Before the Storm

“You should turn around,” the old man said.  “The storm clouds are forming on the mountaintop.”

I remembered the storm from yesterday:  sharp bolts slashed the sky as the thunder exploded.  I was afraid to get out of the car and dash across the parking lot and into the café, where I sipped a hot cider as I watched the rain pelt the ground.  I love watching thunderstorms, but I was uneasy about heading straight toward a dark cloud.

“How much farther ‘til the top?” I asked.

“You’ve got a ways to go,” the old man said.  He wore a navy ball cap and clutched two shiny trekking poles.  “I’ve been hiking from the summit for about an hour and a half, and I’ve been booking it, too.”

I came to Great Basin National Park in Nevada for one reason:  to ascend Wheeler Peak.  Popular images of Nevada revolve around casinos, brothels, and the desert heat of Vegas, but the truth is that the majority of Nevada is full of mountains.  At thirteen thousand feet above sea level, Wheeler Peak is the second tallest in the state.  I had never ascended a mountain this high, and I hated the idea of returning home without reaching the summit. 

I recognized the old man from a cave tour I took the day before, and I caught a snippet of his conversation with the ranger.  He mentioned that he, too, was a park ranger before he retired.  This man, who I assumed to be in his early sixties, was an experienced outdoorsman and seemed to be in good shape for his age.  Despite these signs, I had a habit of telling myself I can make any physical feat come true merely by willpower.  So far, by sheer luck and an ounce of youthful strength this strategy had worked for me, but this recipe didn’t seem sustainable in the long run.

“When is the storm due to start?” I asked, knowing full well this was a stupid question that made me look like an amateur destined for death by lightning strike.  He probably assumed I was just another idiot who had no business being out here.

“You can never tell with storms,” the old man said, “But the clouds have been forming for at least an hour.  I would say you have an hour and a half at most.  You don’t want to be out here when it starts storming.”

I stood there weighing the old man’s words against my own desires.  Truthfully, I was afraid of those dark clouds forming and expanding above my head.  I imagined myself on an exposed ridgeline, practically immersed in the smoky mist of a thunderhead, soaked and shivering, partly due to the cold but mostly due to the unshakeable fear of being struck by the undiscriminating bolts.  At this elevation, luck would be the only determinant between walking out of here unscathed and being zapped like a mosquito imploding against the porch light.

Although my sense of reason pleaded for me to turn around, my legs ached to climb, and my ego was hungry for the opportunity for a brag-worthy experience. 

“You can’t say you didn’t warn me,” I said, “But I want to make a go for it.”

The old man’s face shriveled up in clear disappointment.  Instantly, his concern transformed to apathy.  I knew he meant well, but it is much easier to advise someone to turn around once you have already reached the top.  I left the old man behind and picked up the pace.  I made a promise to myself:  I would try to make it to the top, but the second I heard thunder I would turn around and sprint down this mountain.

* * *

Hi, how are you?

We’re just fine.  And you?

I’m doing well.  What would you like to drink?

I’d like a glass of wine.

(There’s more than one.  You should be more specific.)

On the left are the whites, and on the right are the reds.

I’ll take a zinfandel. 

And have you decided on the menu?

We have a few questions.  Is the trout really local?

(Not if you consider Sysco’s warehouse in Houston to be local.)

Yes.

Is it frozen?

We’re very far from water here in the desert, so, yes, unfortunately, it is.

And the salmon?  Is it farm-raised?

Unfortunately, yes.

I’ll take the short ribs, then.

Okay.  Thank you.  I take the menus and start to walk away.

So do you live around here?

Yes. I live over there.  I point out the window at my dormitory.

How did you end up out here?

I use my usual refrain:  I moved from Pittsburgh to Florida to live with my aunt, rent-free, so I could travel more easily and not be tied down with a lease.  From Florida, I found a job on a cruise ship in Hawaii, where I met a man who told me about park jobs, which led me to Yellowstone.  An ensuing road trip took me through Utah.  I applied online.  They hired me.  Here I am.

Do you like it out here?

I love it.  There’s so much to see on the weekends, and the weather is nice.  It’s hot during the day, but it gets cold at night.  There are times I want a more glorified job, but it serves its purpose.

 

You should travel while you’re young. I wish I did that.

If you want to witness the homogeneity of the human race, you should wait tables.  You get the same questions all the time:  Where are you from?  What brought you here?  Where’s the bathroom? Everyone flies to Vegas to see the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce.  It’s amazing that in such a large country with millions of people they all come up with the same itinerary.  Even I did the same thing:  driving from Vegas to the South Rim to Zion and onto Bryce. 

