Desert Cabal by Amy Irvine

Author:Amy Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE HEAT OF NOON: ROCK AND TREE AND CLOUD

It’s twelve o’clock, Mr. Abbey, and somewhere in your beloved Arches is a hiker sporting ExOfficio garb with an SPF of fifty, a CamelBak pack, and Merrell boots. He is waving his red bandana at anything flying overhead. He needs help because he drank a half-dozen quad-shot lattés in order to work sixty-plus hours before a red-eye to Salt Lake City, and then a rental car drive to Moab, where he imbibed too much desert pale ale, and the next morning, that is this morning, he forgot to tighten the lid on the CamelBak bladder. At some point, hours ago, he veered off the beaten park path into the back of beyond, where he learned he has lost all his water. He’s shaky now, and seeing double. He needs a rescue—which he can luckily summon on his cell phone. This means grids of volunteers on foot, droves of good ol’ boys on ATVs, and helicopters buzzing overhead. Now the whole desert is a shit-show just because this guy forgot to attend to the details of his fancy, over-designed gear. And still he’s not remotely as fucked as the border-crossers. Especially the children who’ve been torn away from their parents.

Did I mention he belongs to The Wilderness Society?

This man. His circumstances. I am catching him at a bad time, releasing him as a mockery for you to see. In this way, I share your so-called misanthropy—and it’s likely arrogant on both our parts. Because we have found ourselves lost and delirious—you in Havasu, me in Dark Canyon, to name just one instance each. No doubt there was a point when we’d have conceded to a rescue—if we could have hailed one.

Or not. After all, this is how we come to inhabit a place. To inhabit ourselves. This un-finding, this kind of reduction down to bone on stone, is what you and I were gunning for all along.

We are lost in a new way. And as the land fades to black we need our Hitchcock. We need him to get all eyes on the place in the frame, the whole of it. Whether the director likes it or not, that frame must be widened—made panoramic even—so as to include a herd, a horde, a halfassed happenstance of bumbling humans. Not all of them know who you are. Some worship Aron Ralston, the man who in a slot canyon cut off his own arm, which was pinned beneath a boulder. Others idolize Dean Potter, a notorious climber and BASE jumper who in his squirrel suit flew into one of Yosemite’s granite walls. Both bumbled perilously—and in Dean’s case, fatally—in national parks and wilderness. What a glorious right and privilege.

Not everyone knows that these new heroes—yes, that’s what our culture by and large views them as—were building off of your desert forays. The heroes themselves might not even know.

But I see you. Batting your way through the tamarisk. I’m over here, knee-deep and flailing in the quicksand.

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