“This is it.” My voice startles me, as though it’s not my own. Any noise out here, any sound not native to the land seems a violence at worst, a disrespectful intrusion at best. There is a silence in the desert so profound, so deep, so far beyond an “absence of noise” that I’m certain it will swallow me whole if I let it. So dense it’s palpable, so thick that any sound I muster is immediately enveloped by a nothingness so rich that I’m left doubting whether I had said anything at all.
I’ve come to the edge of the Great Basin desert, canyon country, to find something that first called to me two decades ago in the most unlikely of places, perched thirty-one stories above the canyon of materialism known as the “Magnificent Mile”, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. A young commodity trader pursuing that most elusive prey, the Big Bucks, my newfound quest for Something More, something real led me to a series of spiritual writings centered in the southwestern desert. There was magic out there for me, I could feel it. But it’d be another twenty years before I’d have sufficiently bled myself of the Lust for Stuff, the artificial World of Man, and deemed myself worthy to trek through its polar opposite.
I am drawn to worlds lacking safety nets. I traded commodities because I answered to no one and there was no one to catch me when I fell. No bosses, no pensions, no health plans, no unemployment insurance. Sink or swim. Find out exactly what you’re made of, blaze your own trail through this minefield or join the herd, the 95% who crawl back into the comfort of a “J-O-B” within their first year, unable to hack it in the brutal world of 100% personal responsibility, a world that revels in ferreting out your every weakness, your every flaw, a world that abides no excuses, offers no apologies and doles out no mercy.
The desert is such a world.
I’m well beyond the last stretch of road before this great expanse, which neither acknowledges nor answers to any human jurisdictions nor boundaries, ceases being Colorado and becomes Utah. There are few signs of humanity’s encroachment here. Autumn. Very little water, still less game. Even the piñon pines, prolifically dropping nuts by the bucketful only a few hours east, are barren here. Not a cone to be found. I spot occasional animal sign but nothing fresh. At this time of year this area is devoid of resources necessary to support wildlife much larger than rodents. This is the proverbial land where “no one can hear you scream.” Make a wrong turn and it might be your last. No cell phones, no park rangers, no nothing even vaguely resembling the World of Man for miles in any direction. It might as well be a thousand miles for a guy packing only a knife, compass, a flint for fire-starting and a quart of water.
I was saving myself for the desert until I felt it was time. I’ve roamed through all manner of wilderness, exploring, searching. Inevitably, wherever I found myself was never quite “it.” Magnificent, spectacular, awe-inspiring, to be sure: tropical beaches, mountains, rivers, snow-capped 14,000 foot peaks, monstrous boulder fields, crystal clear alpine lakes, dense boreal forests, views that seem to transcend eternity. But never quite it, never quite enough. Not quite what I was looking for.
But this place, the desert, this is it.
I know silence – dead silence. I live deep in the mountains, 8500 feet above the sea. It’s quiet there. But nothing like this. This is no mere absence of sound but a virtual tonal vacuum. Even my mind is hushed as the desiccated air sucks thoughts from my head. There is a nothingness so absolute here that I’m suddenly gripped by an irrational fear that the entire world has died off and I’m the last man standing.
It may very well have. How would I know? I’ve seen no one, heard no one for days.
It is dusk now. The moon, a sliver short of full, rises just over a dry, craggy mesa towards the east. The sun sets over another to the west. Its last rays paint a ribbon of shimmering flame along the slick red rim of canyon overhead as I descend into a narrower slot within. A lone raven circles above, the only other creature stirring. Nary the slightest breeze. “When will you learn? Bring the camera. Always bring the camera. This time will never come again.” But there’s no way to capture this moment, regardless of how desperately I want to save it, record it, hold on to it forever.
The raven caws. For a moment my soul transcends, soars with the raven, above it all. I let go. I release the need to cling, I relinquish the fear of losing this beauty and simply be. Here. Now. I am… fully immersed in one perfect collision of time and space, suddenly present to my insignificance within gargantuan canyon walls. I could die, right now, and nothing would change here. The vertical wind-blown slabs of towering red stone would continue to lord over this very spot, as they have for untold millennia, thoroughly unimpressed. The coyotes would shred my carcass, strip every bone clean.
How utterly meaningless my problems occur, cradled within the immutable mass of this seemingly endless cathedral of stone.
