Kirk M. Maxey: Blog and Website

Red dust from the desert filtered into the tent as the morning sun rose. At dawn the light was diffuse and the triangle of fabric enclosed space was peaceful. Then the first of the sun’s direct rays brushed the canvas with an incandescent glow. It lit up the dust particles as they drifted about on tiny currents of air. A boy of 19 crawled stiffly out from under the flap on his hands and knees. He stood up, stretched, and then drank long and sloppily from a plastic gallon water jug. Water streamed down his neck and dark stains spread down his T-shirt to his navel. He shuffled a few more steps from the tent, and urinated on a cactus, frowning at the paltry stream of salty orange liquid. Then he and went back for another long drink from the water jug.

He eyed the open tent flap and the form of his companion dozing under the bright red quilted down. There had been arguments yesterday, and he was both irritated that the guy was not waking up and glad not to have to put up with talking to him. Pulling a small notebook quietly from his side of the tent, he settled in the dry sand and opened it to read the last entry he had written. It was a self portrait from a day in August, the summer before, on the last day of his summer construction job.

Self Portrait (This part of the reading is best done while playing this Bob Seeger tune)

It was Friday afternoon. Sunlight filtered down through the aspen leaves, falling in soft patches on the grass. He lay back on the ground beside the trees with the tall grass swaying gently beside him, the pattern of sunlight and shadow flickering over his legs. His right hand rested easily on the handle of a battered chainsaw, its casing still hot to the touch, a fine blue tendril of smoke curling up from its oily muffler. The diesel engine of a backhoe throbbed in the distance. The aspen leaves trembled softly, whispering in quiet shock at the destruction that had stopped just short of their roots.

The grove where he lay stood at the edge of a wide swath of downed timber. A patchwork of stumps, broken branches, and bare logs stretched down one hundred yards to the wide brown expanse of bare earth that would soon be a dam. The backhoe was perched on the side of the mountain, preparing a trench for the placement of a pipeline. He watched through half-closed eyes as the silvery teeth of the shovel sliced into the earth, watched as the mechanical arm contracted, lifting a scoop of wet brown dirt up from the ground. Over and over the arm dipped and rose, slowly extending the trench that ran up the hillside to the aspen grove.

He was young and slender, with blue eyes that sparkled with a mixture of curiosity and confidence. His arms were smooth and brown, his hands hardened from a summer of labor. Pitch stains marred the battered yellow hardhat that was pushed forward to shield his eyes from the afternoon sun. A lock of dark brown hair tinted with gold pushed out from under its brim around his ear. A few stray chips of wood clung to the golden hair on the back of his arm. He brushed them away and sank deeper into the grass.

He was pleased with himself – pleased with life. Though his blue jeans were black with oil and his arms grimy with dust and sweat, there was no dirt in his soul. His smooth features and quiet smile betrayed wounds no deeper than the fine white lines from this summer’s scars etched on the back of his hand. His world was expanding, as was his own opinion of himself. This summer he had learned to cut a tree and make it fall where he wanted it. He had learned to work ten hours a day. He had learned that there wasn’t a lot that he couldn’t do. The weeks had passed and the trees had fallen, one after another, creaking and splintering in an explosion of dust and bark and flying branches. Through the felling of trees, he honed his skill with the saw, his judgment of their weight and balance. He had gotten good at something.

It was Friday, his work was done, and the world lay stretched out before him. He gazed over the gently nodding heads of grass at the mountains shimmering in the distance. He was unhurried, and looked with detached amusement at the dusty confusion of the construction site below him. He smiled softly and closed his eyes.

An ant ran quickly over his leg, as the backhoe droned on in the distance. He would lie here in the warm afternoon sun, do as he pleased, and think, among other things, that this would always be possible. When the backhoe stopped, it would be 5:00. Quitting time. Then he would get up, pick up his saw, and walk down the mountain for the last time. The aspen leaves rustled softly, and a patch of warm sunlight flickered over his face.

Utah, 7 Months later

On this morning, he slid the notebook back inside the tent flap. He put a full canteen of water and a candy bar inside a small day pack along with a camera and a flannel shirt. He glanced briefly at the smooth red sandstone formations of southeast Utah spread out around him, and at the white snowcaps of the Manti-La Salle Mountains far to the north.