But to them I am a curiosity, an anomaly, the one who swims against the current.  They are envious of me, but I feel sorry for them.  From what I understand, this is how they think life should go:

You get an education, a job that turns into a career, a girlfriend who becomes a wife.  You buy a house, have a baby, then another.  You raise the kids, change their diapers, help them with their homework, ship them off to college.  Thirty years after you bought it, the house is empty, except for you and your partner, but now you’re scarred by the war you barely emerged from:  screaming babies, sleepless nights, endless headaches, sexual frustration, sagging skin, graying hairs, and the bosses you curse under your breath but never out loud because of the mortgage you must pay.  

You count down the years until you can retire.  Then one day, you punch out for the last time.  Your coworkers send you off with a cake and balloons.  You’ve been dreaming about this day for decades. 

You’ve got money saved up, so you buy an RV with a corny name like RoadRunner or Voyager.  Now you do all the things you’ve been putting off while you were busy with spreadsheets, 401Ks, and sitting in rush-hour traffic during the daily pilgrimage to and from the office.  Now you leave the suburbs behind and you hit the road and simultaneously clog it up with your house on wheels, stuffed to the brim with all the things you deem necessary for comfortable living.  You don’t care about the line of cars honking their horns behind you because you’re leaving all your stressful memories behind, and you’re living for you now. 

As the drivers behind you risk their lives to pass you against oncoming traffic, you soak up the sights.  This is your country, and now you’re going to see as much of it as you can.  You hop from one national park to the next, and you park at the viewpoint, climb down from the cabin, and gaze down upon some alien landscape colored orange, purple, and white.  Your hands are on your hips, your head shaking in amazement.  You lean toward your significant other and mutter something generic like:  Isn’t this something else?

Now it’s time to gather proof you will later show your neighbors during your Tuesday night bowling league which is outside the gated community where you winter in Florida.  You get out your camera and ask the nearest stranger if he would mind taking your picture.  You put your arm around your wife and smile.  You are happy because time belongs to you now, and you’re with your partner on a beautiful planet that stands in the background.  You thank the stranger because now you’ll be able to save this onto your computer and show your grandchildren what they have to look forward to after sixty years of cramming knowledge into their craniums and toiling away until their spines ache.

You owe it to yourself to get out there, but there is only one problem with this method:  now you are too old to walk, to run, to climb, to scramble, to swim, to shimmy, to carry a heavy load on your back, to withstand the extreme heat and cold, to sleep on the desert floor.  You can only look down upon the land from the safety of this parking lot.  You will not dirty your clothes, jump over snakes, squeeze through narrow slot canyons, fall out of trees, plunge into crystal blue pools, or run from the lightning.  You won't embrace solitude, for you will not escape the overcrowding presence of your fellow man and woman.  You have brought the comforts of home with you, and possibly there's a kitchen with a sink in your vehicle, so you cannot understand the thirst of a parched tongue or the hunger of a body stretched to its limits.  In this manner, you will not know the land you claim to be yours.

* * *

I could see the top from where I stood.  I had been pushing myself, yet the summit seemed to get no closer.  Behind me, the sky was clear blue, but a blanket of dark gray loomed before me.  The peak looked like the backbone of a giant whale, a white stripe coursing down its body.  Even in July, piles of snow had yet to melt.  I was well above the timberline and now hopped from one boulder to another.  To my right I could see green circles on the land between mountain ranges.  I assumed these to be manicured fields watered by machines.  Forests, on the other hand, looked like messy patches of green hair.  Below me, a raven took flight.

I abandoned my backpack on a hilltop and now moved freely, crawling up the rocks and trekking through piles of slippery snow.  The air was frigid and extremely thin.  My heart was pounding from the exertion and the fear of the storm’s inevitability.  I scared myself into believing I heard thunder now that I was close enough to practically inhale the clouds.  But I had ventured too far to turn around now.  Five more minutes, and I would accomplish my goal.

I was exhausted and thirsty.  Against my better judgment, I left my water bottle behind with my pack because I thought it would attract lightning like Benjamin Franklin’s key, so I scooped up handfuls of snow and swallowed them.  With each step forward, I asked myself what was so important about climbing this mountain.  I knew that I was partly being melodramatic.  I was not climbing an erupting volcano, but this storm could turn ugly.  Was summiting this peak worth putting myself in danger?  I knew it was not, but the only thing that kept me going was my blind optimism.  It won’t rain until I get off the mountain, I told myself, knowing there was not an ounce of truth to this prediction.

I felt this heat in my chest that occurs when my body sounds the alarm.  This has happened before when I thought I was going to be fired from my job, when a bison threatened to charge me, and a when I was running home at night when a man emerged from the bushes and chased me down the street.  Hairy situations that are avoidable by staying at home and being a good boy.  Cortisol coursed through my adrenal glands.  My ears pricked up to detect a rumbling in the atmosphere.  My tired legs found a new energy.  This is the essence of fear.  Part of you shuts down while the rest of you is jolted awake.  You are perceptive to the world and all its threats, and you are ready, if necessary, to bolt. 

     

While in descent a man passed me.  I asked him how much farther to the summit.

“On the map, it’s about a pinky’s length away,” he said.

