Published in Genesis

Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI

Fall 2006

I am standing on a remote washboard road in Eureka Valley, in northern Death Valley National Park. Four hours of white-knuckle driving on this road (against the advice of the ranger at the last outpost), dodging rocks and boulders strewn across the road, carefully negotiating washouts, and swerving around Road Closed signs have brought me seventy miles to this place. Miraculously, I’m here without a gash in the oil pan of my little car, or any of my teeth rattled loose.

To the south I can see the graceful, ghostly shapes of the white-sand dunes at the end of this valley. To the north is a seemingly endless expanse of treeless desert, hemmed in on both sides by dry, craggy peaks. Immediately behind me, to the east, is a massive alluvial fan that spills out of the Last Chance range – waterless, rugged desert mountains layered and streaked with the history of ancient geology. In front of me, to the west, is my objective: Marble Canyon dunes. They are barely visible through a notch in the Saline mountains on the west side of Eureka Valley. Beyond the dunes, beyond the Saline Range and desolate Saline Valley, and further yet, beyond the Inyo Mountains and Owens Valley, are the Sierra Nevada, still capped with snow in mid-May.

Why am I here? Because it’s my nature to be drawn to the wilderness – the only temporary palliative for the incurable illness that has dogged me all of my life: a restlessness that has driven me many times deep, and alone, into the mountains, into the desert, or into any wild place where I can escape the comforts of home and the sounds of civilization. It has often been a source of bewildering amazement to me that the security of family and home, the comforting and predictable habits of domestic routine, even the warm glow of lights through the windows of a house on a snowy evening, can drive me nearly insane and fill me with an overwhelming desire to flee to the wilderness, again.

This time, I’ve flown 2,000 miles, then driven a few hundred more, to make my way to Eureka Valley. I was drawn here because this is nearly the most remote, empty space I could find on a road map of the United States – a map useful to me mostly for revealing places to avoid. I am here to explore the desert, canyons and dunes – to find some peace of mind. But, I am also here to remove a burden from my shoulders.

I am here to shake off thirteen years of cubicle-bound existence, to throw off my heavy carapace of corporate routine and boredom. To start a new life. For too long I’ve been existing but not really living. Maybe the so-called American Dream is not for me. Somehow it seems a waste to spend your youth preparing for retirement, putting off dreams until you’re older, retired, and have time and a big, fat Cadillac to chase them in. What if you don’t live that long? Our culture applies constant pressure to us to buy, buy, buy – bigger homes, newer cars, big-screen televisions to numb our minds in front of, and on and on. Then, of course, you must have a job that pays enough to support all of this stuff. Get married, get a job, start a family, own a home, “get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success” as Dylan said. You’ll have time to enjoy life when you retire. That seems to be the dominant and long-prevailing version of the American Dream, a version that I don’t buy into any longer.

Not for me. I’m going to live. Now. Too often I see people who, instead of chasing their dreams, chase what they’re told they’re supposed to chase. They become zombies, driving unthinkingly the same route to work every day to a job they despise but cannot leave, their senses numbed by the onslaught of the sounds of civilization – traffic noise, blaring televisions – becoming oblivious to the natural beauty of the world around them, dying inside, year after year after year until they’re just worn out. Their defenses collapse, their muscles and brains weaken and they become susceptible to pulled groins, hemorrhoids, sore backs, furrowed brows, grumpy dispositions and debilitating mental illnesses such as depression and religion.

Ambrose Bierce, the crotchety, cynical old author of The Devil’s Dictionary, refusing to fade slowly and feebly into his old age, instead disappeared abruptly, escaped to Mexico, and was never seen again. That’s not my style, but I admire his defiance, and determination to live life on his own terms. I also have my own ideas of how I want to live. I’m going to explore the world and chase my dreams while I’m young enough and healthy enough, and in my old age I want to still be walking in the mountains with an open trail in front of me and a bandanna on my head. That’s my version of the American Dream.

I am here to carry the burden of my past into the desert and leave it there for the sun to bake and wreck. But I’m still standing here. This burden I’m carrying is heavy and I too have become soft. I’m hesitating.

We are too far removed from nature, and year by year nature is further removed from us in the long march of “progress”. We have a cocoon of safety around us. The walls of our homes protect us from the weather; a grocery store and a hospital are just up the street; help is only a phone call away. And though I love the wilderness, though I daydream about being in the mountains with a pack on my back, though the sight of a mountain sunrise nearly breaks my heart, though I’ve never been as at home as when I’m as far from civilization as I can get, I too have come to rely on that cocoon. So that now, standing here in the silent desert heat with the prospect of a long, solitary hike before me, I begin to wonder: What the hell am I doing?