Then he glanced back at the tent, and with an adolescent smile imagined his companion waking in a few hours to wonder where he had gone. Not telling him was the first of many mistakes. A disaster is not usually the result of one egregious error. More often, it is the sequential accumulation of 4 or 5 of them, culminating in one that builds on the earlier ones in an irreversible slide into really bad things. He was about to find that out.

He started walking purposefully across the flat desert, heading toward a break in the low sandstone cliffs. The smooth braided pattern in the sand told that when there was water, it flowed in this direction. There were track trails and small burrows of kangaroo rats, and from time to time the straight, purposeful trail of a coyote. Eventually banks of eroded sand rose up on each side, and his trail became the bottom of a wide, sandy ditch. He began to find stones washed into piles along the sandbars. Most of them were grainy black and red basalts that looked baked from their years in the desert sun, but there were also milky white quartz and pink shards of chert. He picked them up, turned them in his hand, and tried to knock a few sharp flakes from some of them like an Indian would do. He had the vague idea that he would follow this dry wash until it reached the Colorado River, then follow the riverbank down into the town of Moab and get a hamburger. It was barely 10:00 in the morning, and he was hungry already.

He ate half the candy bar, took a long drink of water, and climbed up the side of the wash onto hard red sandstone. On both sides, the rock rose up in banded layers of ginger, mustard, and cinnamon for more than three hundred feet. From here he could see how the water had sliced through the cliff wall a mile or more ahead, leaving a notch. Through this window he could see far to the east, where some bright green cottonwood trees hinted that there was much more water. That was probably the Colorado River. He dropped back down into the wash, where the walking was easy for a while on the hard packed sand. But eventually the sand disappeared and he was forced to hop from boulder to boulder between towering walls that squeezed in closer from each side. Sometimes he had to lower himself by hand over the lip of a narrow chute, or slide down where the water had flowed and drop into the sand where it had formed a pool.

He was mesmerized by the beauty of the sculpted and braided rock all around him. He stopped and took several pictures of the walls, the sky, and of his own footprints. He even took off his shoes, and made a purposeful track of human prints across a small basin of damp sand, and then photographed them.

The air was dry, juniper scented and warm at midday, and his T-shirt once again was spotted with dampness – this time his own sweat. It was mid afternoon when the narrow gorge suddenly opened up and he found himself on a gentle sagebrush slope a few hundred yards from the river. It was March, and the snowmelt was starting in earnest hundreds of miles upstream in Colorado. The river was dark, murky and pressing ominously at its banks.

There was an old pinion pine there on the hillside, so he sat down in its shade and had the last half of the candy bar and most of the rest of the water. The last few swallows were left in the bottom of the aluminum container, just in case. As he surveyed up and down the river, he began to feel slightly worried. The sun was already low, sending long shadows from the cliffs on his right out across the rolling whitecaps. He could see cars, like small dots on the highway on the other side. But the town he was hoping to walk down to was nowhere in sight. He pulled on his pack, found a game trail that roughly ran parallel to the river, and began to walk rapidly. He amazed himself at how much distance he had covered. He quickly added several more miles, winding in and out with the course of the river. Glancing at his watch, he guessed that he had already traveled about twelve miles since he set off that morning. Suddenly he rounded another bend in the canyon and his spirits sank.

As the river meandered back and forth between the tall cliffs that contained it, periodically it would sweep right up to the base of the sandstone and there would be no room for a trail or path of any kind between the cliff and the river. Such a place confronted him now. His shoulder brushed against the canyon wall as he stood on the last narrow ledge of rock. Ahead of him, the river hissed and whispered as it undercut the cliff. Behind him, a few willows poked up out of the thin strip of sandbar that ended at his feet. He looked carefully at the water, trying to imagine how deep it was, and how fast it would carry him if he tried to swim. It was cold in the shadow of the canyon towering above him, and he shivered. He retreated a few feet, scanning the sandstone wall that was pinning him against the river. For a brief moment, he considered backtracking all of the way up the river and into the gorge he had descended in the morning. But as he looked at his watch, he abandoned that idea. There wasn’t nearly enough time.

