Getting to the desert was like a backwards game of Twister – untangling ourselves from work, homestead responsibilities, the comfort of warm beds and stocked fridges.
There’s always that feeling, zooming away from home, car crammed with stuff, that we’ve forgotten something vital.
That our busy adult lives could fall apart without us there to prop them up, like yanking the mannequin from the clothes.
And that is when I know we’re doing exactly the right thing.
When you ask Col and Rose what they did on our desert trip, they reply, “We played in the sand.”
Precisely.
The older kids cartwheeled and somersaulted in the sandy wash, while the 3-year-old simply flopped down on his belly and swam.
They conducted sand-digging contests, transported sand from one place to another via shirts and buried each other. It was as if sand were a new medium, and they the scientists charged with understanding its every nuance.
And me? I read two books; rambled around the slickrock; kept the kids fed via cooler and camp stove; brought and ignored work; enjoyed old friends and our new bonds through parenthood; prayed to the god of corneal eye protection (on account of all the flung sand); provided lap space for children around morning and evening campfires; and objectified my husband as he chopped wood with breathtaking form.
I’m programmed to search for life’s meaning the same way I search for my glasses in the morning: patting down my bedside table vigorously and with hope. This is both a strength and a weakness.
I look back at Rose’s courage to ford spiny tumbleweed-choked passages; Col’s astonished “wow,” when he crawled from our tent and saw the night tapestry of stars. Is that it? Is that why we came? Was it to give the kids three days where every sandy, rocky, sagebrush treasure belongs to all and yet to no one? Was it enough to hear the wingbeats of ravens paddling the emptiest sky? Or to simply “be” where the differentness of desert slows time like a long exhale bookended by regular life?
Really, I don’t know.
Perhaps it’s all that and also having said, “Yes, let’s go,” the echo of that “yes” reverberating for a long time forward.
Reach Rachel Turiel at sanjuandrive@frontier.net. Visit her blog, 6512 and growing, on raising children, chickens and other messy, rewarding endeavors at 6,512 feet.