It seemed like I was climbing up the down-escalator, but his description put my remaining voyage into a digestible perspective and I pushed through the last leg of the climb.  I reached the top, wrote my name in the ledger that was housed in a mailbox, and stared at the expansiveness surrounding me:  chocolate shark-fins speckled with ghost-like shapes clinging to the dirt and, above, a dense layer of thunderheads crackling with electricity. In celebration, I pumped my fist in the air to an invisible audience and quickly resigned to get the hell out of there.

I hopped down the boulders again, sloshed through the snow, and once my feet hit solid ground I took off running.  I retrieved my pack and headed toward the forest.  With each step I took, I knew my probability for survival was increasing dramatically.  I was dropping from threat level red to orange to yellow. 

Eventually, I passed a couple who was picnicking on a large stone.  They asked me about the storm clouds, and I revealed my fear that the storm could start any minute.

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you to turn around,” I said, “Because it’s easier to say that once you’ve already been to the top.”

I mentioned the old man, and they, too, received a similar warning from him.  The fact he showed up in two stories lent him a mythic persona as though he were a portentous wizard who can see the future, albeit not very accurately.   

“He said it would take us four hours to get where we are now, but it only took us one,” the guy said.

The guy said he had climbed this peak before when the weather looked even worse.  His nonchalant attitude was blindly reassuring.  It’s a lot easier to hide your fear when you’re with somebody.  Even I was comforted by the couple’s presence.  At the least, you can revel in the thought you aren’t the only stupid person on the mountain when the weatherman calls for a storm.

I wished them luck and surged onward until I reached the trees.  The clouds looked less ominous as the sky receded.  I startled a family of deer and chased them through the brush. 

After this brief interlude, I proceeded another mile down the trail until I reached a glacial lake where I lay down on the rocky beach.  Just as I hoped, I had made it down the mountain, unscathed, with enough time to spare before the storm.  Using my backpack as my pillow, I closed my eyes for a short nap.  My body sapped of its sugar, I slept soundly until the raindrops splashed against my cheeks and woke me up.        

Mid-Season Mentality

This is usually how it goes: 

I wake up to allow time for my hobbies that separate me from the role I must eventually play in the evening.  Breakfast is never worth waking up for.  Liquid eggs, cold potatoes, and chewy bacon await each morning.  It is better to sleep in and miss it altogether.  Around ten o’clock, my ritual begins. 

I start with a bowl of Cheerios and drink two cups of coffee while reading a book in the employee dining room (EDR).  The desert mountain is still cool and replete with morning breezes.  The heat is yet to come. 

With only a minor break between meals, it is time for lunch at 10:45.  The EDR cook frequently gives minimal effort and has a penchant for serving dry chicken, unsalted green beans, and schizophrenic meals in which the options seem borne from a blind-folded dart game.  Sloppy joes and tuna salad.  Roast beef sandwiches and penne pasta with marinara sauce.  There is hardly a soul who cares for his food, and we would gladly wish for him to be given the boot so that we may fend for ourselves.

 

Every now and then he bakes a delicious cookie laden with gooey chocolate and asks everyone what they think, and we cannot help but to tell him the truth.  This occasional treat briefly abates our frustration that this man continues to disappoint us day after day, yet his job somehow remains secure.  Any normal company that desires to make a profit and yearns to keep its employees happy would have fired him for his consistently sub-standard performance.  A teacher who fails to instruct his students would be asked to consider a career change.  An investment banker who frequently costs his company money would be let go.  But a cook who can’t cook still has a job. 

This is the nature of the company we work for:  an unprofessional regime, a sorry excuse for a concessionaire comprised of ladder-climbers with low standards, the burned-out, the bottom of the barrel, immigrants, and the moneymakers who have grown less virtuous and more apathetic.

If the usual EDR cook is off, there stands a chance the meal is appetizing, and I eat to the point of excess, because one must take full advantage of the rarity.  If the usual EDR cook is working, I eat what I can stomach, with my already lowered standards, or opt for a sandwich. 

I sit at a square table surrounded by three empty chairs.  There are many people whose company I enjoy, but there are more people I prefer to avoid.  As far as conversations go, there are three formats.  Gossip:  who got fired for drunkenness?  This person of high authority was seen rubbing the leg of someone of a lowly position.  Complaints directed toward the company accompanied by the necessary commiseration.  Or my preference:  the outdoors. 

Like any job, we swap weekend stories.  For those of us who leave the property during our two days off, we speak of slot canyons, dirt roads, Anasazi ruins, mountain lakes, national parks.  There are some who seek adventure, and there are those who want to seek adventure but for some reason don’t and replace their desires with a friendly form of envy and a list of dreams delayed. 

