Storms -Installment 3 of the Desert Memoir

Storms

The wind was merciless.  By this point, I’d nestled myself into my tent for added weight; if I hadn’t, a gust would’ve pulled my tent stakes clear out of the sandy earth and sent my only shelter cartwheeling down the canyon.  I scribbled anxiously in my journal, which was accumulating a thick layer of red dust with every passing torrent—as were the rest of my possessions, for that matter.  My sleeping bag had pools of sand collecting in the folds, my backpack was tinted slightly orange by dirt particles embedded in its fabric, the lenses of my sunglasses were coated no matter how many times I wiped them off, and my primarily white snapback was made certain to never be totally white again.  


What was left of my wits was slowly being corroded by the pummeling gusts.  They came sporadically, but not without warning; you could hear the wind long before it hit, whistling through the pinnacles and spires of the surrounding canyons and humming like a jet engine—a premonition of the coming force that would clobbered my tent into a half-bent, violently flapping mess.  Sometimes there were entire minutes before it struck, other times mere seconds—occasionally, it wouldn’t hit at all.  I was left to guess. 


I felt like the wind was playing sadistic games with me.  I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the desert was confronting, accusing, exposing me for being too inexperienced and unseasoned to possibly try to hold my own in the wilderness—especially in the hostility of this wilderness.  It exploited the insecurities I’d actively been denying: that I wasn’t smart enough, strong enough, experienced enough, prepared enough.  Not unfamiliarly, I felt hopelessly inadequate—and the desert was threatening to lay bare that fact.

My nerves became so intolerably on edge that I altogether shut my journal, nestled into the bottom of my sleeping bag, and and tried to talk myself down from my state of anxiety.  I reassured myself that I wasn’t in danger, that the worse thing that could happen is I’d have to find more rocks to weigh down my tent stakes, and that the wind was just doing what wind does—move particles of air through space—and that it had no malignant intent against me.  But even in knowing that, I remained a skittish wreck for the rest of the night.  


The bout of wind abated long enough for me to cook and eat dinner in relative comfort, which eased my restlessness somewhat.  I picked up a few new tactics to combat the anxiety, including writing down everything I was thankful for that day—specifically regarding the very things my nervousness derived from from—myself, my competence, the desert, the weather, the indifference of the universe.  As always, genuine heart-felt gratitude proved to be my infallible cure-all.  I settled into my tent for the night with a restored—albeit shaky—sense of confidence, convincing myself that I no longer felt lonely, inept, or even a little bit scared. 

As far as I was aware, I didn’t sleep all night—but miraculously the hours went by.  The wind returned, soon followed by a patter I assumed to be rain.  At some point in the night, I'd subconsciously pulled my fleece headband over my ears to block the sound of the howling wind—I pulled it back up, surprised to be met by white morning light filtering through my tent.  The drumming of rain seemed to have picked up, now accompanied by the unsettling sound of rushing water.  I thought of the dry creek bed below me.  For all I knew, there could be a tremendous russet wall of water sloshing just around the next corner of the canyon, ready to obliterate my bank.  Would I be able to get out?  Could it be high enough to reach a park-designated backcountry site?  It didn’t take long for those thoughts to clear syrupy, sleep-deprived brain. 
 
I rocked up, deciding to first deal with what was in arm's length of me. I inspected my sleeping bag for wet spots and checked over the tent floor; although massive puddles had collected on my tarp, nothing had seeped through into my shelter yet.  I moved on to assess what was happening outside.  Rather than the pouring rain I expected, what met me on the other side of my rain fly were tremendously fat, wet flakes of snow.  The temperature was barely precipice of freezing, and the snow was cut heavily with sleet that drenched the earth.  The creek bed below was still dry (for the moment), so I glanced over the canyon walls to try to pinpoint the sound of the rushing water.  A sizable waterfall had appeared in a natural corner of the slick rock, roaring down the soaked, maroon canyon wall.  I was thinking about its beauty when I realized that the little corner is where the trail drops into the canyon.