Almost without thinking about it, he started to climb. There were handholds, and then a small crack. Maybe he was telling himself that he needed to get a bit higher in order to see further downstream. There was something exhilarating about grasping a small handhold far above your head, and then hoisting your body up into space. He quickly ascended about thirty-five feet, and then came to a decision point. He was directly above the water. Any slip now and he would probably strike a glancing blow on the cliff, and then drown in the Colorado River. But to advance, he needed to surmount a small overhang. It extended out over his head about eighteen inches, making it hard to see what was above it. There was a good jam crack for one hand. He decided. He tightened his daypack on his shoulders, reached up with his fist and clenched it inside the narrow crack. Fear was gnawing at his stomach. He pulled himself slowly up, bumping his head against the overhang. His head was pushed sideways by the rock, his ear resting flat on his right shoulder. The rock bit into his knuckles. With his free hand, he reached out and above the overhang, grappling for a handhold. He found one. One more breath, and he released the fist from the jam crack. His body swung gently, sickeningly away from the cliff, and he pulled down with all his adolescent strength on the ledge above. His head rose up over the lip, and the aching hand that had been jammed into the crack below shot out to grip the easy corner of stone, waiting just where he needed it to be. With a quick heave he scraped his belly up over the edge and pulled himself away from the tug of the empty space and the river below.

He licked the blood off the back of his hand and fingers. The wrist quivered slightly as he held it against his mouth. A warm glow spread across his shoulders – partly the adrenaline of cheating death – but it was also the sun. What had not been visible from below was a wide defect in the canyon wall, a series of bowls and stair steps, and the setting sun was shining brightly above its edge. Turning to see it, he felt triumphant. With one final look at the blackness of the river swirling forty feet below, he turned and bounded up into the sunlight.

Where he thought he would go now, and what exactly the plan was to get to Moab, was never clear. The brain of a nineteen year old male lives in a stiff brew of hormonal substances, especially during physical exertion. He went mostly without having the sensation of thinking. It felt as if he floated by magic up to the canyon rim. Great circular bowls of sandstone were crossed, ledges scaled. Sheer cliffs, taller but less difficult than the first overhang by the river, fell behind him. The twilight sun made the canyon walls wild with colors, vivid crimson blending in with purples and cinnamon and pools of black shade. Flaming clouds reached out from the sky. Just as the sun was setting, he topped out and could see for miles in all directions. Including south, downriver, where the twinkling lights of Moab accented the canyon shadows – much farther away than he would have liked. There was no chance of continuing to follow the river. The jumble of ravines and cliff walls facing him from that direction was impenetrable. But there was one wide canyon, he would later know that it was called Courthouse Wash, and he could see it leading away from the city and back into the desert just to the west of him, where it dwindled into the slick-rock scrub. His plan, had there been enough daylight to execute it, might have worked. He struck out at a brisk walk, determined to find and drop down into the shallow headwaters of the canyon, much like he had followed a different canyon earlier in the day. He would simply follow the path of the water back down to the town.

The sun set, and a sudden chill came to the desert. He pulled his flannel shirt on and rolled up the sleeves. The canteen rattled – it was long since empty. With a growing sense of urgency he pushed past the clumps of brush. It began to be difficult to see the landscape in the distance, and then it was hard just to make out where to put his feet. The stars came out in a glorious sweep across the sky. A dome shaped mound of rock rose up in his path, and as he skirted around it to the left, he suddenly stopped short. In front of him, spread out on the ground, was the same sparkling display of stars. Against an inky purple backdrop, stars were glittering up at him from his feet. Hesitantly, he reached down, almost as if he feared that he might drop off into this space. And he touched – water. As soon as he saw the ripple spreading away from his hand, his brain knew once again where he was. Quickly dropping to his belly, he drank long and deep. He filled the canteen. And he realized that it was now completely, totally dark. He sat on the edge of an enormous sandstone bowl, with a calm reflecting pool of water in it, and wondered what he should do. From the feel of his legs, he had walked more than eighteen miles. His focus on getting to Moab was now blurred by fatigue.