I started with a list of places I would like to see, and I drove to the vistas, but soon I realized this was doing nothing for me.  What is the point of seeing a place you will not touch or make no exertion to get acquainted with?  I might as well look at pictures online.  Not to mention I was behaving like the tourists I despised.  I made a vow to get dirtier, to challenge myself physically, to up the ante of danger and bravado, to go farther, to explore deeper, to climb, to swim, to paddle, to hike into the remote recesses of the American Southwest.   

          

I try to go as far as I can, driving hours down two-lane roads littered with deer carcasses to reach remote parks and monuments with the hope to find solitude, a sense of euphoria, and a disconnectedness from my weekday self.  These two days are the reason I took this job.  At this point in my life, I want to focus on exploration while my legs are strong, but this comes with a trade-off.

 

The job provides little to no glory, and my week seems like a downer compared to the highs of weekend trips.  I must don my uniform:  polish-able, nonslip shoes that look like army boots, black dress pants, a white shirt with buttons on the collars, and a gimmicky bolo tie.  My cheeks are sheared of their miniscule follicles.  My nametag hangs on the right side of my chest.  Everything must be in order according to those who make and enforce the rules. 

If my name tag were to hang from the left side of my chest or if my tiny facial hairs were to sprout and cast a shadow on my face, the manager would react with anger, as though this were a travesty easily avoided and appropriately dealt with using aggression.  Each time this happens, I want to remind him of his own mortality and the inconsequential nature of his complaints. 

This code of rigidity he is so busy maintaining gives rise to an artificial world that contrasts starkly with the one that exists outside the windows and beyond the parking lot.  How can he see the stratification between us but deny his own desires that we share:  the desire to rid ourselves of this orderliness and to shed our civility to bask in the wild where nothing matters except hunger, warmth, and thirst.

In order to achieve this level of peace in the outdoors, there is a role I must play and political battles to fight.  When the season started, I was enthusiastic and inquisitive with guests.  I would ask them of their vacation plans and their origins, but now I have become hardened and bitter.  I am direct and sometimes emotionless:  a button-pusher going through the motions to expedite an undesirable process.  I deal with only the basics.  Tell me what you want, and I will get it for you.  Like a loveless whore.  And worse, I have become greedy.

The money in the beginning of the year was ridiculous.  There were lines at the door, and tourists spending loads of money.  In a single dinner shift, I could clear three hundred dollars.  If I worked a double, I could make over five hundred.  We all made thousands of dollars with our manners and our fingers and our straining shoulders and our aching legs and our stinking, sweaty feet.  And the best part was:  it was all so easy.

 

If you wanted more money, all you had to do was move faster and connive your way for more shifts and more tables.  Prey on the lazy, or those who have had their fill.  But I always wanted more.  I picked up any lunch shift that anyone wanted to give away.  If someone wanted to leave early, I would take their section and stay late. 

Twenty dollar bills became Monopoly money.  I would go out to eat with friends and pick up the tab, and, although I hate to admit it, it made me feel empowered.  I started paying off my loans aggressively.  I would go on thousand-mile road trips and spend hundreds of dollars in cash and still have plenty left in my stash.  But I was generous too.  Each shift I tipped out my sever assistant much more than the usual amount.  I had enough to eat, enough to make a profit, enough to share and then some.  And all for what:  bringing somebody a plate of food?

 

But then the crowds disappeared, and money wasn’t always so easy to come by.  You had to fight for your money, and I became a hardened individual devoid of my usual sentimentality.  I protested to oust the sixty-five year old server who consistently gets the best section.  I yelled at the hosts for not evenly distributing the guests.  I called a server assistant incompetent for working too slowly.  I accosted the bartender for serving glasses of wine with pieces of cork floating on top.

These were my friends, and I was treating them poorly.  I realized something in me had changed, but my aggressiveness was paying off.  I was still making the same kind of money while others weren’t because of my pestering, conniving, and protesting, but in the process I had made several enemies.

In the dining room, servers with seniority are given the best sections near the windows, despite the fact their skill level may not warrant such a bonus.  I was left in the middle, where nobody wants to sit.  This system based on favoritism has been in place too long, and I could not allow myself to remain quiet and become a victim of the injustice.  I am not accustomed to this villainous role, so at first I was uncomfortable by the uneasiness in which people treated me, as though my presence was not wanted because I am threatening to destroy the order that has been created.

Now my motivation is waning and apathy threatens to overtake me.  I am no longer angry when I see a ten percent tip from a French family who orders a bottle of wine and two steaks.  I don’t wish to be heartless to my coworkers, although often my frustration mounts inside of me to the point where I want to smash a chair over someone’s head.  Instead, I do what I am told and say nothing and walk away in defeat. 

I was only trying to survive, but at the same time I know I have been incredibly selfish.  I have listened to my primal desires and in the process I have betrayed a close friend and angered many of my coworkers.  So now I mostly immerse myself into my book and daydream my weekend plans.  I imagine strange vistas before me:  red and orange rocks protruding from the earth in alien shapes, canyons devoid of humans but filled with wild horses, a silver river carving its way through the stone.  The desert water recedes from this world and into the narrows, a labyrinth of shadows and million-year-old forces that never stop crafting the land.

