What I Saw When I Wasn't Looking

Utah is a state made for motorcycles. It’s really just a giant playground in general, but it’s a wonderful place to ride. The main reason is that there are so few people out here. There’s no stop and go traffic, or traffic at all. If you get stuck in traffic you’ve somehow done something very wrong. I’ve only had my bike out here for about a week and I’ve already experienced some of the best rides I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, this place isn’t without its drawbacks.

The weather out here is just as beautiful and extreme as the landscape. A warm and beautiful day can turn into thunderstorms before you know it. I’ve ridden in the rain before, but what really scared me was the wind. I was riding around 60mph coming out of Capitol Reed National Park, and I could see the skies turning grey in front of me, but what really gave it away was the feeling in the air. That pre-rain dampness that’s in the air made it obvious I was about to have problems, but there was nowhere for me to stop. I decided that I had to go through it. Before I rode into any rain, I started getting hit with gusts of wind that were going at least 40mph. Every blast pushed me to the edge of the road, and that was even more terrifying because the only thing between me and a canyon ledge was a low guard rail. On of the scariest – and coolest – moments came when I was reaching the top of a hill after leaning into the wind the entire way up. I’d reach the top and suddenly the wind would be gone, and I’d find myself in this weird vacuum where I thought maybe it was over. Seconds later another blast of wind would come at me from another direction, catching me completely off-guard as I started back down the hill.

Then the rain started. The wind was keeping my glasses relatively clear, but the rain drops would hit exposed parts of my face so hard that a few of them left welts. There were no respites from the wind this time. It was a constant 30mph, and the only change was a change in direction, making me scramble to counter sudden powerful gusts from random directions. At one point I was coming along a ridge at about 50mph when a blast came at me from my left. To the right there was nothing but a guard rail between me a 100 foot drop to a canyon floor. The wind pushed me closer and closer along the wet pavement to the edge of the road, and I’m leaning hard to my left the entire time. The wind was just so strong it could knock around 700 pounds of bike and rider. The only way I could get any sort of control back was by letting off of the throttle completely and letting my bike drift through it without offering any resistance. It was an awesome experience that I don’t plan on doing again on purpose anytime soon.

I mentioned spirits in my last post, and I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly is out here. But I also realize that maybe I left out something in what I mean by spirit. I don’t mean ghosts or haunted place, though there could be plenty of those out here as well. I mean spirit as in essence, as in soul. What makes this place tick? What are the parts that make this place so unique? Edward Abbey commented – I’m paraphrasing a lot right now – that thinkers and authors had already pinpointed the mystery of places like the sea or the forests. We already know what we love about them. To take that idea a bit further, look at the amount of tales, legends, and stories already told about those places. How many of them involve fantastic creatures and the brave men and women who have encountered them, who have tried to conquer them? Moby Dick springs to mind, or maybe Beowulf. What can we take from these two things? Sea monsters and mythic cave beasts. But, then, are there not also fairy tales about these places? Mermaids – the friendly kind – or maybe unicorns? These stories and these creatures have become part of a places soul, or at least they’ve become a way to explain that soul. They are born of these places as much as they are part of the established landscape…or sea-scape.

So, my point being, what about the desert-scape? What collective stories do we know about the desert? Personally, I know of almost none. Arabian Nights? Navajo tales about skin walkers? Aladdin? I got nothing, but I want to know more. What creatures make up these weird red desert, and what stories can I find them in? I might run into a werewolf in the forest, but what could I find in the desert? I might meet a mermaid by the beach, but what will I meet in the canyons?

You ever see things in your peripherals that you think are people or faces? Maybe you’ll be opening a door and you’ll catch some movement out of the corner of your eye and for a split second you’re convinced there’s someone standing in front of you? Or maybe you’re driving and you check your rear view mirror and you could swear there’s a person in your back seat? This happens to me regularly. I know it happens to everyone, but for some reason it seems to happen to me almost every day. Sometimes it’s not a person. Sometimes it’s a flash of white light moving just outside my field of vision, or brief blurriness in front of me, like something is trying to…teleport in, I guess. Trying to manifest itself right in front of me. For a while I thought it was just my contacts drying out, but it’ll happen while I’m wearing glasses as well. It also seems to be happening more now that I’ve moved out to the desert.

