The Desert Half

1

Matt and I meet for the first time at a house party. I’ve tagged along with friends I made at the farmers market a few weeks ago—interns at Moab’s Youth Garden Project. Through them I’ve met a slew of other summer hires, mostly from Outward Bound and other outdoor groups. Temporary locals. It’s no surprise that my first friends in Moab are as transient here as I am.

I don’t know the hostess—whose birthday has occasioned the baking of an impressive array of cupcakes—or anyone else, really. But everyone is friendly, and I talk easily with the guests who spill onto the porch and into the yard. I tell Matt that I’m from New York, and that I’m here to do research for a book involving the area’s history and the adventure tourism town Moab has become. I don’t quite know what form this book will take, or if it will ever really be a book, but I’ve spent a month here, doing interviews, hiking when the July heat relents, and swinging wildly between deep doubt over what the hell I’m doing here and sheer love for the landscape and the town in the middle of it.

My background in local history impresses Matt. It’s rare, he tells me, to meet anyone else under the age of sixty who cares about things like Moab’s role in the Cold War uranium boom.

He offers to take me along on his next canyoneering trip, but this is my last night in town. I like the idea of going on one of Matt’s trips eventually, though, and I think I might like to interview him too. As a business owner in Moab’s recreation-driven economy, he could provide a piece of the story I hope to tell. We exchange business cards. I tell him I’ll get in touch the next time I’m in town.

2

When I show up at Matt’s office, I find myself blushing, grinning, a little bit flustered. It’s been over a year since we met. Evidently I’ve forgotten how attractive he is. With his boyish features, he could pass for much younger than his forty-something years, and he has the lean, sinuous build of a man who spends more time outside than in.

“Are you hungry?” he asks. We relocate to a restaurant across the street for the interview—or our first date.

Three hours later I turn off my recorder and Matt grabs the check. A few hours after that, he asks if I’d mind some company at my campsite down by the Colorado River. I do not mind. Moab’s warm October days turn to crisp October nights; mornings I’ve been waking up to a frosty thirty-seven degrees.

In my rental car, as I navigate the river’s serpentine curves, Matt wonders aloud whether he could live in New York. Could he really live in a big city? Maybe. Probably. I can tell he’s only playing with the idea, not seriously considering it, because I recognize his tone.

He sounds like me talking about the desert. Over the years, our visits will offer us chances to try on each other’s landscapes. I’ll take him to Chinatown for dim sum, to Prospect Park for New Year’s fireworks, and to rooftops for sweeping skyline views. He’ll take me flying over Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and camping in the middle of desert nowhere. But we don’t know that yet. I don’t even really know what will happen when we reach my campsite—or maybe I already do.

My tent that night feels much warmer. The next night, and the rest of my nights in Moab, I stay at Matt’s.

3

“How are you going to go back to New York?” Carrie, another writer at the artist residency in this small Colorado town, asks me sincerely. Here on the Western Slope of the Rockies, Moab is close enough to continue to feel real, and the glow of my time there is evidently still on me.

I’ve installed myself at the kitchen table to spill to Carrie my anxiety about the future as she cooks. Life after graduate school awaits me in New York. It is a given that I will go back there, even though I don’t know exactly what’s next. And yet the look on her face when she asks the question makes me consider it seriously. I see myself through the eyes of someone who has only known me a few weeks, the idealized version of myself that I imagine I would become if I moved out West: independent, strong, tan from days spent hiking. At ease among canyons and mountains, mind unburdened by the logistics of urban life. The version of me that Carrie has gotten to know is so at home in the West that she can’t picture me back East, can’t imagine me compressing my life into city spaces.

But I go back anyway, to attend to all the threads I’ve left unspooling there.

4

On the last day of another trip to Moab, Matt and I go for a drive. We head to the Sand Flats Recreation Area. He pulls over near where the smooth, rolling slickrock hills meet the La Sal Mountains. He locks the car in deference to the city habits my trips to the desert have failed to shake. No one locks anything in Moab; Matt often leaves his car keys in the center console and the keys to his office, from which he runs a canyoneering guide service, in the mailbox.

We begin walking toward Porcupine Rim, seeking dinosaur tracks. “They’re around here somewhere,” he tells me. A friend showed them to him ten or fifteen years ago. This seems like ages to me, but a decade or so is nothing to the dinosaur tracks. Matt leads the way, scanning the ground, following a combination of intuition, geological knowledge, and memory accrued over many years living in this region. He reads the terrain like a map. I stop to stand near the rim, gazing at the red rock towers of Castle Valley below and to the north, and the La Sal Mountains, just east of us, green and gray with tufts of golden yellow where the aspens have begun to turn.