Stuck

The dirt road curved around the ranches and wound its way up the mountain.  The wheels of my car flung tiny rocks and wafted dust into the air.  The bends in the road were sharp, and the climb was steep enough to make the engine struggle to stay cool enough to function.

As the road leveled off into a sparse forest, a trio of elk bounded across my path and continued grazing.  The skies were a thick and ominous gray, and the air at this elevation was rapidly cooling, despite the midday heat blazing thousands of feet below.  I was blindly following GoogleMaps’ directions in search for the Kolob Canyon of Zion National Park.  I typed in Kolob Canyon, rather than the Kolob Canyon Visitor Center, and the GPS took me very literally, as computers usually do.  It was sending me into the heart of my destination, and by now I had lost cell reception.  I knew this wasn’t right, yet I pressed onward, partly out of the sheer surprise of ending up in such a place and partly due to a lack of places to turn around.

Soon the dirt road turned to mud, and the tires lost their purchase and began to skid and flounder.  Steering grew unsteady.  The brakes became coated with a thick and pasty mud.  I slowed the car to a crawl and weaved into the turns as the car hydroplaned across a set of potholes filled with rainwater.  By this time I knew I was lost, so I found a flat spot to turn around with much difficulty.

  

On the way back toward civilization I tried to build up speed because the car was quickly losing traction and relying purely on dwindling momentum.  Soon I lost control completely as the tires slowed their revolutions and skied over the slippery surface.  I flinched as the car bumped into the muddy embankment.  I pressed on the gas, but there was no movement——only the frustrated whine of the rubber spinning uselessly.  We were stuck.

Megan, Kendyl and I got of the car and inspected our situation.  The others were mildly giddy about the conundrum, but I felt their enthusiasm was borne from their detachment.  This was not their car stuck in the mud, but mine.  I was only slightly frustrated with my irresponsibility for landing in such a position, but I, too, was eager for the challenge of finding a way to get unstuck.  The car is cheap and over twenty years old, so I was not too concerned. Besides, it has always been my intention to run it into the ground.  On this day I was successful, and I thought it was extremely possible this burial in the mud could be its funeral.  The towing alone would probably cost more than the car itself, and I would rather push it off a cliff than pay the fee. 

At first, Megan and Kendyl tried pushing as I pressed on the gas, but a brief experiment proved useless.  The coolant bubbled and smoke hissed from the engine.  I got out of the car again and walked in my slippers until they became caked with mud.  I did not want to ruin both my car and my footwear, so I took off my slippers and squelched my feet in the cold mud.  I walked to the trunk and peered under the car.  The right rear wheel was completely covered in mud.  Pushing would be futile until we dug this thing out.

“Should we start thinking of a backup plan?” Megan asked.

Kendyl suggested calling a friend who was at least two hours away, but she soon realized we had no service.  We were several miles up this road, at least a day’s walk back to the highway.  To the right of the muddy road was a grassy hill that offered an overlook of the valley below.  Megan started up the road to see how far we were from stable dirt and cell reception, and I started toward the overlook to get our bearings.  The grass was soaked, and the water enveloped my feet and numbed them.  I stepped over rusted cans and broken bits of fence and reached an abandoned hermit’s nest.  The view of distant farms offered no solution.

I walked back to confront the quagmire.  I released my frustration by launching rocks into the grass and screaming expletives.  Kendyl was very level-headed, as though this were a game with no real-life consequences.  Megan reported that once we crested this mound we would be back on flat ground and soon would hit the dirt road, if we ever got the car unstuck.  We would all have to work together and think reasonably, or we could have an even more serious dilemma on our hands.  I was determined to drive out of here, so I resolved to embrace this situation. 

I dipped my fingers into the mud and painted lines under my eyes like a quarterback.  I put the emergency brake on and crawled under the car and dug out mounds of freezing mud until my fingers became so numb I had trouble bending them.  I tagged Kendyl in, and she took a turn scooping out the mud.  I needed to make progress and warm my fingers through exertion, so I walked ahead of the car and discarded larger stones that would impede our progress.  Kendyl emerged from underneath the car covered in mud and shivering.  I handed her a blanket and dove under the car to continue digging until I unearthed the wheel.

Kendyl hopped in the driver’s seat while I took my position at the rear.  She rolled the window down, and I yelled that I was ready.  She put the car in drive and stepped on the gas while I heaved.  I planted my feet against the embankment and pushed while my feet slipped in the mud and I wondered if I was making any difference until the car began to teeter out of the divot and rock forward.  One last heave and the car shot out of the ditch and out of my grasp.  I ran to catch up to it and shouted jubilantly.

My spirits were immediately lifted.  I had always used blind optimism and stubbornness to accept any alternative to get out of hairy situations before, but there were moments in which I thought success was impossible.  We still weren’t out of trouble quite yet, as the car began to zig from side to side and became stuck again.  But this setback was minor compared to what we had just overcome.

