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Left Unsaid

Escape to the Four Corners - what, again?

By Jeff Osgood

"I'd love to get back to the Northwest, you know, maybe do the Olympic Peninsula, stuff like that." This is uttered over pizza, a hearty end-of-the-trail meal typical of the dinners my older brother and I share when he comes out from Pennsylvania to join me on one of my desert wanderings. David continues, "And you know, 2010 is another trip to Peru for me and this time you have to come along."

I cringe at all this, but stay silent, busying myself with a mouthful of smoked trout and jalape�o pizza. "Count me out," I say to myself. Sorry, all booked up. No thanks. Freedom comes in small doses these days. I'm fully ensnared in the trip lines of occupation and domesticity. When the opportunity to toss pack and boots in the vehicle and strike out comes to me, I weigh my options carefully. But somehow the nose of my car always points southwest to the dry rock wilderness of the Four Corners - Canyon of the Ancients, Escalante, Comb Ridge, Grand Gulch. Down there I find a landscape that embodies the escape I burn for? but why?

Why the damn desert? It's hot and dangerous, and all that rock and sand is tough on my knees. Why keep circling the same area, year after year, like trying to cut sign?

Perhaps the answers are in my bones. Some folks have floated the fantastical theory that experience, even place-centered experience is carried in our RNA, our mitochondrial DNA. It's thought to be a genetic stamp of memories, knowledge, and emotions barely hiding in the mess of our inner workings. Believers use this scientific-voodoo as explanation to the phenomena of a person sensing familiarity in a place they've never trammeled before.

Does this setting of stone, sun, and scarce water play a part in my history? Is this all some kind of subliminal homecoming? Doubt it. My stock is English, the builders of New England on this continent. If these fine folk were encoded in my genome, I'd sooner have the urge to hang witches rather than strike out for desert country. Besides, the whole idea on my long-dead ancestors working my rudder creeps me out. And like Huck Finn said, "I don't take no stock in dead people."

"You know," my brother says, snaking the last slice of pizza, "there's an awesome canoeing trip in New Jersey."

"New Jersey?" I ask. "How do you keep the bottom of the boat from corroding in that cesspool."

"It's not urban canoeing. There are some really wild places in parts of New Jersey."

I chew on a discarded crust to stop up further retort.

I could fight back with, "It's the desert or nothing!" Punctuate it with a fist on the table, rattle the beer bottles. But David would demand reasons. Damn scientist, he always demands proof. That RNA crap wouldn't last a minute against his empirical reasoning.

If I strike back, it must be with logic. I could outline the simple equation of area. There's more terrain out this way than an explorer could cover in ten lifetimes. Mesa, ridge, wash, canyon, gulch, nook, and crevice so legion one can't begin to scratch its cracked and creased surface.

More logic? How about geologic? Uplift, upheaval, erosion, tectonics, strata, striation. This scab of land is scoured down to the bones, the ribs and protruding hips of the earth. Time, epochs and millennia, laid out like a slab of bacon.

Alas, this logical line of reasoning seems secondary to me if not completely hollow. It's too cold to capture some unnamable, some warmer draw I have to these places. If I try to put words to the real reasons why this country draws me in, would anyone else be able to understand?

There's this place, between to giant sandstone walls, where it is so quiet, it weighs like jungle humidity in the air. And when a raven flaps in, an ear can hear the whistling shuffle of its wings gripping air. Below that, there's the critching sound of its pivoting joints. After the bird wings out, the inaudible comes to life. To hell with Yeats's bee-loud glen at Innisfree, out there an ear can hear sunlight curing dark rock, leaves shriveling in the shade of scrub oak, gravel and silt settling in a dry creek bed.

There's another place where a trail moves from the dry-roasted smells of pungent sage and acrid juniper into hedges of wood's rose. Walking by the pink flowers lifts waves of sweet scent so dense it drowns three-day old body odor and makes jerky taste like it's dipped in nectar.

And there are a thousand places out there in the drier, unpeopled parts of the country that make people momentarily hold their breath. Humbling surprises of shape, color, size, strength, and fragility that trip the tongue. Even the most priggish English professor can round a canyon bend and come face to face with something so beautiful and terrible that his or her descriptors are reduced to base profanity and juvenile slang.

The essence of these places mix together to push on a body like a heavy hand to the shoulder. Nothing forceful, nothing restraining. More like a hand coming in to encourage someone to stay, to linger, to take another few minutes.

That's the desert Southwest. That's what this place has to it. At least for me.

"And you know, we still got to get up to Alaska," David says wiping his hands with a greasy napkin. "That place is definitely on the list."

The pizza's all gone, the beer bottles empty. Nothing left to plug up the pie hole.

"Alaska, yeah," I say, chewing the words a bit. "I hear the bugs are real bite-in-the-ass up there."

David leers at me. I shrug and we plan tomorrow's outing. We'll pick up a trail off the Hole-In-The-Rock Road and make our way down to the Escalante River. Up a side canyon is a place called Golden Cathedral. It's a soaring pour-over punctured with two giant holes above a still-water pool. During a certain window of the day, sunlight cuts through those holes, bounces off the water, and fills the grotto with shimmering liquid light. Maybe we'll make it there during that magic hour. Maybe we'll round the bend before the Cathedral and our breath will catch in our throats. In that flashbulb of a moment, that place will be all there is. Places like the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and certainly the wilds of New Jersey won't even exist. A little breeze will shuttle the cottonwoods behind us, brush past, follow the curves of the wall and die in the hanging ferns along a crescent seep. Standing there, feet in the sand, all there will be is that place and that nick of time.

That place will do all my talking for me.

Jeff Osgood writes from his home on the Front Range.