Journeys

I met a coyote on the road once, only three days after I'd met cows. I had been driving on a small road over a fairly uninhabited hill near San Luis Obispo and came to a stretch that prominently featured a cow firmly planted in the middle. Swinging its head to look at me, so I stopped. And waited. Cows are very large. My parents crossed a field of cows when they lived in England and informed me of this fact, but I had never felt the truth of it so profoundly before. In my steel vehicle I felt rather fragile and small. So I waited. I think I may have honked. I debated before doing it, fearing a massive bovine retribution, and cannot actually remember today whether or not I waited in silence or let loose a sonic attack. I may have compromised and rolled down the window to holler. I can't remember. Such is the state of my pathetic memory, or an indication of the great anxiety I felt at the time. But obviously it did give way, or I would not have met my coyote.

I was on a road trip, foolishly trying to follow in the footsteps of the mighty essayists of our country, and naturally failing miserably. I'd like to think I failed in style, but I can surely say I had a good time doing it. Two days in SLO and back home and then I headed south but mostly east, towards joshua trees, full moons, and olive trees. The olives were at my history teacher's house - five acres on essentially wild land along with horses, mules, cats, and a dog. And for one night, me. I had been there many years before on a weekend rock climbing trip with other fellow high-schoolers. We went horseback riding after it was dark and climbed during the light. I was sore and dusty but loved it. I had come back a year later for a week of backpacking and climbing, and saw the brightest and fullest moon ever. It woke me up as I slept, so brilliantly blinding that I thought someone had shined a flashlight straight into my eyes.

This time I slept indoors, and left early after breakfast. There is one main highway that goes all the way from one end of the park to the other - I got my day-pass and started out. Joshua Tree is larger than the state of Rhode Island, which makes my intention to see and reflect on all of it in one day seem rather lofty and irrational. But I was determined. It was hot, and my car threatened to overheat with age so I opened up the front windows and let the vents run past the engine. I don't remember much from that day except for the endless miles of road, the dry hills, the scraggly trees growing up out of the earth like a teenager who desperately tries to prove his maturity. Joshua Tree may seem odd and barren but this is not so. There is a surprising diversity of plant and animal life, even large species like some kind of sheep or goat - I've never been good at tracks, but there was a distinctive hoof in my campground long ago. I remember stopping and going on a short well-marked hike that looped through a small bowl in a hillside, at one point clambering up a small pile of boulders to rest in the shade and with a view. I love the colors of the desert. The purple shadows, the gray-green mists of leaves. The rough edges of the hills jutting out in earthy browns. Here are there a flowered burst of color. The searing blue of sky.

I played with my water bottle as I drove along. If I let it sit for a while in one position a tiny dew of perspiration would build up inside the bottle as the drops tried to escape. I would lift it and tip, washing half of that dusting away, then replace it and wait again. I did this over and over, each time only washing half the area of the previous. For some reason I found the way the water continued to bead up fascinating - the way that the first section was much more densely covered than the second, the second than the third, and so on. It was like a fantastic endless venn diagram only with much odder shapes. Eventually I remembered that I had brought the water to avoid dehydration or sunstroke or any other related malady and drank, destroying all the evidence of my hard-won scientific discovery. I am not sure quite what this revelation was, I just know that I found it wonderful and mesmerizing and entertained me for many miles on the road.

Which was why I felt so unprepared when I had to come quickly to a halt, once again. He stood there, on the road, defiantly planted on either side of the yellow center line and turned his head to look. Regarding me for an instant, an hour, I am not sure. I had seen coyotes before when driving in the San Gabriel Mountains and knew they lived in the desert also but I hadn't expected to see one. Not so presently. It was present. Not by the side of the road, but in it. I felt challenged and evaluated. I felt more naked than I had with the cows, not because of the danger of a coyote (I'm sure, had I honked or shouted it would have fled immediately) but because of the sudden feeling that I didn't belong. That none of us belonged in that foreign landscape. Annie Dillard writes about her encounter with a weasel, quite unexpectedly making eye contact and suddenly crowding into his brain and life, and being crowded into in return. This was not that moment, but it was not far from it. We stared at each other through the windshield, in shock, wonder, amazement, resentment, fear. I am not sure how much of this we shared and how much was either of us alone. A long, long moment we sat like that and then he turned his head away and trotted off into the desert landscape. I lost him in the bushes and against the dun earth quickly and, feeling that the sentiment ought to be mutual, started up in first again and slowly took off down the road.

It was a long day. The heat wore on me and I took a break near the other end of the park at the visitor center, reading in the corner under a small air conditioning vent, drinking from my bottle. It wasn't mesmerising anymore. Just wet. When I finally left the boundaries and headed down to the highway I passed over the San Andreas Fault, a cavernous split in the earth spanned by a bridge that feels immensely too slight and infirm once you are directly over the gaping maw. It was majestic and terrifying, but I did not stop, I did not visit the lookout on the mountains above (or if I did I cannot remember). It had been one of my intended points of reflection, of the power of the earth hidden so deep within, of the fear that something as simple as a crack in the ground can muster in us when we are safely so far away. But I did not reflect. I never wrote the essays I meant to about Joshua Tree. I never wrote anything about the rest of my trip to San Diego or back home. My writing, turned in for my senior project, only discussed the northern half of my venture. Apricots and stars and airplanes. Subjects for civilization and normal life. I finally sat down six months later and added a scrawled page on my dusty encounter but I could not capture the alien nature, the discord of that meeting, in that place, at that time in a sleepy afternoon in the hot sun on the road. The pavement baking underfoot, the radio off for lack of any real signals.

I was alone, from the time I left to the time I arrived in San Diego, late in the evening with only myself to talk to. Martha Wyke has written that the elegiac poets used women as a means to define themselves, I doubt we in the modern world are so different - relying on friends and brand names to safely categorize ourselves. We exists, particularly in the teenage years, yearning after a means to determine our "true selves" our "identities" when in fact our method of searching probably indicates plenty if we ever bothered to pay attention. But in that one moment, I was forcibly defined. The opposition displayed such fundamentalism, such obviousness. When the moment passed my definition passed away with it. I have not been back to Joshua Tree since then. My sister has, to climb, but I have not. I don't think about going often, but once in a while I crave the desert. I am not sure if it is the color I yearn for, or the dry heat, the olives, the moon, my mirror.