Right after my then-wife left, I found myself suddenly free to do what I had postponed all those years of marriage. We worked out a schedule with the kids that left me free to take long weekends twice a month, and, since I am self-employed and the recession has all but gutted my business, these weekends have become longer. I have spent most of them, in all seasons for the last four years, in the wilderness of southern Utah, carrying minimal gear, sleeping on the ground, and navigating more and more by instinct, without maps and without any destination in mind. I can’t claim to feel any profound peace in those remote canyons, though they are indeed very quiet and almost entirely untracked. My experience there is intensely internal and meditative, and the turbulence of my thoughts does not allow much peace. Also, in wild country like that, where the topography contains endless mazes and dead-ends, dense thickets and gripping exposure, hot days and cold nights -almost all the inhospitality that nature has to offer- there is almost constantly some fear, at least while I am moving. I tend to move quickly through the places that threaten sudden floods or a sprained ankle. And, of course, I rush to avoid mosquitoes and cedar gnats. I make wide, exhausting detours around poison ivy and thickets of tamarisk and Russian olive. When I come to a place that feels right, often where I can lie under a piñon, with my back to a wall of warm sandstone, facing a view of canyons and mountains, I sit in soft sand and make a little fire and try to do nothing at all. My mind returns over and over to my children, back in Salt Lake, and to my lover in town managing her restaurant, and to my unpaid taxes and my clients who resent my frequent excursions beyond the reach of the cellular telecommunications network, but I can in fact relax and set aside some of my worries and attain a kind of precariously-balanced peace.
About a year ago I was walking up a small canyon several miles from town, a place not mentioned in any of the guidebooks and, thanks to a vertical ledge of basalt, ungrazed, when I smelled burning juniper. There was a faint blue haze in the air, pouring slowly downcanyon on the moist, cool air of evening. I didn’t want to see people, and I had just found a nice spot for camping, so I rolled out my sleeping bag in some sand above the floodline and sat for awhile. From that bench above the bed of the wash I could see the tops of cottonwoods catching the copper light, and a jumble of massive boulders, and the sun reflecting back to me from the snow on the Henrys. I took out my watercolors and did a quick sketch, working more and more from memory as the sun set and left everything but the sky black. I didn’t want to light a fire of my own that night, so I got in my bag and just lay there thinking and listening for a long time before I fell asleep. I woke up when the sun reached me and had a slow morning without coffee, just sitting.
Late in the morning I smelled juniper smoke again and decided to walk upcanyon, but stealthily in case I could get by the other camp unseen. Around a bend, the canyon became straight and wide. A massive dam of boulders lay across the upper end, and several side canyons full of cottonwoods and willows spilled into it. I walked along the hard gravel between the sand and a bank of willows for some time, until my new vantage showed me that the smoke was coming out of one of the side canyons. Two very large and almost symmetrical cottonwoods framed the canyon mouth, shading it and almost enclosing it. Cattails and willows ringed a wide pool at the roots of the big trees. I could smell the water.
I kept in the willows and walked a wide arc around the pool and climbed up into some fallen boulders above the lowest branches of the trees, found a comfortable place in the shade, and sat. Soon I could hear voices, not clearly because of the echo, but I caught a few words. Two men discussing something. Their conversation had the slow, intermittent cadence of deliberation, of trying to figure something out. There was the sound of rock moving against rock, gritty and not very hard. Also the sounds of scraping and tapping.
***
As I sat there, keeping still and quiet, I tried to remember ever having spied on someone before, but the only memory I could come up with was from my early childhood, peering out of our front-hall coat closet at a drunken party of my father’s students, feeling the thrill of the voyeur: hoping to see, certainly, but not entirely hoping to remain unseen. Hoping, maybe, for some complicity, though unable to ask for it. Caught between desire and shame.
