This month I turned 65, an April Fool, an Aries from the Year of the Monkey, a mixed bag. More years behind than in front of this monkey, I reminded myself, as I tried to follow my daughter’s advice. Be good, I told her; you be good, she told me. At least I’d made it to the Year of the Metal Ox.
I celebrated, as I do, by taking a day off from my work and walking deep into the desert. I’m partially immunized, living in solitude, but imagining a renewed social life. Tomorrow, I’ll get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Today, though, I walked miles into the desert, not looking for bighorn sheep or trying to scare up ravens or scanning for bear prints. I was after arches, the second largest concentration of sandstone arches outside of Utah’s Arches National Park — and few people at this time of year visit the lesser-known formations. Situated in wilderness in western Colorado, it’s quite a distance to travel in a day, but with good weather I made the round trip in about 10 hours. Later in the season, a dirt road is opened, a slice into the wilderness, and folks can drive their four-by-fours within an easy stroll. I prefer to travel on foot, close to dirt, vaulted by sky, my rhythm the rhythm of human evolution. We humans evolved to walk. So, I walked and dawdled and walked and dawdled and walked some more, the world in motion as I moved through it. There must be a mathematical equation for such double movement, earth spinning, human walking, both tiny blips in the cosmos. I doubt it can be expressed as a constant.
Many desert days are transcendent, and this one was no exception. I got lost for a time, or at least I lost the trail, steered in the wrong direction by a misleading Bureau of Land Management sign. It pointed right, and so I went right, accompanied by a conspiracy of ravens. As I made my way along the edge of a cliff, one raven flew next to me at eye level, folded its wings, did a half barrel roll, opened its wings upside down, cawed loudly twice, and righted itself. It performed this maneuver three times and then flew to a nearby dead tree. It perched there and looked at me with its baleful gaze as if to say, Wadda ya think, silly human without wings? I was impressed and delighted, one more raven behavior I’d not seen before. If I were prone to seek signs in nature, a Carlos Castaneda sort of magical realism, I’d swear that bird was telling me to stop taking myself so damn seriously. I agreed, croaked out a cawcaw in thanks, flapped my arms, and spent the rest of the day in playful wonder.
I still had a long way to go. First, I had to find the trail I’d lost, which meant walking back uphill a mile or so. The morning was cool, and I didn’t mind the extra walking. I was surprised to see across the canyon several high-end houses — some of them carved into sandstone walls — and one modest cabin. Private gated land bordering wilderness allowed those with means to hide from those without means. I took out my binoculars. Each house I glassed appeared empty, their interiors a dark wilderness, their roof lines fancy perches for ravens, expensive empty roosts. I marveled at the waste. I kept walking.
At my feet: brilliant red Indian paintbrush, a hemiparasitic plant that pulls some of its nutrients from the roots of other plants, such as sagebrush and rabbitbrush. It is in the genus Castilleja, named for Spanish botanist Domingo Castillejo who died in 1786 at an unknown age (though many field guides list his years as 1744-1793). He lived at a time of the plague’s quiescence. Also at my feet: tiny, pinkish-white flowers of a species I first thought belonged in the Phlox genus. Phlox is Greek for “flame.” I had to get down on my belly to see them up close. They were not Phlox. I stood and brushed off the desert dirt. I’ll put a name to these flowers another day. (I later poked around in the OED, found Pliny the Elder from a 1601 translation: “The Panse, called in Latine Flammea, and in Greeke Phlox, I meane the wild kind onely.” Pliny died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, A.D. 79. He was 55 or 56).
I stood and brushed off the desert dirt. I’ll put a name to these flowers another day.
Four hours later, I had traversed many canyons, up and down and up and down and up some more, and finally turned a corner. I’d walked through junipers and pines, Mormon tea and a variety of cactus. I’d seen one other human, a slender mountain runner with a Camelback full of water, his ears clogged with earbuds. We traded thumbs up, but I puzzled over the need to listen to something other than wind and raven, the scuttle of a lizard, the skittering of small rocks underfoot.
The many arches were stunning in their color and size and span, an erosional sketch of space. I sat and watched shadows move across sandstone walls. I thought of scrambling to the top of the mesa and walking across an arch, the closest to imitating a raven I could imagine. But I was weary and had another 8 miles to go. Instead, I removed my shoes and socks and took a nap beneath a juniper tree, which had grown next to a huge, arrow-shaped boulder. The sand made a perfect daybed, the wind a soft companion.
I awoke to a green-skinned lizard with a yellow head poised nearby. It allowed me to get close enough for several photographs, then it ran beneath the arrow-shaped boulder. It was fast. I followed, barefoot, to see where it went, and found a blue water bottle partially hidden in a crack. It was a geocache. I’d stumbled on three or four of them in my desert wanderings. I’ve never looked for one, they just appear. They are filled with notes and names and dates, and with the odd flotsam and jetsam left by those with map and compass and coordinates, some sort of international hide-and-seek, whose players don’t know, and will probably never know, one another. An interesting way to learn the planet and commune with like-minded souls.
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I fished around in my pockets for something to add to the cache. I pulled out a handful of juniper berries, dusky blue. Those wouldn’t do. I fished around some more and found a scrap of paper, which had been through the wash a time or two, forgotten. The word on the paper was faded but still legible. I undid the creases and slid it into the water bottle. My message, cast adrift, simple and global, personal and ranging across the centuries, joined other messages, from Mary, who was pleased to find her fifth geocache; from Sebastian, visiting from Germany, who was joyous in the Erhabenheit of the desert; from Moonlight and Feather and Sunburned Rat, all “free-kin on the color”; from Joey and his boyfriend Joe, and a half dozen more. I wondered what future cache-seekers would find in this bottle. I silently wished them well and imagined their playful, rock-hopping, light-footed exuberance for a walk on their planet in their days of desert transcendence. My one-word note? Zoonosis.
It was time to head home.
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (Routledge 2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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