I don’t know what these phenomenon are. I don’t know if there’s a psychological explanation, or an ocular explanation, or if maybe it has to do with how the sun works out here, or if there really are spirits that exist and just do things like that. I don’t know at all. But that last idea intrigues me the most.

Now, I should explain that I don’t believe in anything spiritual or religious. Excuse me, I do believe that they could exist, but I don’t have absolute faith that they actually do exist. God and Allah and Zeus and Tlaloc and Dizang and Vishnu could all co-exist and play poker every Thursday. Leprechauns and gremlins could be hanging out with Navajo skin changers and dragons on a regular basis. They could all be completely real and exist outside our ability to perceive them. I don’t believe that any more than I believe that I can fly just by wishing really hard or that I’ll lose weight by thinking thin thoughts, but it’s interesting to think about. These stories and tales about creatures and spirits have been passed down through generations and they started as ways to pass the time and explain things that science hadn’t figured out yet. The only reason I think about this kind of stuff – which honestly isn’t that often – is because the storyteller and the romantic in me is bored and wants to take up the yarn. It’s the same reason we all love the world of Harry Potter or Star Wars. There’s no way it could be real….but it’s so much fun to think about.

Believe in want you want to believe or have faith in whatever or whoever you want, I don’t want to offend anyone with my silly ranting. I just want it to be clear where I’m coming from.

ANYWAY, what does this have to do with me seeing things in my peripherals? I believe, or rather I find it entertaining to think they might be, some desert spirits that I’ve never encountered before. What are they? I have no idea. I don’t know where they might come from or what they might want. I don’t know their motivations. I’m still working that out.

So I learned something about myself. That was part of the point, right? I figured out that, at least at this point in my life, I need solitude. I’ve always been something of an introvert, but part of what spurred the move out here was a desire to cut myself off from people. Like I said in the first post I wrote after coming out here, I needed to get away. I needed to get away from friends, family, and coworkers. I love all of them, but I needed time to myself to reset. I needed to shroud myself in solitude and not really interact with anyone that I knew. I’m not a complete hermit, obviously. I still use my phone or email to communicate, but I was so burnt from having to be ‘present’ all the time. I wanted a place where I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. I wanted to find a place where I could just…exist. Where I could just retreat, briefly, into a cocoon of self.

The paradox, of course, is that I work with people all day. But that, to me, is different. I smile pleasantly, make a joke or two, and send them happily on their way, our paths never to cross again. It’s the people that I have to see all the time that set my teeth on edge. I’ve had a few temporary roommates in the last few weeks, and I’ve gone out of my way not to be home when I have them. I don’t want to speak to them. All of them have been lovely people, kind and funny and generous, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them while they’re in my house. I need a world to myself, a permanent shield from the outside world, and I can’t create one with other people in it. Some people can. Some people can be in the same house as three or four people and feel totally comfortable and at home. I can’t. These people become regulars, people I have to please or people who have expectations of who I am as a person and I just can’t deal with that right now. It might seem silly or immature, but it’s the truth.

There are a few people in my life who I would gladly share my space with, people who have earned my trust and my love, but none of them are here. “Maybe if you give someone a chance you’ll become best friends”. Sure. It could happen. But not now. I’d need it to be a person that I chose to let it, not someone I have no control over. I need to be alone for a bit.

The one thing I didn’t expect out here was the amount of stuff people give me. Visitors hand stuff to me all the time. So far I’ve been given two books, a slice of pizza, four bottles of water, and a jar full of homemade potato salad which turned out to be quite good. Most of these things are from people I call “parks people”, since they spend almost all their free time driving around in micro-buses and campers visiting every national park they can. They seem to be the most pleasant people I could hope to meet, and they’d like nothing more than to sit and chat with me about nothing and let the time idly flow by. It’s almost like they’re giving me things as a way of thanking me for working for the park service. They seem to want to make me smile. But even those I wouldn’t call “parks people” have given me things. Someone drove from Colorado with a slice of pizza wrapped in tin foil for me, just because I had sold him a season pass. It’s not like he did it just for me, he was coming here anyway, but still!