As I remember, most of my father’s students were poor objects for a young boy’s secret watching: almost all were men, and mostly of the weak, unhealthy, misshapen kind that made it into the inner circle of a young professor of abstruse theories at MIT in the early 70s. Their awkwardness gave me no pleasure, and I couldn’t understand what they were discussing, probably something about the mathematics of orbital trajectories or the upper-atmosphere chemistry of Venus. But I do remember that one of the students stood out. He was more graceful than the others, fairly handsome and athletic, stronger and more fluid in his movements, more confident in his speech, more self-assured. He dressed well, as far as I could determine at that age. He certainly was not one of the nerds, yet my father had a high opinion of his intelligence. Most importantly, he had a girlfriend, and she was beautiful, as I saw her. I think what this meant for me then, as it did for so long, even into my adulthood, was that she looked healthy, and that she glowed with smooth, unblemished, golden-brown pulchritude. And from where I crouched under the wet coats that smelled of lanolin and rubber, I could see, intermittently, the entire length of her perfect legs, from sandaled ankle to white underpants, as she leaned back into her boyfriend from her perch on the arm of his chair.
To see what you oughtn’t compresses the lungs, shortens the breath, and fills even a little boy with longing. And even a little boy knows that this can never be spoken, and suspects that he may be alone in this forever.
***
I sat alone, but not completely alone. There, miles from the nearest town, which is very small, and which is tens of miles from the next town, which is also very small, I had chosen to sneak up to the only others in the area. I had set out to be alone and unmolested, and I assumed that these two men had set out with the same goal. This is a strange kind of aloneness: I couldn’t speak or even stand up for fear of being noticed, but I stayed because I wanted to, and the want was fierce. Partly, that want was curiosity, and partly it was the thrill of evasion. I think I also relished the sense that I was gaining secret knowledge that I could, conceivably, use against them, whoever they were. They were sneaking, I remember thinking, for a moment without irony. They must have something to hide, and that something must have value to them, so maybe I could profit from it. My invisibility was powerful, and immediately corrupting. My heart surged with adrenaline, my mind raced with stories, the canyon became an unfocused backdrop for the workings of my imagination, and the two men in the side canyon took on villainous traits that, as far as I knew, they didn’t deserve.
After maybe an hour, which is a long time to hide behind a rock keeping silent, as any hunter can attest, the men moved closer to the mouth of the canyon and came into view for the first time. One I immediately recognized from town. He was, and still is, a part-time guide who works for a local outfitter. I had seen him every so often in town, sometimes washing dishes in my lady-friend’s restaurant, sometimes doing yardwork for the lodge. I didn’t know much about him. The other was a stranger to me, and a startling sight: he wore only buckskin leggings and thin sandals, he was tall and rangy, and his long yellow hair was twisted into a thick knot on top of his head. They squatted on a wide flat rock to wash their hands in the pool, and when they stood I could see that the stranger had thick ropy scars in a chevron design down his chest, not from any accident, obviously, but for decoration.
Now I could hear them, but they didn’t say much. They talked briefly about how to move a large rock. Later, after they snacked on jerky and drank straight from the pool, the one I recognized, whom I’ll call Lauro, said he was getting wood, and he hopped down the boulders and walked off picking up branches as he went. The line of willows was full of gray-weathered wood that had come down in floods from the piñon-juniper above. The stranger shredded some juniper bark, piled it on a circle of blackened sand, moved some charcoal around, blew for a minute, and soon had a small fire going.
As the sun climbed, I had to slowly circle the boulder to stay in the shade. In the early afternoon, when Lauro and the stranger were back in the canyon making their inscrutable scraping and tapping noises, sometimes discussing their project, every so often swearing in pain or frustration, which are hard to tell apart when you can’t see the sufferer’s face, I stretched out and took a nap.
Not much of what happened that day is interesting except that I ought not to have been looking. Doing what is forbidden is, of course, exciting. But the excitement I felt wasn’t enough to make their snacks and occasional conversation and washing and fire-making –in short, their domestic routine- interesting, and I was bored. Also, I was beginning to think unkind thoughts about myself, such as: what kind of man, in his 40s with three daughters at home and a professional career, spends most of a day spying on two men? And what kind of sick motivation kept me glued to their uninteresting comings and goings for most of a day despite discomfort, boredom, and, now, as the sun lowered, clouds of gnats?
