Usually I walk in canyons to particular destinations, to specific features. I walk where there is water. I walk where other people walk, where there are trails. This time was different. I would be walking a path no humans walk, at least in its entirety. Humans cross this path; there is Highway 89 and there are numerous dirt roads, but these lines of travel all run counter to the path I was about to take. Humans pass on human errands. A family on vacation crosses this route, speeding down the highway. A rancher crosses too, bumping down a dusty red road in the predawn light to check his tanks.
The Elegy I Can’t Help But Write
I can’t sleep. The inflatable pad underneath me feels torturously unstable. I am tempted to push it aside in favor of the cold, lumpy ground. Hours pass and I wonder if I have been thinking about anything at all. I roll onto my other side again and listen to the tent fabric scrape against a dead finger of greasewood. I had reached the San Rafael Swell in central Utah just in time to start walking up a narrow canyon patinated with dark streaks of desert varnish. The deep sand slowed my pace as wind-broken rain scattered out of the orange west. I planned to walk for at least an hour and a half, but the storm clouds made evening arrive early. At the first sign of flatness I dropped my pack and listened as caterpillars dropped out of the cottonwoods above me like weighty raindrops.
The World Outside the Mind
It’s the fifth week? Tenth week of the pandemic? Who knows. I wake and put on water for tea and sit down at my computer again. The world is contained within the window of my screen every day now, separate from me. My friends call occasionally from their own separate windows. The window itself facilitates our stilted, delayed connections. Before all this it was just the eye which mediated, now it’s this window. There is no coming together, drifting apart, only separation. I’ve come to love my neighborhood. The magnolias, blooming pears, crabapples, and tulips are the only things that seem to me both separate from me and tangible. They’re right here. I believe they exist. They suggest to me that there might be more than just my own mind.
The Desert's Dream
When we climbed the road out of Hurricane, Utah and spilled out onto the Arizona strip we were disheartened to see the ground covered in pillows of windblown snow.
A storm had passed through on Sunday and nights had been cold and days sunny but not warm in the two days that had since passed. We turned off the pavement onto a snowy, muddy, and frozen road and motored slowly south, watching the cold land pass beside us. The dark forms of horses stood in the cold night and paced along a fence. A jackrabbit darted into the road in front of us and ran in the patch of frozen mud between the strips of snow for miles. When we sped up, it sped up, and when we stopped it stopped. When we tried to gun it to get around, it pushed its little heart as hard as it could, ears determined, legs moving like pistons, getting up to 35 miles an hour before we backed off and conceded to just follow at jackrabbit pace.
Developing themes in thesis work
At the edge of the firs he became a mirror through inheritance. He stands on the edge of the Red Rock Lakes now just as he stood 200 million years ago when the limestone solidified and began rising out of the valley behind him. He waited there in darkness, not unworried, but staring intently at the possibility that the sun will never rise again.
Driving Through the Summer Storm
Near the Drum Mountains in central-western Utah the virga approached us, and we sped towards it in my 1993 Nissan truck. Dark blue and humanlike it swept the plane. It touched down somewhere, its feet the fleeting monsoon, welcomed by reaching greasewood and shivering russian thistle. Lightning cut across the dark form and we entered the deluge. Flash and boom inside of it, and flash and boom again. The rain transitioned from a heavy downpour to individual drops and the drops lessened and we looked back and the great dark form was now behind us; we had passed through its body. Lightning hit the sagebrush and greasewood plane where we had just been.