The moon rose, not full but a solid quarter of bright white shining on the horizon. He could see his feet well, and began once again to walk through the night. The problem with night-walking is depth perception, and distance. Almost anything a few feet away gives off enough reflected light to discern where and what it is. But the amount of reflected light drops away with the cube of the distance. Very quickly, even things in full view but far enough away melt into the darkness. Objects in the shadows cannot be seen at all. As an area of darkness appeared in front of him, he could not tell at all if it might be a shallow depression or a gaping canyon.

His solution was to throw objects. Very soon after he left the reflecting pool of water, he came to what he guessed to be the dry wash he was seeking. Nearing the edge, he threw a fist-sized rock out into the night. It never landed. He found a foot long dead branch, and hurled that. Seconds later, he heard it clattering far below him. His hair bristled with cold fear. He was on the edge of a chasm several hundred feet deep. Edging back from the rim, he turned to the right and circled wide around it, coming back at least half a mile further upstream. When a dark abyss blocked his path, he stopped short and threw test objects. Several times his small missiles impacted immediately, and he skidded down into a shallow dip and continued along his way. The moon rose higher, and he imagined that he could see further.

On his next approach to the canyon, he passed through a small V and saw a pair of rock towers, silvery in the night, flanking him on both sides. He was tired, frustrated and hungry. He sat down on his heels and edged much further toward the black nothing facing him before launching a test rock. For two, three seconds – nothing – and then a hollow boom as the rock splintered in the depths. He gasped and clenched his teeth, because his feet were slipping down on the steeply curved rock. For a few seconds, he hung in pure equilibrium with friction and gravity – then a few inches at a time, he scraped his way up and away from the brink.

By this time he was muttering to himself. He was shivering with cold. His legs ached. He turned one more time to the right and circled away and then back toward the canyon. On this last approach, he was encouraged to see the unmistakable branches of a cottonwood tree piercing up from the dark. What he did then – how close he edged out into the night – what objects he threw – no one knows, because he cannot remember. There was an ominous, slow slide that accelerated past the point of stopping. He flipped from his back to his front, raking the cliff with his hands, and the flesh was rasped away from his fingertips, the nails splintering into the night. A long and silent drop through space ended with a crushing impact and a flash of pain through his left leg. There were more thuds as he cartwheeled away from the rock, and a sudden stop as his body wedged on an outcrop. Thinking it all over, he lifted his head slightly and felt his body wrenched sideways. Now he was falling horizontally, and that is how he landed. His head plowed into the ground with an audible splat. He had landed in shallow water. In shock, he leaped up and was suddenly hobbling as he began to see that his left leg did not work at all. Soaking wet, he staggered perhaps fifteen feet through slithering bulrushes and collapsed on his back. There he lay for the rest of the night.

There were only two things he could do. Hold his leg up, his knee curled over his stomach, to find some position where it caused him less pain. And shiver. Still wet in the thirty-degree desert night, he was wracked at once with shivering so violent that he could scarcely draw a breath. He pulled bullrushes from both sides and tucked them under his back to lift it off the damp sand. The moon crossed the narrow slot of night sky above the canyon walls. Coyotes howled straight above him, where his trail ended at the rim. His teeth rattled in their sockets. For hours, he shook like an epileptic, hissing for breath, unable to move. His eyes were clinched tight. There was no need to open them for the same view of black stone walls and a narrow strip of starry sky. His mouth gaped open in shock and exhaustion when finally he saw dusky red stone and a pearl grey sky. He had survived the night.

Still shivering violently, he began to slide backwards on his tailbone away from the wash. An hour and perhaps twenty feet later, he came upon his backpack. He strapped it on backwards, covering his stomach, and it was then that he noticed his arms. His flannel shirt sleeves had nearly been severed at the elbows from impacts with the rock. Black rivulets of dried blood showed through the tears. He ripped the sleeves free, and then slid his raw palms into them, clenching his fists to make them stay. Blood soaked out into the cloth, and they were soon glued into place by a crude cement of dried plasma and sand. With better protection on his hands, he could push down harder with them, still backing away from the puddle of water in the bottom of Courthouse Wash, now crusted with a thin film of ice. He began to bump up over hard sandstone. His neck, wrenched by the impact, ached and burned as he tried to look behind him to pick a path up the smooth rock and toward a juniper tree sprouting above on a small rise. The sun was sliding down the far canyon wall, glowing orange in the midst of the cool morning shadows. He could see that eventually, it would reach the flat rock and the tree just above him. All his energy was focused into dragging himself into the warmth of that yellow glow. And every few feet, despite all his skill, his swollen left leg would impact something with a few ounces of force. He would collapse and groan, grasping his thigh above the knee with both hands as if to choke the nerves that were feeding him this agony. Slowly the throbbing would subside, and his head would clear enough to consider moving on. This went on for hours, and the rock was well warmed by the time he slid fitfully out of the shadows and collapsed near the tree.