The day stretched on. I saw the men a few more times, when they walked downstream from the side canyon to pee. When it was getting dark they knocked off work, built up the fire, sat, smoked grass, and ate. After their smoke they got jokey for a while, but then fell silent, and I don’t remember anything else from that day. They slept under wool blankets around the fire and I slept in my bag under my boulder, under the wall, under the stars.
I woke up early the next morning. Usually I would have relieved myself and tried to go back to sleep, but I woke up quickly and completely, because the men were nearby and my sense of transgression had me alert and wary. I listened for any sign of them, but couldn’t hear anything. I slowly slipped out of my bag and looked over the edge, and saw that they were asleep, the mirrored arcs of their bodies like a pair of folded wings around the smoldering black of the fire-ring. I quietly stuffed my bag into my backpack, put my socks in my shoes, which I would carry until out of earshot, and slowly, precisely, went boulder to boulder in the halfdark till I was well upcanyon. There I stopped to brush my teeth, put my shoes on, and get set to walk.
Over the next two or three days I found my way out of the canyon and then around it up in the piñon-juniper. As you’ll know if you’ve ever walked this country, you can go a long way on quite flat gravel, winding between the trees, thinking that you’re getting somewhere, when suddenly you’re standing at the very edge of a canyon, and there is no way down without ropes, so you walk next to that canyon until it’s crossable, and you continue along the main rim again until you meet the next sidecanyon. There aren’t many chances to see the land ahead of you, so you follow the edge of a canyon and only rarely strike off cross-country on a compass bearing. One of the mainstays of my backcountry meditations is the constant conflict between my idea of the trek and the actual lay of the land. Either I make this conflict meditative, and somehow instructive, or I am always butting my head, so to speak, against unyielding stone, which, maddening to some, never fights back, but just sits there placidly and immovably being stone.
As I walked, I skirted several of these side canyons, but always stayed parallel to the main canyon that I had walked up a few days before. Most of the sidecanyons are boxed, in local parlance, meaning their upper reach is a wall of stone, not just an eroded channel, and these box canyons are rarely explored. They tend to be steep, deep, wet, and overgrown. One might force into the thicket from below, on horseback, wearing leathers, to flush a valuable cow, but only if one is better paid than the average cowboy. Another might rappel in from the rim, but who would ever walk there with that much gear? After skirting several of these box canyons I came to a wider canyon that looked easy to cross, and too long to walk around. With a bit of clambering, sometimes lowering my pack on a short rope I carried for that purpose, I made it down to the sandy bottom, which was flat and inviting. With no goal in mind, and no particular schedule, I strolled down the wash. The cottonwoods kept the sun off, the stone walls held the shape of wind and water, and the sky was cobalt. Here, off the map, I was in my own perfect, private National Park, forever to be unnamed and unnoticed by the Nation, I hoped. There were a few pouroffs, steep enough to have kept the cattle out, but easy enough to climb down, always with that faint anxiety about how to get back up later, if I had to.
I walked downhill in this perfect canyon for some time when it abruptly became humid and green, greener than the willows, far greener than the sage and piñon. The palette wasn’t right. A hard, straight edge of impossibly-lush green separated the pristine canyon I‘d been walking through from a broad field of marijuana plants, as tall as me.
Again I was seeing what I oughtn’t, but now by accident. It felt different. I remember noticing a moment of connoisseurship, almost, as I quickly weighed the differences between voyeuristic watching and accidental witnessing: the voyeur feels shame and longing and a possibly permanent aloneness, while the accidental witness feels the powerful urge to disappear, to get into the shadows and then to flee, to avoid being seen seeing. Sometimes we crane our necks to peer at the forbidden from a secret place, and sometimes we stumble upon it and wish we hadn’t.
Of course, I am describing a fleeting moment a year later. I was not slow, or quick, enough to put all of this in order right then. I think I was motionless only long enough to see the scene: the neat rows of shaggy green plants; the sky reflected in the irrigation water that flooded the field; the purple, glossy solar panels against the north wall, the tidy hoops of black hose against the beautifully-made stone retaining wall; the little garden of tomatoes, squash, beans, and corn; and to sharply inhale before turning quickly, and taking a few long strides into the willows, behind a garage-sized boulder. I had to gather my wits, an apt cliché, because they had scattered. So, somewhat breathless and witless, I crouched hard behind the boulder and tried to think. I imagine that animals try to think sometimes, but mostly they excel at doing what I had just done in getting myself hidden and safe and alone.
