona History

My burro encounter happened in 1995.