In a land without water, you need four liters every day to survive.
I had to bring my own. One liter weighs one kilogram; one kilogram weighs two and one-fifth pounds; twelve liters for three days of trekking—add two extra litters for good measure—makes fourteen liters and fourteen kilograms. That’s thirty-one pounds. And because a human can live only two days without water, those thirty-one pounds needed to be added to my already twenty-five pound pack: fifty-five pounds.
My back creaked like old floor boards when I swung my pack into place. It was heavier on the slickrock. The trek of broken sandstone, tight squeezes through boulders bigger than houses, uneven pitches, and deep lunges tested balance, strength, and endurance. Fifty-five pounds on my back didn’t help.
We met last year. The moment I walked out onto the sand, I knew the desert was a special place. My visit was brief. But this year, I made it a point to return. Not a visit, though. I wanted to lose myself in it, completely immersed. But the desert is the kingdom of death. Life does not prosper; it barely survives. It is a difficult and dangerous place. One does many things for love—things that others call madness—so when I told them I was going into the desert, I knew I was in love. Or mad. There was a riddle hidden between her rocks, under her dirt. I felt something so remarkable wash over me, although I did not understand its meaning. I never forgot that feeling, and I never stopped wondering what it meant. I had to return.
As soon as I found the spot to make camp, my pack hit the earth with a solid thud. I followed it to the ground. I had no energy to pitch the tent. I sat and listened. Warm air and grit scraped my face, but no leaves rustled. Grass, craggy bushes and gangly trees—they were speechless. I only heard the wind itself, blowing in my ears. A raven’s deep-throated call pulsed through the canyons. And when those black birds were elsewhere and the sky lost its breath: silence. I looked out over a grassland breaking through endless fields of sandstone, guarded on all sides by sandstone towers. Behind me, a red wall blocked the wind. In a past life, it protected a cowboy camp; their graffiti tattooed its face. Stove and shotgun shells rusted at its feet. Dead or Alive: that was all I could decipher. I sat there, listening for any sound, and watched the Sun as it fell from the sky.
In the desert, nothing matters but food and water and shelter. I was immersed in unsoiled beauty, but still my mind always came back to those things. My food was austere: freeze dried meals, an assortment of jerky, nuts, Cliff Bars, fruit, and a bit of chocolate to make me forget what I was eating. It was weight, not taste that mattered. 3 PM. Too early for dinner, I told myself. The minutes marched at a snail’s pace; I held line as long as I could. But when you finally give in, that meal tastes better than the finest steakhouse cut ever could. In the desert, nothing matters but food and water and shelter.
Shelter. You need shelter—especially in this place. Hydrated and fed, I pitched the tent. Even before the Sun sets, it gets cold. A winter jacket and hat replaced shorts and short sleeves. As the last light staggered over the horizon, the vacuum it left behind was flooded with chill. Lights began poking through the sky, but compared to the Sun, they were cold and distant.
Several days passed I slept beneath the same desert stars, but in different park. By day, I hiked up sand dunes seventy-five stories tall, a trek that made today’s rock and dirt of the red waste look easy. In Great Sands, each step was met with ferocious resistance. With all the power I could summon, I pushed into the shifting ridgelines, arms and poles acting as extra legs as my own sank beneath the sand. The dunes grabbed at my feet, clawing for the water weighing down my pack. My skin reddened, blasted by coarse grain and Sun. That night, the tent was pitched in a deep recess, surrounded by tall peaks, protected from the vicious wind. Everywhere was sand. That night was full of cold light. Not long after dusk, the winds quieted, and in the calm, the full Moon marched up from the East, climbing over the dunes. Its pale light brought no warmth. Midway over the encasing walls, its top half burned like the end of an alpine tunnel. Darkness was broken by snowy mountains ahead; that’s when I knew this was a strange place. I walked in the pale moonlight, across the harder sands, surfing down the looser edges. The landscape was so strange and foreign, I felt as though I was walking across the surface of the Moon. There were no friendly streetlights and headlights to give guidance. The cold light and shadows hid whatever monsters my mind created and gave life to forgotten senses. The desert is an alien place.