I actually had to stop writing this for a few minutes because someone came to my window to give me another book. I had to stop writing about how people give me things because someone wanted to give me more things.

Someone invited me to their wedding last week. They were having it in the park and we apparently had such a nice time chatting that they invited me to the hotel for the reception! They were serious about it, too, gave me the ballroom room it was being held in and honestly wanted me to show up. I couldn’t because I had to work, but the fact that these people, “park people”, would invite someone they just met to their wedding was a nice surprise. Congratulations you two! I doubt they’ll read this, but ya never know.

I have a co-worker whose mere existence infuriates me. He’s a kind, gentle, well-meaning man, maybe a year older than I am. He speaks plainly, is pleasant with customers, and courteous with co-workers. He’s on-time, communicates effectively, and is generally in a good mood. There are moments when he forgets something so trivial that I want to murder him, but I’ve been chalking that up to my impatience and not any sort of incompetence on his part. In short, he’s almost the perfect co-worker. But he infuriates me sometimes.

When it comes to this job, my anger has been simmering just under the surface. Between the paperwork, the supervisors, the bureaucracy, the redundant meetings, and the asinine mundane-ness of the position, there are moments when I need to scream at someone. But there, in the face of all of this inane stupidity, is my co-worker. He stands there as wave after wave of idiocy flows over him and he doesn’t even flinch. He smiles and talks about what a lovely place this is and how much he enjoys being here. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong to him. He’s getting paid, he’s helping people, he’s good! He goes about his day with pep in his step and a song in his heart, the world is his fucking oyster.

He’s not angry about our overlords! He’s not tired of our boring job! He’s looking forward to his day off so he can clean his room! How is a rational human being capable of such joy in the face of such ridiculous odds? Maybe he drank the Kool-Aid. Maybe he believes in the cause to fervently that he’s blind to the mental trauma that’s being done. Maybe he’s an idiot. It’s possible, I mean, I don’t honestly know him that well. Maybe he just doesn’t know enough to be angry. Maybe he’s the kind of person who will just go along with anything if he thinks it’s “the right thing to do” or “for the greater good”. Maybe he’s been sent her to torment me, for there really is nothing more infuriating to the cynic than the joyfully optimistic. That’s what makes me so angry at him. That he can joyfully wander through this desert, blessed by optimism and a total lack of situational awareness. His ability to walk through these flames fueled by bureaucratic ineptitude and emerge unscathed, his uniform crisp and his hat on straight, sends me into a rage that is totally unjustified. That he can’t see the nonsense in front of him while I drink it all up.

There are hundreds of cows running amok out here. There are several open ranges that allow cows to freely cross major roads to get from one side of their range to another. The problem is that cows are stupid. They don’t have any hustle when it comes to crossing, and they’ll walk right in front of your car, day or night, without a second thought like an idiotic beef transportation system. You might ask “are you really gunna judge an animal based on its ability to cross a road?” Yes, especially when they’re in my way and could cause me to die. I’ve come up with a list of how I could potentially die by cow:

I’ll come over a hill at 70 mph – a legal and reasonable speed – and there’s a four hundred pound cow standing in the road. I hit said cow, and the impact sends me through the windshield even though I’m wearing a seat belt, and I’ll die.

I’ll be standing on a cliff enjoying the view when a cow will just stupidly walk into me, knocking me off the cliff, and I’ll die.

I’ll be eating a hamburger at the one restaurant here, and I’ll choke on a piece of beef, and I’ll die.

I’ll be driving through a section of road with a small cliff on the side, and a cow will stupidly fall off said cliff, landing on my car, and I’ll die.

I’ll be in the booth at work when a stampede of these wandering idiots flattens me and the booth, and I’ll die.

I’ll stop in the middle of the road because a family of bovine morons is just standing there, looking at me like I’m the asshole, and a Mack truck will hit me from behind, and I’ll die.

I’ll eat all the burgers I can out of spite, and after years of grease and fat my heart will finally fail, and at 45, I’ll die.

