WORD of the WILD by Brandon Mark Bertelsen a Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Utah in Partial

WORD OF THE WILD

Brandon Mark Bertelsen

A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Honors Degree in Bachelor of Science

Parks, Recreation and Tourism College of Health

Approved:

______Daniel L. Dustin, PhD Kelly S. Bricker, PhD Thesis Faculty Supervisor Chair, Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism

______Kelly S. Bricker, PhD Sylvia D. Torti, PhD Honors Faculty Advisor Dean, Honors College

ABSTRACT

Many people value and experience what the natural world has to offer and many people do not. The opportunities that exist outdoors include recreation, education, development, and therapy. Everything I do, school, work, volunteer, and play, is to better provide outdoor experiences for people of all types and abilities. My complete passion and devotion to this originates in how I was raised, strengthened by witnessing the effect of its absence in those close to me, and confirmed by my studies and employment while pursuing my Bachelors of Science in Parks, Recreation and Tourism emphasis Adventure and Outdoor Programming.

The purpose of Part 1: Recreation is to show the joy we may experience from outdoor adventures. By sea kayaking the remote tributaries of Lake Powell with two friends, quiet and calm in the winter, we find a refreshment of both our strength and spirit. The purpose of Part 2: Education is to show how learning brings vitality into life, especially when the subject is hands on and reveals a small part of the infinite intricacies of the amazing puzzle we call nature. On a backpacking trip into the Wind River

Mountains, Wyoming we learn about what the sky offers during both the day and night.

The purpose of Part 3: Development is to show that leadership and confidence are one of the many characteristics that that may grown during outdoor experiences. For the first time, I lead a large whitewater rafting trip through Cataract Canyon of the Colorado

River. The purpose of Part 4: Therapy is to show outdoor adventures can provide and wonderful opportunity for healing of both the mind and body. I leave the city to backpack alone in the mountains and canyons of southern Utah.

iii

This is a collection of creative writings. My purpose is to share what only I, of many outdoor professionals, have done and to help people imagine what is possible.

People will look out into the world and dream big then chase their dreams. My purpose is also to share a fraction of what I have done in four years at the University of Utah, and to show that fun is only one incredible part of what the wilderness has to offer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

INTRODUCTION 1

PART 1: RECREATION 15

PART 2: EDUCATION 30

PART 3: DEVELOPMENT 42

PART 4: THERAPY 54

REFERENCES 81

INTRODUCTION

What wakes me up early and keeps me up late, keeps me grinding on the weekends, keeps me occupied through the week? My answer is sharing the natural world. This is my gift, my passion. Every day of my life I work to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. My method to this is the outdoors. This allows me to channel my energy into everything I want from the world. What I want is to be happy, at peace. My education in Parks, Recreation and Tourism emphasis Adventure and Outdoor

Programming busies me on my path to other people’s happiness and in the end my own.

Many people live for others, as politicians, musicians, teachers, public transit workers, chefs, mechanics, in fact in some sense or another about everyone lives for others. I live for others by leading them on outdoor adventures. This has had an increasingly active role in my life because I know the tremendous positive impact I can create on people’s life’s through the natural world. In fact, now everything I do is to better share the natural world with others.

My writing shares the four kinds of experiences I facilitate to satisfy the core values people want. Everyone lives to play, to learn, to grow, and to heal. Recreation, education, development, and therapy. By consciously choosing when and how to facilitate these four experiences I can offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people during my time on Earth.

I am young but I have tasted the fruit of my labor, even if just the beginning. At times I about cry when I see people benefit from the wilderness. I have seen people laugh and smile truly happy to do nothing but play in a river. I have seen minds work then jaws

2 drop when they can visualize for the first time our place in the solar system from an earthly perspective, why the sun, moon, and planets all cross our sky on the same elliptic.

People grow confidence and work in a team. Social skills blossom. Finally, people’s deep wounds, mental and physical, can heal. Struggles are seen in a new light. I know I can do more. I love the powerful benefits I wield through trips in the wilderness. I can do amazing things for many people and I have only just begun.

The following is a letter I wrote to my father in the fall of 2012 after moving away from home to college. It is the first time I recorded my inspiration for outdoor adventures and why I share it with others. Three and a half years later it continues to ring true and if anything I am living the future I wrote for myself more and more with every passing season.

November 30, 2012

Dear Dad,

I remember you telling me about that one winter in college where you claimed to

have skied 75 days. The few times you have told me that, you always said it with a

smile. You’d say it had cost you an extra year of college, but for some reason I

don’t think you regret it, or at least back then you didn’t.

I feel as though I’m in that stage of life. All I want to do is to adventure outside.

I have so much energy, I am so happy, and I have big plans. When we talk all I

want to do is tell you about my adventures in nature, in the mountains, where I

grow so much. Out there I learn and become a better person. I think, I enjoy it,

3 and I wish that experience upon everyone I know. The outdoors means so much to me; I never want to let it go, and I don’t plan to.

I get a feeling that the person you were in college and the person I am in college are so similar. From what you’ve shared with me, your happiest moments come from your time in the mountains. Sure you, and in a sense myself, have had a good time with the ladies and doing stupid things with friends, but what you seem to really look back upon is your time in that beautiful Montana wilderness. Weren’t you that guy who would go sprinting up and over ridges after that elusive group of deer, build a fire with Grandpa Al in a winter snowstorm to dry out your socks, truck up into the hills to get the family a Christmas tree or a load of wood, and of course ski your heart out at good ol’ Bridger Bowl? You’ve reminisced to me about those days where once class ended you would rush up to the ski hill and squeeze in as many runs as possible. You’d take pride in catching the last chair.

And I have a pretty good idea that you loved nothing more than to lap that Bridger lift shredding the moguls on your beloved skinny skis until you could hardly walk.

Just like you, my happiest moments come from the mountains, and I have a lot of them. One of the first ones was where you and I road tripped to Whistler. We stopped at the “world famous” Tim Horton’s Doughnuts both there and back. You put me in a ski school to learn some basics while you ripped up the mountain with

Sean. Then you came down to where I was making my turns and took me up to the real mountain for my first time. Remember that college ski kid who walked out of the gondola with a cloud smoke following him? Well you shared with me that that was my first smell of marijuana. We rode that gondola up while I clumsily tried to

4 hold all of my gear. It was a foggy day but I tried to show off my skills to you. All the while I got to see you ski some steeps right next to the groomer. I kept up as best I could. We had so much fun that day. And if I remember correctly you bought me my first pair of skis then, some short red ones with a sweat black and white checkered pattern, and celebrated with a tasty dinner out.

The last year or two are where my adventures really start to pick up. I sense that their frequency as well as epicness is increasing at an exponential rate, especially haven chosen the University of Utah and being involved in the Outdoor Recreation

Program as a trip coordinator.

Five days rafting Hell’s Canyon

A week in Canada Canoeing Murtle Lake

Climbing Mt. Adams

Backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail by Crystal Mountain

Backpacking in the mountains near Leavenworth

Backcountry skiing in the Wasatch

A week rafting down Cataract Canyon from Moab to Lake Powell

And beautiful day hikes like no other

I know you loved spending time out in the wild hunting, skiing, hiking, along with various other activities. I just know it. Stories of your childhood where you would spend summers at Grandpa B’s ranch in Ovando convince me you love nature. And I guarantee there are so many other trips and adventures that you’ve had which even you haven’t thought of in quite a while.

I love hearing stories of your adventures; the new ones are even better.

The unpredictable weather, the exploration, the refreshment, the solitude, and the adventure are all reasons why I love the wild. And I am convinced that you, in college, had this same passion.

I know you tried to carry this passion over to life in Washington, the evidence is everywhere. But for some reason it seems to have faded away. I look at the pair of mountain bikes you and mom would ride, and would even take me on once I came around, and wonder the last time the wheels felt dirt. How long have those knobby tires been flat? I see pictures of our young new family on hikes in the rainforest or on camping trips with the dogs Bridger and Maddie. Why are there not more recent photos? I touch the rusty edges of the old skis in our garage that haven’t seen snow in years. Don’t they still slide on that cold white stuff we called snow?

The air in the boxes of camping gear on the shelves is musty and stale with old age.

When I look for something to take on one of my trips I wonder the year that any of this has been out of the box let alone in the forest.

What happened?

Do you still have that love for outdoor adventure?

Similarly, why did music fall out of your life? I know how much you loved drumming. You started with lessons and the school band as a little kid, and not too much later began making some money off of it. From what I’ve heard, back in your college days you were kind of a rockstar! Mom tells me about watching you play in one of your bands and how much you loved it. Did you begin to part from it when you found better ways to make money? I know you raked in the dough as a roofer for a few years. And that once you graduated college you made even more

6 when you got a job as a mechanical engineer and moved to Washington. But did the drumming not fully come along for the ride? As with outdoor adventure I know you tried to take it with you to Washington, but it seems like you haven’t played in a while. And it’s been even longer since you were part of a fun band.

Sometime around my freshman year of high school you were a part of a band called Roadhouse. You guys played a gig way out past West Valley in a barn and you took me with you as an extra hand to help set up. From what I saw you had a great time rocking out with those guys. The environment was so much fun. Your drum stage was set up perfectly centered and raised right in between the guitarists and keyboard player. Electrical cords snaked in and out of the scattered mats.

Black instrument cases of various shapes and sizes lined the wooden walls. The tall speakers at the edges of the room projected the sounds from each band member.

Your drum beat, the coordinated bass guitar, the wild lead guitar with his raspy voice, and the talented keyboardist all mixed together to put on one hell of a show for the crowd. You told me how much you loved that old looking red barn with an inside fit to throw a wild party. Antiques were scattered over the walls and dim lights covered the ceiling. The gig went late into the night and Mom and I went home before you were through. But as we were leaving I could clearly see that you loved playing in that band.

Where did that love for music go?

Where did that love for outdoor adventure go?

Did Washington take it away?

Was it health?

Mechanical engineering?

Money?

I wish I knew.

There’s a part of me which strongly believes that love never left, how could it?

Maybe it’s the motivation that left. Is there no longer a motivation to leave the couch and the television to go have an adventure? What would it take to want to go for a hike in the beautiful Cascades that are our backyard, to take Mom and the dogs up to a lake and go fishing, to go shooting with all those sweet guns you have with mom, to go jam on the drums (I want to learn guitar this summer so we can make some good music), or to go right out in our garage and create something out of all that nice wood working equipment we scored?

Right now in my life I cannot imagine a future without nature. Nature is refreshing; it is enlightening. It keeps me healthy. It helps me make good friends and gets me involved with new lives. Through the mountains I meet wise people who share knowledge. I meet idols in the mountains that are aged in life but also very healthy and very happy. I am truly alive when I am living outdoors.

My favorite memories are in the wild. In the mountains. In nature. I share these memories with scouts, old friends, new friends, strangers, family, but most importantly you and Mom. I treasure experiences with our three part family in the outdoors above so much else. Sadly they are becoming increasingly scarce.

Two summers ago was one of the best summers I have ever had. It was also eye opening. You and I went on a road trip through Montana. We stayed in Missoula with Grandma Georgie, visited Grandpa B, and spent most of our nights with

Funny Gramma and Julie. Our plan for the trip was not only to visit family but also to play outside. If I recall correctly our first outing was to redo a hike we had done several years prior: Sacagawea Peak.

We never made it to the top to take another father-son picture with the sign on the ridge but I guess that’s okay. The large snowpack from the winter had yet to fully melt and was covering all of the switchbacks. The tough part wasn’t the hiking, but was seeing how large the difference had become in our hiking skills.

Only two or three years prior you were helping me up the trail. It seems our roles had switched. After a couple hours of struggling off trail we figured there was too much snow to safely make it up there and made our way back. Time to try another adventure.

Up next was a mountain bike trip on an old logging road you used to use to go hunting. This was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. On the uphill a man probably in his late fifties or sixties passed us with a big smile on his face, thoroughly enjoying being out there. Not too much later we caught back up with him when the trail detoured around the washed out road, more evidence of a heavy winter. I helped that guy lay some branches over a creek and pass all of our bikes over it. When we began biking again he took off and we never saw him again.

About an hour into the climb we decided to head back down; I wish we had gone further into the hills. We only had one helmet and you had me wear like a father should. We cruised down to the trailhead having a total blast and I find that you’re no longer behind me. So I bike back up until we meet and you tell me you took a

9 spill and fell over the handle bars. I was happy to find you were totally fine but realized once again there was a growing difference in our outdoor skills.

I go mountain biking quite often out here in Utah and I absolutely love it. From campus I bike for about an hour traversing and climbing the beautiful hills to reach the downhill trail called Bobsled. Every time I bike Bobsled I wish you could experience the same wild, adrenaline filled, flow of turns that I do. For ten minutes all my sense are completely focused on nothing but the fast winding single track curving up and down both walls. The tunnel through the trees, the rocky dirt trail, and the absolute sense of adventure put a true smile on my face. That feeling doesn’t have to come from such an extreme action sport. But I want you to feel that same thing. I feel like it’s been too long.

What I remember clearly as the best part of our summer trip to Montana though was when you and I went fishing at Hyalite Lake. You had the whole process down to an art it seemed. Throw the tackle boxes in the back, pick up some worms and snacks at the Kagy Korner gas station, cruise on up to the far side of the lake with Pickle Barrel sandwiches, and set up our poles. My favorite picture from the trip was of me lounging in our green Coleman camp chair grasping a fishing pole and wearing my shades and a hat. This is my favorite picture because you took it.

