ROAD TRIPS RUN THE RISK OF EITHER DEADENING THE SENSES WITH hours of monotonous sameness rushing by the window at sixty miles per hour, reminding us that no matter how fast or where we go we’re still mired in our own inescapable neurosis, or they loosen the spirit from the anchor of the daily grind and lift us up on the breeze to soar, like our hands sticking out the window planing on the wind. But however they make us feel, there are never enough places to stop and pee.
I pulled the car over into the parking lot. The blazing sun baked every square inch of ground, and I could feel my hair practically cooking as I walked out toward the crater. The middle schoolers I was taking on this adventure—Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Red Rock Canyon—ran past me shrieking toward the rim. Ubehebe Crater is one of the more distinctive landmarks in Death Valley—an area already stuffed with more landmarks than Disneyworld. A massive half-mile-wide pit in the middle of a desolate landscape, the crater is the collapsed cone of a volcano. Visiting Ubehebe is a strange experience. To saunter down the black, sandy volcanic sands into the baking calm of the center is to enter another world. The Timbisha Shoshone believe their people came from Ubehebe Crater. The story goes that Coyote was carrying the Timbisha Shoshone in a basket across the desert and set the basket down to sleep. As Coyote napped, the people snuck out of the basket and dispersed across the desert. The crater is now all that’s left, a depression of a giant basket.
Creation myths such as these always make more sense to me than biblical tales. Like many Indigenous peoples, the Shoshone’s stories about themselves are rooted in place, defined in part by the landscape around them. I always find these narratives compelling. Hardly surprising; bookshelves are full of white dudes like me trying to force our way into some comprehension of the natural world using native mythology as a guide. We’re like the weirdo unpopular kids in middle school trying to hang out with the cool, popular crowd so that we can be associated with something sublime rather than recognized for our awkwardness and body odor.
We all climbed down the sides of the crater, where the heat pressed down on us in stifling stillness. The rocky, wrinkled walls were reddish brown, and black sand had poured down over eons in great huge fans along the bottom. I had brought a book of Native American origin stories to read to the students at night, but wondered if I even should. What was I trying to do, after all, bringing them here, to this place, junked up on McDonald’s and Subway, for a glimpse at a landscape that is so deeply steeped in Indigenous memory, only to roar off again in our minivans to some other sacred spot.
In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin travels to the outback of Australia trying to learn about the “Dreamtime” of the Aborigines. The book—published in 1987—was a critical success, cementing Chatwin’s reputation as a brilliant travel writer. Dreamtime is a complex idea, a difficult topic for a westerner like me to conjure into words. It’s a series of foundational myths about the creation of the world by ancient spirits, so it happened a long time ago and yet is a living, breathing philosophy and internal compass. See? Dreamtime, if nothing else, escapes the boxy confines of Western labels and thought. Part of Dreamtime (to be really clear, these ideas can’t be expressed with clarity by someone like me; I don’t know if any non-Aboriginal could understand) are the “Songlines.” Both stories and maps, Songlines seem to be central to the Dreamtime and the way Aboriginal people navigate both their internal and external realities. But even that description doesn’t do it justice; the Songlines contain their mythology and beliefs as well. They are a collective personification bound up in rhythm and cadence. One aspect of the Songlines is that an Aboriginal traveler could “sing” their way across the landscape, noting geographical features (two emus sleeping, for example, denoting emu-esque-looking rock outcroppings) as they moved, the song and country around them blending into a kind of spiritual map. Chatwin bounces around the outback in this book, meeting Aborigines and trying to come to some understanding of the nature of walking and Indigenous wisdom and travel, among other subjects.
It’s yet another travel book written by a white man using native ideologies as a springboard for personal exploration, a kind of passive literary colonization. I can’t really blame Chatwin though. First, the idea of Aboriginal Dreamtime and Songlines is so deeply fascinating it’s hard not to get obsessed. Secondly, Chatwin’s book is brilliant. As a writer he’s marvelous. As a privileged white male writer myself, I sympathize with Chatwin’s need to associate with Indigenous wisdom, as cringe-worthy as that kind of bookish appropriation can be. It’s clear that as a certain type of white male writer, we’re aware that we’ve lost something That by virtue of issuing forth from the momentous propulsion of Western thought, we’ve corralled and domesticated our own imaginations. We—I—seek out any identification with Indigenous ideas because I know my own thought patterns are so patterned by the hierarchies of Western intellectualization that I’m removed from a real firsthand understanding. I’m distanced from direct experience of the world around me by objective rationale and classification. This whole thing smacks of the romantic notion of “the noble savage,” I know. But just because my longings are cliché and thoroughly debunked doesn’t mean I feel them any less intensely.