I laughed slightly, totally unsure of what to do with this information.  Some part of me met it with excitement—how many times do you get to be trapped in a canyon by a flood in your life—but more parts of me met it with unease.  I was pretty much stuck out here for now.  I stepped out of the tent to take a reflective moment to pee/reconsider my options, which was an altogether discouraging endeavor. I returned to the tent soaking after a mere minute and a half outside, and with no more in the way of plans than before.  I clambered into sleeping bag and reached for my satellite messenger, checking over it to see if it had any weather predicting feature.  I finally gave up and sent a desperate text into my parents:  “Requesting hourly weather from basecamp.  May change route.  Deciding at 11.”  Sent.  I checked my watch—only 8 AM.  I had plenty of time to wait the storm out.


I was horribly wrong.  By 9:15, my subpar outlook had become exponentially bleaker.  I had no reply from ‘basecamp,’ the miniature lakes collecting on my tarp had begun leaking through my tent floor, the inside of my sleeping bag was damp from my brief trip outside, and I was freezing despite the fact I was wearing every layer I’d packed.  My options were to either: 1.) hike up into Chesler Park, continue my route, and hope that the weather clears enough that I can dry out my gear or, 2.) wait for the flood barring the way out to run itself dry, hike out, and get a hotel room in Moab.  The downfall of option one was its weather-dependency: if the storm didn’t let up, I could easily find myself in a frozen tent with a wet sleeping bag, possibly trapped by a flood again.  Option two, however, almost seemed worse: I’d spend every waking minute of the next twenty four hours, and maybe the rest of my existence, wondering if things would’ve been okay if I’d just toughed it out.  I checked the satellite messenger three more times before deciding—tentatively, I may add—that I didn’t want to risk brushing with hypothermia that night.  I was going to leave the backcountry. 


I emerged from my tent to find my dry creek was now wet.  In fact, over a foot of wetness covered the whole fifteen-foot wide bed.  And there I was, desperately fleeing my new water-front estate—nicer on the Cape anyway, I guessed.  I broke down my sopping campsite and said my goodbyes—to the juniper/bodhi tree, to my cooking rock, to the flat square of dry ground where my tarp had been.  I slung my monstrous pack on and made my way down to the newly rushing river.  


I passed up and down the bank several times in search of an easy crossing —no such luck.  I rolled up my pants to my knees, kicked off my shoes and peeled back my socks, a process that took nearly ten minutes with my enormous pack threatening to capsize me.  I plodded through the frigid, muddy run off, for once feeling grateful for the years of ski racing that’ve eliminated the feeling in my feet.  I walked barefoot all the way back to the trail, geared up to hike, and started to trudge back out the way I’d came.  

For such a horrendous day, you can imagine my acute shock at seeing other hikers.  But there they were, a man and a woman, a pair neon raincoats looking sickeningly unnatural against the otherwise grey palette of colors.  


“Hey there!” The man called down to me with a subtle foreign accent of some sort.


“How’s it goin?”


“Good. Were you here overnight?”  He gestured at my huge pack.  I explained to him that I’d been in the canyon overnight as part of a four day trip and that I was supposed to continue on to Chesler Park, but I’d been driven out by the weather.  He looked surprised by this. 


“Too bad.  The weather is supposed to get better later.  And you would have your pick of sites because everyone cancelled their trips for today… I guess no one wanted to go because of the snow.”  Evidently he didn’t entirely understand how backcountry site reservations worked, or how bad this blizzard was.  We exchanged a few more words, and he wished me good luck, continued to insist that it’d get nicer as the day went on, and we went our ways.  I trudged on for less than ten minutes thinking about this encounter before halting abruptly, exclaiming out loud “fuck it, I’m Lexi Black. I’m a mountain girl,” and turning back towards the canyon.  I tromped back down, forded the river yet again, and began up the opposite wall into Chesler Park.  