Who I was died trading soybean futures one morning way back when, another time, another place. I piled on contract after contract as the market surged higher, dollar signs flashing in my pupils as every minimum fluctuation, every moment added another several digits to my account. Then it turned, in a heartbeat. Plummeting. Hard. I couldn’t sell out fast enough and the wolves in the trading pit quickly caught the sweaty, musky scent of my impending demise, laced with fear. The entire ring turned toward me, bidding under my offer, clawing for a taste of blood. My world went silent as I gazed upon the frenzy before me with a now detached bemusement. Numbness. I calculated my losses: Bankrupt. An odd sense of peace washed over me as I flashed a half-grin at the bloodthirsty pack of opportunistic dogs.
Everything is gone, what more can you take from me? I have nothing left to lose, I have shed the fear of loss along with the illusory digits that constituted my net worth and now simply am, stripped to the essence of whatever a man is in a world where value is judged by dollars. In that world I am now nothing. In reality I have found everything, all that truly matters. I have found that at my core, stripped of man’s standards, I am still whole. Complete. And without fear.
In the most barren of places I find Life.
It’s in a place of nothing that you discover your own something: who you are, what you’re made of. I stare into the abyss and there is nothing, no one staring back. Just me and my huge fuck-up. And a pack of hungry dogs drooling over the remnants of my financial existence. In my acceptance the market turns again, on a dime. Minutes, seemingly eternal minutes later I’m financially whole again, back to where I started that morning. I puke my entire position to the first available bid and go home. That is, someone, someone occupying this body goes home.
I descend deeper into the slot canyon, mesmerized by shards of life protruding from the most impossible of places. Perfect “bonsai” junipers, perhaps hundreds of years old and only a foot or two high, clinging to life, suspended from the sheer face of a rock wall. I can go no further; before me a forty-foot sheer vertical drop into an oasis of sorts. In a land so dry, a hidden pool of water rests silently below me, encircled by yellowing cottonwoods and willows, a stray aspen, shrubs, mormon tea, animal tracks. I’m staring into an abyss teeming with life in a place where there is so little.
I inhale deeply, immersed in the moist, crushed-apple scent of decaying aspen and willow leaves, drawing it through every fiber of my being. Wonder and awe wash over me, something familiar, yet something long gone, something I have lost. I am whole again, for a moment. I am a child again, thrilled by every sumptuous fragment of existence, awestruck by the simplest of things, in love with life for no reason other than that It Is.
I find a way down, my feet probing blindly yet carefully in the fading light, backwards over the edge, searching for toe holds. Foolish perhaps, unaided climbing in the middle of nowhere, but as there is no life without death, there’s little point to living in the absence of risk. Tadpoles, in various stages of development including fully grown toads, most likely spadefoots, greet me near the pool’s sticky, muddy edge. Elfin, fragile creatures arising from an ephemeral rain-formed puddle, finding their feet, their lungs, what they’re made of, crawling out of the abyss and into the light.
In the most barren of places I find Life.
I am elated. I haven’t felt such joy, such wonder since I don’t know when. Perhaps never? That something so simple, so pure, so real should thrill me beyond description deals the final mortal blow to the dangling vestiges of my crumbling materialistic value system. I’ve chased after things, I’ve chased after toys. High-rise dwellings. Five thousand dollar watches. Clothes. Women. Digits on a financial statement. Nothing has thrilled me more than discovering bug-eyed lumps of wart-laden flesh cruising through muddy, ochre-tinged rainwater, propelled effortlessly by the rhythmic sway of sleek, satiny tails.
Perhaps it’s just the simple joy of discovery, a child gazing upon the wonders of the world, having brought his first eyes into the light once again. Have you ever really seen a toad, or a tree, a puddle, stripped of preconceived notions, social programming, gazed upon only what is there and only with your own eyes? You did as a child. But you’ve forgotten how.
The desert has reminded me, opened my eyes. Everything is new, everything awaiting discovery. My adult expectations, mental images of what a desert is or should be, repeatedly shattered as Nature reveals her secrets to me, bit by bit. I thought the little boy in me had died so very long ago; the irony of his coming out to play, back to life in seemingly barren desert does not escape me. In nothingness, you just might find your Self. The absence of most everything has once again filled me and made me whole.
My cup runneth over. There is magic here.