At night the temperature dips deep; by morning you need thawing out The morning of the second day bit through my sleeping bag. Cowboy walls couldn’t stop that. Even before I knew I was awake, I thought of a hot drink and a hot meal. Coffee and instant oatmeal, black and sugared. Never have I loved these things so much as when I was in the desert. After the hot food I set to work breaking down camp—warming my body—but when first light cracked through the sandstone towers, I dropped everything to claim a patch of sunlight. The desert is a land of extremes.
On the second day, my pack was nine pounds lighter. When the Sun was highest in the sky, where the trail met a riverbed, I left the safety of cairns for arid wilderness. The river had long been dead from thirst. What remained was a collaboration of sand and smoothed stones snaking into the canyons. I would keep it close. Getting lost here would mean death, and in the network of winding unnamed walls, death was waiting. On the river bank, black mold fermented in the red dirt. The desert looked diseased; dark scabs covered the ground like a sunburn. Beyond that, red needles stood sentry, their shapes shaved by a thousand lifetimes of pounding wind. A mile upstream, I dropped my bag, pitched the tent, left the bulk of my carry, and continued up the lost stream. Tracks in the sand. I bent over for a better look—rabbits, birds, lizards—but then the tracks got bigger. Mountain lion? I scanned the sides of the dried river, looking for eyes peering down from the rocks, paying close attention to where the tracks left the sand. Watching. Listening. Black wings swept past red towers. I saw only the raven. I heard only silence.
The first night was cold, the second, deadly. When I returned, I asked the rangers how cold it had been. Twenty-six degrees. Below freezing. I spent that night shivering in my sleeping bag, fully clothed and waiting for dawn. In the middle of the night, when I had to leave the tent, I unzipped the flap, and with my headlamp, I searched the banks for shadow cats and green eyes looking back. My mind twisted each familiar shape into something grotesque and menacing. I picked up my knife, keeping my eyes fixed on the darkness. After a few minutes, I stepped out into night air, my blade open and my eyes watching. And when I returned to the safety of shelter, a feeling of euphoria swelled in me as I lay smiling in my sleeping bag. But my relief was fleeting. The cold left me sleepless. I saw every hour, every half an hour, and opened the tent half a dozen times one hour hoping there was enough light to begin the day. I kept checking my watch. I thought of hot coffee and hot oatmeal. After hours of waiting, the Sun showed itself, and I climbed the rocks to cower in its first rays, hoping to eek out all the warmth I could. The desert gives no quarter.
On that third day, I emerged from the void. With most of my water gone, my pack felt weightless. Its burden had left my mind. Instead, I thought aloud about what I’d order for dinner that night. Maybe Mexican. Or, a juicy bison burger with fries. Or, enchiladas with green sauce. I couldn’t decide. For three nights and days I’d eaten only desert food. Reentering civilization, I rifled through the possibilities. The riverbed met the trail; the trail led to a parking lot and a gravel road, which turned into a paved one. Somewhere along another paved road I found a bed and cell service and continued on until the apex of modern life appeared: cold brew coffee. I was back.
I returned home. I turned on the fireplace, drank cold brew coffee, had dinner at a favorite restaurant, took long showers that turned me pink, poured as much water into my cup as I pleased, and when I wanted something, I got in a car and I bought it and I drove back to my fireplace.
I read this when I returned: we cannot know love without knowing despair. I stared at the flames, thinking. I thought of the desert. I thought about how my first visit was blissful and how my second was a struggle. Modern life had taken away the stars and the Moon and silence, so I went searching. And when the desert took away food and water and shelter, I came back. My world and the desert are opposites. Each, the photo negative of the other. There is a place far away from the honking horns and crowded trains and supermarket shelves. But it comes at a price.
I think about how love and despair need one another. Those words stick in my mind like the riddle of the desert. Last year, I wanted to be lost in that place, but this time—after three days—I was glad to be rid of her. The dirt, the sky, the emptiness. She hadn’t changed—maybe I had. I searched for transcendence in the desert, that undeniable connection I once felt. But when I returned, and I gave myself to her teachings, her sermon was lost beneath the mutterings of my own mind. Food. Water. Shelter.