Hiking into Chesler Park consisted of a grueling half mile that ascends about five hundred feet—all relatively technical climbing, scaling boulders and hopping over gorges all the way out of the canyon and through a split in the massive rock pinnacles that ringed Chesler Park.  The last stretch, a near vertical climb between spires, seemed to filter every collective gust of wind from the area through it.  Exhausted and shivering, I pushed up through the wind tunnel over the crest of the incline, walking another ten steps before the mass of Chesler Park sprawled out before me.


The red desert was crusted in a layer of white; the elevation was high enough up here for the snow to stick.  It was significantly colder, windier, and more exposed than my little canyon camp had been.  I could see absolutely no sign of breakage in the clouds either.  I sighed long and deep--this was a mistake.  I took one look around the open range so famously known for its beauty, decided it didn’t seem all that attractive mid-whiteout, and turned back around again.  I trekked all the way down into the canyon, crossed the river a third time, and went back out the opposite wall yet again.


I spent the next two hours back trying to justify my own actions to myself.  ‘You’re acting on the most important rule of the wilderness—be smart.  Just like your dad drilled into your head since the first day you went into the mountains without him.  Don’t be the group that makes a summit push after turn around time, don’t be the hiker that doesn’t tell anyone where they’re going, don’t be the climber to trust a piton in a section of flaky rock.  Think it through.  Be smart.  That’s what you were doing—being smart.’  But I wasn’t convinced.  ‘This did not mean your trip failed.  You can still upkeep your solo—just don’t talk to anyone (besides the obvious) when you get back.’  But it still wouldn’t the same.  I surprised myself when I then thought: ‘You have no reason to feel guilty about this.’  That, for some reason, wrung true—but I couldn’t explain why.


But then again, why should I have felt guilty?  Because I didn’t execute the sole purpose of my Senior Thesis Experience, to complete a four day solo?  Was that really why I was out there?  God, no.  I was out there for myself and absolutely nothing else—Senior Thesis was just a way to get me here.  Yet even if I was out there for myself, shouldn’t I still feel badly for robbing myself of the solitarily aspect of my experience?  Wasn't that the point of this pilgrimage to the desert?  That’s when it struck me: this wasn’t about being alone.  Not entirely, at least.  It was more of a mean than an end.


What, then, was the end?  Up until then, I’d always conveniently let others label the the trip’s purpose for me.  My friend—moreover, ex-therapist who knows enough about me to be considered a friend—told me that “we go on solos to hit reset.  To get back to ourselves and back to nature.”  It made sense; she shared my conviction that humans are meant to exist in the natural world, plus her merit as a psychotherapist told me there must be some scientific level of truth to how she defined it.  I carried that interpretation with me.  Another, more common label I received from multiple different companions was that I was going on a “self-discovery” trip.  Again, there was truth in it—why I was down there certainly did have something to do with understanding the self.  But at that moment, plodding along slick rock in the middle of a raging snow storm, I realized how ill fitting those two definitions were for the ultimate meaning of the trip.

I was in the desert to take something from it, not to have something taken.  I did not want to be reset; all I carry with me now, all the hurts and hardships and mistakes and bad habits—it gives me substance, makes me who I am.  And I never really felt out of touch with nature enough to get back to it in such a grand manner as ‘reseting.’  As far as self discovery went, there were no big revelations to be had—I’ve never been anything but excessively self aware anyway.  I didn’t want to have anything taken from me, whether it be in a manner of rebooting my system or revealing unknown aspects of myself—because honestly, I felt like I haven’t been on this earth long enough to build a soul that would need such types of things. My persona didn't need to be found or revamped, it needed to be created, enriched.  I came to the desert because it would give me the resources to add substance to my person.  I wanted to know—to be—more, and the experiences given to me here would do exactly that.


When I finally crawled into my car, soaking wet and sore, I no longer felt like I’d failed.  Because I was, in fact, leaving with something more than I had entered with.