Megan joined me in the back of the car and pushed as Kendyl stepped on the gas.  As I was straining against the car, I realized what a great teambuilding exercise this was.  What I initially believed was a terrible inconvenience proved to be exhilarating and memorable.  Megan and I pushed against the car which had now gained purchase once more and started moving without our aid.  We both jogged to keep up with the car until it gained too much speed for us.  Megan stepped away and I jumped on the bumper and held onto the fin and rode against the wind as the tires crunched against the gritty earth.  I jumped off the bumper which was now decorated with my muddy footprints and raised my arms and screeched with victory.

Covered in mud, now, we drive down the mountain as the brakes struggle to slow our descent.  Each bend makes me nervous as I consider using the E-brake, but finally the dirt turns to pavement and off we go.  A shorter hike is planned in Zion, and afterwards we must reward ourselves with pizza; finally, a stop at the carwash where I futilely attempt to erase the evidence of my blunder.    

A Nation within the Nation: Part Two

It rained in the night.  My tent, which is big enough to shelter a German shepherd, sagged under the weight of the water.  My feet got wet, and I woke up before the sunrise to find the roof drooping above my nose.  I ignored the chill in my toes and turned on my side and slept another few hours.  My alarm went off earlier than I wanted it to, but I had made plans to watch the sun rise above the red cliffs of Canyon de Chelly.

From inside my own drenched cocoon, I heard my friend Kendyl rustling the nylon inside her tent.

“Are you awake?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Can you see the sky?  I would look but I’m kind of stuck in here.”

She unzipped her tent.

“Are there a bunch of clouds?  Because if so, I don’t think the sunrise will be worth it.”

“It’s kind of cloudy.”

“I should have expected this.  That’s poor planning on my part,” I said and went back to sleep for another hour.

At a diner in Chinle, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation, I ate a plate of eggs and fry bread.  During my breakfast, I heard a weather report about an unexpected heat wave in Seattle and a news report about the dirty water of Flint, Michigan.  It had been a month since I watched TV or saw firsthand the happenings of the world outside of the gossip that spread through my tiny village in southern Utah.  The skies in northern Arizona were blanketed with gray clouds that promised rain.

From the diner, I called a tour company about hiring a guide for the morning, and we settled on a meeting time at the ranger station.  As I was browsing through the books, a tall man with nose hairs sticking out of his nostrils approached me with a scrap of paper with a butchered spelling of my name on it.  He asked if that was me.  That wasn’t quite me, but I could tell he wasn’t looking for anybody else.  He wore a baseball cap and a pair of blue jeans, not the best choice of pants to enter a canyon with a chance of rain.  He introduced himself and asked me where I was looking to go.  He spoke very slowly, and I could tell that he just woke up from a sleep he wasn’t planning to interrupt so soon.  I said I wanted to see the Antelope House Ruins, which I knew was a far hike. 

“That one is kind of far,” he said, “And the trail will be very slippery.”

Due to the rainstorm, the steep slickrock portions would be less than ideal, so I asked him for an alternative.  He proposed we hike to First Ruin and then onto Junction Ruin.  We agreed upon this, and we got in our cars and I followed him to the backcountry permit office.  As he signed us into the registry, a Navajo woman behind the desk told our guide he couldn’t take us into the canyon since he didn’t get his CPR license renewed.  He said he would call his friend, who would take us instead.  Kendyl and I read travel pamphlets about New Mexico while we waited for the new guide.

Although Canyon de Chelly is a National Monument co-run by the National Park Service, you must hire a certified Navajo guide to take you into the canyon.  There is only one trail where this is not deemed necessary.  I assumed that a guide was made mandatory in these lands under the guise of sacred reasons.  The trail, if one can call it that, is not clearly marked, and getting lost is easy to do.  These both seemed plausible justifications, but I suspected they camouflaged the primary motivation behind this rule.

A young Navajo man with long dark hair in a ponytail entered the backcountry office and introduced himself as DJ.  He was already briefed by the other guide and asked us to follow him in his car to the trailhead.  He drove a ten-year-old Ford with a Slayer decorative plate on the front.  At the trailhead, we got out of our cars and passed the sign that prohibited travel beyond this marker without a guide. 

Our hike was estimated to last at least four hours.  I wasn’t sure how this guided tour would go.  Would the guide ask us questions about where we were from?  Would he volunteer information without being prompted?  Was I expected to engage or pretend to be comfortable hiking with a stranger?  And, most importantly, what would I do if I had to pee?

As we descended a metal staircase and then proceeded down switchbacks seemingly carved into the stone, my head was filled with questions, so I started out small by asking DJ about local attractions and nearby Anasazi sites.  I had seen advertisements of these strange rock formations outside out Farmington, New Mexico and wanted to know if they were worth seeing in person.