After thirty minutes in the morning sun, his body finally relaxed. He peeled away his flannel shirt and stretched it out flat on the rock to dry. It was now a short-sleeved flannel shirt, with a rip from the armpit to the hip, but it was the only warm clothing he had. His left foot was screaming from the constriction of his shoe, so many painful minutes where devoted to loosening the laces and pulling them out. Weakness overcame him frequently, and he would simply lie back on the ground for five or ten minutes before rousing himself and continuing with these small tasks. The shoe was finally loose, and he let it drop to the ground. He began to roll the sock down toward his ankle, but could not finish. The sock was imbedded in the flesh of his leg, which was swollen at the ankle to the size of his thigh. Where he could unroll the sock, it left a crisscross pattern of cotton in purple green skin that immediately oozed a yellow sticky fluid. Any slight torque or pressure on it sent bolts of pain shooting up into his brain.

He could not see it, but the smaller bone in his leg, the fibula, was just a chain of fragments, none of them more than an inch or two long. The tibia, the large bone, was shattered at the end and one of the pieces was protruding inward where the knobby ball of his old ankle had once been. Over time, a purple stain began to form there that soaked through his tightly stretched sock.

He took the camera from the pack, rewound and removed the film, and unscrewed the lens. It was his brother’s camera. For a few moments he felt badly about damaging it. He set the film out on a small sandstone table. He was already beginning to think that he might die, and he felt good to have left his own footprints on the last frame of film that he had taken. He built a small wall of rocks around the bright yellow and black cylinder, and scratched an arrow in the rock, pointing down the wash, where he had already determined that he must go. Canyon wrens called from the cliffs, with a slow, descending song that sounded like a windup toy running out of energy. It was a parody of his own actions, stirring into life and then slumping over, stilled by exhaustion.

Pulling together some withered weeds and scraps of twig and bark from the juniper, he focused the camera lens on them. Gradually they heated, then smoked, and he had a small yellow flame. The smoke was acrid in his nostrils, and he panicked as he realized he had no more wood. He flailed about on his back, scraping at anything flammable within reach. But he could not find enough wood. His little fire burned, ate through the small sticks that he had managed, and died. He slumped back, disappointed but secure in the knowledge that he could do this, and would not be cold another night.

By now the sun was high overhead, and he began to need shade more than warmth. The skin was wearing away from his back and hips, but this was still the only way he could move without jarring his leg unbearably. So he skidded along on his tailbone until he was under the shadow of the tree. Leaning against it, cushioned by his daypack, he fell asleep for the first time. When he awoke, the canyon was in shadow, and the edge of the sunlight was twenty feet above him, on the ledge where he had lodged briefly before the last part of the fall. He realized that he could only start fire for those few hours each day when the sun was directly overhead, shining on the floor of the wash. The prospect of another cold night in the bulrushes drove him to move now.

He stuffed the camera and its components back into the backpack. Scuttling back into the wash, he dragged himself to the puddle and drank from it. It was easy to lay the canteen on its side, let it fill, and then drink without getting wet again. It was surprisingly cold and clean tasting water. For the first time since he had defiled the cactus more than a day ago, he needed to pee. But in the only position his leg could tolerate, it would go all over his stomach. With an infinite amount of care, he tilted himself to one side, and made a round, foaming puddle in the sand right next to his hip. It was so salty it burned, and seemed to be the color of root beer. But something in this simple act confirmed for him that he was gaining strength. His body was functioning, adjusting. Even his swollen leg seemed to be forming itself into a sort of turgid, sturdy cast.