I know you were right there with me having a great time. I remember looking over seeing you relaxing in your chair sipping on that good old fashion Heineken tall boy waiting for some action. We didn’t catch a fish and I doubt we even had a bite.

But really I don’t care because you and I were both completely enjoying and loving nature, together. That is a fine memory and I’ll treasure for as long as I can.

I do not know what you are going through that makes enjoying nature so difficult. I wish I knew so I could help. I do not what why times like Hyalite Lake have become so rare but I want to change that, I truly hope you do too. I want to figure out what you are going through mentally and physically that prevents this enjoyment of what seemed to be your favorite parts in life. Outdoors and music are no longer a huge part of your life. I want them back in it and I am wishing you do too.

What I want most is for that passion of life to come back. You felt it in college, and I feel it now. Up to this point, I have followed a path very similar to yours.

But I am no longer on that same road. I made a turn in my career, in my life.

As a young kid I recall many summers where the three of us would drive to

Montana to visit family. Do you remember the CD we listened to most? Well I would always call it Tuff Gong, but it turns out that was just the producer’s name printed on the CD larger than the artist’s. You guys taught me to love the music of

Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Legend CD, long before the whole Bob Marley cliché fan craze. I thank you for that. There is a lyric off that album that still speaks to me: “Life is worth more than gold.” If that is a life lesson to be learned then thank you for teaching me early.

I have learned, earlier than most, I believe, that money is not the sacred key to happiness. I know we have all heard this. But I am truly applying it to my career, to my life. I hear from people much more experienced in life about this idea. I see positive examples of people living happily and healthily through this belief and I see the other side. My belief that my life will not centralize around making money

11 does not come from one source. It has been growing and building up the more reasoning and examples I find. The more I experience through the mountains and the people they introduce me to, the more I know what I want to do with my life.

I can easily say this is the hardest thing that I have ever gone through. It is because

I love you. I love you so much and am not following in your footsteps. You introduced me to the mountains and they have taken a hold of me for life. But my love for nature has given me a desire to not only stay connected with it, but to give others that same gift. You gave me this love for nature and I want to share it.

When it comes to giving, I want to give to the people I love most: my parents, you and Mom. But haven’t you already experienced this gripping love? This love and addiction that gives everything and takes nothing but our time? And if time is money and nature is taking our money isn’t that still worth it? Do we need a lot of money to stay healthy, be spiritually content, and become compassionate toward each person who comes into our life?

Yes I know there is a certain level of income required to make it through life comfortably and I plan on reaching that wholeheartedly. But I plan on doing it through an education that will assist me in spreading my love for nature. My goal is to teach others the benefits of the mountains, educate them in safe recreation, and most importantly provide therapy for those who are in need of natural rehabilitation.

I am not following your path in life but I am not leaving you behind. We are connected forever: emotionally, genetically. I learn from you and hopefully you

learn from me. We’re growing together, yes at different stages in life, but

nonetheless we are going through the same struggle.

Your health is a sensitive subject but that is what I think about most. My desire

for you to return to a prior state of health, or better yet solve this problem and grow

from it, is immeasurable. I know you’ve heard the philosophy that one must trek

through the deepest valley to reach the highest mountain.

I believe you are soon to be standing on top of one beautiful mountain, and I

plan on being your climbing partner. You and I will be there together with one

fantastic view before us. We will get there and it will be amazing. I will help you

to that peak, for it is what I love as well.

Love,

Your son, your climbing partner, Brandon

Since writing the letter life has turned around and I have spent time in the mountains with my parents. My motivation has intensified and the energy I put into outdoor adventures is at what appears to be my current limit. I plan to break down the limit that faces me, cross the boundary, and enter a world where I do even more. Graduation and consequential freedom from school and the city is what will push me on, passionately, for myself and more importantly others.

Word of the Wild is a four-piece creative writing project showing why my passion is sharing outdoor adventures with the world, for all people of all abilities. This collection comes from four of my own inspiring experiences in nature. It speaks for not all, but many, motivations of outdoor enthusiasts and professionals. My work is creative

13 writing because my purpose is to share what is possible and what I have accomplished thus far. I do my research with every trip preparation, facilitation, and reflection. Books, notes, and materials all for outdoor adventures stand tall around my desk. I fail forward, succeed forward every moment I am out. When I am back at my desk I plot to do better, offer more, and provide more valuable experiences next time. The work never ends and I will never find the limit.

I am giving myself completely to my work, to the people of the world. I say my purpose of this creative writing project is to share what is possible. I am really sharing what I have witnessed so far. What is possible? I know that I don’t know. I know that I can do whatever I want if I grab hold of the success and never let go. I dream of success and I dream big. Only time will tell of what is possible. Let us go get it.

The purpose of Part 1: Recreation is to show the joy we may experience from outdoor adventures. Two friends and I explore the remote canyons of Lake Powell, Utah by sea kayak simply for the sake of fun and a challenge. We find a refreshment of both our strength and spirit.

The purpose of Part 2: Education is to show how learning brings vitality into life, especially when the subject is hands on and reveals a small part of the infinite intricacies of the amazing puzzle we call nature. I lead a group of thirteen students into the Wind

River Mountains, Wyoming in the fall learning about the sky the whole way.

The purpose of Part 3: Development is to show the immense opportunity for growth and my experience developing my own leadership. I lead a group of twenty five on a weeklong rafting trip through Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River, Utah. For the

14 future I am already making plans to create opportunities like this for others to develop their own leadership.

The purpose of Part 4: Therapy is to show one of the many forms of healing outdoor adventures offers. I leave the city by myself to backpack the Henry Mountains of

Utah and desert canyons below. This story is based on the daily notes I wrote. In this piece I elaborate on parts and reword others. The style is noticeably different because I wrote in a small pocket book, no desk, no keyboard. I kept my recordings brief and to the point. Through this experience I heal spiritually.

Now with every experience in the natural world several, if not all, of these benefits occur. We may have the goal of achieving one, but often experience several.

This is wonderful. It is part of the game. Enjoy.

PART 1: RECREATION

The family leaves me standing lost in the moment. I long to be the customers I just sent away with backpacks, headlamps, a stove, and sleeping bags if only for the weekend. I want to jump and play in the mountain streams with the children. I can join and pick flowers, fry fish, and chat under our Milky Way at night. I can sleep soundly, tired from a day of hiking and route-finding, dreaming of what adventures the dawn light would bring, a bit fearful of what critters and creatures eye my snoring body under the moon.

The mother opens the door and they walk to the parking lot. A young brother and sister learn to use the headlamps. The sister blinds the brother and giggles. I watch the family walk away.

My stuffy collared shirt chokes the enthusiasm out of me. The white lights above zap the twinkle from my eyes. Under my neatly groomed and pulled-back hair my tired face watches customers come and go. There is no shame in staring at this point, the day’s done.

I am the child drooling on the candy store window, the puppy stuck behind the chain-link fence. I would be happier if I didn’t know such sugary treats existed, if such an open field grass with tennis balls to be thrown never existed. To be far away in a world neatly sealed from my desires is one thing, but I am right here touching the means to their joy, renting out toys to be used for their weekend in wonderland. I am paid minimum wage to spoon feed the face of recreation when all I want is to be there and play. My

16 desire is not out of sight. It is not out of mind. I am teased and tortured like an animal with a meaty bone dangling in front of its face supported by a stick from its collar.

Forever just out of reach. Life would be better if what we want has no presence. So close, yet so far.

My title as Outdoor Adventures Shop Tech is misleading. I wear a cruel costume.

They didn’t tell me but there is no outdoor adventure involved in the job. I watch it go and watch it return, letting my withering imagination and lackluster inquiries fill in the blanks. I’m not kidding anyone; I work a desk job, the ugliest place in the world.

Time to process rental contracts. I press ENTER. The clock ticks. I press OPEN.

Tick. REPLY. Tick. SEND. Tick. My hand moves the mouse. The arrow-shaped group of pixels hovers, two dimensionally, over the red X. Tick. My eyes, strained from staring at a lit screen, under artificial light, fixate on the bottom right corner. Tick. 4:59 PM.

Tick. 5:00 PM Friday. SHUT DOWN.

I exhale and with my breath, a piece of my soul leaves as well, forever with the work week that consumes my life.

The closer to the end of the work week, the longer it takes for the weekend to arrive. So it goes. Clocking out is death. The after-life is the commute home. And that joyful moment of stepping away from the vehicle is rebirth. A piece of the body has died and I am reborn. Work, fear, love, and our existence as a whole is a process of living and dying. A longing for refreshment of strength and spirit comes from degradation of body and mind. Ass glued to seat, eyes to screen for eight hours a day, five days a week inspires a re-creation. A routine life of serving customers, taking their credit cards, and

17 handing them a receipt to sign, plants seeds of grand dreams. I dream of foreign cultures and sunshine, where excitement and love wait around each bend in the trail.

A dream flashes across my eyes. I smile. I see myself deep in the mountains, no roads in sight, an imaginary range, with two companions hiking hard. A light snow blows across our bodies. Our noses drip down into our beards, smiles and panting mouths hidden underneath. An intermittent sun lights the way along a knife edge ridge to the tallest point around. We laugh and cry and look down into the snowy valley and beyond at how far we’ve come, how close we’ve become, and how far yet we have to go. The life is beautiful. Vibrant and absolute perfection. The dream flashes across my eyes and is gone.

Working the job is a dream world, the ugliest place on earth.

I breathe and rock on my porch, my attempt at unwinding, but the city fidgets on. I sense an orchestra of anxiety around me. My spirit cries for the final note but the encores continue on, forever. Staccato footsteps, shiny high heels returning to their place of residence, lace the deep roar of over-sized engines. A few birds tweet as the sun lowers to the building tops, but even the tweets are spastic. Food here, fiend there. Twitch, tweet, twitch, tweet. A jackhammer solo. The crescendo of sirens. A peak of loud wailing matched with flashes. A spinning glimpse into red, white, and blue so blinding I am turned off to my country’s colors. I turn away and the smell of cheap, hot, and ready pizza smacks me in the face. It is not alone, burning tobacco enters my nose too. I look to the west and find a blanket of smog dampening the sun’s beauty. The harsh final rays are stifled and turned brown, a touch of orange too. So much so I find myself looking directly

18 at the three quarters of the sun not blocked by a skyscraper. Pacman is alive and in the city. The air, heavy with trapped gunk, allows me to gaze directly into the center of our solar system. My eyes don’t hurt but my soul does.

After a bit of contemplation and conferring with my more optimistic side, still recovering from the work week, I conclude a misdiagnosis is impossible. All signs point one way. I diagnose Salt Lake City with attention deficit disorder. People, police, helicopters, hospitals, and construction. I find no calm. No rhythm and no purpose. To

Salt Lake City I prescribe a heaping dose of solidarity in the wild. Unfortunately the city has no legs. It cannot walk away from its disease.

My two companions for the weekend arrive, sea kayaks on the truck, honking in front of my house. I hop from my chair. We turn our backs on the belching, hurried, anxious, and endlessly-searching-but-never-finding sloths I call my city-brethren. Over and out, I’m gone. At least until Monday when I clock back in.

Chris was raised a Las Vegas car valet boy for a casino and is defined by a fierce ambition that doesn’t quite get the job done. He is an incredibly hard worker who looks tough under his buzzed head. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and currently works seasonally at a tiling business on the big island in Hawaii. He saves money by not wearing underwear and spends it on expensive cologne. While half way up a rock climb I have hit him with a barrage of questions about music theory, history, and modern hip hop beat making. He never fails to answer. He sleeps in a beat making laboratory. Challenge him or invite him on an adventure and he will accept. Always. Unless he is riding a coal

19 train to a family reunion in Denver. Piss him off and he will burn your arm with a red-hot fork.

Bobby slept on a friend’s porch in a bivy bag until they were evicted for a block party titled “Flannels and Handles.” Despite growing up as a Wisconsin ice hockey player Bobby does not look as tough as Chris. I met him, rosy cheeks, big smile under a brown curly beard, on Christmas break, drunk and skating circles around the rest of us at

Salt Lake City’s temple square ice rink. His expedition behavior is top notch. He is a well-oiled cog in any team. He is a happy hippy. Post porch-eviction Bobby found himself sleeping in the boathouse of a river guide service in Jackson, Wyoming, his seasonal gig. Bobby is a dreamer, always spouting wild trip ideas. And he knows Chris and I are just wild enough to say yes to them.

Twenty hours later I paddle my sea kayak in the most beautiful place on earth. I glide through a cobalt sky and feathery cloud-filled heaven. The sheet of cold water I am sitting on is a mirror to what’s above. Below I see sky. Above I see sky. The towers of sandstone cliffs frame it all. Not an animal chirps. There is no breeze, and no plants for it to shake if it did arrive. My ears ache for sound waves to pick up, to interpret and hold on to. A small droplet of water breaks the surface tension securing it to the underside of my paddle. It wobbles in the air as it plunges to the lake’s surface. A faint bloop reverberates inside my head reassuring me I can in fact still hear. The February sun heats the air, the water cools it, and my lungs inhale and exhale time and time again. I find air, like water, is peculiar in that less is more, taste-wise. A breathe of cool air, free of emissions and smoke, is one of the greatest treats. But without terrible there is no great. I shall not ever

20 take it for granted. A drink of water, pouring right of the ground, does wonders. How can something so tasteless be so delicious? I quit worrying and simply enjoy.

