I am enfeebled by this torrent of light. Each afternoon seems the last for me. Hammered by the sun, mapless in country but vaguely known, I am like a desiccated pit lying in a sand wash. Hope has become a bird’s feather, glissading from the evening sky.
The journey started well enough. I left my home in the eastern Mojave twelve or fifteen days ago, making a path for the ocean. Like a sleek cougar I crossed the Lloma Hills, then the Little Sangre de Cristo Range. I climbed up out of the southernmost extension of White Shell Canyon without incident. Early on, the searing heat made me wary, brought me to consider traveling only at night. But, the night skies cast with haze and so near a new moon, it was impossible to find my way.
Today I thought it might rain. But it does not seem likely now. It’s been more difficult to locate water than I’ve known in the past, and that lack in this light and heat has added to my anxiety. Also, my grasp of how far I still have to travel is imperfect. This most of all fills me with dread.
In the distance, the stony, cactus-strewn land falls down into the drainage of the Curandera. I will turn north here this morning and hope to be in the wet canyon of the Oso by nightfall and down off this high blistered plain. From there, however far it may be, I know the river will flow to the ocean. It’s comforting, each evening, to construe the ocean as my real destiny—the smooth beach underfoot, round and hard like an athlete’s thigh, the ocean crashing, shaking off the wind, surging up the beach slope, all of it like wild horses. But, walking the Oso, I could come upon some sign that might direct me elsewhere, perhaps north into the Rose Peaks, into country I do not know at all.
Part of the difficulty of this journey has been having to feel my way like this. I departed—my body deft, taut—with a clear image of where I should go: the route, the dangers, the distances by day. But then the landscape became vast. Thinking too much on the end, I sometimes kept a pace poorly matched to the country. By evening I was winded, irritated, dry hearted. I would scrape out a place on the ground and fall asleep, too exhausted to eat. My clothing, thin and worn, began to disintegrate. I would awaken dreamless, my tongue swollen from thirst, and look about delirious for any companion—a dog, a horse, another human being just waking up. But there was no one with whom to speak, no one even to offer water to. I spat my frustration out. I pushed on, resolute as Jupiter’s moons, breaking down only once, weeping and licking the earth.
I did not anticipate the ways in which I would wear out.
My one salvation, a gift I can’t reason through, has been the unceasing kindness of animals. Once, when I was truly lost, when the Grey Spider Hills and the Black Sparrow Hills were entirely confused in a labyrinth of memory, I saw a small coyote sitting between two creosote bushes just a few yards away. She was eyeing me quizzically, whistling me up with that look. I followed behind her without question, into country that eventually made sense to me, or which I eventually remembered.
Another time, the eighth day out, I fainted, collapsing from heat and thirst onto the cobble plain through the blood shimmer of air. I was as overwhelmed by my own foolishness, as struck down by the arrogance in my determination as I was overcome by thirst. Falling, I knew the depth of my stupidity, but not as any humiliation. I felt unshackled. Released. I came back to the surface aware of drops of water trickling into my throat. I tried to raise an arm to the harrowing sun but couldn’t lift the weight. I inhaled the texture of warm silk and heard a scraping like stiffened fans. When I squinted through quivering lashes I saw I was beneath birds.
Mourning doves were perched on my chest, my head, all down my legs, their wings flared above me like parasols. They held my lips apart with slender toes. One by one, doves settled on my cheeks. They craned their necks at angles to drip water, then flew off. Their gleaming eyes were an infant’s lucid pools.
Backed into this rock shelter, out of the sun’s first, slanting rays, I am trying to manufacture now a desire to go on, to step once again into a light I must stroke through. The light wears like acid and the heat to come will terrorize even lizards. It is not the desert of my childhood.
I concentrate on an image of transparent water and cool air flowing through the Oso River Canyon, beyond the horizon. I will lie down naked in its current. Cool watercress will stick like rose petals to my skin. I will anoint my eyes, my fevered ears. I will lap water like a shaking dog. The fired plain before me, the wicked piercing of thorns, my knotted intestines, the lost path I will endure for that. Drawing the two together in my mind—the eviscerating heat, the forgiving water—I see the horizons of my life. My desire to arrive, to cover this distance, is so acute I whimper like a colt when I breathe.