Here, on the verge of cutting the last few strands of my own safety net, fear grips my spine, freezing my feet to the ground. Some of my fears are rational. What if I get appendicitis, or get bit by a rattlesnake? Help is not on the way. I have children to raise – there are people depending on me. I should get back in the car and drive away.

But no. I fear having regrets more than I fear whatever may happen to me in the next few days. I have traveled two thousand miles to do this, and I will.

Seven miles of remote desert hiking separate me from Marble Canyon dunes. Seven miles of sun-baked desert pavement; mesquite and creosote bush; leopard lizards, banded geckos and mocking ravens; ominous, circling vultures; and the figments of my imagination. “The stone grows cold,” says the poet. “Eternity is not for stones.”¹ But that’s not true in this valley. Only the stones have eternity here. I have only one short life. My backpack is ready. All I have to do is start walking.

High velocity rifle bullets are capable of traveling great distances, with great accuracy. This is why snipers and big-game hunters use rifles instead of shotguns. Shotguns are for close-up work – bank robberies, pheasant hunting, home protection. The metallic clank of a shotgun shell being loaded into its chamber is enough to convince most intruders to take their business elsewhere.

Inside of a shotgun shell are hundreds of tiny steel pellets. When a shotgun is fired, these pellets are expelled in a lightly concentrated spray. The pellets are small, light and round, factors that cause their energy to dissipate quickly in the air. The effective range of a shotgun is only about fifty yards. And that is a fact that has had a profound effect on my life.

One day, while we were pheasant hunting, Dillon, my stepfather, raised his shotgun to his shoulder, pointed it at our dog, Tammy, and pulled the trigger. But it was too late. When small, fast-moving creatures caught Tammy’s eye, she was compelled by the very genes bred into her little Brittany spaniel body to give chase. By the time Dillon pulled the trigger Tammy was a distant white blur in hot pursuit of a rabbit, oblivious to Dillon’s mounting anger at her refusal to obey his commands to come back.

Tammy was a hunter, and many times I watched her stalking squirrels in our yard. She would occasionally look back at me as she crept up on an unsuspecting squirrel, as if looking for approval. But she never caught one. Inevitably, the squirrel would sense her coming and scramble up a tree, leaving her surprised and disappointed every time. We spent countless days exploring the woods near our home. She slept on the floor near my bed. Amid the turmoil of my youth, Tammy was my best friend.

Over the years I’d grown used to Dillon’s irrational outbursts of anger. They never really amounted to anything serious – he never hit me. He could be kind, but he could also be very cold. I never knew which Dillon would come home from work. I was always tense around him, but I thought we had reached a kind of unspoken understanding. That is, he could have his anger, and I would just stay out of the way. But on this day he crossed a line that I didn’t even know existed.

He pulled the trigger and the pellets fell harmlessly to the ground. But damage was done nevertheless. I too had a shotgun in my hands. In the aftermath of this moment, which lasted perhaps two seconds, I realized that I would have shot Dillon if he had killed Tammy. It would have been an instant, unthinking, emotional reaction rather than a conscious choice, but I would have done it.

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if that had happened, and whether I’d be sorry. And I wonder at how strange and incomprehensible life can be, that choices made in a split second can determine the course of your whole life.

Silence is a physical presence in this desert. No wind, no sound of water, no buzzing insects. Anything alive and with sense is hiding from the withering heat. My ears are ringing. I can hear my heart pounding. But the silence is occasionally broken, reminding me that I’m not really alone here. Far above me two ravens fly, their wings rhythmically beating the air. Then silence again.

I’m now halfway across the valley to Marble Canyon dunes. From the road the desert looked flat. It’s not. The land undulates. There are washes, gullies from rain that has (rarely) fallen over thousands of years – dried to cement-like hardness; inexplicable piles of stones; boulders, split and blackened by the sun. This is a strange land. I find things: a rusted tin can, a spent artillery shell, a rusty string of unused .50 caliber machine gun bullets. I should watch my step.

There is also delicate beauty – wildflowers left over from an unusually wet winter. Everywhere, sprouting from the desert pavement, are salmon-colored globemallow, goldpoppy, pink and purple desert fivespot, larkspur, orange desert mariposa, golden primrose, and on the upper slopes of the valley, brilliant pink flowering prickly pear cactus and desert Indian paintbrush. They seem to defy the heat and the stones. The land is so dry that it’s hard to believe rain has ever fallen here. But it has, in unusual amounts this past winter, and the wildflowers are taking advantage of the remaining moisture while it lasts. Soon they will succumb to the summer heat, leaving only dried stems, the remnants of their brief, beautiful lives.