A flash of my mind reminds me of all the comfort and certainty I abandoned in the city. The seed of uneasiness sprouts. Day to day I live a safe and cozy existence and now I am experiencing anything but. I escape the hurriedness of life in Salt Lake City in the tributaries of the Escalante River, flooded by Lake Powell, only to find hell emerging in the midst of the cobalt sky and feathery cloud filled heaven. I left the city for relief.

This is not what I find. My companions Chris and Bobby, also in their early twenties, are now just dark specs on the placid water’s horizon. Their kayaks escape mine. My futon mattress on the floor of a six foot tall basement bedroom, my comfortable, cozy home, will take more than a day’s worth of struggle to return to.

It is midwinter, in a remote canyon of Lake Powell. There is no help. We are the backup plan. Endless things can happen to keep me from getting home. Sickness, injury, getting lost, or weather can roll in. My kayak can flip and it can sink or I can drown.

Hypothermia is not unrealistic. I can lose Chris and Bobby, they’re so far away. The uneasiness lurches and continues its growth in my belly.

“Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland

Eskimos are prone. ‘The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. . . . The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were

21 floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking. . . . Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.’ Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families” (Dillard, 22).

The world explodes around me. First I saw the beauty but terror tears it away. My imagination runs wild. The blue above thickens and takes off, light years out of reach.

With it the spindrifts of white blow up and up on a warm front out of our atmosphere into the absence of what is terrestrial. The vertical shores of our Lake Powell bend past vertical and grow over me. The summit of the red walls, scarred white and black from the pounding and evaporation of elements, burst upward. I can no longer see the tops.

The scale becomes too massive to comprehend. With every kayak paddle forward the walls fall away, steeper and more foreign every second. On my map, water-proofed in a

Zip-Lock, I eye our location at the mouth of the flooded Escalante River into Glen

Canyon of Lake Powell. Around me, I have never felt in a more unearthly place. The shores evade me. The shores are vertical and impossible to beach even if I could reach them. I have been abandoned on an ocean’s in Satan’s front yard. The devils poke and laugh from above as I paddle to catch Chris and Bobby who continued to shrink into oblivion. I paddle on clouds. I look down and the water shows the blue and white above.

The surface disappears and sky washes all around me. The horizontal water touching the vertical red of the shore disappears. The reflection of the walls reach down as well. The cliffs rise up over me. The cliffs reach down under me. Satan blinds my eyes with the desert sun as he bends the massive rocks around me. He’s everywhere. He engulfs me and no other life sees. No birds tweet above in disgust. No sage twitches in the wind at

22 my pain. Rodents don’t scamper and hawks don’t dive at my self-induced demise. The desert ocean provides for no organisms.

Throughout my life I have always run to the mountains. I thank the difficulties. I run to the wilderness, the desert of civilization, not necessarily of water. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Because adventure is supposed to be fun? Except our adventure isn’t fun. The drive, the portage, and the day of paddle consisted of immense physical and mental effort. We are paddling so far I repetitively count 1,000 paddles at a time to stay sane.

Finally, that night I found what I had been looking for. A moment of peace.

We lick the crumbs from our plates, the remnants of the pizza, each of us silently sipping from the bottle. The world does not express itself through noise. I try to match the silence. My chews quiet. All night I sit on the beach. The black shore and black cliffs surround the glassy water, reflecting in thin ripples the stars, planets, and the moon in its third quarter.

Back to that afternoon, when I found myself shrinking on Satan’s ocean-side porch. My eyelids drop with the burnt red rock walls. My heart settles with the water ripples from the droplets off the end of my kayak. The world’s expansion, the world’s abandonment of me in my state of mental despair ceases. The tip of my red and orange kayak miles away switches directions of travel and returns. The slick black handle of the paddle held by my cracked palms no longer feels a day’s journey away. I swallow my saliva, nervously, and it slides into my stomach, now only a foot or two from my eyes. My body exists immediately once again. The ten miles of open water, the thousand foot portage

23 over a half mile in the crack of the watching red walls, the fifty miles of off road desert trail, and four hours of intergalactic travel on I-15 becomes a feasible journey of pain and endurance rather than the unattainable distance to the holy grail, to civilization’s comfort.

My universe returns to touching distance.

Again I paddle. My vessel slides forward across the clear liquid. Small waves spread in a V formation behind. I turn my back to the comfort of couches and roofs, refrigerators and light switches, cell phones and music.

I tried to quit early on. Bobby smiled and said no while Chris simply looked in my direction unblinking, jaw clenched. I tried to quit on the entire trip after the three of us moved kayak one of three to the water. It took two hours. My forearms swelled and veins bulged from fatigue. My legs wobbled. We hiked up for kayak two. Calling Hole in the Rock a hike is misleading. The thousand foot cliffs surrounding Lake Powell block all access for a hundred miles except for this point, a slit in the vertical walls that drops all one thousand vertical feet in half of a mile. Climbing is more fitting. The majority of the way I needed my hands. At times I used one hand to grip the wall next to my face, one foot to press myself away from a house sized boulder into the wall, and my other hand to dangle the kayak below my legs and lower it ten, twelve feet to a partner below.

Others times I had to use both hands to lower myself into a tunnel below a boulder thirty feet wide caught in the skinny canyon then reach back up and drag the fully loaded kayak down after me.

But who am I to complain? The Mormons didn’t quit. They were humans no better than I. A party of three hundred missionaries first descended Hole in the Rock in

24 the 1800’s. With iron will and infallible faith they took their orders from God. They ventured east from St. George across the Colorado River to begin a new town on the San

Juan River for the Latter Day Saints. Two hours and I wanted to quit. These people, two hundred years ago, spent six weeks on the Hole in the Rock, six months before they settled. What it must have been like to be on a mission, hell-bent for success, is unimaginable. Failure was not an option for them. Failure ensured them a spot in the inferno underneath the red rock. They were close enough. Eternal life alone in a fiery desert; thirsty, tired, hungry, lonely, but never dead. And that is what I felt: the pull of quitting, the pull of the desert devil. They did not have the luxury I did of quitting. I am spoiled rotten. They blasted the crack with dynamite wide enough to lower their sixty wagons by rope, wheels locked, and supplies strapped down. At other parts they lowered wooden barrels holding a person to scout the next obstacle or place more dynamite

(Kelsey, 162-64).

Even after their destruction of the canyon for their wagons, it remains just as steep, only a bit wider in sections. Erosion of the walls has filled in some of the more mellow areas with piles of stones, massive and miniscule alike.

The Mormons took their orders and made their way down the Hole in the Rock to the heart of the desert. Such a place, must have said to them, you will all die. How did they expect to escape? They took their entire lives’ into the unknown. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. Friends. Partners.

The future held no certainty for these brave people. Each night as they spooned the last morsel of bacon and beans in their mouths they looked at their partners and silently pondered their fate. With the Hole in the Rock to their back and the enormous Colorado

River in front they were trapped. There was no option of traversing the shoreline. Their small beach turned to cliffs yielding only a small bit of rocky slope. But where would that lead? Nowhere. No development existed on the river in those days. Their only option was forward. Backward up the Hole on the Rock may have been feasible on foot but not by wagon. The wagons were lowered knowing they’d never return. But after that lay the barren trek back to the St. George settlement, over 200 miles of rough desert. A long shot by foot.

Deep into our exploration of the Escalante canyon, we spin circles at the end of a crack two miles deep. The three of us silently venture in. It narrows. It deepens. The dropping sun only lights the very tops of the walls. Earlier it reflected on the water itself and danced on amphitheateresque overhangs. We only have glimpses of the highest walls. The further in we paddle the more the rock above leans back and forth over us, a vertical serpentine of air. The sky above becomes a rarity. Our world consists of deep blue water and rock. The rock walls moves back with our paddles, our bodies stay still.

It stretches itself in wide skinny layers, like settling fluids that never fixed.

A streak of purple and brown shoots from high up by the rim down and back below the surface of the water. I imagine it continues down to the floor of the saturated sand and below into the earth until that layer of geology ceases to exist and leads to an earlier point in time settled in rock. The other side of the canyon reflects the streak.

Before millions of years of water eroded the rock between away, they must have been connected.

Eternity is nothing. Stone is not forever. How evil a trick, to tear apart and push away what is tied together for all of time. Guarantees are a lie. Humans’ future on Earth is the same as the layer of rock. Each birth ends in death. Each construction ends in demolition. But each ending yields to the new, the unknown. And adventure is the unknown.

I float past my friends into the canyon only twenty feet wide. I turn a corner to the left under a massive patch of silver stone speckled with yellow and orange. Above, the walls almost touch, they long for each other. A small chock-stone could bridge the gap. It could wedge between the walls, forever separate but for the moment in time so excruciatingly close. I take two strokes and glide underneath my lower body one with my orange and yellow kayak. I twist my hips and the kayak tilts. It is my lower half. The scene darkens and my heart beat quickens. Nothing is certain. What lays ahead, my return, our return, what exists upon our return? The certainty in my life makes me scared and pathetic. I want to be hard and embrace the unknown. The certainty that comes with life in the city weakens me. The expected, the monotony, the boredom.

I push on through a turn to the right and a long curve to the left, the end of our passage. We reach the desert canyon’s cul de sac, a circle at the end of the canyon with a diameter of thirty feet. The canyon continues to the left but blocks us by a ledge twenty feet tall. Through the ledge a small trickle has carved a flute to the water. An intermittent waterfall, about the flow of a shower in a bathroom. The water free falls off the highest ledge and relentlessly pounds the black and orange stone below it. This carves a bowl that spirals out to one side letting the water continue its cascade down to our level. Curtains of moss and algae hang from each side waving just the slightest from

27 stray splashes of water. Is this a sustained stream? If so, it’s a rarity in the desert. A spring? Does it have a season? Above still no sky but the walls close in around our bubble of life. But we know the light from the sun still shines because it illuminates the overhanging wall to the east.

A brilliant display of white hits the tall wall of rock, a pale red and pink turned heavenly. The circle of light narrows as it approaches the water. Only a point touches.

One at a time, as we enter the Cathedral, we pause at the meeting of lit red rock sandstone and placid blue water. The point where light, water, and stone meet. We raise our eyes into the last of the blinding light from beyond and continue around the circle for our drink of fresh cascading water. We exit the room. The light into the Cathedral in the Desert fades, the sunlight shrinks and disappears. Darkness prevails and the trickle echoes on.

They stood on the shore of the west’s wildest river. Return impossible. Faith in a new home lay ahead. Could they make it? Somewhere? Anywhere?

Waves break against the side of my kayak splashing my face. My eyes dry from the strain in the night. I only see the headlamps of Bobby and Chris or the stars and slightly darker cliffs on the horizon. Focusing on both proves to be impossible. I paddle to make progress just as much to keep balance in the rough water. Another stroke, another point of security in my wobbly vessel, my awkward lower half. We have a decent understanding of how to maneuver the openings and channels of the flooded Escalante

River to return to camp, but night navigation is new to each of us. A new black horizon rises up above to tell us a bend approaches.

Why is civilization comfortable? The city fluffs the pillow under my head at night. It warms the water splashed on my face each morning. Paves roads to buildings that sell food. Entertains with movies and recliners. The comforts are matched with horrors. But we don’t see it. An increased difficulty for internal reflection. The ease of having food delivered to our front doors. The ease of paying for the food with a plastic card. The instant satisfaction of the grease, sugar, and salt. We always miss out. There is always too much to do. The top never nears. I never sit, never think, only run every day. I never struggle. The challenge is not real.

I return from adventure, my home always new. The walls more real, the truth, my love more defined. My body and mind free of clouds like the red rock under an unobstructed blazing desert sun.

“The crust’s burning,” Bobby tells me, “Spin the fry bake.”

“Got it, got it,” I say trailing off. I tighten my mouth so saliva won’t drip out.

Chris stares, straight face. The flickers of the stove flames cast shadows around his cheek bones. He looked gaunt. Paired with his shaved head and pale skin, he looks malnourished, starving.

“This beats the hell out of DiGiornos,” Chris mutters.

The aroma of sweet and salty butter fried bread wafts into our huddled noses.

Mozzarella cheese drips off the sides of the bread sizzling, a noise louder than the small roar of the burning white gas. The cold, dry air hardens my fingertips. The scrutiny of the baking pizza tires my eyes more after our night kayak.

The black of the night covers our backs.

“Drink more whiskey, maybe you’ll cook faster.” Bobby pokes me in the side with a dark green bottle. He giggles under shoulder length greasy blonde hair and facial hair. Our noises are lost in the night. I smile. I find the calm in the middle of nowhere.

PART 2: EDUCATION

Light is white. Our sunlight is not. I point and twelve heads bend up, pushing their large backpacks back. What do we see? Is what we see a weekend’s trek into the Wind river

Mountains of Wyoming the same as what we see in Salt Lake City? Elevation, smog, a difference in horizon. It all must play a role.