Books like Chatwin’s are like explorations into wild landscapes. They are the manifestation of longing—an individual hurls themself into the unknown to find, what? Themself, maybe? Meaning? It is the kind of journey I daydream intensely about, usually while sitting in my car outside Chipotle waiting for my order, or listening to the Muzak echo tinnily from my phone as I wait on hold with Verizon because I was overcharged on this month’s bill, and thinking, Well, this sucks. There’s gotta be something else.
Chatwin travels to Australia and co-opts the mystery of the Aborigines for his own artistic ends; a yearning for communion with some realer version of himself, perhaps. An understanding of some core aspect of identity bound up in movement, in being nomadic. If I’m being honest, I’m no different. I’ve spent a good portion of my life nosing around the world’s woodsy corners. I think I go to these places in the hope that seeking will strip away the layers of whiteness, civilization, and good sense. Power wash the layers of domestication armoring my heart and mind with a good dose of the outdoors, and maybe I’ll glimpse some version of my authentic self. That, perhaps, by tracing these ancient tracks of Indigenous wisdom, I can be in communion with a more concrete version of myself. Because, for some of us, two-car garages and frequent flier miles are not enough. Or maybe too much?
But with a writer like Chatwin, or any traveler who heads out into places like the Mojave Desert, there is, obviously, a risk of romanticizing and exoticising the “other.” Collecting stories that don’t belong to you to place in your curio cabinet and show off to your friends. It’s also possible to make mysterious things that are, in fact, mundane—to imbue Indigenous ideas with an aura of magic they don’t contain. I listened to a conversation between Black artists once, and one of them said that he was sick and tired of using art to proclaim “Black excellence.” He said that what he wanted was for some twenty-year-old Black kid to be able to get stoned and play Xbox all day. That real equity will be achieved when people of color can be just as unapologetically mediocre as white people. It made me think of the way some white writers, especially, can approach Indigenous culture. Maybe the “other” isn’t different. Maybe I’m just looking at things the wrong way, hiking trails and scouring deserts looking for some secret that doesn’t exist.
What a white writer does by extracting Indigenous stories like ore from the earth is take away the agency of first peoples to contain their own legacy. You can’t blame us, though. If forced to tell only our own stories, books would be full of nothing but tales of how bilious Lord Abercrombie got all gouty and farted into his breeches whilst wiping aristocratic boogers on his waistcoat.
It can sometimes feel like we’ve lost something. As though once you’ve boiled down the white, privileged existence, all you’re left with are Franzen-esque screeds about how our mothers didn’t love us enough and how our ambition to write the great American novel was torpedoed by the need to get a job. Boo-hoo. It’s no wonder white men start so many wars. We need something to write about.
The kids explored and yelled, complained of being thirsty and having sand in their shoes, and eventually we all got back in the cars and trundled off to the next spot we wanted to visit. The landscape of the Mojave sped by: ochres and browns, reds, and about one hundred shades of beige. The shining white of salt pan flats, the flinty grays of the mountains ringing the valleys. It was Martian and weird and undeniably beautiful, but as I headed south through the desert I began to understand how much my own use and enjoyment of these lands was a form of theft. How my love of the outdoors—my attraction to wild places—was a form of colonization, sort of an imperialist strategy outfitted by Patagonia and North Face.
Of course, the strains of appropriation run through my whole life. I grew up on the banks of the Neshobe River in Vermont, a name with opaque origins. Possibly an Algonquin word brought north to Vermont by early white settlers, the word is first seen in Littleton, Massachusetts, in the mid-eighteenth century, and means “double water,” or perhaps the space between two bodies of water. In any case, a land speculator named Josiah Powers headed up to what was then the New Hampshire land grants and brought the name with him. It was applied to the town in the central mountains of Vermont where I grew up. It was soon replaced by the name “Brandon,” but the little stream that ran through the town kept the name, as did the elementary school I attended.
My favorite movie as a kid was Windwalker A rarity, in that it was a film about Native Americans without reference to white settlers. Based on a novel by Blaine M. Yorgason, it tells the story of a Cheyenne chief’s untimely death, resurrection, and battle with the rival Crow people. An attempt at authenticity was made—the languages of the Cheyenne and Crow are used with English subtitles—but the main roles were played by white actors. In a cruel bit of irony, the corny trailer I looked up on YouTube describes it as “the most authentic Indian film ever made.” Yet it stars a Brit and a Yank.
The book I read and reread growing up was Call of the Wild by Jack London, wherein the hero, the dog Buck, enacts the penultimate scene by murdering the Yeehat Indian tribe in revenge for killing his white master, John Thorton. It is not mentioned that Thorton is, of course, trespassing on Yeehat lands, or that Thorton is part of a wave of white settlers rapaciously searching for gold in the rivers of the Yukon Territory. But that book and its messages are so deeply burned in my brain that it became part of how I saw the outdoors, adventures, and myself.