A lovely Canadian couple – I’m almost positive they were Canadian – came to my booth about two weeks ago, and we started chatting about the park and the desert. A lot of the visitors are regulars, and the friendly ones will usually try to find out a bit about you. People just seem to be friendlier in general out here and they think nothing of stopping to chat for a few minutes with a complete stranger. It still catches me off guard sometimes, but it really is a pleasant experience most of the time. Anyway, these folks asked me where I was from and I told them New York. People’s faces usually light up when I say that. “Whoooaaa, what are you doing out here?” or “you’re a long way from home” or “well, this is certainly a change of pace from New York”. People mostly assume I’m from New York City and I let them. It’s easier than explaining that I’m from the North Shore of Long Island and grew up on beaches and in forests, not in the concrete jungles of Manhattan or Brooklyn. So I say I’m from New York and the man driving goes “oh cool, like Edward Abbey?” and I must have had a blank expression on my face. “He lived in Hoboken and moved out to Utah to work at Arches and eventually became a writer,” he explained. Since I’d already started writing here and I’ve been working on a longer project as well, I told them about this little blog I’m working on and how part of the whole reason I’m out here is to write. “You’ve got to read Desert Solitaire,” they tell me. “It’s all about his experiences working in the desert for six months, and he’s got some pretty strong opinions about a lot of stuff”. Before I can even say that I was driving three hours to Barnes and Noble the next day anyway – if I’m gunna quote Faulkner I should probably read some – the woman goes “Actually hold on!” She runs into the back of their VW microbus – these people are living an amazing life – and grabs me a copy of the very book we’re talking about! I was floored. I asked if they were sure and they said if I was in the booth when they came back through later that week they’d grab it and if not I should hold on to it. I thanked them and they drove into the park, a small halo floating above their VW microbus.

So I’m still in the process of reading it and I plan on writing something about it within the next week or so – he does have some pretty strong opinions – but I loved how the whole thing came together. Hearing about how this person who also lived in the northeast and decided to disappear into the desert and turned to writing as a form of catharsis and expression seemed to validate my own decisions in many ways. While he eventually became a serious environmental activist and his prose is more eloquently descriptive than mine can ever hope to be – I’m really just typing words at the internet – I instantly felt validated by the mere fact that this book existed. It wasn’t anything like “well if he can do it so can I”. It was more the feeling of “I’m not alone! It’s not just me who made this insane decision!” It was a breath of fresh air in this dusty desert.

I feel wasted out here in the desert. I feel like I could be doing so much more out here but I’m not. I sit in a small box all day and hand out passes to people. It’s really hard to get excited about this. It’s awful to say, but I don’t know that I care about this job yet, or if I ever will. I knew this was the job going in. I’m not complaining about it, I knew what it would be like. I just didn’t expect it to be as boring as it is. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

When I first left for this job at the end of March, I technically didn’t know if I had it yet. My supervisor told me to come out not knowing if I had been cleared by HR, and HR themselves were completely silent on the matter. I left my home, my friends, my family, and my job for a position that I didn’t know if I had been appointed to. I took it on pure faith because I told myself I wanted to get out. So I drove across the country to a place I’d never been to work for a person I’d never met – and it turns out I never would – in a position I wasn’t sure I got. It was terrifying. But it did teach me a few important lessons. I learned that I was completely capable of throwing up my hands, saying “fuck it”, and leaving. I’d be alright if I did that, mentally if not financially. I also learned about the support I have from my family and friends, that they didn’t care about why I made the decision, they were just happy that I made it at all and I was willing to move on to perceived bigger and better things. I’ve long been a proponent of saying “fuck it”, and this was a powerful reminder of why.

Here’s the problem though. The ability to say “fuck it” isn’t necessarily a new idea for me, but it is certainly more powerful now than it has ever been before. Add it to a job that I’m not motivated to do and we now have a bit of a conundrum. If I left tomorrow or found out HR really didn’t give me the job, I’d thank them while I told them to go to hell. That’s dangerous. How can I reconcile that fact? How do I get to a point where I’m excited about what I do again?

Figured I’d try something different.