Look up. Let us play the game of what ifs. What if our sun was a different star, a hotter star like Altair or Sirius? Then, our sun would burn white, not yellow. What if our eyes were equally sensitive to all light? Violets would not fade into indigo and blue. Just for a moment take these variables and set them aside. Pretend with me for just a minute our sun’s light is perfectly white, not yellow, and our eyes are equally sensitive to all frequencies of light. Our sun is white. Our eyes are not prejudice. This scenario creates a perfect learning opportunity for why our sky is the color it is. If our sun is white and our eyes are equally sensitive to all visible light wave frequencies our world would be different. In space, the sun would be white, everything next to it black. A perfect contrast, perfect brightness in the midst of perfect darkness, no color. Absolute black and white.

Even through my imagination I am craving a color, a difference in such a simple vision.

Now, in our perfect world, move closer to Earth and let us keep the atmosphere the same, still mostly made of the small particles nitrogen and oxygen. Up in the world’s highest mountains, where the atmosphere is relatively thin, we look up at the sky. The sun is a blinding mixture of yellow and green, as if a lime is illuminated from the inside

31 by stadium lighting. The sky next to the sun is a dark violet. Let me explain. Remember grade school physics? The color spectrum from long wave length and low frequency to short wave length and high frequency goes Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo,

Violet. ROYGBIV. If we are in space, outside our atmosphere, there are no particles between our eye and the sun. The sun, in this scenario, is white, an equal combination of all seven colors. It is white and bright to our eye. Nothing changes the direction of the waves between the sun and our eye. No wave is absorbed and reemitted in a different direction. Either the light waves enter our eye, together as white, or they pass us.

Brows furrow and faces contort. This information enters one ear and exits another. Too much to chew. Too large of a bite. It is theoretical not experiential. Nothing to grasp on to. We let it go and hike on. The vegetation is still sparse but the forests are in sight. The grasses dry. The dust billows with each footstep under the weight of our weekend provisions. The granite peaks and summit plateaus rise above with sprinkles of snowpack shimmering far above through the heat around us. It oddly reminds me of the growing patches of moisture on my shirt, except I cannot smell the far away snow. The cloth around my armpits and back enter a tidal cycle of saturation and evaporation. An odor of effort, the cycle of sodium washing and replenishing. With each recession of the furthest reaches of sweat, a white residue of salt is left, like a high effort mark. My thumb inches along our route on the map. One bit at a time our location moves away from the trailhead into the highest hills. Our destination: Ross Lake. None of us have been there but friends speak highly of the expansive alpine lake. It sits, deep and cold blue, around

10,000 feet, flanked on one side by a steep forest and rocky shore, the other by vertical white walls of granite rising a thousand feet toward the sun.

On the highest peaks of our planet sunlight must travel through the atmosphere to reach us and our eyes, whether hidden behind dark lenses or quickly on their way to snow blindness, out in the elements. The atmosphere’s thickness from the top of Mt. Everest compared to the Dead Sea of Jordan/Israel, 29,029 feet above sea level to 1,360 feet below sea level, 30,389 feet is quite substantial relative to the overall atmosphere’s thickness. The mesosphere, 260,000 to 280,000 feet is the layer in our atmosphere where only the highest clouds exist, noctilucent clouds, visible up to two hours after sunset and up to two hours before sunrise. Meteors burn up in this layer. This layer is the coldest place on Earth, averaging negative 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Here the atmospheric pressure is less than 1/1000th of that at sea level. Just below the mesosphere is the ozone layer. Not even jets can fly here. Above this there are virtually no particles in the atmosphere and those that do exist, such a bit of oxygen, travel on average almost a mile before colliding with another molecule (Layers).

Above the top of Mt. Everest the density of the atmosphere declines exponentially, and with it the scattering of sunlight. At the lowest place on Earth where we can stand, sea level and below, much more air is between our eye and space then the sun. A lot more molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and many more opportunities for absorption and reemission in other directions. These molecules are small, similar to the smaller of the visible light frequencies, blue indigo and violet. Because of the similarity of size, the colors of visible light closer to the shorter wave length end of the spectrum hit the molecules nitrogen and oxygen much more than the colors with larger wave lengths.

Colors such as blue, indigo, and violet are scattered more than the colors red, orange, and

33 yellow. In order of most scattered to least scattered: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.

Too much too fast? I struggle sharing my excitement for the science we see in nature. Actually, we have not even seen the science I am trying to share. I created an unrealistic world where the unique intricacies of nature are nonexistent. But only to expedite understanding! Oh, what a loss. The simplest question and the simplest is answer so far away. Why is the sky blue? Let me begin with a make-believe universe.

Where really to start? Where can we begin that immediately connects even two dots?

Where can we begin that grabs hold of the interest of the students, draws oohs, ahhs, wows, and whoas from their mouths, yet still hold truth in it? The truth is not simple.

Why is the sky blue? It shouldn’t be! With a perfect eye and perfectly white sun it is bright violet! I salvage my rambling with the direction of imagination.

Imagine we have amazing vision. Vision beyond that of even an eagle. We can see the white light waves of the sun, traveling at a blistering 186,000 miles per second.

The reds and oranges have the longer wave length and shorter frequency. Yellow, green, and blue have medium length and frequency. Indigo and violet have the shortest length and highest frequency. We see them all separately but together they are white light. The light waves are zooming towards Earth through the great absence we call space. They are one, each equal in intensity. Then, the first collision. Violets smash into the smallest particles of our sky, our atmosphere. They bounce in every direction. Back towards the sun, their origin, a sphere of violet flies outward, some violet even continues with the other waves that are larger and avoided the particles. As a group, the light continues towards Earth as direct radiation. This is the first point where the scattered violet colors

34 the sky. From this high up, at the summits of the world’s highest peaks, the sky should appear dark violet. Lower at a more common elevation, say 10,000 feet, the height our group is approaching, more of the shorter length colors hit particles and are scattered. A lot of violet. Some indigo. A little blue. These scatterings from the sky reach our eye. By my explanation we should see a bright indigo above us, but despite our strongest hopes only a bright blue prevails.

On the trail a student steps aside to wait for me. They tell me they do not see a purple sky. Are we all color blind? No, the student remembers the two variables we experience in our imperfect world. Our sun is yellow-intense and our eyes are less sensitive to the shortest of color wave lengths. Why didn’t I start with that? I did. That means what we see differs from the imaginary perfect world only in a shift away from purple towards yellow. What is between violet and yellow? Blue! The beautiful powder blue we all see every day and less and less ask why this blue is in between violet and yellow. The student smiles, eyes wide. Her pack looks lighter. She looks at me, up at the other part of the sky. I made it so complicated.

We rest. In a clearing away from the trail we drink water, snack, and lounge amongst the boulders and vegetation letting the alpine breeze ruffle the parts of our shirts not saturated in sweat. The blowing air smells free. Free of contaminants. Free of any desire, ready to be drawn toward a lack of atmospheric pressure. I tape one student’s heel, over a hot spot to prevent a blister. Another student approaches me, admitting he tried to tough out a hot spot on his heel. I pull his thick wool sock down. The blister is revealed.

My warnings and offerings of tape did no good for this one. I lightly poke the outer layer of skin, the epidermis. This layer protects the thicker part of the skin from infection and

35 form drying out. The thicker part of the skin, under the epidermis and over the subcutaneous fatty tissue, muscle, and bone, is called the dermis. The dermis is the skin under the protective layer. The dermis is home to the roots of hair, sweat pores, nerves, and capillaries.

Friction, moisture, and heat cause blisters. In this student’s case it appears his thick wool socks plus a warm environment and sweat led to warmth and moisture. That paired with the rubbing of his heal against the back of his boot, likely not broken in or tied too tight, resulted in the nice large bubble of fluid. This fluid built up when the previously mentioned factors began to separate the epidermis from the dermis. Fluid and swelling is nature’s splint. The purpose is to immobilize the swollen area in a way that allows use without movement, more often in the case of musculoskeletal injuries. But healing is hindered by the fluid-filled environment. The fluid does not promote healing, only immobilization.

So, I relieve the pressure of fluid by the prick of a clean needle. I clean the wound and apply and antibiotic ointment. I stick a doughnut-shaped piece of moleskin around the sensitive area and roll up the sock. Let us continue, the group is ready to move under the blue sky. A handful of small cumulus clouds build in the distance. There is little threat of a storm because our sighting of them is past morning and they are too shallow to produce rain. It is late enough and cool enough in the afternoon that they will not continue into cumulonimbus, or thunderheads. In fact they are scarce and shallow enough to suggest a calm clear night ahead (Ludlum, 464-65).

This sky is black, though. I like to think of this black sky as just the same as the daytime sky. No one stood up on a ladder and unhooked the tapestry will call daytime

36 and replaced it with nighttime. Everything we see at night is there during the day. When

I look at the sky during the day my imagination takes off. I imagine the constellations and planets, the shooting stars and far away reaches of our Milky Way. I even pretend to see the satellites circling us. I do see the moon. And that reminds me there is a similarity between the two times. The moon is the warrior that no one can remove. Circling us once a month, it shows up despite the sun and can even tease us with a moonrise in the middle of the night. I doubt many people notice that a full moon rises at sunset and a new moon rises at sunrise. There is a logical continuum of the pattern that fills in between.

We reach the lake, finally. The last miles dragged on.

The sunset is red, pink, and orange. Why? The pieces fit together. At a different angle the light travels through more atmosphere scattering more and more light until the sun sets and all of the light is scattered.

We cook dinner: rice and beans in tortillas with vegetables. In a circle we let the food settle, our bodies rest, and our minds wander.

I share the legend of the green ray. Around the fire with a person who has spent many nights under the sky, talk often seems to turn to the wonders of the world. Light is a popular theme, likely inspired by the dancing orange nipping at the hardened fingers around it, illuminating gray hair and wrinkled faces. The aurora borealis. Mirages.

Shooting stars. Comets. Asteroids. Meteors. And the elusive green ray.

“In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open” (Dillard, 17).

The moon, tonight, hasn’t risen so the horizon is black. All we see is a window of outer space. A planet shines above, almost out of sight. We know it is a planet because it travels in roughly the same path as the moon, the sun, and all other planets. All of these things in our solar system are in the same plane. We call it the elliptic. It makes so much sense! I see the solar system sideways spinning around me. I visualize it from afar as one larger disk with inner disks spinning at different speeds represented by different planets and moons and the sun. I don’t know what planet it is. It is dark and I don’t want to turn a light on to read what planet or planets are visible at this time of year at this time of night.

The planet doesn’t twinkle like a star. Because it is close, the rays of light come from slightly different angles. The rays of light are actually reflections of the suns light.

A light that never turns off. At least we probably won’t be around when the switch is flipped. What a sight. What stage is our sun in? What comes after this stage? Isn’t it a brilliant light show of fire and heat followed by its demise? Its end of light and burning fuel. The tank will run out.

A co-leader once told me he watched a star flash, brighten, and disappear.

Everything changes.

Everything dies.

Because the rays of light reflected off the planets come from several different points towards my eye the wavering in the light is filled in by the neighboring rays of light. Stars, aside from our sun, on the other hand are much further away, outside our solar system. They are so far away that their light seems to come from one single point.

Because of this there are not enough rays of light coming from far enough distance apart

38 to cancel their shimmers. But as planets send their light from a measurable width the light waves join and create an object for our eyes to see.

I notice this too when I look down on a city at night from the top of a hill. The lights of buildings and cars and street lamps shimmer to my eyes. All across Salt Lake

Valley, light wavers to me. Is the source of the light so minuscule compared to my distance that it is not wide enough to cancel out its shimmers? At first I didn’t think so.

But I continued to sit on the hill at night. I came back another night not too long after. I watched the lights of the skyscapers dance. They danced in place, I almost thought someone was flipping the switch on and off. But to the entire city? No. But compared to stars and planets? Maybe I greatly underestimated the difference in distance between the planets in our solar system and the other stars in our galaxy. The planets look very similar to stars. But they are simply reflecting the light from the sun, which that may be a cause for their relatively solid light. The stars are other suns so far away that their light matches the like of our sun reflecting off of planets. So the light from the city must be coming from a point incredibly tiny compared to my distance from them. The filament in a bulb is small now that I think about it. I know our sun is absolutely massive and still very far from us. This thought opened my mind to how far the stars must be to be so bright yet so small and only visible in the night sky.

A student says they have never seen the sky from an outside perspective. Our solar system finally makes sense from this point of view.

The night is young and we are free of the weight of our packs, lying in the grass in a circle. Our heads almost touch and we all look up at the night sky.

I am about to take us from the Milky Way Galaxy into the Andromeda Galaxy.

We live on Planet Earth and Earth is in the Milky Way. Andromeda is our closest neighbor. It is the furthest visible object we can see with our naked eye. When we are far away from the city, far away from light pollution, such as here in the mountains or desert, we see back into time. People thousands of years ago must have looked deep into the heavens like this regularly. Several thousand visible stars of every magnitude and distance twinkle overhead.

First, we look north. We know it is north because we remember which direction the sun set and turn a bit more than 90 degrees clockwise. We pick out the Big Dipper, part of a larger constellation called Ursa Major, the Big Bear. The far end of the Big

Dipper, the end of the scoop, is made of two stars pointing to Polaris. Polaris is about three fist widths away and is the North Star. It is also at the handle of the Little Dipper, part of Ursa Minor. At the start of autumn, when evening falls, the Little Dipper is almost upside down. Legend has it, it is upside down because it is pouring the beautiful gold, orange, and red colors across our landscape.

