actually scoured sand. It’s the rough country, after all, that’s in possession of us and not the other way around.
Look, it’s early. But I’ve primed the old Coleman and the coffee is on.
SOLITAIRE
I’m caffeinated now, and pacing around the mound of grit heaped over what’s left of you. The sky is a primrose, blooming far beyond the margins of this place, this state, this nation. A sky that shows us how not to crouch too tightly over what we claim as ours. That reminds us how to reach for, and touch, what is Other.
Circling back to the notion of informalities: I just can’t. Hence the Mister. I’d like to keep some boundaries between us and a bit of decorum is good for that. Precautions must be taken because, as I packed for this journey, our mutual friend and iconic bookseller Ken Sanders reminded me that it wasn’t just that women hurled themselves at you—you did plenty of your own hurling, too. Sure enough, a few months before you passed away, my mother drove to Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City, where she stood in line for you to sign a copy of The Fool’s Progress, which she gave to me for Christmas that year. You were nearly dead, but you hit on her. This was despite the fact that she’d read nothing you’d written. Nor was she one to wander through the desert outback. Apparently, you knew how to travel between topographies.
Another mutual friend, Charles Bowden—god rest his seared, singular soul—was a known womanizer, too. And for both of you, much has been made of this, and perhaps unfairly. Meaning you weren’t exceptional—in this way, anyway. Men juggling multiple women is a common and longstanding tradition in the West, if not the world. Some of my ancestors were polygamists, as was John Singer, the man who fixed our television before dying in a shoot-out over homeschooling his kids. And a girl from a similar arrangement beat the ever-loving shit out of me on the playground the year before she was taken out of school to be married. We were in sixth grade at the time.
But things are changing on this front too. While you’ve been underground, rubbing elbows with grubs and worms, a new narrative has been in the works. For instance, there’s now this thing called #metoo. (It’s used for a type of brief, mass communication called “tweeting,” which in this case has nothing to do with your beloved canyon wren, or any other bird for that matter.) The rules of engagement between men and women—even when consent is mutual—have been seriously upset. No one is sure of how we are to deal with each other now, but however it shakes out, I’m pretty sure you won’t like it. You don’t get to gawk at co-eds anymore—not without consequence. And it’s no longer charming to describe us as rosy-cheeked skinny dippers—even if Katie Lee considered it a compliment.
This is not to say that I’m some shrill, ballbiting feminist with a bone to pick out of your saltbush beard. Nor am I implying we neuter or tie a tourniquet around our time together today. That would be like smothering this desert with black top, concrete, and a strip mall—but come to think of it, things here, around your grave, aren’t as peaceful as this still morning would have me believe. Did you know that in the last few years at least ten thousand miles of renegade roads have been gouged into the surrounding wilderness? Not by recreational motorheads, like those in Moab. But by the United States Border Patrol. Its agents know no limits, when it comes to sniffing out tens of thousands of desperate Latinx people—only to turn them back toward the desperation. That is, if they’re not indefinitely held against their will in encampments far too similar to Hitler’s. The patrollers even seek and destroy the food and water caches left for the border-crossers by bleeding-heart types. This cruel effort ensures that many will perish out here, halfway between two worlds—worlds even this desierto cannot fuse.
Here, in this place where you asked to be buried on the sly, I guess it’s fair to say that its solitude is an illusion. Come to think of it, you were rarely solitary in Arches. There were cattle round-ups with caballeros, there was barroom banter with yellowcake miners, and there were rivers run with friends. And when you were working in that trailer, scribbling away in those notebooks the desert’s details that would become a bible for the desert brethren—there was a wife. There were children. And there were other women. I know it’s a device, writing as though one were alone when in fact one is not. And it worked. Everyone who read that book took to the desert solo. Self included. When I first read Desert Solitaire, I was single and free. It was easy to follow suit. But now that I have been a working mother wrangling a special-needs child in a complicated and congested world—my definition of solitude has changed. What was once a necessity is now a luxury, and I cannot often afford it.
Which reminds me, I’ve been wondering about a line from that book of yours: “If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.”
I get the part about space and time. Every cell in my body would trade the latter for the former. But the phrase that you chose to italicize … what did you mean, “to live like men”? Of course you meant we should quit racing like lab rats toward sugar, to fill every moment with tributes to all things temporal. And of course, you meant let’s not fill every acre with reminders of our species. But were you also contemplating our urge to fill the other side of the bed or the unclaimed stool in a bar?
I’m with you, on forsaking time. On embracing space. But while we’re at it, let’s figure out why we cling to the contrary.
And for parity’s sake, let’s find out what it means to live like women. Or perhaps we should say, let’s find how women like to live. I don’t think we’ve ever been asked that question. The results could be revolutionary. Evolutionary. We might become a new species entirely.
THE SERPENTS OF PARADISE
Would you be kind enough to tell me about that first morning in Arches, when you woke up and stepped outside your tiny, tin abode and saw such vacancy? I can only imagine how wondrous that was—to see the place so obscenely, unabashedly devoid of human sign.
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