You wake up at 2:30 in the morning and you’re not sure why. You planned on getting up early but this wasn’t what you had in mind. So you lay in bed for about half an hour, trying to figure out if you want to go back to sleep or just get up. You don’t really make a decision, so you pull out the book you’ve been reading, reasoning that you’ll either pass out reading or stay up and enjoy your book. Eventually, your alarm for 4:30 goes off and you finally drag yourself out of bed, noticing how damn cold it is. You make breakfast and coffee, that sweet black nectar. You’re ready at 5:15, which is perfect since you need to be at the cliff at 6:45 and it’ll take an hour and fifteen minutes to get there – which, incidentally, is the least amount of time it takes you to get anywhere. You step out into the dark, cold morning and instinctively look up into the sky, easily locating Orion and Sirius. The constellations are so much larger than you’re used to, and you gaze at both dippers as you walk to your car. Within minutes you’re heading north-east into the desert, just you and the stars. You hit 70 miles-per-hour without thinking, and you don’t even notice until you’re flying past one of the tiny housing developments that dot the area. But they’re all gone quickly, and once again you’re alone with the sky. It doesn’t stay that way for long. Fifteen minutes into the desert and you can see the faintest glimmers of pale light start to peek past the mountains to the east. You have an hour left to drive, but you’re not worried. You can still see Orion to the west, as if he was trying to guard the night sky against the coming sun. It’s a battle you know he’ll lose, but you smile thinking maybe he’ll buy you some time. The road in front of you is either straight as an arrow or a twisty mountain pass, and it’s impossible to remember which part you’ll hit next. The pale purple to the east keeps disappearing as you pass each mountain, which you’ve taken to collectively calling “the Green Dwarves”. The road markers on your right glow a faint white as you rumble past them, but the brightest thing in this desert by far is your headlights. Rabbits seem to love running across the road in front of you, and you’re pleasantly surprised that they always make it across before you get too close. Finally, after coming out of a stretch of twisted mountain paths, you reach the fork in the road. It’s 6am. To the left, north, is another long stretch of desert. You go right, south, into the canyon.  It’s another twisty length of road, but with cottonwoods, junipers, and several hundred foot tall cliff walls staring at you as you go 70 right at them before the road swoops out of the way. After fifteen minutes, you’ve made it. The cliff looking out over a huge stretch of southern Utah. You can’t see if yet, but you know there’s a stretch of the Colorado River somewhere down there. The sun has been rising for nearly an hour, so you can see the outlines of buttes and plateaus forming in the distance, miles away. You’ve got another twenty minutes before anything happens, but you don’t mind. You brought a camp chair and a thermos of coffee. You’re set.

It happens slowly at first. You don’t really notice it for the first few minutes. You’re more concerned with the horse fly that keeps trying to get into your coffee. Finally, it’s so obvious that you can’t help but see it. The world around you is getting brighter. It’s still grey, but it’s gone from black to a light grey, with hints of color thrown onto almost every surface you can see. The clouds, though, those clouds are the real treat. Stretched across what you’re convinced is the entire state is a blanket of soft, black clouds rushing along the sky. Those clouds are what give it away. At first they go from black to grey with the rest of the world, but soon you can see hints of yellow underneath them. They seem to glow at first, giving off their own light, but soon the sun is beginning to peek over the horizon and those clouds aren’t just glowing, they’re burning. The underside of them is orange while the tops are still grey, making them look like giant floating fires. The crowning sun is washing the entire scene with a soft yellow light, except for those burning orange clouds. The Colorado River looks like it’s on fire and the rocky plains below look like they’re made of gold. It looks like a giant water color painting. Except for those clouds that make the sky look like it’s on fire.

I know I’ve written at length about the skies here in southern Utah, but I’m doing it again. It is massive in both its scope and complexities, and it is impossible to look up and see the same view you saw an hour ago. For one thing, there are times of the day that is nearly impossible to tell where the land stops and the sky starts. Early in the day while the sun is steadily making its way higher into the sky, you can see the mountains to the west slowly appear if you have the patience to watch the show. The sky above is the first thing to light up in a pale blue that’s almost white, and the pale grey of the mountain tops themselves seem to blend in with the pale blue backdrop. You can see the rock formations reaching up into the sky, or the sky reaching up into the ground, both of them seemingly connected for a few brief minutes. The same thing happens in reverse at dusk. The red, yellow, and amber streaks of the cliffs and buttes explode into prominence as the sun sets in the west, the sky to the east now a bright, rusty red. This time the hills and formations to west seem to be painted in this yellowish-red from light from the sky above, again briefly united while the sun calls it quits for the day.

