Where are you really from?

I will leave California one day. But, before that, I return to her, from a trip east with Lukas to his family’s land in Arizona. After a few days there we drive back westward through the fields of saguaros and cholla and prickly pear his parents can turn into wine. In this expanse of nothing we have a hard fight that travels for hours and hours and rips everything open, pulling the seams apart like grains of sand. It is about assimilating into each other. To make something new you must shift your allegiance, something he is slow to realize and I am impatient to resolve.

The desert shames us with her species’ adaptations, Austin writes, their ability to flower, to fruit in the waterless scorch, to scamper and scavenge and procreate. “One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to ‘try’ but to do.”

In the white truce of noon, moving west along that open road, we speed all the way up to the crumbling, arid precipice, and then, somehow, we slowly circle ourselves back. To drink from the fabled desert river Hassaympa, Austin tells us, is to “no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiance as with the color of romance.” Hollowed out from our fight, more awake than we’ve ever been, we seek out the quenching shade, the spring that will water us a long time.