Desert

Capitol Reef National Park. Cohab Canyon, before sunrise. Monday June 26th.

It feels good to be writing in nature again. Stillness in the desert is unlike anywhere else. Life is at the edge of existence and timescales are expanded.

I first came here with my future wife the same year I first went to the Sierra Mountains. An important year. Now I sit in our family canyon high above the campsite where they are sleeping. The ashes of my father in law have been mixed with the red earth in this small deep canyon. I sit in simplicity and solitude. This place is a desert garden, but that belies a softness and although the sculpted sandstone is indeed soft, the desert is not. It’s vitality is real and present and unforgiving. The allure of this is intoxicating. My coffee in its mug, the pavement here, the ease of flush toilets and pumped water, these all create a facade. A facade of easy. Of comfort. There is a perfect amount of water for the living things that evolved to be here. We did not. It’s only when humans are introduced do we label it harsh, unforgiving, devoid, a wasteland, and build the conveniences that make it a park. Easy first. Safety first. Don’t get hurt. Drive to the overlook. Carry enough water. Step away, really away and into the heat and dust. Strip naked and bake in the hot noon sun, feel the moisture evaporate. Feel the death that will soon come. Find the shade of a beautiful juniper and sit underneath.

The morning silence is broken by voices and clomping boots. Humans. Fellow species maybe, but I’ve moved on with the ravens and pinion pine to some other place. A place without plastic pens and coffee shipped halfway around the world. I’m sitting in a little stone cleft, just off the trail. I should rub this pink and red and family dust all over me to blend in and disappear. I don’t need to, they walk past without saying anything. Engrossed with their own conversation, their voices carry down canyon awhile before the stillness envelopes me once again.  

Sunrise, a day later, a ridge opposite. I dangle my feet off the edge and sip my coffee. More silence. It’s enveloping here. I pick up an iron rich stone and throw it off the edge. It’s sound when it hits the floor below has a brittle ping and is swallowed up almost instantly. I think of wordless music. Bach doesn’t belong here, his point counterpoint belongs in the mountains where the crispness of geography and life fits the complexity. No, the desert is too still, too deadly vacant. The intimacy of existence needs either a single instrument, or long slow builds. I think of two musicians I enjoy, the cellist Zoe Keating and the composer John Luther Adams. They have the right stark sensibility. I feel satisfied with my thought experiment. The sun’s rays touch and the heat is immediate. Gone is the morning chill. But I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to walk down to the campsite with its shuffling human noises and buzzing RV generators. I’m not a misanthrope, I’m really not. I just find our species noisy and in this place, that noise is magnified. So I pull out my battered copy of Desert Solitaire and read awhile. Edward Abbey. The desert transcendental madman. His words are pure and harsh and good. I write a little on the title page, underneath where I wrote something in 2009, underneath where I wrote something in 2003. The book is falling apart. When it finally does I should use it to start a desert campfire. I think he’d like that. 

A few nights later I set out under half moonlight to walk. I want to feel closed in and see if I can engage with the life that comes out only after sunset. The wonderful array of crepuscular and nocturnal animals; bats, owls, moths, scorpions (I need a UV light to make the hyaline layer on their exoskeleton glow), the yipping coyote, ringtails, Dipodomys ordii, the kangaroo rat, with its long tail and loping gait. It gets all its water from seeds and plants. I search to hear its distinctive predator, the rattle of the Midget-faded rattlesnake, the smallest of all rattlesnakes. I’ve read that this species is nonaggressive, unlike its belligerent brethren, the Mojave Rattlesnake, that I’ve run into several times as I’ve tramped around that other lower desert. The Canyon Bats are the most plentiful and dart about my head with perfect echolocation. I welcome these tiny two inch fliers; come eat these biting flies. Something scurries by my feet and disappears into the underbrush. My limited nighttime senses only see movement and can’t discern what it was. I have no flashlight and even if I did I wouldn’t turn it on. This is their world, not mine. The stillness of the day is replaced by this active night, when the genuine life here can go about its business of living without the deadly sun overhead. The desert varnish of the distant Wingate Sandstone cliffs glows colorless under the moonlight. The eerie luminous light enhances the preternatural feel I’m having. It’s no wonder the ancient peoples of this place etched those bizarre pictographs in the rock with the distinctive bulbous heads and distorted bodies. What did they feel of this place. We’ll never know. They left the area 700 years ago, merging with other cultures in what’s known as residential cycling. A cultural dilution that erased all but these rock etchings and a few stone tools. I turn and walk back towards camp. Overhead the Milky Way is just visible through the blueish tint of moonlight. 

What is the draw to the desert. Everything about it says stay away. It’s hardships are unforgiving and its landscapes cannot be easily assimilated. But I love it. I love it for its quality of strangeness I can’t quite articulate. The aridity creates a kind of stasis where change and growth are slow. It evokes something unseen, something hidden in its veil of silence. Come, it says. Sit awhile, I need to feed my wake of vultures. You can watch the show.