Even though this valley is dry, it’s apparent that water has had a dramatic, violent impact on the desert. The whole valley is carved with the dried stream channels that carry water when it does rain, usually in quick, devastating thunderstorms. In August 2004 a fast-moving storm dumped several inches of rain in the mountains near Badwater. The rain poured down Furnace Creek wash, carrying millions of tons of rock, destroying roads, buildings, and fatally burying two people in their car.

A frantic lizard scurrying among the stones suddenly stops near my foot, his whole body expanding and contracting with each breath. He is tiny and speckled with metallic green and blue, and he is beautiful. He’s small and fragile, yet so full of life and a will to survive in this inhospitable desert, that his mere existence seems a miracle to me. As I’m standing in this vast, empty geography a creeping awareness of the fragility, smallness, and brevity of my own life overcomes me. “Life is strange and changeful,” says the poet. “The meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.”²

For the few days that I am here this valley, with its mountains, wildflowers, and dunes, belongs to me. The sky is big and blue and I’m alive. For this moment, that is enough.

I remember Dillon as a balding, middle-aged banker with a moustache who smoked a pipe and listened to Scott Joplin records. I was five years old when Dillon married my mother. He adopted me and I took his last name. He was a talented carpenter; he made sourdough pancakes, and fudge; he ate garden peppers until he turned red and sweat rolled down his face. Dillon showed me how to use the tools he kept in the basement; he taught me how to fish; he took me on walks in the woods near our home. He also taught me to hunt, and on my tenth birthday he gave me a shotgun, the gun that I nearly turned on him two years later.

Although I have a relationship with my real father now, Dillon was the only father I knew when I was young. He was a restless, troubled, angry man with a violent temper, and he scared me. He broke things; he punched walls; he screamed and yelled. He made no effort to keep his frustration and anger to himself – instead, he wore it on his sleeve. I kept my distance.

After he divorced my mother and left, leaving only the impressions on the carpet where his dresser had been, my fear faded, and was replaced by anger. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, or who I wanted to be. More than anything in the world, I didn’t want to be like Dillon. I rejected everything he taught and gave me, including his religion and his name.

When I was 17, Dillon died of cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years. For two years he lingered, dying slowly and painfully, and it seemed to me that his inexplicable anger, restlessness, bitterness, and inner turmoil had eaten away at him, killing him from the inside. He was buried on a hilltop cemetery on a muggy Iowa summer afternoon.

Dillon left his first wife and their three children when they were very young. Though they stayed in contact and my stepbrother and stepsisters spent summers with us, they grew up in Pennsylvania, while we lived in Iowa. He loved them, in his own way. I saw him cry after talking to them on the phone. But even now, twenty three years after his death, my brother and sisters still have the unhealed wounds that came with being Dillon’s children. He shut himself off from everyone, kept everyone at arm’s length with his anger, and though we were all at his bedside when he died, he died very alone.

As years passed, as I began living my own life and making my own mistakes, my anger toward Dillon drained away. I began to feel sorry for him. Despite being surrounded by family that loved and cared for him, he must have been very lonely.

A Buddhist would say that desire is the source of suffering. Our desire to cling to material things, our desire to cling to our loved ones, our desire to cling to our very own lives, leads inevitably to suffering. What was Dillon clinging to? What was he looking for? More than likely, even he didn’t know. If only he could have seen how beautiful the world is; if only he could have seen how lucky he was to be alive, short though our lives are. Instead he was driven by his impulsive anger and never stopped to consider the possibility that he could be happy if he’d just let it go.

I visited his grave a few years after he died. It was a cold winter day, and the oak trees in the hilltop cemetery were bare and the sky was dark with snow clouds. His gravestone had sunk into the ground and it was covered with leaves. I thought maybe I’d have something to say to him. But I didn’t. I never went back.

Night is falling on Marble Canyon dunes. I’m sitting on the highest dune, near my tent, a perch from which I can see across Eureka Valley, but I cannot see my car without binoculars. With my binoculars I can barely make out a small glint of sun reflecting off its windows. As the sun sets, mountain shadow creeps slowly across the valley, toward the peaks on the other side. The Last Chance range turns bright purple in the twilight. The sky turns from dark blue to black, and stars appear. There is no moon tonight. The evening breeze dies and silence again descends on the valley.