“What’s the northernmost peak in the La Sals?” Matt quizzes, grinning.

I have no idea. The only peaks I can name are Mount Peale, the highest, and the one with the best name, Tukuhnikivats (Ute for “where the sun lingers”), a favorite of writer and canyon-country patron saint Edward Abbey. The answer: Round Mountain, a craggy stub of a hill down in Castle Valley that looks like something the La Sals burped up and kicked away.

We return to the dinosaur track hunt. “We’re in the right layer,” Matt insists, gesturing at the sandstone ledge beneath our feet. It’s the Kayenta, the geologic layer that lies beneath the Navajo—which forms the rounded buttes and fins of the area—and above the Wingate. Wingate and Navajo sandstone are aeolian: wind-formed, the remnants of ancient dunes. Kayenta is alluvial, formed by river deposits. Since the rock layers tell what was here when, Matt is seeking a time—a moment of heavier precipitation between drier times, during the Jurassic period—more than a location.

Eventually we give up the search. I don’t mind. I’m stocking up on images and associations, new angles and panoramas, filling in my memory-map. These days I’m struggling with the thing I’ve been calling a book, but what makes the slickrock desert so troublesome to capture in writing is also what I love about it: the way it folds and unfolds, staggeringly vast, holding so many stories without any sense of beginning or end. The way it resists being fully known.

All afternoon, Matt fills in the blanks for everything I wonder about, from the plants along the road (the big yellow blooms are rabbitbrush, the small ones snakeweed) to the far-off mesas. I envy his ability to name. This kind of place-intimacy takes time to accumulate, data and experiences layering across the years. In the evening, over beers at a locals-only area of an otherwise tourist-filled restaurant in town, Matt’s friend and sometimes-roommate, Ed, whom I met the same night I met Matt, will dub me an “honorary local.” But out here, suddenly, my multi-year on-and-off affair with this place seems shorter than ever.

Besides, I still live in New York. On visits out West I store up knowledge and experience like a thirsty desert plant drinking in sudden rain, as though this could nourish me through another season back east. It makes me feel as if only half my life is really happening in the place where I live, which, in turn, somehow diminishes both halves. On trips to Moab my eagerness takes on a slightly desperate air, and moments calcify immediately into memories—good for writing, bad for living. Meanwhile in New York I feel trapped, or at least a little too enclosed. “It’s like you live in a slot canyon,” Matt will say one morning the following spring, standing in the shaft of late morning light that falls across my bedroom, as he gazes out the window at the narrow space between buildings—what passes for a view in Brooklyn.

5

A writer friend is visiting New York from Colorado. We meet late one night for a drink along with a photographer and his girlfriend, and it is surreal to discuss far but familiar landscapes while sitting in an East Village bar. The writer and the photographer are serious desert rats, devoted mountain men, and they quantify a piece of land not in terms of size but rather in terms of the time it would take to truly know it. This appeals to me, resonates, feels impossibly distant from this compact—albeit endlessly explorable—cityscape.

We end up in a cab to Central Park; the photographer’s girlfriend has never been. As we watch the buildings and lights go by, the writer asks about my life these days. All of his questions boil down to: Why are you still here? But to even have this conversation while in New York is nearly impossible. The city’s all-consuming-ness seems to crush or negate whatever feelings I have when elsewhere. Do I really love the desert, or was that just a cute phase I went through? I realize as we talk that I have tamped down my desires so effectively that I no longer fully believe they are legitimate.

I say good things about my life in New York. I say the city is not finished with me yet. I say the time is not quite right; I can’t see moving to a small town as a single person my age. I don’t tell him I constantly wonder what will happen to the life I’ve been building if I cut it off at the stem, transplant it somewhere new, and see if it will grow. I don’t say that maybe borrowing a landscape and being able to leave it behind actually does something for me. That the longing itself may give me something I need. That a geographical obstacle can stand in for a resistance to another kind of change—place as a placeholder for a different kind of life.

At the park, where the June heat persists in these early morning hours, the writer and the photographer muse about the rocks we scramble across, about movement and deep time and glaciation. I think about slickrock, about the Sand Flats, about how the places we’ve been thread their way into the places we come home to.