“You ever go to New Mexico?” I asked.

“I’ve been there before,” he said.

“Is there anything you’d recommend?”

He pondered this for a short while and then said, “There’s Mesa Verde, but I haven’t been there since I was a kid.”

I didn’t bother telling him that Mesa Verde was in Colorado.  Instead, I decided he was not an expert in this realm. 

We reached the canyon floor which was lush with verdant grass poking through a swamp of brown rain water mixed with cow piss.  DJ tried to navigate around these pools of urine through high brush and around spiky tree branches, but I told him to walk where he had to walk.  Eventually we would stop caring about what we stepped in.

The land is divided by fences demarcating the private lots from public spaces.  The Navajo have lived in Canyon de Chelly for over four hundred years, and they still inhabit this land today.  Despite the lack of running water, many ranchers dwell on the canyon floor and keep herds of cattle.

“People actually live down here?” I asked.

DJ said that he has family that lives down here, and this made me wonder how they got groceries. 

“There’s a dirt road that leads out of the canyon and into town,” DJ said.    

Most people that live down here own Jeeps, and the town of Chinle, equipped with gas stations, a grocery store, and a few restaurants, is only a short drive away.

“Why are there signs that say you can’t take pictures of the houses and the people down here?” I asked. 

I had heard something I attributed to myth that certain people believe their souls will be stolen if they are photographed.

“These people live in a touristy area,” DJ said, “And they just want everyone to respect their privacy.”

It was apparent I was carrying assumptions and prejudices with me due to my limited knowledge of the Navajo.  Whatever I didn’t know I filled in with guesswork that could be described as outdated and fantastical.  I was thinking of the Navajo from dramatic historical perspectives:  their migration to the Southwest, their ousting by white settlers, their decimation, and their rebuilding.  Groups that stick together in secluded areas possess a more visible evolution and their history is undoubtedly present at every turn.  However, I wanted to understand a more modern and nuanced perspective of the Navajo way of life.    

There’s a steep wooden staircase that took us over the barbed wire and out of the quagmire and into the creekbed.

  

We crossed the ankle-deep stream and passed a group of hikers led by a pale and scrawny Park Ranger.  I wondered briefly if he felt estranged by his assignment here.  He was explaining the history of lands that did not belong to him.  It was as though he were an outsider claiming expertise in a foreign country.

DJ pointed out a set of petroglyphs high against the red cliff.  They were carved by Anasazi some of them possibly 700 years ago when the drawings were more accessible before the ground eroded.  There was a square etched into the wall accompanied by the usual drawings of antelope.  Closer to the ground were more recent additions of hunters on horseback, signifying the arrival of the Spanish.

   

“Nobody really knows what the drawings mean,” DJ said.  “They could be doodles.”

“Who do you think are the modern descendants of the Anasazi?” I asked.

“If you ask me, I’d say it’s a little bit of us, little bit of the Hopi, and a little bit of the Zuni in New Mexico.”

From my sparse readings I believed that the Hopi were the main descendants, but it didn’t make sense to affirm that the Anasazi were the ancestors of the Navajo.  From an etymological and linguistic standpoint, Anasazi is a Navajo word that means enemies of our ancestors.  This signifies to me that the Navajo and Anasazi were rivals.  I had learned from a man I waited on in the dining room who told me that the Navajo were an Athabaskan clan, and DJ told me this meant his people descended from northwestern Canada and eastern Alaska before settling in modern day Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. 

Many Native Americans speak of an ancestral homeland.  Before white explorers crossed the Mississippi River and started clearing the forests to create settlements in the American West, many Native American groups lived peripatetic lives, moving from place to place to follow their food source.  Communities were built and abandoned to settle more favorable environs.  Groups even vacated due to religious or moral reasons.  There is a theory the Anasazi relocated to avoid living in sin, a movement known as the Kachina Phenomenon.   

Although the Navajo claim the Southwest as their spiritual home, DJ believes that Navajo have more in common with Alaskan natives than with other Native American groups in the Southwest.  Both their languages and looks are similar.  Athabaskan groups in Alaska call themselves the Dena, or the people, just as the Navajo deem themselves the Dineh.  The Anasazi settled this area centuries before the Navajos moved south.  How then could these Alaskan descendants share ancestry with the Anasazi?

I did not press him further about the Anasazi, and instead he spoke of his brief experiences as a medicine man at his aunt’s wedding.  He also mentioned a time in which he brewed peyote.  He spoke without elaboration, so these practices seemed nearly as foreign to him as they were to me.  Certainly he practiced traditions that he shared with older generations, but DJ seemed more like an average American to me.  With the exception of my genetic makeup, I share little to nothing in cultural tradition to my ancestors who immigrated to America.  Occasionally I’ll eat at a Greek restaurant, but I’m sure that my family’s old customs have been white-washed in favor of the broad-stroked American lifestyle, where average upbringings and daily habits differ very little from coast to coast.