So: what to do? The wash above the straight green line was open, completely exposed to view except for the little triangle of willows behind the boulder. The field of marijuana stretched wall-to-wall and was probably watched. The walls were nearly vertical, and too smooth to climb. So I waited. I spent another day crouched behind a boulder in a state of excited alertness, my head clear and focused, my ears straining at every sound. I didn’t take off my pack, because I might need to run. I stayed crouched as long as my knees allowed and then settled into a more relaxed position though my mind didn’t relax at all. I stood for a long time, too. Late in the afternoon a sudden whir and click set my heart pounding and my thighs twitching, but it was only a timed irrigation valve opening, I think. I could see a corner of the field, all of the vegetable garden, and the solar panels from behind the boulder, but by sunset I hadn’t seen or heard a person. As the sky darkened, I stretched and drank water and had a snack. Then I used a bunch of willow shoots to brush away my footprints while I stood on a rock. The moon would be rising soon, so I peered around the boulder as far as I could, and then dashed out into the wash and ran back uphill as quickly as I could over the uneven ground. After the first pouroff I slowed to a brisk walk, and kept going for maybe a half hour before climbing out of the wash and settling under a piñon. I sat still until the sweat dried, then unrolled my bag and stared gathering sticks. It seems strange to me now that I made a fire, but I don’t remember hesitating then. Maybe the lay of the land offered me some sense of security that calmed me. Anyway, I did make a fire, and I did sit facing it, so my eyes adjusted to the light, and I couldn’t have seen into the dark even there where it never gets very dark, where the stars alone make enough light to walk by, and where, that night, the moon was a round mirror. A moment ago I credited for my confidence, in retrospect, the lay of the land, but I should have added that I usually carry a compact .45 auto pistol, for mountain lions, I say if asked, but also because I like to carry a gun. Or, to be clear and forthright, I like a good gun’s weight and power and the way it extends my power out into what I can see but can’t otherwise touch.
***
A few years ago a friend was walking with his dog not far from here. The dog is an affable Labrador, always game and inexhaustible. When I’ve walked with them, the dog ranges widely, often out of sight, often following scents and running. She covers ten times more ground than we do. It’s a good, and, I imagine, ancient feeling to be walking in the woods while your dog scouts a vast area, flushing game, extending your reach much more deeply into the wild –and closer to the ground- than you will ever go. One day, on one of these hikes, the dog started barking and wailing in alarming tones off in the woods. My friend jogged off the path to see what was wrong, assuming a coyote trap or an eye injury. He came to a rockfall, where a mountain lion had his dog cornered and was moving in. Just like a big housecat stalking a mouse, he said. My friend is a big man, and he loves his dog, and he carries a heavy hardwood walking stick, and he stepped right up to the lion and broke the stick over her back. She ran off. I don’t know anything about mountain lions, but people who do know, ranchers and trackers and guides I know, all say that my friend was lucky, that he could have been killed, that he should have thrown something or made a loud noise or, according to the ranchers, at least, let the lion have the dog. The way city people love their dogs is a mystery to the ranchers, they want us to believe, but I secretly think they love their outside heelers and hounds as much as we love our pets.
Anyway, I spend a lot of time around that mountain, so I bought a bigger pistol. My ethics forbid shooting a pinnacle predator, but I could do it to save my life, or even my dog’s life, I suppose. I tell myself that the first five rounds of .45 will make enough noise to scare away the someday lion, and the sixth round is in case she comes back.
***
So I sat there blind in the firelight for a good long time, holding my gun. Later, I propped it up in one of my shoes, which I always keep in reach when I sleep out, and went to sleep. Nothing happened that night. The next day I walked back to my truck, way back at the mouth of the canyon, and drove back to town for a shower, a steak at the restaurant, and a sweet reunion with my girlfriend.