6

I’ve brought my restlessness back to Moab, this time only briefly, to meet up with Matt so we can go camping. While Matt packs, I sit on his couch and talk to Ed. I tell Ed about my part-time jobs, the writing I’m not doing enough of, the questions I have about what’s to come. I tell him something is going to have to change soon, but I don’t know what. Will I leave New York? How many times can I ask this question? I mean it a little more each time—or at least I think I do—but I still don’t know where I would go. West? But where? We talk about Utah and Colorado, about mountains, towns with colleges, radio stations. But my family and friends are mostly in New York. Anywhere else, I’d be starting fresh, I say. I’d know no one.

Ed regards me from an armchair. “You don’t seem to have much trouble making friends,” he says.

Matt and I drive south out of town, past Main Street’s souvenir shops and cafes, past the RV parks on the outskirts of town, past everything that’s become so familiar to me these past few years, and I feel a surge of affection for this valley and the red rock that surrounds it. What I feel for Moab is no longer all-encompassing awe, though my feelings still run much deeper than the sentimental fondness reserved for fleeting trysts. It’s more like what I feel for Matt: an affection that drifts comfortably with the shifting of circumstances, layers accruing over time. It’s a love that leaves room for other loves, a connection that comes with the understanding that the realest part of your life has to unfold in the place where you live, if you’re going to be settled or happy.

We drive in the direction of the setting sun with topographic maps unfolded across our laps, GPS be damned, and wind up camping down an unkempt, washed-out dirt road. In the morning we awaken to cool breezes and bright sun, sagebrush and pinyon pines dotting the land all around us. The deep quiet of desert nowhere. Matt climbs on top of the van with binoculars. The sloping profile of Sleeping Ute Mountain on the horizon anchors the landscape to the map, resolving the muddle of the night’s dark, unmarked roads.

We make our way to the Ancestral Puebloan villages at Hovenweep National Monument. We do a good impression of a real couple at the visitor center before setting off for the day, handing each other books and maps, chatting with the park ranger, smirking together at the educational video.

There’s hardly anyone around, so naturally it is not until Matt breaks the rules and hops off-trail for a closer view of some petroglyphs that the ranger from the visitor center appears. “Where’s your other half?” he asks me. I’m shuffling guiltily along a sandstone slab at the edge of a canyon overlooking the ruins.

The ranger is friendly but stern. I mumble something about answering nature’s call. I don’t explain that Matt is not my other half. As I take antsy steps from rock to rock, I try to see what we look like together, and for a moment I can almost inhabit that imagined relationship. It almost feels like seeing myself through Carrie’s eyes a few years ago—a quick flicker of a life I might have if things went another way. But the park ranger, now pointing out highlights to a pair of better-behaved hikers, doesn’t need to know all that. When there is no simple term for the relationship you’re in, you wind up borrowing the emotional shorthand available, gliding into other people’s expectations because it’s easier that way.

Once the ranger heads out of sight, Matt scrambles up the rocks to meet me, looking sheepish but pleased. He shows me photos of the spirals on the rock walls below, and I halfheartedly scold him for almost getting us in trouble. We giggle the whole walk back to the van, caught up in the particular intimacy of a close call.

At a diner in Dove Creek later that afternoon, our good-natured but tired-looking waitress certainly reads us the same way the ranger did, and we play into it, teasing each other, predicting each other’s orders. A tin sign in the diner window says, if you’re lucky enough to live in the mountains, you’re lucky enough! Shafts of August sun stream through the letters cut out of the tin and through the mountains zigzagging across the middle. “I couldn’t live in a concrete jungle like Denver,” the waitress tells us. “I wouldn’t survive long there.”

I think about the city I’ll be going home to soon, the way I shift between this world and that. I think of Matt and me, the way a month or more can go by without a word passing between us, the way we flit in and out of each other’s lives, in and out of this relationship shorthand, with surprising grace.

It’s the same way I come out here and do a good impression of a local for weeks at a time before retreating to New York. There are advantages to not living in the place you love: Its magic remains intact, safe from the inevitable ordinariness that accompanies settling down somewhere.

When I leave, the lure of the desert will fade a bit to make room for a fuller world at home, as it always does. I’ll try to carry the desert maps and stories a little more lightly, to live inside the manmade slot canyons of my city without dreaming so far into elsewhere. But maybe this is what it means to learn a landscape by heart.

• 0