The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (12 page)

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I
DID A LOT OF THINGS DURING
the six years I lived in the city after my first divorce. The love-hate relationship with my boyfriend lasted for two of them. I took an eclectic smattering of courses—accounting, computing, Spanish, Eastern philosophy. I made new friends, became part owner of a picture-framing business and the volunteer director of a filmmakers’ organization. I grew more confident and ambitious, eventually winning a grant and producing my own film. But nothing I did affected me so powerfully as that first dive into a mountain lake. I couldn’t get enough of the scent of water and wilderness on my skin.

In November, four months after our trip to the Desolation Wilderness, the smells of wormwood and sage folded themselves into that bouquet. To avoid awkward Thanksgivings with our respective ex-partners and the friends we had in common with them, my boyfriend and I fled south through hundreds of miles of empty grasslands, stopped for a bleak turkey buffet in Bakersfield, then crossed the Sierras by way of Lake Isabella. Winding into Death Valley from the Panamint Mountains, we saw our planet laid breathtakingly bare. The pink gold of sunset gilded the sand dunes, alkali plains, saltwater ponds, and labyrinthine canyons. Although we rolled down the narrow highway as fast as we could in my little Honda, the planet rolled faster. Glancing over our shoulders, we watched helplessly as the Panamints heaved upward, consuming the sun.

We took the only spot left in the official dunes campground—a bare patch of gravel beside snoring, elephantine RVs. It was a lot colder out than we’d hoped it would be, but it seemed ludicrous to erect a tent there. We threw a few supplies into our day packs, tossed our canteens and sleeping bags over our shoulders, and against park regulations, headed for the objects of our fascination. As we walked, a nearly full
harvest moon overtook the eastern Amargosa Range, spilling orange light onto the dunes’ flanks.

We climbed the nearest dune, plunged down the back side, trudged upward again. All evidence of the day’s tourists gradually disappeared, the snaking ridgelines becoming sharply distinct undulating spines, unmarred by footprints other than the ones we left behind us as the moon’s orange glow faded to white. I had never seen anything more sensuous than the milky-white skin of the earth lapped in moonlight.

We bedded down in a hollow between dunes, zipping our bags together and pulling the drawstrings so tight all we had to breathe out of was a small hole. Even then, the cold woke us early. We put on every stitch of clothing we’d brought, draped our sleeping bags over our shoulders as shawls, and climbed to the peak of the nearest dune.

Pink dawn light illuminated the entire valley, a few lustrous clouds floated above us, and as we watched, a sheet of sunlight inched operatically down the face of the Panamint Range toward the valley and us. “Wow,” I said.

“Yeah. Wow,” said my boyfriend. He hadn’t been to the desert before either. I liked discovering it together. For once, he wasn’t the expert.

When the sunlight reached us, warming the top of my head, then my shoulders and thighs, it felt like an all-encompassing caress.

If we kept our backs to the distant campground, it was easy to imagine ourselves the only humans on the planet. So we did that, following the ridgelines away from all signs of civilization. By midmorning, the sun was beating down on us. I needed to put some sunscreen on my arms and face and, grateful that I’d brought a pair of shorts, took off my boots and socks, then my jeans. How wonderful to feel the sand on my bare feet, especially during November.

Mark Twain got it right when he said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Except for my trips home to Kansas and camping trips with my boyfriend that summer, I hadn’t felt truly warm in eight long years. I pulled my shorts on, but couldn’t bring myself to put my feet back into my boots. Instead, I sat down and
dragged my toes through the sand, savoring the contrast between the sun’s heat on the surface and the night’s chill beneath it. I made rainbow arcs in the sand, then tried to erase them with my hand. Failing, I lay down.

How quiet it is, I thought. There was no traffic or other human-generated noises to filter out. I’d always thought of the desert as a wasteland, eerie and alien. I hadn’t been prepared for this softness or the stunning beauty. I felt at home here. I stuffed my jeans into my pack and, carrying my boots, climbed upward again.

All this climbing took effort, but I was now a complete convert. As on the lakeshore after my cold swim, I felt enlivened, awakened—not just in body but in mind. I wanted to visit every mountain range that surrounded us, to see into each dark, distant crevasse.