Two days past, in Agredecido Canyon, I came upon a gallery of wild figures painted on a sheer rock escarpment a thousand years ago. I was walking on the far side of the wash and nearly missed them, concealed behind a row of tall cottonwoods. So many days in a landscape without people had made me anxious and I went quickly across, as though they were alive and could speak.
Someone’s ancestors had drawn thirty-four figures on the sienna rock, many familiar and comforting—mountain sheep running, human figures traveling, and other animals free of gravity, as if they were plummeting toward the sky. Huge kachinalike demigods were dancing. A square-shouldered human form stood with its back turned, holding a snake. Two perplexing images attracted me. One was a series of pictographs, lined out along a cleft in the rock. The initial drawing, the one farthest to the left as I read them, was of a single bush, like sagebrush. Then came a clump of thin, thready lines, lightly incised. Then a rope coil with tattered ends and then a second rope, unwound and undulating. Lastly, a cast of double curves, like a child’s sea gulls flying away.
The second image was simpler, a bear tumbling on the spout of a shooting geyser. I thought it a water geyser, but the bear’s large eyes and the round shape of its mouth revealed such fear that finally I believed it a geyser of blood. As with so much of what people leave behind, it’s difficult to say what was meant. We can only surmise that they loved, that they were afraid.
I rise and press off. From beneath a paloverde I take a bearing on the high white disk of the sun. Looking toward the indistinct middle distance, the outwash plain of distorted mountains, I believe I am looking at the shoulder of the place where the waters of the Oso will rise.
I stride along this route just north of west, listening to the seething cut of the sickle light, feeling the black heat rise around me like water, watchful where I step. My eye is out sharply for any track, for the camouflage in which poisonous snakes hide. I find a good pace and work to hold it, adjusting breath and stride as I cross arroyos with their evidence of flash floods and climb and descend shallow hills. I do not think of the Oso at all but only of what is around me—the powdery orange of globe mallow blossoms, lac glistening on wands of creosote bushes, bumblebees whining. The afternoon, the prostrate sky, sweep on. My feet crumble the rain pan and wind pack of dust. Breezes whisk scorched seeds toward me. The seeds, bits of brittle leaf and stem, corral my feet and lie still.
At one point I see antelope—so far south for these animals, twenty or more of them ranging to the southeast, an elongation of life under the heaved sky.
At last light, when the sun has set beneath the mountains, I am without a trace of the Oso. I sit down on a granite boulder, a slow collapse onto the bone of my haunches. The country has clearly proved more than I can imagine. I consider that I began this morning confidently, rightly seasoned I believed, and then, with every conscious fiber, I feel I will not despair. My body comes back erect with determination. I have made so many miles today. But I know—I have no good day past this one. Desperation, the heavy night tide, surges. I cannot stand again. My feet throb from stone bruises and thorn punctures. My flesh spills the shrieking heat. My tongue wads my mouth. I bow my head, my sticking eyelids, to my knees. Into this agony, as if from an unsuspected room, comes a bare cascade of sound. My wounds become silent. The long phrase descends again, a liquid tremolo. The skin over my cheekbones chills, as when sweat suddenly dries. Again the falling tiyew, tiyew, tiyew, tiyew, and, a turn at the end, tew.
I stand up to rivet the dimness. The burbling call breaks the dark once more. This time I hear each note, a canyon wren, surely, but something else. I strain my ears at the night, listening for that other sound. When it comes I realize it has been there each time, each call, an ornament hardly separated from the bird’s first note. I recall vividly the last canyon wrens I heard, ones around my home where they are never far from the waters of the Colorado, their voices another purling in the dry air.
The song again, pure, sharp, now without the grace note. I fix its place and move into the night, my face averted, feeling through the darkness with my hands, sliding my feet ahead, down a scrabble slope. Long minutes pass between bursts of wren song and then there is only silence. I am standing in water for some moments before I am aware of its caress, before I can separate the pain in my feet from its soothing. A little farther on I hear the gurgle of springs. More water, running from beneath the Sierra de San Martin. I squat down to feel the expanse of the shallow flow. Headwaters of the Oso.
I walk a little ways, down the gathering waters.
I drink. I bathe. I rinse out my clothes.
The ocean is far away, but I feel its breath booming against the edge of the continent. Wind evaporating water tightens my bare flesh. I feel the running tide of my own salted blood. In the full round air from below I can detect, though barely, a perfume of pear blossoms and wetted fields. I can distinguish in it the last halt cries of birds, becalmed in the marshes.