Time has almost no meaning out here, not in the traditional sense. As I’ve said before, there’s nowhere to go and not a whole lot to do, so there’s almost nothing at all that’s pressing. If you have the day off you wake up and do whatever you feel like doing for about fourteen hours. By then it’s dark and you’re kind of done for the day. Even if you do have work, everything seems to be contingent on the sun. You work when the sun is out and when it starts to go down, you start finishing up for the day. There’s no rush hours and no lunch rushes. There’s no rushing at all. People exist happily in space totally devoid of time. There’s no 11 o’clock staff meetings, no 2:30 start times, no 4 to 8 happy hours, it’s all just people doing things that they want to do when they feel like doing it. You can comfortably ignore hours at a time and not have missed a single thing except maybe the score of the baseball game you weren’t really watching anyway. The desert is totally timeless, aside from when people are up and doing whatever they want or when they’re not.

Coming from a place where time is everything, it’s both a huge relief and a huge source of stress. The idea that I can take a six hour drive to Colorado and not have missed a single thing in Utah is amazing, but having to rely on other people doing anything in a timely manner is infuriating. When I want to get something done I have a very “GO GO GO!” mentality, but no one else does. It’s a bizzare paradox that I’m still working on, but so far the pros faaaar outweigh the cons. While I write this I’m technically on the clock because I have TIME.

There’s something profoundly beautiful in the Western sky that I, in all my East Coast ignorance, was not prepared for. The sheer scope of the land is one thing, but the sky seems truly limitless out here. Standing almost anywhere guarantees you a fantastic view of what seems like a bright blue canopy, but it’s when you find yourself at any kind of elevation that you truly get a show. For starters, the clouds seem close enough to grab onto, and the idea of sliding your hand into the giant ball of fluff doesn’t seem like too farfetched a notion. But the sky here is so expansive that you’re not just seeing the clouds nearest you, you’re seeing all the clouds. The only thing stopping you from seeing everything in the sky is the curvature of the earth, and even then you’re seeing things that, from your tiny vantage point, might as well be worlds away.

I’ll give you an example: Today there was a storm somewhere maybe five miles away. At the beginning of dusk, you could make out exactly where the storm was. There was no confusion about it, you could see exactly where the black clouds extended from the mountains that formed horizon right up into…nothingness, I guess is the best word. You couldn’t really see where the clouds stopped and space ended. There next to it, as clear as day, was a similarly shaped cloud, but instead of black it was pure white. These two massive clouds right next to each other, one bringing rain and one bringing cool evening breezes to the desert. Maybe they weren’t even different clouds. Maybe it was one massive system that acted like one of the old gods that dabbled in duality, bringing respite from its own chaos.

You could see past that massive old god to a sky streaked with purples and ambers. The chaos didn’t stop you from seeing everything in the sky past it. To the east was a sky that was embracing the night, letting deep violets and blacks slowly take over, while the west still clung to the day with streaks of bright blue and vibrant yellow. There was no way to take it all in without standing for a few minutes and just staring. It was a sky that gave pause, especially to someone who had never seen anything like it.

So there’s a cricket either in my house or just outside my window, chirping away like a maniac. There’s very little to hold my attention out here other than books, so a decent about of my free time is spent reading, but that’s damn near impossible for me to do with this little monster chirping away. So me, being both exhausted and wanting for some kind of mental stimulation, got angry and desperately tried to rationalize this crickets self-identity.

After I tried ignoring it, the first thing I did, obviously, was to sit up off the couch and yell “don’t you know I’m trying to read!?” to an otherwise empty house. It kept chirping as if nothing had happened. For whatever reason, I thought ‘do you really not know how loud you’re being?’, to which the part of my brain that knows I’m an idiot for having this conversation at all goes ‘of course not, it’s a fucking cricket’. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ll just get annoyed by the silliest of things, so at that moment, the fact that a god damn cricket didn’t have any sort of self-awareness bothered me more than the fact that I couldn’t read my book in peace. Somehow, in the span of like five seconds, I went from hating a cricket for being loud to hating it for not having any concept of the world around it. My next thought was ‘I know some people like that’, and that thought, somehow, suddenly made me very aware of the fact that I was arguing with myself over a cricket.