The desert wasn’t alien. We were. The only humans for miles, we’d sprung up clothed, with Gore-Tex day packs, wearing boots and shielded behind polarized sunglasses, as if the light on our own planet was too bright for our eyes, the ground too harsh for our feet. In fact, with crumpled brown mountain ranges as boundaries, the Death Valley dunes seemed as safe and finite as a cradle. Shadows hugged the southern convex sides of the steepest hollows. We wandered—cool to hot, up and over, light to shade.

With the dune’s curving tan walls as a backdrop and a blue limitless ceiling overhead, every plant we saw might have been a statue in an otherwise empty gallery. Blades of rice grass, swayed easily by the slightest breeze, had traced circles around themselves in the sand. Wind had exposed the roots of mesquite bushes, making them look convoluted and sinister. We skirted the valleys they grew in but were drawn to the shade of one plump specimen. I got out my knife and opened a can of tuna. Leaning on my elbow to drain the juice, I noticed tiny tracks leading under the bush. I crouched down to investigate and came face-to-face with a lizard. He swallowed, thin white shutters lowering over his eyes.

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H
AVING SPENT THE NIGHT AND MORNING DRENCHED
in transfixing beauty, neither of us could stomach the thought of erecting our tent in the campground, so we gassed up and headed for more remote desert. After leaving Death Valley on a gravel road, we saw no other vehicles for the rest of the day. The only evidence of human habitation was a weathered-gray abandoned cabin perched all by itself on a smooth mountain slope. Intrigued, we hiked up to it and toed through broken glass and chunks of aqua plaster to look out a window onto an infinity of sandy-brown soil, uniformly small and equidistant sagebrush, and blue sky. The window frame had no glass in it, so nothing stood between us and the vibrant desert. Staring at the unlimited space fanned out before me, I felt magnified and ethereal, yet grounded, as if the house were my body and the window my eye sockets.

I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word—not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.

2

A
FTER THAT TRIP TO
D
EATH
V
ALLEY,
I
WENT DESERT CAMPING EVERY CHANCE
I
GOT.
My zealotry now exceeded my boyfriend’s, but I didn’t let that stop me. If he wouldn’t go, I invited other friends to join me. If they declined, I went by myself. Most of the desert belonged to the federal Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. I could camp anywhere I wanted, the more remote, the better. Although I sometimes had to share the scant shade of a Joshua or piñon pine tree with a cow, never once during that period did I sleep in a developed campground. This was one of the things I loved
most and which still amazes my nonwestern friends when we go camping today.

Still, I did choose campsites carefully—not for proximity to other people, as there usually were no others, but for the ability to see headlights approaching from far away. Seeking beauty, adventure, and meaning in the wilderness is a time-honored American tradition, but I was undertaking the quest in the body of a woman. I had to take precautions. After stopping at a small-town gas station or café, my eyes strayed instinctively to my rearview mirror. If anyone followed me for long, I slowed down so they would have to pass. I bought a little .22 pistol and kept it beside me at night, reaching out often to assure myself it was there.

Although I was frightened and lonely at times, I found it increasingly more difficult to stay home. In the desert, I had discovered the West of my imagination, my childhood canyon infinitely magnified. I went there for inspiration and insight. When I returned home and stepped back into my city life, the more authentic Julene stayed behind. I daydreamed about that shack my boyfriend and I had visited. Just remembering it, I could feel the landscape’s profundity seeping into me. I thought I could write in such a place, and a writer is what I’d decided I wanted to be. I had enough money from selling my house that, if I was thrifty, I could live for two years without needing a job. I’d seen other abandoned cabins in my travels. Gradually, an idea took hold. What if I could find out who owned one of those places and they let me fix it up and live in it?

To realize that dream would require a vehicle that could go anywhere. I traded my little Honda in on a boxy oxidized-red Toyota Land Cruiser. My best friend, Beatrice, who was both an artist and a carpenter, installed a false wood floor in the back of it for me. The floor had two hinged doors into compartments big enough for a week’s worth of food and clothes. Onto the outside of the Cruiser, another friend and I fastened mounts for gas and water cans, and onto the front bumper, a locking army surplus ammo box for storing tools that same friend had taught me to use.

