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" The guy glanced at me, then back at the screen. "You work here?" he snapped. "

Mary Sojourner

" It took a mile of hard walking before the Escalade driver's set jaw and stony eyes began to fade from my vision. "

Mary Sojourner

This is not about right diet, right fitness, right investing. This is not about the next undiscovered perfect place to settle down. This is not about insisting that you are still the wild-and-crazy guy you were when you were 20. It goes without saying that I am not writing about cosmetic laceration, botox or $250 jeans that shape your sagging ass. And this is assuredly not about building your 5,000-square-foot house on pristine land so you can look out your huge windows and pretend you've begun a BRAND NEW LIFE OUTDOORS as a Westerner.

I live in a no-longer-little high-desert mountain town. Flagstaff used to be a haven for hairy river runners and rock climbers from whom you'd want to stay up-wind and hikers who were as apt to peel off their socks at one of the outdoor tables at Macy's cafe without an apology as they were not likely to order a soy caramel wanker de-caff.

I am a 67-year-old woman who looks her age. I used to be a 30-, 40- and 50-year-old woman who looked her age. I used to be a woman who believed she could surf attrition and mortality.

No more.

A brutal good-bye, two falls on unforgiving desert trails, the news that diabetes is on its way and glaucoma hovering have all brought me to the end of a box canyon in which my only choices are to sit tight, study the terrain and not panic.

It would be tolerable if it was just mortal me I had to deal with. What breaks my heart on an hourly basis, what makes my blood run cold is the attrition my species is inflicting on the planet. On high desert and low desert, on rare wetlands and shrinking rivers . . . I better stop listing what's dying or lost because you already know this - and I want you to keep reading. You. You, aging Westerner. You, a full-fledged member of our virulent species.

Here's a little pop wisdom. Deep wisdom. The kind of wisdom that looks a hell of a lot like a box canyon at the terminus of a flash flood.

Agent Smith speaks: You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague . . .

I sit on my butt in the box canyon and wait to learn what is going to keep me from becoming a gnarled old bat muttering to herself on the charming street of some cuted-up "Western" town. All I hear is the fine silence of rock. All I feel is my broken-heart. I wait.

And then I remember a meeting I wish I could forget.

I wish it hadn't been a 2007 Escalade. I wish it hadn't had California plates. I wish the couple hadn't been perhaps five years older than I. I wish he hadn't looked like most rich land developers: the Republican good boy hair-cut, the jowls, the red nose, the stink of money and spoiled brat. I wish she hadn't been 15 years younger, her blonde helmet hair crowned with $200 shades. I wish they hadn't both been staring intently into a tiny computer screen in the dash-board.

I wish he hadn't parked the Escalade half-way across the right lane of the two-lane road that goes into the parking gravel for Buffalo Park.

I drove around them and parked in the lot 20 feet from where the Escalade squatted. I waited a minute.

I waited five minutes. Finally, my heart rate slowed. The Escalade had not moved. I climbed out into the glorious air and walked up to the rolled-up window of the Escalade. I smiled. The woman startled, then opened the window. Stale air-conditioned air blasted my face.

"Can I help you?" I felt my mother's smile on my face. She was a snob, a cynic, an operative who always ferretted out the pretensions of the nouveau riche. (Our family lived on what my Dad earned as a teacher and salesman. Chump change. Never enough.)

The Escalade woman who is doubtless known as The Wife looked up with a nervous smile. "We don't know where we are."

"You're half-way across the road," I said. "Tell you what. Pull over and I'll tell you where you are."

The guy glanced at me, then back at the screen. "You work here?" he snapped.

"I live here," I said in my mother's icy voice.

He looked up at the Peaks. "What's that?"

"You pull over," I said. "You're blocking the road. You pull over and I'll tell you what it is and where you are."

He snarled something, rolled up both windows and sped into the Buffalo Park lot and made a gravel-spewing U-turn. I stepped out to greet them. He hit the gas and roared past me. The woman gave a weak little wave.

I realized he'd snarled, "Good-bye." I flipped him off. I said a truly foul word, enunciating as though for a lip-reader, hoping he was looking in the rear-view mirror.

It took a mile of hard walking before the Escalade driver's set jaw and stony eyes began to fade from my vision. I talked to myself, muttered all the clichés of modern self-help I could think of: He had a dreadful childhood. His father was an alcoholic. He is an old man losing his - everything. He is a greedy, self-aggrandizing, rigid bully.

Oops.

And then, a writer's fail-safe kicked in. I will hold this story in my mind and write about it. I looked up. The Peaks rose before me. They were not the "what" of the man's question. They were the generous center of my world.

Only later, as I told the story to a friend, did I understand that I had filed the incident not in my mind, but in my heart. I told her that I had begun to curse the man, to hope that he went broke buying Viagra, that his wife left him for a younger guy, that he suddenly found himself gripped in the cold vise of his mean-ness. And, I said to her, "Can you imagine how awful it would be to live in his body?"

In that instant, I understood. Not just what imprisoned the man and his wife, but what had imprisoned me. Story was the key. Story unlocked the difficult route up. And story was not only the way out of the box canyon; story was the way to occupy the silence and the inexorable presence of walls - be they made of sandstone or mortality.

Mary Sojourner writes from the shadow of the sacred mountains near Flagstaff, Ariz. She is the author of Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest, Solace: rituals of loss and desire and the short story collection, Delicate. Parts of this column appeared in a different form in Flag LIVE!, a Flagstaff entertainment publication.