Solace by Mary Sojourner

Author:Mary Sojourner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER

CRACK IN THE WORLD

Ev

It was during that summer of ordinary joy that I met another wiry red-haired guy—at a Grand Canyon anti-uranium mining demonstration. He pulled to the side of the road, took a flyer from my hand, and said, “What are you guys doing?”

I told him. He climbed out of the truck, grabbed a handful of flyers, and stood next to me. He said he was from New York. On his way to no longer being from New York. No job. No safety net. Just fire for the West. Did I know what he was talking about?

“You ever read Ed Abbey?” I said.

He pulled a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang from his backpack.

“Man,” I said, “are you ever in the right place.”

We kept talking. We haven’t stopped, talking our way up talus slopes under white-hot Mohave sun, into a bend in a slot canyon no wider than our shoulders, down the crumbling face of a mesa we should never have crawled up. And we talked ourselves into friendship. Hard friendship. Easy as sliding into the current in the slow San Juan and floating to the next eddy.

We have never been lovers. Great good luck.

Ev came back west in the early nineties on a vacation, then, as I had, came back for good. To work as a waiter at the Grand Canyon, spending every minute away from his job exploring, moving on canyon trails as Scheherazade once told stories.

In 1995 he moved into the cabin next door. It was the perfect not-marriage. Good coffee and better talk on my back stoop. Nickel-and-dime gourmet for dinner and world-class Scrabble and more talk. No topic was taboo. Proximity granted us the minutiae of intimacy. Separate cabins granted us oceans of space.

As I think about the early days of our friendship, I see travertine, depositions of truth, carried by intentions fluid and hidden as underground rivers. There are pockets of treasures, the astonishment of discovering we both loved hard trails, Luther Allison, Forty-Second and Broadway in the early seventies, mean slot machines, and generous casino buffets.

We talked about what would happen when he found a lover. He wanted one. I didn’t. I taught him my favorite saying: Don’t take your present hostage for some hypothetical future.

He taught me the words I had decided never again to say: “I’m not leaving this friendship.”

We taught each other the peril of Yuppie crises. He’d rolled into town from a two-week pack trip straight to Macy’s. I met him there. We were agonizing over whether to split a cranberry twist and a sticky bun, or go for linguine and Alfredo sauce. He wanted sugar. I wanted fat. I felt my jaw tighten, saw his forehead corrugate. “Oh, my God,” I said, “it’s a Yuppie crisis.”

We drove away from each other on solo road trips, brought back stories, set them out between us as though they were bones or géodes or broken survey stakes. Hot springs on the bank of a frozen river. Slaughtered mountain lion carcasses stinking in a wash.

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