I went down to the U.S. Geological Survey office in San Francisco and bought topographic maps of every western desert, from eastern Washington all the way to the Chihuahuan in New Mexico and the Anza Borrego in Southern California. The maps were beautifully detailed, with symbols for everything from windmills to mines. A solid-black square meant an occupied dwelling, while a hollow square meant a vacant structure. A miner’s shack perhaps, or a failed homesteader’s cabin. Sometimes the squares had little tadpole-shaped squiggles beside them, indicating springs. Most of these oases belonged to ranchers. But there were some squiggles that had no squares beside them, or only hollow squares.

Those hollow squares beside squiggles became my prime destinations. Whenever I got within a few miles of one, I didn’t need the map anymore. On a mountain where all else was pale and muted, there would appear a splash of dark green. Many of those jeep trails were so steep that, driving up them, I could see only sky over the Cruiser’s hood. But the reward for taking such treacherous roads, through hundred degree heat without an air conditioner, were these miraculous glens of trees, sedges, rushes, wildflowers, butterflies, and birds. I would take off my clothes, sink into a bath-sized pool, and look down at the valley I’d come from—as broad as San Francisco Bay, ringed in craggy mountains, with no dwelling or other human in sight. There was no beauty so complete, none so sensually intense and satisfying. Here, together, were the two elements I craved most. Water in the desert.

•   •   •

M
Y FANTASY OF A HOME IN THE
desert fueled my travels for two years. I saw many possible candidates in that time but none so perfect as the little rock house in the middle of what, today, is the Mojave National Preserve. A hundred miles south of Death Valley, the 1.6 million-acre wilderness, although unique and deserving, had not yet received Park Service protection. It was still just BLM land. A generous ranching couple owned the private inholding. They consented to my living there
for as long as I liked. In exchange for my fixing up the house, they even promised to give me a couple of horses.

Never mind that the place had been sitting vacant for years or that it needed a new roof and all new windows and doors. Its beauty trumped those minor drawbacks. The World War I veteran who’d homesteaded the Rock Springs section had built the cabin from large yellow-granite stones he’d quarried from the Gold Mountains—one of four ranges that rose above Cedar Canyon Road. The house sat on a hill on that washboard-gravel thoroughfare, halfway between Cima, a little railroad town where nine people lived, and a phone booth that stood all by itself at the other end. This was before cell phones, so the pay phone would be my only link to the outside world. The ranchers who owned the rock house warned me that there would be days when I drove ten miles to make a call and the phone would be out of order, but I viewed this as just another minor disadvantage.

Sweet and inviting, humble yet commanding a view of a cordillera that fell away into blue distance, ridge on ridge, the flat-roofed, rectangular cabin reminded me of the Hopi dwellings I’d seen in Arizona. Like those houses, it fit into rather than reigned over its landscape. If anything dominated on that hill above Cedar Canyon Road, it was the big juniper tree beside the house, its branches hurled eastward by the prevailing wind. The natural vegetation was more beautiful than any intentional garden. Yucca and bunchgrasses. Hundreds of wildflowers and blooming forbs. Blue sage, purple sage. Shoulder-high pancake prickly pear and beavertail cactuses, their heart-shaped pads crowned in fuchsia blooms.

On a boulder-strewn hill behind the cabin, pink barrel cactuses fended off would-be munchers with whorls of bright-pink spines, and in the gorge between that hill and the cabin, water trickled. The pools were too tiny to immerse myself in, but a mile upstream stood a windmill beside a six-foot-tall stock-water storage tank where I could go swimming! Well, dunking anyway. Neither the water from the windmill nor from the spring was potable, so I would have to haul my drinking
and cooking water from my nearest neighbor’s house, two miles away. Again, a minor drawback.

Recalling my first several months at the rock house, I see myself wearing faded jeans and a ragged white cowboy shirt and driving Dorf, my white 1959 Ford pickup, down a wide, sandy wash. I’m returning from a dilapidated mining shack where I pried up the weathered tongue-in-groove floorboards with a crowbar. The plan is to nail the boards over the cracked linoleum in my cabin. Then I will drive ninety-five miles into Las Vegas, where I’ll rent a drum sander and, since I have no electricity, a generator. After sanding down the boards, I plan to cover them in polyurethane.