We follow the arc of the pointers to Polaris and then another three fist widths to

Cassiopia, in the heart of what we see as our Milky Way. Cassiopia is a pattern of stars shaped like a woman. She is a Greek Goddess, boasting to all who listen she is prettier than all of the sea nymphs. This enrages Neptune, the God of the sea. He takes revenge by chaining Cassiopia’s daughter Andromeda to a rock by the rising sea.

Another three fist widths leads us to the Great Square, the body of Pegasus. Take the lower two most horizontal stars (early evening in mid-October) and go down towards the horizon from the left star an equal distance as a side of Pegasus’s body. We find a star

40 of medium brightness. This star is of no significance when we look up into the sky without our points of reference. No striking color. No outstanding brightness. No cluster of bright, close neighbors. But, this star is the knee of the back leg of Pegasus.

To the left, to the west, just a just one finger width, is the front knee of Pegasus. It is even less bright than the back knee. Another equal distance to the left, still to the west, is an even less bight star. It is barely visible even in the darkest sky. But it is not so faint that when we look at it on a vibrant night that it disappears. I learned that the faintest of light disappears when we look directly at it. Our peripheral vision is more sensitive to light than our direct vision, even if just barely. But that hasn’t mattered yet.

Finally, only a third of a finger width to the left, to the west, of this faint star is a light. This light is so faint that we have to keep our vision on the small star to the right in order to see it. This light is also not one spec. It is a dull haze. We cannot tell but it is a spiral of incredibly dim lights. This minuscule, dull cluster is another galaxy. It is the

Andromeda Galaxy.

We lay with our hair on the ground, billions of broken pieces of decaying vegetation and rocks, tiny and soft beneath us and look up into another galaxy. Another collection of stars, planets, and solar systems. This faint light, so dull we only see it when looking next to it is actually billions of stars amidst dust and gas, just as violently bright as our sun. Yet these fiery giants together look smaller to us than the grains of sand we are laying in.

Another galaxy. With our naked eye. This immense distance the light covers to reach us we cannot comprehend. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy has been travelling for 2.2 million years at 186,000 miles per second to reach us. 2.2 million years.

186,000 miles per second. We are looking more than 2 million years back in time. Back then, the first genus Homo are appearing in Earth’s fossil record. Our own sun’s light takes seven or eight minutes to reach us. Maybe an hour when reflecting off planets. I don’t know. Even light travelling for a small measurable period of time seems absurd.

But another galaxy? Billions of other stars creating an area of light so small and pale in the dark sky all other stars in our galaxy trump it. When I look at it, it disappears.

Another galaxy.

We close our eyes to our own world of planets and stars and darkness attempting to comprehend. We wonder at the world around us. We are in awe of our universe.

Fireworks light up our mind and we want more.

PART 3: DEVELOPMENT

Maturity and adulthood. I spread my wings and fly like the diurnal bird of prey, the daytime raptor. A hooked bill and hooked claws. The Hawk Family is called Family

Accipitridae by those who converse in the scientific language. The juvenile bald eagle is mostly dark with thin white linings in the wings. It has yet to molt white on the underwings, body, tail, and head. Four hundred feet above the placid Colorado River, the immense width of the water makes its slow movement downstream, indistinguishable; the immature eagle rests in an alcove next to an adult. Their nest is just shy of the wingspan of the adult, six feet. The massive bill of the elder is yellow speckled with carrion. The juvenile's is clean and dark, it has yet to lighten with age and yet to make its own kill.

But today it grows up (Halfpenny, 106).

Below, the riparian habitat along the shore of the water is lush and full of life.

The muddy water is home to several fish: the Colorado squawfish, the humpback chub, the bonytail, and the razorback sucker (Valdez, 5). The sand above the shore, above the high water line, is crusted with cryptobiotic soil creating a ground for desert plants.

Prickly pear and primrose, and a small genus of aster are common findings. Critters and snakes scuttle and slither about. Scorpions make their appearance when darkness falls.

The introduced tamarisk, along with the introduced beetle to kill it, and canyon cottonwoods are just some of modern man’s mark. Junipers speckle the hillside. Fish,

43 injured waterfowl, and carrion are the meals the juvenile has been taught to hunt for. The desert Canyonlands is far from desolate.

The bird steps to the edge of the sandstone, unaware of its meaning to humans. It is unaware is has many names. The scientific name: Haliaeetus leucocephalus. The common translation: sea eagle white head. The native name: the messenger, carrying our prayers to the creator and leaving feathers to aid in healing. By native lore, Eagle reminds us “to keep in our minds and hearts what is important in life” (Horn Man, 12). It is also unaware of its current national symbol in the United States but this birds ancestors’ likely had some awareness of its standing as vermin, to be shot on sight, for the last two centuries of American history. But the eagle is not as damaging a predator as the image it once had. The salmon it eats is mostly spawn-out carcasses. The lamb it eats are afterbirths and stillborns. Most of its food is scavenged or robbed from other birds

(Mathews, 419).

The rock ledge rolls down to a vertical then overhanging face of solid Entrada

Sandstone, pink and tan. A hundred feet below is the Carmel Formation a loose slope of crumbling orange stone. Just above the banks of this stretch of the river stands the Page

Sandstone, vertical and yellow. The black talons scratch the surface and push off in unison with the bird’s great wings. A couple flaps and it soars, wings held flat, fully extended and tail fanned. The wings from underneath are a splattering of black grey and tan. Soon they will darken and grow to a black feathered wingspan of seven or eight feet, if it can find food to live on. The soar turns to a glide, the wings are pulled slightly back and the tail folds. The adult watches from the alcove. Vision for eagle is wonderful.

One can spot a fish or rotting meal a thousand feet above. The adult watches the juvenile

44 investigate. It too will have remnants of a meal on its bill. May it live on to see the day its bill turns gold and filled with meat from the river (Peterson, 419).

Our eagle is the sign of potency, healing, power, and illumination. “A spectacular courtship ‘dance’ of bald eagles is well known: the male dive-bombs the female in midair, she rolls over to meet him, they lock talons and plummet earthward, breaking out of their death-taunting embrace at the last possible instant. Juvenile bald eagles engage in every kind of courtship behavior short of mating, which waits for the fifth or sixth winter” (419, Mathews). The opportunity to observe an eagle is special. Eagles are known to abandon nests after humans come too close. They need freedom from humans in order to safely carry on their species. “If Eagle has blessed you with its presence in some way, you are being given potent gifts of clarity and vision to use for the good of all people. You can bring forth the light out of the darkness” (Horn Man, 12).

I identify the raptor above as an eagle by its flat wings. The turkey vulture is a similar size but shows a dihedral in its wings while soaring. The osprey is also a similar size but with a kink in the front of each wing. Twenty four people look to me as I shut off the motor and point to the national bird of the United States. I too am spreading my wings for my first major steps into adulthood. “When I see this way I see truly. . . . I return to my senses” (Dillard, 32). I am the lead coordinator for a seven day whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado River. We started two days ago fifty miles upriver just south of

Moab, Utah. Our craft, seven fully load sixteen-foot long rafts, all strapped together with a two stroke motor on the back is just emerging from upper Cataract Canyon at the

Confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River. We are entering Cataract Canyon

45 proper. We still have fifty miles to go before our takeout at the Dirty Devil River on

Lake Powell. In those fifty miles are twenty miles of some of the largest, most dangerous rapids in the country. The waves flip boats and swallow people. Even with life jackets one’s emergence from deep in the smashing waves is never guaranteed. I’d been down the river once before and had led a few small rafting trips but never an adventure of this length, consequence, or group size. Twenty five people are difficult to manage for an hour in a controlled classroom while trying to teach. Twenty five people on a week break from a hellish semester of college following summer, adrenaline pumping, with attention spans of squirrels, and always too much to say is another story. Class is not dismissed until everyone is back in town, but return is not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that they didn’t read what they signed. They signed their life away. My assistant leaders and

I are not guides. We are cooperative leaders where participation is optional and responsibility is spread through the group.

My heart beats hard as I scan the rapid named Satan’s Gut for some sort of safe passage for my raft. But safety is relative. Twenty two numbered rapids are now behind us. The final and largest one is before us. I’m worried about getting the participants to the take out. The unharnessed river rushes down the squeeze of massive boulders; its roar makes the scout difficult. The right side is a guaranteed roller coaster slamming rocks and trying to square up to lateral waves from each side. A swimmer there would take a beating. And a flipped or pinned raft seems all too likely.

Take the safe route, be conservative. It is all mind control. Live long and contribute to society. Mitigate risks. We see it everywhere. Yet, why in the hell did I

46 get myself in the situation? I have put not only myself in a dangerous situation but twenty four other human beings. Water tears apart boats, people, and lives.

The water flowing before us is a distant and slow collection of runoff and spring water. A dripping glacier in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. The faucet-like flow of a seep high in the canyons of the desert. All across the Colorado Plateau drops of water fall downward from melting snow and springs. It carries sediment turning the water brown. Water scrapes the earth on each side of its flow. Rocks and sand, trees and soil come tumbling into the water. The canyon narrows and the walls rise up. The grade steepens and the water flows faster. Carcasses of long dead tree trunks taken from far upstream dot the rocky shores. The river is wild. Nothing harnesses it here besides the

Flaming Gorge dam on the Green River six hundred river miles in the northeast corner of

Utah.

I pick my line and mimic the path I want my boat to take. I raise my hand and pretend it is floating down the water. I know the view from above at the scout is much different than when I’m in the water, people sitting in front of me and all the features of the rapid are hidden. There is one way to the takeout, to the safety of our party, and that is straight through Satan’s Gut. I visualize pointing my bow river left, my stern just missing the shark tooth boulder in the middle of the river to my backside. Two long and solid backstrokes will put me floating down and to the right down the frothing madness. I will miss Big Mossy on the left. I will miss the series of pour overs and angled holes to the right. Either would be nearly impossible to keep the boat squared up to the waves let alone right side up. Big Mossy is the rock iceberg that just shows its hulking round and

47 black body. Only a thin sheet of water flows over it. Curtains of dark green moss dangle in the current. On the downstream side the water crashes down and down and fills in the bottomless hole in the river behind it. On each side the water twists violently sucking anything around under the surface. It doesn’t let go. It is a recirculating hydraulic waiting to tear apart what comes its way over and over. Even a path just left of the rough water in the middle will end in the crashing power of Big Mossy.

To the right of my chosen line, the major flow of the rivers drags everything right and down and cascading series of waves and holes curling over and dropping off straight ahead, to the left, and to the right. A line to the right would be a rodeo of squaring up and high siding to keep the rubber right side up.

Fear for the safety of the people in my boat, the other captains and their passengers knocks me in the stomach. I have to shit. Vomit too. I have to move away from the observatory of future disaster. I have to find comfort away from it all. But I know there is one way down, through the rapid. The brown current never ceases to roar.

It yells to me.

I’m stuck between the cries for comfort, for peace of mind, the happy life and adventure!

When safe, warm, dry, and well fed, something is absent. My life is incomplete. My meaning extends beyond survival. It is to thrive. To leap into the unknown and emerge on the other side. I emerge time and time again a new person. I learn how I react to threats. I grow and harden. I discover and rediscover my person. I take others with me.

I drag them past their comfort zone. I place myself in a role of responsibility. Their life

48 support. Their crutch. Their provider of the greater good. In the unknown we become are ordinary selves, the people of provision for everything.

Risk is not a point though. It is a two dimension spectrum. Likelihood of occurrence sits on the x-axis. Consequence of occurrence stands on the y-axis.

Low likelihood of occurrence and low consequence of occurrence.

Low likelihood of occurrence and high consequence of occurrence.

High likelihood of occurrence and low consequence of occurrence.

High likelihood of occurrence and high consequence of occurrence (Kosseff,

134).

But I create a z-axis, reward. I break it down beyond risk and reward. I say likelihood of occurrence, consequence of occurrence, and reward all play into the game.

All three must be balanced and weighed fairly. But, as likelihood and consequence increase, I must do more to control it. In the end we must get home. I am leading for a reason. Except we did not venture all the way out here for no excitement just to return to the city. There must be a way I can maintain a level of perceived risk to increase the reward while mitigating the real risk.

All forty eight eyes, wide open under sandy and tightly strapped river helmets and above wet type five PFDs, turn to me. My co-leaders wonder what the call is, what line? What order? My participants ask is it safe to run? Should they walk around? What is a portage?

The desert cracks my fingers and fills them with sand. It overheats me and then chills me to the bone with its frigid waves. The Colorado River is its own independent entity. It doesn’t confer with the Columbia before consuming its tributaries and eroding its walls. John Wesley Powell, the captain of the first party to run and explore the

Colorado and its tributaries didn’t double check with anyone before pressing onwards.

His party committed and acted.