Because of books like London’s and a desire for outdoor adventure, I’d eventually end up with Outward Bound. Early adventures in Florida took me down rivers in central Florida, the last stronghold of the Seminole, who fought a bitter war against white settlers for decades. Later, I’d hike the Sierra Nevada. The section of the range in northern California was the home of Ishi, whose life story is perhaps the saddest, and most emblem-atic. Considered to be one of the only members left of his tribe—though specialists would later connect him with various “umbrella” tribes of the region—Ishi was captured near Mount Lassen in northern California. He was poked and prodded and studied at the University of Berkeley, and they gave him a job. Janitor. He eventually died of tuberculosis. Most of his family had been killed in the Three Knolls Massacre of 1865, in which around forty Yahi were murdered. Ishi’s people were attacked while they were sleeping.
It goes on and on. While living in Los Angeles I explored the San Gabriel Mountains almost daily, peaks named in conjunction with local Christian missions that decimated the culture of the Gabrielino-Tongva, people who had lived in the San Gabriel valley prior to white settlers moving into the area. Even now, I teach at Champlain College, named after a French explorer who led the way for colonization of lands previously occupied by the Abenaki, Huron, and Algonquin peoples.
My love of the outdoors rests on a legacy of usurpation, theft, and genocide.
I married a woman descended from the Indigenous peoples of the Sonoran Desert. After decades of blithely tramping across native lands, obliviously singing the praises of white conservationists who sought to protect these “unpeopled” lands (because they’d already disposed of the Indians living there through the judicious distribution of blankets à la smallpox and a healthy dollop of genocidal Manifest Destiny), I’ve come to wonder about my marriage. Did I find my wife attractive because she had thick, straight black hair, brown skin, and dark eyes? Yes. Was I bowled over by what I saw as her exotic looks? Again, yes. Does that mean I’ve “tokenized” her? Seen her race as “other,” thus unknowable and mysterious and compellingly alien? Yes. Do I still find her smoking hot because of her Indigenous good looks? Yes. Is that racist? Probably. Guilty as charged.
We pulled off the highway at one of those ubiquitous, neon-lit truck stops somewhere in the area of the Nevada/California state line, heading into the Nevada desert to visit some old historic mines on the way south to Joshua Tree. It was dinnertime, and the kids piled out of the van and into fast-food joints to fill their bellies with Brazilian rainforest beef and cloned fries.
The kids purchased their grub and slammed and flopped to the cheerless, plasticky tables to eat.
I watched one of the kids, David, cruise through his burger. It was impressive, the speed at which he ate. Fries and then shake were finished in record time. He must’ve had the metabolism of a field mouse, because David headed back up to the counter and bought another strawberry shake. He gamely began slurping down his second shake, his intake at this point surpassing thirty ounces of plasticine milkshake that looked like melted Barbies.
As we left the restaurant, some of the boys started grab-assing. Punching each other, grabbing friends, headlocks, shin kicks, farts, belches. Class acts. David was involved in the fun. He was practically vibrating, wound up on boy-energy and about sixteen thousand calories of milkshake. He’d probably consumed a bushel of sugarcane. The kids were whirling about under the hot, windy evening sky of the Mojave.
It was at this point that a jitterbugging David, who was now overfed, overstimulated, and overwhelmed, projectile-vomited.
It was a fantastic pink arc. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything quite so awe-inspiring. It was like the fountains of the Bellagio in Vegas were erupting from David’s mouth. There was just so much of it, and it kept coming in one long, continuous stream. David’s digestive system maintained the pressure of a fairly large bore garden hose for a couple of seconds. It was like firemen were using Pepto Bismol to put out a blaze.
Maybe I would never understand what was really going on in the stories of the Aborigines or Shoshone. I could know it, but not really know it. But I knew then, crisscrossing that landscape, and in the years since, visiting and exploring wild places, that traversing the landscape is a form of storytelling. That, for me, I can make meaning—of myself, of the places I visit, of the choices I’ve made—by moving through mountains and forests. I was a visitor to these lands; that I knew. The Indigenous people who were here before had a connection to this place I’d probably never truly grasp. But, like them, I needed these mountains and trails to find my way through life.
Their stories told of the origins of their people, the creation of their world. I looked at David. What could my own legacy provide? As a white European American, my story was one of colonial conquest, Manifest Destiny served with a side of eugenics. Kids were now screaming and running away from David as though he’d just tossed down some plutonium in a pile in front of him.
The Shoshone. Abenaki. Huron and Seminole. Their stories aren’t mine, I thought. But I will have my own. Someday, I will tell the story of the Pink Volcano of the Mojave.