I’m steering the pickup with one hand, the way my father used to steer his pickups, while he absentmindedly stared at some field or another. My elbow is resting on the windowsill just as his used to do. It’s October, the air starting to turn crisp. The leaves on the cottonwoods near the windmill flutter like millions of yellow butterflies, and the rabbit brush is in full bright-yellow bloom, scattering pollen onto Dorf’s dash as we squeeze past. I don’t care that the rabbit brush is scraping Dorf’s already scratched and dented sides.

I call my pickup Dorf because someone who owned him before me switched the “F” and “D” on the hood. I’d found him in a used car lot in Needles, on the California-Arizona border, my unlucky town. Just after I bought him, I was driving home when I heard an unmistakable noise. A few years before that, I’d been approaching Needles in my Cruiser when my passenger and I heard that very same clanking sound coming from the engine compartment. We lost all power and rolled to a stop on the interstate’s shoulder, flinching as the engine continued to gurgle, hiss, and steam. The Cruiser had thrown a rod bearing. A local mechanic charged fifteen hundred dollars to rebuild the engine. I couldn’t afford spending that much again.

In Dorf’s case, I would have to do the work myself, especially since he was just my beater work truck. When I’d begun exploring the desert, it had seemed necessary to learn some basics about engine repair. Otherwise, if I were stranded during one of my forays, I might have to walk
more miles than I’d walked in all of the years of my life combined. The friend who had taught me the essentials came for a visit shortly after Dorf broke down. He helped me free the engine and winch it out of the truck, then, before leaving, reminded me of the main precepts. You have to throw yourself into mechanical work and not hold back. Don’t worry about getting greasy. You can buy this product in an orange bottle that removes grease. If you aren’t strong enough to loosen a bolt, use a cheater bar—a length of pipe that fits over the end of the wrench and gives you leverage. And a company called Chilton’s puts out a manual for every American vehicle ever made. The instructions are easy to follow and accompanied by pictures. When in doubt, ask the parts guys at the Napa store in Needles.

I looked at Dorf’s engine, dangling by chains from the beams of the old roofless carport attached to the rock house. Truly, learning the rudiments of engine maintenance had reminded me of sewing, which my mother began teaching me when I was only seven or eight. Both were just mechanical processes, involving skill with tools and parts that you fit together. I’d done my own oil changes and tune-ups for years now and had performed a number of minor repairs on the Cruiser. I could do this. And with some additional advice and tools borrowed from the same neighbor who had lent me the use of his well, I did.

Compare this woman with the girl who got married just so a man would take her where she wanted to go. Compare her with the young woman who resentfully climbed that trail in the Desolation Wilderness behind a man who was not, in fact, forcing her to do anything. Not since I’d been a little girl running around the farm, dragging ladders that weighed twice as much as I did up barn stairs to see into pigeons’ nests or busting quartz nuggets with my father’s sledgehammer to ponder the shiny crystals inside, had I been filled with more volition. For the first time since that childhood, I was at home in my body in a place that felt like home. Because I’d had to rewin that centeredness, I was not likely to lose it ever again.

There was just one problem.

Now I’m stuck with myself, answerable to myself, and the future
is nothing more than more of myself.
That’s what I wrote in one of the countless spiral notebooks I filled by kerosene lantern light. In satisfying my yearning for wild land, I had reopened myself to the loneliness I felt after my divorce. Like any animal who had strayed from its bevy, brood, flock, or clan, I yearned for my own kind.

I recalled the warning look in the eyes of the ranchers who owned the rock house when they’d said that the pay phone didn’t always work. Years later, in 1997, that phone booth would become famous when a desert wanderer’s account of it spread through print news stories and over the Internet. People from far away would journey there in order to camp beside it and answer the calls that poured in, from random places around the world. But for me, “the phone in the middle of nowhere” was not a quirky anomaly or just a camp place to camp. Predictably, I now realized, I had become as addicted to it as I was to the cigarettes I was constantly trying to quit.

Most often I called my friend Beatrice in San Francisco, the one who had built storage compartments into the Cruiser for me. She’d done me more favors than I would ever be able to repay. She’d helped me move to the rock house, even though it had been January and cold weather was not her thing. When it began to snow, she had intrepidly dug a long four-by-four out of the remains of the caved-in barn. Using my sledgehammer, she’d whacked the support into place under my buckling roof to keep the weight of the new snow from collapsing it completely. Before leaving me to fend for myself, she’d drawn plans for the outhouse I would later build.