All party members looked to me because I am leading the trip. Indecision be damned. I own the trip. I am confident. I planned the itinerary. I knew which waves on what day to scout. Rapid 10, day five, scout from river right. Three big waves down the middle. Only the third curls into a recirculating hole. Wave one and two flow to the left missing the meat of number three. Rapid 20, day five, scout from the island in the middle. At a flow of 7,000 cubic feet per second the current allows our party to beach on the island and walk to the front of it to scout the rapid on the right. The river on the left of the island is too strewn with boulders to run at this level. Always require PFDs to be worn on scouts. People are excited, distracted, anxious and can slip into the water and down in the waves. Also, always bring a throw rope for the same reason. One old river rat always brings a personal groover to scouts for when the fear really hit. Rapid 20, run down the middle nose to the left pulling back to swing into the wave train missing the boat eating hole on the left and just skimming the two sharp boulders on the right.

Always point your nose towards the greatest danger, your backstroke is the most powerful.

Three scouts on day six. Big Drop 1: run the middle-right. The river will take us right. Run with it. Point the nose down and to the right square up to the waves. A back

50 stroke into the waves isn’t needed, just forward pushing. Most importantly get momentum away from the rocks and holes on river left. A run over there is carnage.

Likely a pinned raft and swimmers. Big Drop 2: river right is home of Little Niagara.

The flow isn’t too high so the feature isn’t active. A boulder, like an upturned van, points out and up downstream. In a season with higher flow the water rushes up the flat ramp of the rock and plummets back to earth behind it. The free falling water would be airborne for a height greater than the length of our rafts. People die when they run it, bodies never found. At our river flow the water rushes halfway up and pours over each side, still a substantial drop curling into the hole behind it. The level drops five feet about instantly from above to below the rock. Our run is river left. Let the river take the boat, float right of the rapid defining boulder in the center. Point left and pull back to avoid the rocky shore and sleeper rocks just waiting to cause a flip. Square up to the wave train and occasional laterals and we’re home free until Big Drop 3, Satan’s Gut.

Satan’s Gut, once again, is a scout from river left. The final scout. The blood will be pumping. Don’t let our guard down yet. This is the biggest, the baddest. This is the steepest rapid. From above heading towards it the waves will be invisible. You will only see the fast flat water gaining small and smooth waves before it disappears between a few massive rocks. The only water visible after that is the churning aftermath. All else, all that will allow passage or create tragedy is hidden in the steep gradient. The line to hit is two boats’ lengths from the left shore. In between the line and the shore is Satan’s Gut, a pour over on Big Mossy. No boat could make it past that. Pull too hard to the left and a series of sleepers and holes will send the boat downstream like a ping pong ball. It will smash rocks, get rocked on big curlers and send its riders flying. Hit the smooth water

51 flowing fast at the top going down and to the right. We call it the tongue. On Big Drop 3 the sweet spot is a boat’s length wide. Square up just before passing Big Mossy and ride it out punch each wave to come your way.

I own this trip. Not the river, it is wild. I planned this trip inside and out, from the trip cost per person to the number of rafts and trucks to the rations of daily coffee grounds. There is still no guarantee. I prepared to brief the crew on the rapids, the read and runs and the scouts both. I recruited my team of leaders. We signed participants up told them what they were in for. I delegate to the leaders and we lead the participants. I am leading this trip.

For the first time in my life all eyes turn to me and no one stands at my side to walk me through. I stand where Major Powell stood. I look to him. One hundred and forty five years ago Major Powell, one armed and bearded also scouted Big Drop 3, then unnamed with fear clawing in his stomach. He did not know river what lay ahead. He was the first ever down this river. He acted. I do not know what events lay ahead. I act.

“The barometric records are examined to see what descent we have made since we left the mouth of the [Confluence], and what descent since we left the Pacific Railroad, and what fall there yet must be to the river ere we reach the end of the great canyons. The conclusion at which the men arrive seems to be about this: that there are great descents yet to be made, but if they are distributed in rapids and short falls, as they have been heretofore, we shall be able to overcome them; but may be we shall come to a fall in these canyons which we cannot pass, where the walls rise from the water’s edge, so that we cannot land, and where the water is so swift that we cannot return. Such places have

52 been found, except that the falls were not so great but that we could run them with safety.

How will it be in the future? So they speculate over the serious probabilities in jesting mood” (Powell, 217-18).

To leaders: I gather them and they each walk me through their line. I will row my boat first and six will follow my line. I will immediately eddy out and provide first safety.

The boat with the major first aid and pin kit goes last. I will row two participants. Two other captains will row two participants and the other four boats will row three participants.

To participants, I quiz them. In concentric circles we review in-boat safety, what to do when swimming just outside the boat, far away, and when under a flipped boat. What is a highside? The best rescue is self-rescue. Describe to me what self-rescue is. Another scenario. Buddy check your PFDs and helmets. Meet with your captains. Prepare the boats for the river. Double check the boat is rigged to flip, remove foot and body entrapments. Throw line handy? Have a good run. Be humble. Be confident.

Like the river I flow. I have flown and grown into a leader.

Gravity takes all water to the same place. Then back again. Different paths are taken. Shores erode. Meanders are abandoned. All water flows to the end of the canyon, to next canyon, to the Colorado River delta at the Sea of Cortez, but no longer. The river is dead, harvested by those around it. I, like all humans die, our journey unfinished.

Some of us take the rough line, the conservative line. Some take rounds and rounds

53 around the eddy before continuing downstream. Some get tossed up on the shore, beached, waiting for high water. We all get there, we all die. How we do it, how we live, is up to us.

“Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.

Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I see myself as a flower.

Breathing out, I feel fresh.

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.

Breathing out, I feel solid.

Breathing in, I see myself as water.

Breathing out, I reflect all that is.

Breathing in, I see myself as space.

Breathing out, I feel free” (Hanh, 23).

The participant coils and stows the bowline. I wrap my cracked fingers around the oar handles. With six strokes we are in the current and the river pulls us down into the spitting waves of the gut of Cataract Canyon.

PART 4: THERAPY

Underneath the snow-capped Henry Mountains, the final range to be mapped in the contiguous United States and home to the largest free roaming heard of bison, overlooking the far-below arid and distant maze of red sedimentary desert I march through the heat-induced mirages, parched past mild thirst into dehydration, to my death and inevitable rebirth.

Why do I leave? I yearn to be like my heroes I read about, the legends I hear tales about. Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Environmental activist John Muir. Free and wild soul Jack Kerouac. Geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell. Naturalist Aldo

Leopold. Desert wanderer Everett Ruess. Mountaineer Reinhold Messner. Their stories speak to me. So much so I embark to be among them.

On day one, May eleventh, I step away from civilization. Six miles of hell into the Henry Mountains, wandering from dry creek to empty spring. I stop peeing. Fear fills my thoughts. I walk up dry wash after arid mesa. Not one a drip of water.

Loneliness hits hard. From the road to the trail to the wash then mesa, knowing I won’t see friends, family, or a human face for ten days I almost lay down and cry. Water.

Loneliness hits like guilt until thirst takes its place. I trudge, refusing to give up on day one, through the foothills of the Henry’s highest peaks until dusk, every blue stream and bubbling spring on my map hot and dusty in real life. I let my pack slump to the ground covering a sandstone rock a baby juniper. The pack is old and from another life. From

55 my life of people, buildings, and currency I had bought it, faded black and green, a Wind

River Mountains patch and a Bob Marley patch surround the small fraying American flag rustling in the air.

Dry, likely zero percent humidity. No water even in the air. The sun inches toward the horizon, the tallest snowcapped summits above. A vertical mile above. My original destination. The pack hurts to carry so I leave it. It has no name, just a broken back frame and a missing hip buckle I replaced with webbing and a slippery mule knot.

We are not friends. Yet it still carries my twenty pounds of food.

The backpack doesn’t acknowledge me as I leave for water. Two final locations on the map within a half mile showed promise. But so had Granite Creek, a long thick blue line on the map. At Granite Creek I ended up running down to the canyon floor in joy only to find the ripples of cold water a mirage. The dust and stones reached as far as my eye could see. Possible water source one brought me to a small amphitheater in the wash. Walls of dead tan shrubs, curled remnants of leaves shattered on the sand below, rose up around a floor of cracking pink. A few bones scatter the area, bleached white.

My legs wobble stepping over them. No water. In a hydrated life I would have held them to the sky, examined them, and lay them back to rest in peace.

My thumb traces the route to Twin Seeps. I climb a hill of juniper and sage between large gray orange boulders. The pale red soil crunches under my boots. Few plants rise from the dry ground and most have fallen back as dead litter. I can’t comprehend the beauty through my swollen tongue. The sun drops and the bright contrast of the foothills stretching taught beneath the beasts of the Henry’s begins its nightly darkening. The crumbling high desert shows no expression as I walk. Will it be

56 my last? My final hope of water approaches. A small steep gully with a few deer tracks point the way. I pass the relics of a broken board partially nailed to a tree, long dead.

The remnants of an old cowboy camp. A few stones in a circle. A couple rusted cans.

My final hope provides. I was prepared to wait out the night, eating dry food, and leave everything to stumble back to a road for help. But the cow-stomped, shit-covered puddle provides. The fear begins to fade, a bit. My filter still leaves the taste of shit in my first liter. I boil everything else. Bacon, beans, and tea for dinner. I sleep hard under the star studded sky, knife, light, and bear spray in hand for cougar protection.

With water, my burning desire for a healing life in the wild is rekindled. I dream of quitting but I am motivated to continue. I fear the loneliness. I miss my friends, family, and comforts of a home. I fear failure too. I want to be like my heroes. I want to be my own hero, to overcome the mental and physical challenge of eleven days alone in the wild. I want to unplug, find myself, and escape my city life.

Day two, May twelfth, I wake up sun blazing. It is above the far away eastern horizon of the flat desert below, and I realize the substantial elevation I have already stumbled up.

My body is still recovering and my legs are still weak. Guilt returns to my stomach for the worry I have placed in those close to me. Hopefully the feeling isn’t Giardia. Ten days in the highs of the Henry Mountains and the lows of the canyons below is crazy.

Why, then? Because it is what I want. Simple. I boil water for a thick meal of oats and banana chips.

I decide to head south under the Henry’s towards Crescent Creek. Word from the large Native American man who dropped me at my trail yesterday said it is flowing. It is

57 my only way to continue. If it turns out to be dry I will submit and head back to the road for another adventure, one with more water. Hopefully I will find water and head to the peaks.

Water dictates one path. Like an animal I scour the land for that one uncompromising source of life. My plans of peaks and many nights in the wilderness fall away before my need for water. Nothing separates me from the Clovis people roaming endless lands, hunting mammoths and giant sloth always near their water. I live a cactus’ life grasping the earth sucking at the soil for every last drop, waiting for the purple thunderheads to form and moisten the land. An emaciated white tail deer and I relate, roaming the hills with no plan but to find water and eat.

After much off trail scrambling up and down red crumbling hills with parched shrubbery I reach a path to take me to Crescent Creek. Under the shade of a juniper by a dry wash I see the backs of two people sitting. Who are they? Why are they out here? I decide to approach after adjusting the knife and bear spray on my belt. They are kind and go by Mary Fireweed and Trekker Bob. Their friendliness strikes a chord. They are headed a similar direction for the rest of the day so I join. We hike to Crescent Creek, flowing, and camp at Mud Spring, dry.

I drop my pack in a clearing amongst larger junipers and backtrack towards the creek for water where Bob and Mary are filling up. They decide to fill up and then go set up for the night. When I reach the creek Bob and Mary are gone, no signs, nothing. Did I become suspect, did they ditch me? Did one of them have a heart attack? I got water and returned to where I left my pack unsure of what to do. I found them setting up their shelters for the night in a nearby clearing. Turned out when I was investigating Mud

Spring they continued on the trail a bit further so I missed them until we both returned.

Crazy stuff. Amidst my loneliness I increasingly have a strong desire to be with people.

Their brevity in my life has only strengthened my fears of solitude, animals, and injury.

At dusk they share their story while I eat a simple soup. Bob is 72 years old, a small hardened body, and Mary is 62, larger than Bob with skin thickened by her years working in the heat and under the elements as a firefighter. Her gray hair twists toward the ground around her rectangular glasses. I find them a quarter of their way through their 400 mile desert trek from Arches National Park in Southeastern Utah, past Zion

National Park, to the rim of the Grand Canyon in Northwestern Arizona.

My jealousy must show. Their packs have no excess anything on them. Each weighs a fraction of mine. They have refined them through their entire lives to determine what needs to come and what needs to stay for the most efficient travel. How little can one bring to maintain an acceptable level of safety and stay just shy of their maximum level of risk?

Mary Fireweed worked in Yosemite during the 70’s. She watched the BASE jumper leaping from El Capitan die during a BASE-jumping protest. I saw the same incident in the documentary McConkey. Mary dated a climber in Yosemite Valley and lived in a cave with him and his gun. They were a part of the bud crash, an event in the history of Yosemite Valley that I heard about in the documentary Valley Uprising. A large undercover cargo plane crashed in a remote frozen lake above the valley. Both the counterculture, hippy rock climbers and the rangers heard about the crash but the park rangers waited for better weather to investigate the crash. The climbers were curious and climbed to the wreckage right away. They discovered no survivors, as expected, and an

59 entire cargo plane full of burlap sacks of marijuana. Twenty four hours a day for a week they dug into the plane half submerged in ice using chainsaws and packed out their treasure. Not only did they have more pot than they ever wanted to smoke but they also went down to the cities of California and sold it. Mary said some made enough money that season to retire, buy an extravagant house in an upscale city neighborhood, and be a climbing bum for the rest of their lives. But a lot of the marijuana had been covered in leaking jet fuel. This caused a peculiar smell on top of the skunky smoke and an occasional flash of fire when someone lit up.

Mary also attended Berkley during the Vietnam protests. She worked hard as a firefighter and retired at 55. Now her passion is long distance backpacking. She has hiked the length of the famed Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and the

Continental Divide Trail. She also has hiked the Bigfoot Trail in California which a biologist developed. This trail visits every single species of tree in the state of California.

She has hiked the lovely Arizona Trail and finally she is hiking the Hayduke Trail.

Contrary to my initial belief, Trekker Bob is not her significant other. He is just another older hiker also looking to sacrifice complete solitude to increase his margin of safety.

Both are drawn to the challenge of the Hayduke Trail. They say it is dry, disorienting, and little information is available unlike the PCT or AT. They are rising to the challenge.

Mary knew the late father of my old coworker, Pat, Mike from Ashland, Oregon and is close with Pat’s mother. I worked with Pat and his wife Erin in Centennial Valley,

Montana. Great folks. Small world.

Trekker Bob is very systematic and set in his ways. Tomorrow they head south around the Henry’s toward Escalante. I have decided to saddle up and head north

60 towards the highest point in the range, Mt. Ellen in celebration of my Dad’s fifty-second birthday. Mary has a GPS locater which lets her check in with those she is close to. I decide I am going to get one too, to let people know I’m okay on these trips. It would also be nice for emergencies so search and rescue wouldn’t wait a week or so after I break a leg until my overdue return to begin a search.

I hiked about eleven miles and more than 3,000 feet of vertical today. The old farts kicked my butt.

Day three, May thirteenth, Dad’s Birthday. Early goodbye to Mary Fireweed and Trekker

Bob. Mary is a new hero of mine. She says not to worry about cougars, there is no population pressure in the Henry’s. I lay awake all last night trying to remember to ask her about the cougars here. She tells me the last mauling in the Sierras was from a woman filtering water. The environment had been loud and she had her back exposed.

My gut turns in fear and my imagination goes wild. The image of my own mauling is here and will not leave. It doesn’t matter to me there is no population pressure in these parts.

I hike a bit more than three miles to Wickiup Pass, uphill, through the forest, without breakfast, fear weighing me down, and doing three hundred and sixty degree spins every hundred feet. Then, I see fresh cougar tracks in the mud going the opposite way. Cougars, or puma or mountain lion, are larger than the biggest of dogs. Males, 150 pounds. Females, 130. They can be gray to red and their tail extends over half their body length. Black marks their ear tips and tail’s end. The track is about four inches by four inches, claws absent, pulled back. Four toes marks make an arc around the interdigital

61 pad which is fronted with two lobes. I don’t find enough tracks to determine whether the trail is a walk or bound. I see deer tracks too, telling me cougar prey is abundant, but that does nothing to ease my anxiety (Halfpenny, 10).

I force down a lunch, back against tree. It doesn’t sit well. I hike hard towards

Bull Creek Pass another three miles and 1,000 vertical feet away but fear and exhaustion take over. I am caught between hiking above the forest into the alpine for better visibility for predators and weakness. My heart beats fast and hard. It doesn’t calm down even with ten deep breaths of the breathing square. I close my eyes and see cougars hidden in the brush, pouncing at my neck, incisors piercing flesh. I open my eyes and spot dozens of hiding places. I turn at every rustle of leaf and see more. Behind trees, over the knolls, beneath the brush. They’re everywhere. I am sweating while standing, scanning, panting, and turning. It is quiet so I hear only my own sounds. The blood pumping in my ears, my desperate breaths about to cease at my mauling. I can’t handle the fear.

I give up and sit against a hill. I let my vision zone out and the forest before me blurs. I hate where I am. I hate the weight latched to my back. Through my panic attack I take a hard troubled nap with my three weapons in hand: knife, bear spray, and trekking pole. My back and head rest against the steep side of the road and my closed eyes face into the trees.

I continue on after my breakdown a bit more at ease. Let it be. The increasingly open sub alpine life zone helps as well. The expanse of red and purple land opens up and falls away with every step up. Less and less do I see places for a cougar to stalk me. I travel the constant uphill and many snow crossings to Bull Creek Pass. I stash most of my gear and hike with a light pack up another 1,000 feet and three miles to the Mt. Ellen

Ridge and then the lone standing talus covered northern Mt. Ellen summit. High point

11, 522 feet.

The saddle feels like the moon with a hazy Martian desert on the horizon. I find bison scat all over. I don’t see the herd but hear it is one of the largest wild bison herds left in the country. I find coyote, deer, and elk scat too. Maybe a deer vertebrae? I walk the desolate battlefield to the high point. Winds at least fifty miles an hours blow me every which way. My ears ache from the cold, the noise, and the air being blow in and out of them. I wish Dad happy birthday into the wind, sending it northwest when there is no more elevation to gain.

My beat body takes a heavy seat against a mound of dirt next to the tarp I set up on the side of the pass. Enchilada soup with Bull Mountain and Robber’s Roost in the sunset. Life is grand. I live in absolute royalty. Little birds tweeting and a slight breeze say goodnight.

About twelve miles and more than 3,000 vertical today. Sleeping at 10,500 feet.

The distant La Sals are hazy across the land.

Day four, May fourteenth, I awake at 10,500 feet in the fog. No fine views grace my lonely existence this morning. I melt snow for water, eat a snack, and pack up quick because the storm is brewing. A two person plane flies over me through the gray sky at

Bull Creek Pass just two hundred feet above. I don’t wave because I don’t want them to think I need help. As soon as I drop my drawers for my morning poop a wall of wind and snow hits me from behind and doesn’t let up until the evening.

I begin my descent from the peaks. I spook a big black bird into flight and it spooks me. Is it a turkey? Wildlife so far: white tail deer, squirrel, rabbits, lizards, cougar tracks, elk scat, blue birds, robin, raven, smaller birds.

The thunder hits hard with fog and a slight drizzle. But, I am cozy under my beautifully pitched tarp at camp tonight. I spend my time this afternoon not hiking but reading and writing. Oh the hail! The pattering and cool moist breeze eases my mind away to then and there. I hold a book, and my thoughts mix with the ink words at my fingertips.

What to do, trying to figure it out:

Practice not doing and everything will fall into place.

When people see somethings as beautiful and good, other things become ugly and bad.

Things arise and she lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess, acts but doesn’t expect.

The Master doesn’t take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners.

She is detached from all things; that is why she in one with them.

Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.

In thinking, keep to the simple.

In conflict, be fair and generous.

In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.

My heart is clenched.

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will?

Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

Thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky!

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear, they are both phantoms (Mitchell).

I love the cold air on my face, in my nose, against my eyes. It hardens my fingertips poking out of my knit fingerless gloves, thickens the skin. My toes are warm in my wool socks tied into my leather boots. A rustle in the brush and fluttering of wings and I freeze. My heart and fingers clench more. I inhale and redirect my building fear. Nothing more. I can only see out the end of my pitched tarp. Trees and brush disappearing into the mist. I drift back into my thoughts and printed words. Then and there.

See the world as yourself.

Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

….welcome all things.

Empty your mind of thoughts. Let your heart be at peace.

Stop thinking, and end your problems.

What difference between yes and no? between success and failure?

The ordinary mind is the same as the sage’s, the same as the enlightened. Do not forget.

If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.

If you want to be given everything, give up everything.

The story of amazement, the open mind.

Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.

The travelling artistic scientist.

If peace is shattered how are we content?

If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.

The soft overcomes the hard. The slow overcomes the fast.

Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.

When there is no desire, all things are at peace (Mitchell).

My clenched heart is slowly being pried open, a finger at a time.

With night comes wind, rain, heavy thunder, and lightning. Sometime before dawn I kept waking to sprinkles of moisture on my face. I realize the tarp is also laying on my face even between large gusts. I put my hand on the ground in the black night and feel inches of snow. I turn my light on and find an eyelet from the corner of the tarp has ripped out

66 and a guy-line untied. I run out in the storm in long underwear and a sweater to fix what

I can and sleep the rest of the night like a wet burrito.

Six miles with a loss of 2,000 vertical feet.

Day five, May fifteenth, I awake to a windstorm and the aftermath of a snowstorm. I pack and leave in half a foot of fresh snow. I thought I’d dropped below the snow level.

I filter what I can from Crescent Creek then my filter clogs. I treat the rest with iodine.

The sun has not yet peaked over the flat land below. I have no watch but know it is very early in the morning.

I trudge down in the mud that threatens to spill into my ankle high boots. The evergreen forests end and turn to juniper and aspen which turns to juniper and sage. My favorite is the brilliant neon green and bright white of the aspen.

I make great time down Butler Wash past an abandoned mine and dilapidated rusted yellow Dodge car to a road.

I think of Mom and Dad when I reach Poison Spring canyon. I miss them and their love. They nourished me, raised me, sent me to school, and now I leave into the wild for them to worry. We all care deeply for each other but I doubt they understand what I’m looking for. I trudge another six miles into the heart of the beautiful canyon with trickles of clear water. Maybe the next day I’ll find the spring.

Twenty miles downhill hurts the body. Lonely again after seeing a road and old mine. With the red canyon as walls to my room I feel really alone. I try to just be and enjoy. No desires like love equals peace. Hard.

Have I mentioned the flowers in the desert? Pink, yellow, white, purple, red, orange, beautiful.

So far 6 + 11 + 12 + 6 + 20 = 55 miles with lots of gain, about 6,500 feet, and loss, about 7,500 feet. Cool.

I sleep hard through more rain. Thankfully my tarp holds up. I fixed the torn eyelet by girth-hitching a large round pebble under the fabric to the guy-line.

What to do, trying to figure it out, continued part two:

The master does nothing yet leaves nothing undone.

The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done.

No expectations. No regrets. No residue.

ORDINARY MEN HATE SOLITUDE. BUT THE MASTER MAKES USE OF IT,

EMBRACING HIS ALONENESS, REALIZING HE IS ONE WITH THE WHOLE

UNIVERSE (Mitchell).

I am alone walking amongst mountains and canyons, valleys and deserts looking for what my heroes have found. I seek the joy, the adventure, the interest, the struggle which I know others have found. I have been in the city living, working, learning, and yearning to be out. My mind races. I want it to sit, quietly. I want to want nothing, to be here and now and love it absolutely. I want to live in the wilderness for ten nights, independent. I am caught in the midst of a twisted paradox.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.

Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy.

This is true trust.

If you keep your mind from judging and aren’t led by the senses, your heart will find peace.

Let the Tao be present in your life and you will become genuine.

Being genuine is straightforwardness with nothing to hide nor defend.

Thanks for everything, I have no complaint whatsoever.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts and the world will govern itself.

Therefore the master takes action by letting things take their course. He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning. He has nothing, thus nothing to lose. What he desires is non-desire; what he learns is to unlearn. He simply reminds people of who they have always been. He cares about nothing but the Tao. Thus he can care for all things.

Since he and his wife love the Tao even more than they love each other, their marriage is radiant with love.

Simplicity, patience, compassion.

Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to your source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world (Mitchell).

I am privileged and hurt. I am living but missing something. I my struggles are self- imposed. Much of the world really struggles. Physiologically I am fine. I am safe unless I place myself in an unsafe place. My small family loves me. I have a place where I belong amongst my friends, my community. I lack a confidence, peace, and joy. The hustle and bustle of busy life robbed that of me. Maybe. I hurt and am not sure why.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying there is nothing you can’t achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut yourself.

The hard and stiff will be broken, dead.

The soft and supple will prevail, live.

The soft overcomes the hard, the gentle overcomes the rigid. This is like water.

The master, therefore, remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his heart.

The words seem paradoxical.

Because he has given up helping, he is people’s greatest help. They can help themselves.

Wise men don’t need to prove their point; men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

By not dominating the master leads.

The more he gives to others, the wealthier he is.

When he can give himself completely, his wealth is infinite (Mitchell).

Day six, May sixteenth, I wake up lazily. The beautiful birds in Poison Spring Canyon sing with the rising sun, white in the blue sky over the pink rock cradling the green. I walk to gather water from the small trickle. I hike above the rim of the canyon to the massive mounds of rolling rock. When the angle of the rock is above forty-five degrees it is hard to keep friction and it gets scary. I slip and scrap a leg. I try to find a new, less steep way down and keep getting cliffed out.

I get back to camp just in time to meet two folks hiking, Bob and Mike. Mike looks for a cave. Bob waits in the shade of a canyon cottonwood. They reunite and continue towards the Dirty Devil River.

I read and write and watch the birds sing all day. I snack and start gathering water again. I looked up every crack and side canyon within two miles but no spring. It is amazing what the desert has to offer. Absolutely beautiful, perfect. I find every inch as interesting as every mile. I find slots winding back through greenery for half a mile ending in a dried waterfall over a silty pothole. I know it is periodically a waterfall because of the black and white streaks of minerals left on the walls where the last trickles of water evaporated.

I find amphitheaters and overhangs, seeps and hidden forks, and a huge side canyon with dozens of pools of standing water amongst the shrubbery ending in a hundred foot tall overhanging crack above a red silty pothole.