For a moment I imagine things in the dark: strange voices; mountain lions; rattlesnakes; dark, mysterious shapes moving across the dunes. Despite my wild imagination, there is no one here but me, the dunes, and the wary foxes and coyotes who leave their tracks in the sand in their perpetual search for food. And now I’m too tired to care. If a mountain lion paws at my tent tonight, I’ll toss him my trail mix and go back to sleep.

I am overcome with exhaustion, burned and pummeled by the sun and the long hot walk, but I don’t want to sleep yet. The air is cool but the sand is warm and I go for a barefoot walk around my temporary home on the dune. The starlight is bright enough to see by. Though I’ve only been here a day, my initial fears of being alone in the desert have all but drained away. Somehow I feel at home here, as I always do after returning to my wilderness, wherever it is. The sand is soft and warm under my tent. With a wispy blanket of Milky Way overhead, I fall into a deep, deep sleep.

Despite the fear, anger and hurt feelings that Dillon brought into my family’s lives, despite the fact that I used to define myself by not being Dillon, despite the fact that I believe some of his restlessness rubbed off on me by association, I’ve decided that I have something to thank him for. When I was thirteen he took me camping in the mountains east of the Wyoming Tetons. We hiked into the backcountry, above the tree line, and camped for several days. Far below us, clouds drifted through the valleys; we drank ice cold water from the stream that trickled down from the snowmelt on the peaks above us; coyotes howled in the night; I breathed in the cold mountain air and it seeped into my bones. Even Dillon seemed at peace, one of the few times I ever saw him truly happy.

When it was time to leave, I wanted to stay. I wanted to hike down the ridge near our camp, down to the valley, then on to the next mountain range, then the next, and never stop. When we came home from Wyoming, part of me stayed in those mountains. They’re always calling me back.

Dillon unintentionally showed me the cure for my restlessness, but his anger and frustration with life were too much for even the mountains to cure. He never saw that his life could have been different. When I think of Dillon now, I still picture him with that shotgun raised to his shoulder, but I also picture him sitting by our campfire in the Wyoming mountains, in his brief moment of happiness.

I awake in Marble Canyon before sunrise, a few pink clouds hovering on the eastern horizon. The sand is still warm from the previous day’s heat and there are fresh coyote tracks near my tent from a visitor in the night. The air is clear and cool. I breathe in this clean, dry desert air, taking in the smells of mesquite and sagebrush. I would stay here longer if I could. But my food is gone and I have very little water left. In the desert water is life, and I consider the remaining life left in my pack against the quickly rising heat and distance to my car far across the valley.

Reluctantly, I pack and begin the hike back across the valley. For a while I can follow my own tracks in the sand from the previous day, but I lose them. I stop occasionally to spot my car with the binoculars and adjust my course. The flowers are bright in the early morning sun. To the south are the white, towering shapes of the massive Eureka Dunes, dominated by the largest, the Sand Mountain, which rises 700 feet above the valley floor.

I have much company this morning. Lizards are scurrying, making their morning rounds before the heat of the day sends them into hiding. Hummingbirds buzz past me, taking advantage of the flowers’ remaining nectar. A small fox scuttles through the mesquite ahead of me, his head low to the ground. The desert is not dead. It’s teeming with life. Somehow, this valley’s residents have found a way to live despite the lack of water, despite the devastating sun and heat, despite all of the obstacles to their survival.

Finally I reach the road and my car. I’m dusty, sweaty, filthy, and happier than I’ve been in a long time. I take my clothes off and stand naked in the road. If a car were coming I’d see it miles away, and I wouldn’t even care. I’ve gone half native; my dark hair is light with desert dust; my burden is in Marble Canyon, beginning to bake in the morning sun. It doesn’t stand a chance and I have no pity on it. I did my time in the corporate cubicle; it’s time to move on. With a change of clothes, food and water, I’m ready to leave this valley and drive the dusty, teeth-rattling miles down the Death Valley road, back to civilization.

The desert is indifferent and unchanged by my presence, but the feeling is not mutual, and I give a bow of thanks. Marble Canyon and its dunes, this desert valley and its mountains, have a permanence that I, with my short life, cannot comprehend. But I do know it will always be here for me, if I want to come back. One last look at this harsh, dry, delicately beautiful valley, and it’s time to get in the car. I’m ready to go home and face the future.

1.      From Presence of Eternity – Eunice Tietjens

2.      From All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren