Thoughts on a Desert Ledge

I’m an American woman in mid-life, who for the most part has bought into the prevailing model that busy is good. Outside of an hour’s walk through the woods and a few weeks’ car camping when my daughter was young, I’m a city girl whose idea of roughing it is a room in Motel 6.

“Vision Quest,” the brochure read. “Do it while you still can.” Seemed like a good idea when I filled out the form back there sitting at my desk. But now, I wasn’t so sure -- not sure at all in fact, as I set down what looked like a very tiny amount of gear on a ledge overlooking Hell Roaring Canyon in the Utah desert.

So what was I doing, preparing to fast for seventy-two hours on the rim of Utah’s Hell Roaring Canyon? That’s a long time when all you have to do is find shelter, drink water, and come to terms with being alone.

My first challenge was setting up camp. After a dozen tries and an exercise in creative vocalization, I succeeded in anchoring my tarp to a few rocks and one cliff-hanging tree. I secreted my precious water in a crevasse to protect it from the sun. I memorized the edges of the ledge I’d chosen as home. With 72 hours ahead, I had no need to hurry, but before long, altitude and heat cut my pace down, made me question every move I would have undertaken easily the day before. Drink water, I kept reminding myself, repeating the survival mantra of the desert: pee often, pee clear.

After dark, the temperature dropped . . . and dropped. I could hear nocturnal creatures doing creaturely things, and we weren’t permitted a fire. The novelty of watching my frosty breath kept me entertained for maybe a minute, but it was the ice crystals in my drinking water that made me take seriously the fact that I was under-dressed and the night was getting COLD. Abandoning any pious intentions of keeping vigil, I pulled my sleeping bag over my ears. The moon was full, but there was nothing friendly about its light, as it froze my eyes for hours before I gave up and slept. Dear God, let me survive this night, was all I could pray.

By mid-morning of Day Two, sunshine and curiosity nudged me into exploring the wash. An occasional bandana signaled a colleague’s camp. A raven flew past, cracking the silence with the flapping of its wings. Gradually, I realized that, yes, I was isolated, but I was not alone.

I am in a place of constant movement . . .[I wrote in my journal], some episodic, as when huge boulders break loose and tumble down the gorge or when the canyon hosts the raging floods from which it got its name. Some of the movements are very slow, as in the work of roots and water that pry loose those hunks of granite and of shale. Slow as in the one-inch-per-century growth of the cryptogam, or the trees that take a decade even to inch above the soil.

Lizards flit about, and hummingbirds, and even an eagle soars. The ants lug to their nest every scarce crumb they find. A scorpion rests under a rock, but lift that cover and she scuttles away. When the wind ceases, insects are everywhere. Timeless it is, but movement still through time. I am embedded in Life’s relationship . . . if I can just be slow enough to see.

Heading back to camp, I spotted a pile of human trash, old pots and rusty cans, stashed under a rock. I loaded my arms, and the booty made my unfit body even more ungainly as I clambered up a few hundred feet of boulder-size debris. It somehow mattered enormously to me that I carry out at least a portion of that anonymous debris, make an act of reparation toward the slow processes of the desert.

Back in my perch, I turned again to writing:

Radical Love . . . guides me in knowing that the child starving in the Sahara, the woman celebrating a birth in Melanesia, the man tortured in Brazil, all are part of me. I feel deep kinship with the little lizard that stopped to exchange stares and the tree that snapped when I pulled too tightly on the rope anchoring my tarp.

Radical Love makes work for justice inevitable, for the Holy is present in this lizard, this tree, as surely as in the eyes of a stranger, or the heart of a friend.

The desert taught me that we are all connected – not just with our neighbors, not just with our own species, but we are one with the ocean sand and the desert cryptogam, the great whales and the Asian elephants, the mockingbirds and, yes, the bugs and the bacteria too. We are one with the mountains, and the rivers and trees, and the great mystery of the beyond.

Time passed, and I survived. Saying final thanks to the tree that anchored my tarp, I said aloud, “I owe you more than I have words to say.” Perhaps I moved, but perhaps not. What I experienced was the tree reaching down, tweaking my hat from my head. As though spoken aloud, I heard a voice: Your species always uses so many words. To listen, to love, that is enough.

I went to the desert to learn to listen. I did not expect to hear the voice of a tree.