***
Back in Salt Lake I used Google Earth to map my meandering hike. I looked and looked, but the images didn’t show the marijuana field. Either the images were too old, or the depth of the canyon kept the lush green from sight. I’m fairly sure I’ve mapped the right canyon, but I can’t clearly see much where I spent those two nights, one hoping to see, and one hoping not to be seen.
This spring, before the trees leafed out, I went back. I parked my truck further up the road, at the mouth of a parallel canyon. I walked up that canyon, looking up side canyons until I found one I could climb out of and up onto the flats above the canyon I’d had my adventures in last summer. From the rim, I could see the long straight section of wash maybe 200 feet below. I was directly opposite the sidecanyon with the symmetrical cottonwoods, which looked like enormous gateposts from here. There was no sign of people or smoke. I found a way down the scree and crossed the sandy wash, heading straight for the pool. When I got there, I suppressed my trepidation, and walked between the trees, into the shade. The black sand of the fire-ring was there, but smoothed by snow and rain. A neat pile of juniper was stacked between two stones, dry and waiting. I could see no sign that anyone had been there recently. I walked further in, noticing how cool and pleasant it was. Several massive boulders formed a colossal stairway under over-leaning walls of orange stone. At the top of the stairs was a broad sandy channel that led, in steps and pouroffs, up into a narrow slot. Above the channel was a flat sandy bench, supported for maybe 20 feet by a pitched wall of carefully, and, I acknowledged with some pleasure, artfully stacked chunks of squared sandstone. Someone, Lauro and the stranger, had set the wall well and straight, and had wedged the larger stones tight with chips. They had also driven two pitons into the wall above the bench, I suppose to hang a tarp. My sense was of a comfortably beautiful place that had been carefully, even lovingly, converted into a camp, or a sort of seasonal house. I was full of admiration. I had expected something, I’m not sure what. Nothing specific, but something less than this. Something not so fine and well-done. I walked further up the canyon. As it narrowed, into a fairly narrow slot, I found a high shelf, what was once maybe a pocket of softer stone long since washed away, high above my head, maybe 15 feet above the sandy floor. Dished steps, almost rungs, really, were chipped out of the vertical rock face. I climbed and found a tightly-wrapped tarp, heavy and full, lashed with tentcord to a pair of pitons. I didn’t open it.
Maybe 100 yards further upcanyon the walls flared out and the ground became rocky and steep. Up a high rockfall, I followed a worn path, where the rocks had been leveled and wedged into place, and swept clean by repeated use. At the top was the field, now muddy and bare, but I recognized it instantly. There, on the other side was my boulder. The solar panels and the irrigation equipment weren’t there. From this side, I could see a small shed made of juniper and adobe. Inside everything was tarped and tidy.
When I think of an unpleasant person, I feel free to make up stories. I suppose all sorts of nasty things, backstories that explain their unpleasantness, childhood traumas, abuses, losses, laziness and corruption, stuff like that. In recent years I have tried to stop doing this, and have largely managed to stop making up stories about my friends. I treat pleasant people with something like deference, but also like reverence. I hold out on judgment and try to let their goodness shine. Standing there in front of that shed, seeing the care and intelligence and resourcefulness of these two men, I couldn’t suppose anything at all. I felt an unexpected warmth for them arise in me. It’s hard to feel foolish in the wilderness, where no one is there to judge, but I wasn’t right then in the wilderness. I was in a strangely cultivated place, on an edge between the wild and the domestic, and I felt shame. I pictured myself as a DEA agent, perhaps rappelling out of a black helicopter into this canyon, having received a tip from a hiker, having to destroy this order, burn the crop, restore this place to its natural beauty, and I felt shame.
***
Not long ago I bumped into Lauro in town. We chatted a minute. I made no mention of having spied on him, of course. We barely know each other, or, I should say, he barely knows me. I feel that I know at least something important about him. I think he was maybe a bit startled by my warmth. We’ve always said Hello, how are you?, in passing, but I engaged him. I looked him in the eye and asked about him, and he was I think a bit startled. He was warm, too, but we were headed opposite directions.
