my real name is Elizabeth—Elizabeth Suzanne Waxwing. My dad called me Betty Sue and my mom called me Liz. I decided I preferred Luna, after the redwood tree that Julia Butterfly Hill, the famous tree-sitter, saved. And it refers to the moon, which was worshipped by women and pagans before the patriarchs took over and burned midwives and crones at the stake for communing with nature and healing with herbs.”
Hoppy was impressed. “Sounds like you’re a student of history.”
“Not really. I’m just trying to figure out how this world we have inherited is such a mess.”
“So when did you do it? Ya know, change from Betty or Liz to Luna?”
She told him about the two seasons with the Pathway Wilderness School where she was sent after that unfortunate misunderstanding with the patrol car. She backpacked hundreds of miles with four counselors and a dozen fellow miscreants, a.k.a. troubled teens.
She arrived with a snoot full of resentment that she soon had no time or energy to feel because she was so busy just surviving. She had never backpacked before and it was grueling. Not only was the pack heavy, you had to find and filter your drinking water, make all the meals together, gather firewood, and wash yourself under a sloppy solar shower that was always too hot or too cool. Every day was a series of chores and struggles. At night she worked on staying warm. On days when they were not hiking they talked and talked and talked. The counselors were trained to rappel off cliffs and provide wilderness first aid but also to lead discussions about the emotional wreckage in the lives of their surly charges.
At night, the counselors took her shoes so she couldn’t run away. She wouldn’t have known where to run if she had the chance. Boon County included a thousand square miles of rugged wilderness. Although it was safer than any nighttime landscape she had ever known, with no cars to run you over and no lurking criminals, moving about at night was scary. Not a week into her first hike, she heard coyotes yip and a mountain lion scream in the pitch dark. There was no light but the moon and stars so it was easy to trip over uneven ground studded with sharp rocks. One must stay put at night.
Hoppy couldn’t get enough of Luna and was afraid she might stop. He told her he hiked through several national parks and wilderness areas but he was unfamiliar with Southwest canyon country. “You must know this land here very well after so much time on it. What can you tell me about the Colorado Plateau?”
She told him how they hiked across forested mountains cut by deep ravines that descended into redrock canyons with fifty-foot spillovers. She learned to rappel. Some canyons narrowed into slots that were scoured by flash floods. She learned to fit herself into them and climb with her back to one wall and her feet on the opposite wall—chimneying, they called it. They humped their packs up and over giant mounds of soft turquoise ash from prehistoric volcanoes long dormant. They camped in pinyon islands that covered the tops of buttes they had to climb with ropes. There was one gallery of old trees she named “the bonsai forest” for the twisted intensity of its venerable junipers. They drank from puddles in sandstone rills and from potholes that captured rain water running over open stone. There was nowhere to go but right here where you walked, no time but right now. This moment, no other.
Far away from the ubiquitous thrum, buzz, honk, and chatter of the city, she discovered a soundscape free of the collective tinnitus that is the murmur of civilization. It opened her. Eventually the noise in her head, all that blabber remembered and wished, the fragments of music, television, texts, tweets, and ads that cluttered her inner narrative, faded to silence. Sounds that had been masked or absent from her life returned to her. She began hearing the wind rattling delicate aspen leaves above her as a music more peaceful than music, something like it but without pretense or conception. She saw how the wind pulsed and whorled across an open horizon of rice grass and sand, leaving a signature that was the same rippled pattern she saw on the sandy bottoms of the stream beds they crossed. She heard ravens comment on her passing and watched the slow, effortless spiral of hawks so far above her that they appeared as dark specs in an azure realm.
She listened to her own breath. The rhythm of her footsteps crunching across the earth held her attention for hours. In the end, she learned to take pleasure in simple things like clean socks, shade when hot, sunshine when cold, laughter, an unexpected kindness, honey in her tea. For the first time in her life gratitude and grace bore forgiveness.
It was at night when she got it. She was lying in her sleeping bag looking up. She had never seen so many stars. The Milky Way. Shooting stars! She gazed into eternity and found it beautiful beyond words. And then she realized it was all beautiful. And good. And right. Enough. All of it: the steep ravines, the dragonflies, the trees, the fragrant meadows, the stink of sweat, the rose-lit cliffs at dawn, cold showers, and the crackling fire at night. All of it was good and so was she. For the first time in her life she belonged to a place that made perfect sense.
“It’s all connected!” she blurted out in the dark. “It goes round and round. Forever! And we are this momentary synthesis of sunlight, soil, and rain, seeing and feeling it all. That’s our gift, to see the beauty! The beauty of all of it!”
“Shut up, Liz!” said a counselor.
“Yeah, Liz, plug your hole!” added Junior Crenshaw, who was busted for secretly filming the girls’ locker room at his school and then uploading it to YouTube.
“From now on, call me Luna,” she replied.
And then she lay back on the bundle of clothing that served as a pillow and watched her breath rise and drift away on a current of air that had been flowing forever and would never end, joining together her and a billion other breathing creatures, human and wild, into one luminous, dancing, shared river of life.
A year later, Liz Waxwing, now Luna, was home. She made peace with her mother, Virginia Waxwing. Back from the wilderness, Luna discovered that her mom was actually warm and smart and it was not that hard living within the boundaries her mom set for her. She made new friends and finished high school near the top of her class. The day after graduation her mother told her that unconditional love goes on forever but devotion has phases. After eighteen years of putting her own life on hold while raising a shimmering smart daughter, she was leaving with a friend to ride horses in Spain, sail to Bora Bora, and climb mountains in Patagonia.
She did all that and more and Luna watched from a continent away, always a continent away. Luna’s mom was a moving target that was hard to contact. Although Luna loved her mom and wished her well, living independently was harder than she thought it would be. She admired her mom and was pleased for her but she wished she was near. She missed the bond with her mother, the security of that. She didn’t appreciate how much she needed her until she was absent.
Luna accepted her independence. When she looked into a mirror she saw her mother’s high cheek bones and the subtle cleft of her chin and she realized that as the years passed she would acquire the same laugh lines framing the same wide eyes. She would realize that as she lost her mother, she also became her.
Luna left for college on a handsome scholarship and support from the man she considered her ex-dad. Because the land healed her and made her whole she intended to return the favor. She majored in wildlife biology and became active in a community garden near her campus. She spent her vacations climbing through slot canyons in Utah and Arizona. After graduation, she did a brief internship with a professor doing research on the relationship between voles and soil moisture. Then she joined the Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance and devoted herself to setting up their website and organizing demonstrations.
“My love of the land is like that,” she told Hip Hop Hopi. “It’s not just likeable land that needs nurturing. A pretty place like a national park will always have its defenders. The Sea Ledges has no fans. It’s the stray dog of the American