Ahead lay a dense copses of bushes, which could provide enough coverage in which for me to pee.  I had been holding my bladder for the last hour, trying to muster the courage to ask to be excused.  I thought it would be sacrilegious to pee on land considered sacred.  I felt as though I were considering urinating in a shadowy corner of an ancient church.  When we passed the bushes, I knew I had missed my opportunity.  Soon necessity would override my manners.

 

Another half mile down the trail, we spotted a blue Port-a-Potty left behind from a construction project years ago.  I half-jokingly asked if they were still usable, but DJ said he wouldn’t recommend it.  We took a break on logs chiseled into benches and I casually asked if I could take a piss on one of the trees behind the Port-a-Potty.  DJ shrugged his shoulders and said, “Go ahead.”  I felt slightly embarrassed, like a college student who hasn’t shaken the high-school habit of asking to use the restroom during class. 

When I returned, Kendyl took her turn, and I was alone with DJ and felt pressured to make small talk.

"How long have you been doing this?" I asked.

"A few years."

"You like it?"

"It's not a bad job."

"What do you do in the winter?"

"Sit around.  Sometimes there's a mechanic who lets me work part-time, but mostly nothing.  There's not many jobs in Chinle."

Kendyl returned, and we resumed our hike.  The rains came again and then turned to hail that stung my nose.  Dark clouds billowed above the canyon walls.

“Bear Grylls said that if clouds look ominous, they probably are,” I said.

Then the thunder bellowed.  Lightning struck the ground somewhere out of sight miles away from us, but the sound was no less comforting.  I winced each time a bolt crackled.  The tiny creek rose above my ankles.  The cold water, now beginning to rage, numbed my toes.  Although he may have been hiding his fear, DJ seemed unperturbed by the thunderstorm, and his calmness soothed my nerves.  

When I'm on an airplane bouncing through turbulence, I examine the stewardesses' faces.  If they're calm, then I shouldn't worry.  If the professionals are panicking, however, then the passengers have little else to do but follow suit.  From the canyon floor filling up with water, I chose to believe this logic.  Nonetheless, when we reached the junction of Canyon de Chelly with Canyon del Muerto, DJ muttered that now might be a good time to turn around. 

Despite my fear and mild discomfort, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the canyon looked in the rain.  Muddy waterfalls the color of chocolate milkshakes spewed through the grooves in the rock.  Piles of hail collected in pockets of earth and resembled snow from a distance.  Looking out of place in this ancient amphitheater, a Jeep Cherokee sloshed through the powerful creek, the very one that carved its way through this canyon. 

On our way back to the trailhead, we passed an Anasazi cliff dwelling next to a clear waterfall that touched down on a fertile patch of grass.  It was apparent the Anasazi chose their location wisely.  

By this time I had to wiggle my toes to maintain sensation, and my legs were beginning to feel the fatigue of a nine mile hike, but I was grateful for the discomfort and the mild danger of possibly getting struck by lightning or getting washed away in a flash flood.  An hour ago the conversation grew stale, and then all was quiet except the crunch of our boots against the fallen hail.  Before the storm, too, the views from the canyon floor were growing monotonous with no sun to offer a variation of light and color.  The rain, and its accompanying unpleasantness, transformed the place entirely.  

We sloshed again through the swampy fields sodden with cow piss and rainwater.  The climb up the slickrock was slushy, and at times we had to jump across the stream cascading downward and over the precipice.  

Our guide stopped before the metal staircase and bent over and struggled to catch his breath.  I looked at Kendyl with mild surprise and realized we could dash up the stairs and avoid paying our guide, but instead we waited for him in the parking lot. 

In between breaths, he said, “Now all you have to do is pay me, and we’ll be on our ways.”

There are certain practices within a tipping culture that are laid out plainly.  The easiest example is how to properly tip a waiter in a restaurant.  But how much should you tip a tour guide?  Does the same 20% rule apply?  The guide’s rate was thirty dollars an hour, and the hike was four hours long.  I handed him two folded bills.  After deliberating all morning about an appropriate tip, I decided to give him an extra thirty dollars.  

I wondered if the thirty dollars an hour was, in fact, his wage.  Was I overpaying him?  I felt guilty for even considering this, but then again he wasn't exactly leading us.  By the end of the hike, we had to slow down so he could keep up with us.  A person's got to make his money somehow, and DJ gave us the experience I was looking for, even though I may have been able to find it on my own.  How else, then, would the money be allocated?  I couldn’t think of many expenses other than the calories we burned and the fraction of a gallon of gas that powered our cars to the trail head.

DJ thanked me without counting the money, and we parted.  He drove off in his little red car, and I took off my wet boots while a tattooed Navajo man pestered me about buying his drawings.  His drawings of the canyon were colorful and pretty, but his prices were high.  Besides, I had already paid a man to walk with me.  Out here, it seems, the only way to make money is off the land.