Desert Shenanigans
A reminder of what this is all for
A couple of days after the Robb Elementary School school slaughter, when I couldn’t take another moment of NPR, this Ezra Klein podcast popped up in my feed: A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems: The award-winning poet shares how she stays open to wonder and beauty in a difficult world.”
Ezra introduced the podcast like this:
“Here’s something I believe — In dark times, when so much in the news is so unrelentingly horrible, it is a political act — it is a political act to open yourself to the awe and joy and beauty the world still provides. To sit with a poem or take a walk in the woods isn’t an abdication or a kind of quietism. It’s a reminder of what this is all for. It’s an opportunity to muster the strength to continue, and to see just a little bit more clearly, and maybe respond just a little more compassionately.”
One of my earlier Substack essays, Be Nice, Have Fun, explores this tug of how we might react to all the things that infuriate and scare us and explores my curiosity about whether it’s possible to temper the bad with a lot of good.
This past spring my thirteen-year-old son Nico and I joined 12 others on a 75-foot “luxury” houseboat on Lake Powell. For those of you who know me better from the helm of a 16’ raft, you know this is a very unlikely way for us to journey through the desert. Add-ons were a 23’-pontoon boat carrying 13 paddleboards, a cherry red wake ski boat, cases of booze, and enough food to feed our teenagers for a month.
We launched on the first day of National Poetry Month, and a “poem-a-day challenge” inspired me on early morning coffee jags on the top deck to try a different way to pen our questionable-but-otherwise-awe-inspiring excursion.
The Desert Speaks
“Man can only mar it”
the canyons cry
as they welcome us with
a halcyon sunrise
and the sound of
starlings in spring.
In her most recent book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown explores the emotion of tranquility. She describes it as the feeling of having to do nothing in a restorative environment that eases mental fatigue and attention depletion. These are the special places we go to count on finding these four essential elements of tranquility:
Sense of getting away
Emersion
Holds your attention without effort
Compatible with one’s preferences
Based on the number of mammoth houseboats with jet boat decks and spiral slides floating empty in the few marinas still open, I can imagine Lake Powell is crazy at certain times of the year, but early April wasn’t one of them. Lake Powell did not disappoint.
Tranquility
When you were thirteen
for seven sun-kissed days
flaming slot canyons and
cool spring-fed rivers
enveloped you and
cut you off from
the pixels
that pillage
your attention and
confidence.
You snuggled your me and your
safe friends
who knew you as a toddler
who marveled at your morphing
and your hilarious antics.
What did you feel when you
slithered into the earth,
neck deep in freezing water?
Do you think about
that moment?
Or is that the point?
To not think,
or judge,
or plan
or do anything but
wonder.
Love on the Rocks photo credit: Cindy Chia
For the past 2 years, as Covid changed our lives, we spent A LOT of time with this same crew in the desert - Bears Ears, Escalante, Robbers Roost … the more remote, the better. When we find ourselves watching our kids huck themselves into Corbet’s Couloir, rappelling into a deep, dark slot canyon, or filming them jumping their mountain bikes, we joke that one day we’ll start irresponsibleparenting.com with Edward Abby as our inspiration.
Survival Hint #1: Stay out of there. Don't go. Stay home and read a good book, this one for example. The Great American Desert is an anti-place. People get hurt, get sick, get lost out there. Even if you survive, which is not certain, you will have a miserable time. The desert is for movies and God-intoxicated mystics, not for family recreation.
~ Edward Abby - from his essay The Great American Desert
This is the final story I have to offer from our trip which I told Moth-style at a story slam at our local pub when we got home. The theme of the night, inspired by Kamala Harris, was “I’m Speaking.”
Fuddy Duddy
Frantumaglia
This orderly-disorderly din
cages the whirlpool of frantumaglia
with their horizontal black lines.
Motivated by fear
and hope
and the discordant clamber
in my brain
I transform narratives
with enduring energy
that stumble and
disarrange.
Reality is a game of illusion.
I’m a disheartened realist.
Random collisions
between me
and the world.
The hand that manically insisted
squeezes out unsuspected,
uncontrolled possibilities
and a tangle of icy determination
and troubling love.
*** Frantumaglia” is a Neapolitan word meaning a jumble of fragments, to shatter, smash, crumble–just like the sandstone under our feet. These lines were lifted from the notes I took reading Elena Ferrante in the early morning sunshine from In the Margins - a series of essays that explore this brilliant author’s writing process.
Thank you for indulging me.
I hope your summer is full of adventure and awe.