He strapped the pack onto his belly, and set off down the wash like a crab. His injured leg was held high, his one good foot thrusting forward alone. He would lift his butt until it came up against the back of his ankle, shoving with both palms pointed backward. Each repetition of the motion gained him about eighteen inches…and so he continued, collapsing briefly from time to time to rest. The leg was quite hard now, and the color of ripe plums. It did not hurt as much anymore.

The sunlight rose up the wall nearly to the canyon rim and became fiery red, although the sky in the slot above him was just a cool blue. The floor of the wash was now solid, sculpted sandstone. It curved into bowls and half circles, dropped over brief sills and waterfalls that made his insect-like crawl difficult. A clump of cottonwoods sprouted from one wall. There in front of them, a bathtub-sized depression had been carved by the running water. It was half filled with sand and wind drifted leaves. With darkness coming swiftly, he realized that this was his best chance to survive the night. Between the trees and the base of the cliff were more dry leaves. He scooped them with his hands, kicking them with his good foot, and shuffled them one small bunch at a time into the bathtub. Within an hour, he had a blanket of leaves almost a foot deep.

As he dropped into the leaf pile and covered himself, it was instantly clear that this would be a better night. He was already warm from the last few hours’ exertion. Under the leaves, he could not believe the warmth that his body seemed to be generating. Sweat ran down the back of his neck. He moved the backpack around and made a small pillow of it, and sat waiting for the darkness. It came quickly. A few hours after sunset, he could tell that the moon had risen because the turrets and rim rocks of the canyon above him seemed to be lit with a pale white spotlight. He suddenly noticed twin rock domes high above him, with a narrow V-shaped groove between them. They perched on the canyon rim, and there was a wide circular undercut that reached up from hundreds of feet below. Its top curved like an arch, creating a mantle perhaps thirty feet tall and ten feet thick for the towers to stand on. His spit turned dry in his mouth as he recognized, from the floor of the wash, a place he had been early the night before. It was the place where he had almost been unable to pull himself back; where he had hung in the balance with gravity, straining with his clenched fingers to get a grip on the smooth, curved sandstone and get away from the edge. He imagined how tiny he must have looked from here, perched on the rim. His eyes followed the smooth, sweeping path his body would have taken, arcing out from the undercut edge of the cliff, and finally impacting after 250 feet on a jumble of sandstone blocks the size of washing machines just a few yards away. He felt sick. Long gone was the euphoria of the climb out of the Colorado River. Forgotten was the magic scene of stars dancing on the floor of the desert. His stomach was a clinched knot. His mind was now much more focused, clear and rational. His liver was furiously making glucose from the amino acids streaming back from his wasting muscles and his injuries. His brain helped conserve this energy by thinking slowly, and only about immediate survival. He piled the leaves more closely around him, and watched the moonlight inch its way down the canyon wall. He slept as well as anyone with a broken leg does. It was scarcely cold at all.

In the morning he waited in the leaf bed until the sun was almost down to the floor of the wash. Twice, he heard the sound of an airplane. The aircraft and its buzzing drone grew louder, then faded, without anything ever coming into sight in the narrow slot of sky between the canyon walls. It was clear that he was almost hidden in the bottom of the wash. No one would find him unless they walked up the canyon on foot. He had to get moving.

He crawled to a pool where the water emerged from the sand to flow freely down the canyon. Once again, it had crusted with ice. He pulled out his pack and took stock of himself. He had one shoe, a camera, and a canteen. He soaked each of his stinging hands in the pool until the sandy shirtsleeve bandages came loose. There was no skin on the ends of his fingers, but dark scabs had begun to form. He rinsed the blood and dirt from the damp cloth, squeezed it dry and clasped the makeshift bandages again in his clenched fists. Gingerly, he lowered his left leg into the freezing water and let the cold dull the pain. It suddenly seemed important to get off the tightly stretched sock and get a better look at his ankle. Tugging at the toes and rolling down from the top, he was able to loosen the fabric slightly. There was a sharp sting as the last resistance gave way. He could see that most of the skin on the inside of the ankle had peeled away with the fabric. What remained was a tightly swollen mass of purple tissue, senseless to the touch, and glistening like plastic except where the skin was broken and honey colored liquid was oozing quietly into droplets.