Each venture away from the trickle leads to my own pathways and excitement of finding rocks, flowers, crypto-covered game trails, water, and new patterns. Often the things closest to camp yield the coolest finds: mini caves with seeps and puzzling

71 boulders to climb. I also find some pictographs and petroglyphs fifteen feet above the ground. Spirals and shapes. Ancient natives in these parts must have been very tall.

In the late afternoon I spotted Mike hiking back up the canyon and went to chat. I point him to the pictographs and he pointed me down canyon to more water and their camp for the night. I hit the trail. I still don’t pass the opportunity for company. I explore deep into a side canyon with flowing water but still did not find the spring.

Four long and never ending miles later is Bob and their camp. On the way I track

Mike’s intermittent footsteps to stay on track. Poison Spring Canyon deepens. The walls rise and the flow of the creek increases. It feels like Cataract Canyon of the Colorado

River, steeper and deeper than I expect.

I drop my pack into muddy water when down climbing, everything is fine. There is still no sign of the spring besides a gradual increase in water. I find Bob, pitch my camp across the creek, and cook potatoes and gravy for dinner. Yum! Life is good.

Mike returns and I climb the huge flat-topped boulder above their camp. We make a fire. We spend the night fireside, listening to the voices of the creek.

They tell their stories. Bob is 55, short and stocky, the friendliest guy out there, in awe of everything. He works a phone answering job for semi-trucks in Oregon. He had to leave. He is a partner for Mike’s “death marches” in the desert here.

Mike is 59 and quiet. He looks hungry. He seems out of it, tired like a whipped dog, or permanently fried from drugs. I make a rare eye contact with him, though, and instantly know he was very much alive. The spark of vitality is there. He rents homes to skiers at the ski resort Mt. Hood, Government Camp specifically. He also had to leave.

Before hiking season in Oregon and Washington he brings Bob to the desert southwest

72 for several weeks of trekking. He is following parts of Butch Cassidy’s trail from the

Castledale heist. I need to learn more of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Two robbers fleeing custody and chasing dreams across the canyons and desert. He wants to give me book on the Anasazi and stars but realizes he doesn’t have it. When Mike treks he usually fasts for days at a time but as he gets older he eats half a granola bar a day.

This cut immense amounts of weight from his pack: pots, stoves, fuel, utensils, oil, and food. This is also what makes my pack heavy. He is very excited to hike in Dark Canyon for a few days later in the summer.

I pee and hit the hay thanking them for the company. What kind, excited people.

I hiked eight miles today. About 63 miles total.

Day seven, Sunday, May seventeenth. I have three full days left and continue to look forward to the love and company of friends and family but I try to keep my heart peaceful, here and now. I rise with the early dark blue sky to pee. Then, as I had planned over the night, I leave to find the spring for Mike and Bob before they leave, they said with first sun. I scour the two prospective canyons and find nothing, not a drop leading to the creek. I find Mike as they are packing and look at his map of the spring. I know right where it is!

I run up the canyon, just past where I’d ended my first search, and easily find it. I plan to show the boys as they pass. The day before I had hiked right past it, maybe ten feet away, but had been so loud, walking and panting, and out of tune with nature that I couldn’t hear the quite loud trickle of flowing water. Spreading the tall grasses and ferns I find an old cowboy’s stone and mud walled basin with a metal pipe sticking out the side.

The cold flow fills my bottle in only four seconds, I can’t stop grinning. I have found nature’s faucet and never have had any liquid taste so sweet. A simple faucet. Complete joy. I point it out to Bob and Mike as they pass.

Back to camp. I climb the boulder. It feels right to carve my initials and date in a discrete location on top. I nap on the boulder overhanging the creek in the rising sun.

Once again I find myself near a wonderful source of water. The last was Crescent

Creek. By this creek I have seen a horn toad and lizards of many kinds, lengths, and colors. I want to learn bird calls. The sandstone rocks look like they are melting.

A lizard ten inches from head to tail crawls by me. Nature paints it blue at the head, yellow on the body, and white and tan at the tail. It moves and looks like a snake.

Again a giant, black feathered bird. I first hear its wings swooshing high above me.

Condor? Unlikey. Those reside further south.

The blowing grass draws circles in the sand.

I read a Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac between the two giant boulders, taking breaks to wash my feet in the cool, clear water flowing over the soft sand. A chipmunk joins the tweeting birds and I on the bark of a nearby tree. Oak? Canyon cottonwood? The chipmunk has red sides with black, white, and red stripes on its back.

For minutes it stands paralyzed clutching the vertical bark twitching its erect tail with each chirp and every squeak. Then it circles the trunk making a high muffled beeping and runs out of sight.

The breeze picks up. Birds don’t sing or call in the wind.

I simply read, collect more water from the spring, nap, and wash. I try to be at peace. Civilization calls to me. Company calls to me. LONELY. It hurts. I find refuge

74 in taking my mind to friends and family. I also escaped to my book. But these things are there and then. A different place and time.

“Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil.

A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.

The species of a layer are alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat. Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above.

Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables” (Leopold, 252).

Lizards dance on the log in the sun while my pages turn under the shade in the sand. The lizards wear scales of different colors. They mate. Birds sing. Kingfisher?

Probably not. Chicken noodle soup with potatoes, cheese, and sardines for dinner on top the big boulder. I keep camp: Poison Spring Canyon, South Fork Junction.

About five miles that day makes 68 miles total.

Day eight, May eighteenth, I listen to the world breath. At first I think the noise is an animal, or footsteps. It is early, the blue hour.

The sunshine hits and I walk the mile upstream to fill my dromedary with delicious spring water. I then leave to explore the south fork canyon. My plan is to turn around when my water bottle is half empty, half full.

Deep in the canyon country, hole riddled walls, I climb with ease, the land void of any path. Exploration.

The flash of a black and white bird streaked with yellow receives my full attention for a moment in all time. Too often I mistake the little chipmunk’s chitter chatter for a bird. Too often birds interest me more because they can fly and I cannot.

I follow the lush growth of trees, reeds, grasses, shrubbery, and the marsh at times making my way up the canyon. At times the canopy must be four times my height. In the desert! I find myself claustrophobic in the desert jungle as grasses brush my face, branches poke my mouth, and my vision only reaches a few feet. Rarely does my entire foot touch solid ground. Take a bearing!

I see the progression of frog life in the pools of the rock and red sand creek. I see that the desert is colored in a swirl of red, brown, pink, and orange shaded dark with black, desert varnish and streaks from floods’ waterfalls, and brightened with white, the minerals left after evaporation.

Anyways the frogs. My mind is flowing. I almost step on a fellow half the size of my fist. Surely the lucky amphibian has had many close calls with fate in his lifetime. In the lowest end of a pool swim wriggling black tadpoles, very aware of my presence, about five or six to a penny. The middle section of the pool, maybe two inches of water

76 on top of the wrippled sand, swim two groups of large tadpoles, each a bit plumper than my big toe. A few lift their mouth to the surface, much like a reeled in sturgeon in search of food. Or are they transitioning to frog life? At the top of the pool, more grayscale rocks at the bottom swim the frogs, very large! Each is about half the size of my fist, a tad smaller. I think I spook a few but they never get out of the water, they just lurch through with their gangly legs.

I think that is it, the entire progression, but I am wrong. Separated by a small, short, trickling waterfall, providing a visual and audio barrier, are the mating frogs.

About five couples lounge in the waters, occasionally swimming. When swimming both the top and bottom partners paddle their legs. Amazing.

The green leaves of the constantly quaking canyon trees are riddled with more holes than a shooting target.

Without sunglass protection the white sand of the desert burns my eyes. This section of land ends and other parts of my body began to burn: skin, legs, shoulders, feet.

Hummingbird couples and dragonfly couples mate.

The thunderheads look red and purple above the desert, perhaps a reflection.

Back at camp, I climb all shapes and sizes of boulders, great fun. Most I can climb, one I need bigger balls or a less remote setting, one I need rock climbing shoes and the same as the previous, and one is impossible. But I do love to climb!

I find the land above the spring a land of an earlier time. The raised up plateau provides a visual relief from the canyon bottom creek I followed and I encountered no evidence of prior human contact.

I imagine the walls of the canyon crumbling, sending enormous boulders tumbling as close to the center of the Earth as they can get. My two giant boulders at the mouth of my deepest camp, for example, crashed all the way to the middle of the canyon, diverting the stream, and scarring all that laid in the way of its mass. From which side they fell I cannot tell. I do know that they were once a cube-like shape, and then from impact at its final resting place it split and one half fell on its side. The fallen one is the one I can climb on top of. Post-dinner above camp thoughts.

About ten miles plus 68 equals 78 total. Goodnight.

Day nine, May nineteenth, take me fly-fishing. A desire inspired by Aldo Leopold, to catch a fish and pan-fry it in cornmeal with onions on a backpacking trip. The sun rises and I poop, wash my butt, hands, face, and bandana. I become a new clean person.

Cheesy hash browns for breakfast with hot sauce, delicious. I make a list of what I would have left, what I would have brought, what I’m glad I brought, and what I’m glad I didn’t bring.

I take a break on a beautiful rock with a lizard, brown in color. Two hikers pass within twenty feet of me. I looked directly at their faces and would have politely waved if they had noticed me. They didn’t. The sporting goods store outfitted them with every gadget and tassel out there, 90 percent camouflage. A man and a woman. Can’t they sense me? Despite the morning wash I smell pretty foul. A sweet and sour bitter aroma.

Part of me likes it, birthed from non-action. From what I see, these two recreationists’ adventure lay within the confines of a skinny path. Fine with me.

Direction’s to Bert’s Treasure Hunt: how far can you get? Hanksville, drive south about seventeen miles. Poison Spring Canyon, down about six miles to where the water first trickles down the trail. Going down, the pictographs are on the left, then the canyon with the deep sandy cave fifty feet above the floor, and the next canyon is it.

Take the first fork to the left. Can you follow the canyon to the top? Two dead end, garden-shrouded, pour-overs lead to a 45 degree slot, inches wide at the sandy bottom and just wide enough ten feet up that goes hundreds of feet up to the rim. The rolling rim offers a high point which beyond sprawls the awe-inspiring Henry’s capped white by the recent snowstorm and darkened by the thunderheads. I see myself in the storm with fears suffering. I make it to the treasure, solo, on day nine. With the taste of life on my lips, I am reborn. What part of me has died?

78 miles plus nine miles equaled 87 miles.

Day ten, Wednesday, May twentieth, Happy Humpday! It doesn’t apply to me though, I have no work week.

The C.F.S. (cubic feet per second) of the trickle down the canyon went from zero in the afternoon to a solid 0.1 in the morning.

Was it wind, thunder, or something motoring through the sky? Always hard to tell. The best adventures were always the ones closest to home, to camp.

So many ants! Mini black, huge black, medium black on trees, small red in sand, medium black, medium red….

Wasting time before the final hike….

The canyon downstream on the right of Bert’s Treasure Hunt is shaweet! One fork, each a jungle, and a caving, stemming paradise.

I ponder Leopold’s biota. Each living organism on earth had a place in a triangle of horizontal layer. At the very base is the soil. Then the plants that lived only off sunshine, water, and nutrients from the soil. Above are the insects that live off of plants.

Above them are animals that live off of insects that live off of plants. Somewhere in the middle are animals that lived off of plants and animals. At the top were those that only lived off of meat. Humans were somewhere in the middle. The beauty of the biota is that surrounding each organism exists an infinitely intricate web of relationships. There is no continuous way to categorize how birds eat other birds that eat insects that eat plants.

Each piece of life interacts with many different levels many different times throughout their whole life. Leopold speculates that there are dependencies that surpass all humans’ levels of understanding. That is why industrial farming so often fails in one way or another. The plants that humans want to eat originally existed in a manner that had many relationships with surrounding plants and animals and bugs and birds that would take lifetimes to unravel. Industrial farming either ruins the soil, produces a harsh chemically altered form of the food, or encounters many other roadblocks to providing mass amounts of the harvestable plant that once flourished.

I watch an ant for thirty minutes. While watching I hold a small pebble in my mouth to see if it quenches my thirst. The ant’s erratic paths receives my full attention and I accidently swallow the rock.

Peaceful time in the shade.

Maybe they will say I am a new person. I will say I am my ordinary self. I am coming home.

Eighty-seven plus nine equals 96 miles walked.

I find an explosion of oily black rock amongst the endless red sandstone.

Sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic. Pressure, melted, heated. I watch brittle fins, red and white, rise slightly above the waves of red rock and stretch on out of sight. I define my life’s passion, my life’s direction. I make a list of friends and family to see. I move on to sit, look, listen, feel, hear, taste, and smell my world.

I’ve never seen a sight so beautiful as the sparrows coming out from their nests in the holes of the red cliffs for their evening feeding lit by the still setting sun twittering and spiraling in the sky, their backdrop a brilliant cobalt blue, wisps and faint puffs of white clouds as seen from below in my sleeping bag settling in for my tenth’s night sleep beside the large-eared kangaroo mouse in his miniature cave.

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Name of Candidate: Brandon Bertelsen

Birth date: June 13, 1994

Birth place: Washington, USA

Address: 8201 North Wenas Road Selah, WA, 98942