Lane writes, "Fierce landscapes remind us that what we long for and what we fear most are both already within us. Another way of saying this is that desert and mountain terrain provokes the identification and reordering of boundaries. It confronts people with their edges."
Last Wednesday, I left with a large group headed out to Moab. Kids, dogs, grandparents and some gonzo mountain bikers. I wanted to just hike. One day, a bunch of us explored a trail called Hidden Valley. This was an appropriate name for a canyon full of arroyos and mysterious caves, deep, red sand, bright green Mormon tea grasses and moss. We were searching for the petroglyphs we had heard were there. Eventually, half of our group became disinterested and went back down. So, three of us were left to wander until we found the petroglyphs. This took some climbing up over crumbling slick rock and sliding a bit on scree until we reached the tops of ridges. Then we very carefully walked along the ledges of the ridges, cognizant of the drop-offs. We walked along until we began to see the petroglyphs emerge from the sun-soaked vertical rock faces. Panel after panel of strange-shaped humans, animals, circle designs, stories told through pictures. And of course some graffiti. Amazingly, some of the marks left by viewers were from the 1800s! But the petroglyphs were stunning. You had to look really close because sometimes the glyphs just disappeared into the rock face if you didn't look at them from a certain angle. It was as if they were hiding. The three of us stayed up on those ridges for a long time, running our fingers over the petroglyphs, the outlines of ancient stories. It was a hidden and fierce museum and we couldn't seem to get enough of it so we meandered along the panels until I could feel the sun burning the back of my neck. My girlfriend and I made our way down slowly until we found a crooked, short juniper bush that offered some shade and we squatted down beneath it's meager shadow and waited for our other intrepid traveler, Chip, to get hot enough to come down. I was running out of water and I had a gnarly headache. We finally decided to get up and find the trail we had originally started on. To our dismay, we couldn't. I wasn't concerned because I knew eventually we would run into someone. However, it was a little spooky thinking of how easily one could become lost in a desert and die. If the intense heat during the day didn't get you, or dehydration, then the cold night would. We called out for Chip several times until he popped up at the end of the ridge that converged with our trail.
Auden wrote a poem about the desert: "For the garden is the only place there is, but/you will not find it/Until you have looked for it everywhere/and found it nowhere that is not a desert." Of course, the most accurate proverb is an Arabic one: "The further you go into the desert, the closer you come to God."
One night, after everyone had crawled into their tents and the children had been hushed, I sat cross-legged in front of my tent, my head tilted back to take in all the millions of stars and the sparkling, large planet Jupiter. I only saw one falling star that whole night, but I heard coyotes and the skittering lizards. I smoked some fine indica until the cars from the distant road sounded like ocean waves and I was so sleepy and overwhelmed by the infinite quietude that I went inside my tent and slept.
The desert is so incredibly fierce that I forgot about everything those five days and just rested in its endless, ancient soul. There was nothing more I could do. I thought of how the cryptobiotic crust and the petroglyphs are so timeless that my illness seemed to merge with the landscape and there was that feeling of oneness that mystics of all belief systems eventually come to realize. There is nothing I can do. But there was this beautiful emptiness all around me. I just rested in it; it was like what I imagine heaven must be.
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