He moved up to a flat ledge above the pool, rolled onto his side, and let the ankle bake in the sun. A thin high overcast had developed, and he could no longer focus enough heat from the camera lens to burn anything. A few brown charred spots were made on a couple of leaves – but no fire. Again he slept, but was awakened by the whump-whump of a helicopter coming in very close to him. He jumped up, struck the broken leg on the ground, screamed, and collapsed. Turning his head, he saw the machine for a brief second as it crossed the canyon several hundred yards above him. The sound echoed for a minute off the canyon walls, faded, and the silence returned.

Emotion is an expensive thing when you have not eaten for several days. He only let the despair of having missed the helicopter sink down into his mind for a short time – then he pushed it away in favor of the optimism that people were actively looking for him. Darkness was coming, so he scooted back to the pool for more water. Both days since the fall he had spent several hours sleeping on the flat sandstone in full sunlight. It kept him warm, but was severely dehydrating. As he backed away from the pond, a small toad blundered out of the dry grass in front of him and he stamped on it with his good foot. He held the limp body in his fingers for a few moments, thinking he should eat it. It did not look remotely appetizing. He sniffed it, then threw it into the sagebrush. Later as he shivered under the blanket of leaves in the stone hollow, he wondered if it had been smart. He could lie on his right side now, just resting his left leg on a cushion of leaves piled over the right leg. It took the weight off his tailbone, and let him take short naps. In between, he listened to the pack rats rustling under the ledge above him, and stared up at the place where the two towers stood like grave markers in the moonlight. His body felt cold to him on this night, not warm like the night before. He noticed that his fingers were quivering as he held them clasped under his armpits. It was not explosive shivering like the night he had been wet. It was more like a gentle seizure that would not go away. He rocked his lower jaw back and forth, clicking his molars to the rhythm of “American Tune”, a song by Paul Simon. He ran over and over the verse that said, “And I dreamed I was dying. I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly, and looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly…” Then his perspective changed, and he was sitting back up between the twin towers, he had both of his shoes on, his left leg was fine, and he was watching the small lump of leaves far below him, shaking gently in the moonlight. He stayed there for the rest of the night, without pain, and without hunger. Only when he awoke did he find himself once again in a bowl in the rock filled with crumpled dry leaves.

As a thin grey light came back to the canyon next morning, a grim determination came over his mind. He climbed up out of the depression and rose up on his one good foot. Searching out a path, he hopped on one leg, and very quickly covered forty yards. Sinking to the ground, he traversed some broken boulders with his slower crab walk. As soon as he reached flat ground, he rose up again and hopped one-legged. Relentlessly, he drove himself down the canyon. It was more than a mile. Maybe it was 10:00 am when he rounded a curve in the wash and the right hand wall melted away, opening up into a wide, sand covered valley. He was crab walking around some sage clumps, heading for the center of the open space when he heard the helicopter. It was coming directly up the wash from the Colorado. In seconds it thundered into sight directly in front of him, and settled immediately down onto the dusty bank a few hundred feet away. He covered the intervening space so quickly on one foot that he was banging on the clear plastic door even before the pilot could open it.

All he could remember of the helicopter ride was how short it was, and how the pilot offered him a cigarette. He did not want a cigarette. But it made him angry that he had to be picked up by a helicopter when he was only half a mile from the town. He wanted to have made it there on his own.  At the hospital, he listened in disbelief as the doctor informed the staff and his family that his stomach would not be able to eat food, and that he could only be given coffee to drink. He did not want coffee. A hamburger and coke found their way into the room under a jacket within an hour, and as he ate this first meal, he rejoined the rest of the world.

But the person who came back into the world was not the same one that had picked up a chainsaw and started to cut trees ten months before. Some of the same Indians who inhabited this desert before the white man had a tradition of sending their young males off alone, intentionally, to discover for themselves what they could be. Over a time of 3 or 4 days without food, a vision called the Weyekin (from the native language of the Nez Perce) would reveal itself. The Weyekin helps to center the young male into his world and lets him understand the correct position for him within the tribe and the environment around him. This tradition must have had a high level of mortality, but perhaps there is also some benefit to this culling and seasoning of young men.