It’s the fifth week? Tenth week of the pandemic? Who knows. I wake and put on water for tea and sit down at my computer again. The world is contained within the window of my screen every day now, separate from me. My friends call occasionally from their own separate windows. The window itself facilitates our stilted, delayed connections. Before all this it was just the eye which mediated, now it’s this window. There is no coming together, drifting apart, only separation. I’ve come to love my neighborhood. The magnolias, blooming pears, crabapples, and tulips are the only things that seem to me both separate from me and tangible. They’re right here. I believe they exist. They suggest to me that there might be more than just my own mind.
As soon as the stay at home order is lifted, I start trying to find a way to get out of here. With Emery County closed to camping my usual haunts within a four-hour drive have been off the table. There’s still a lot of snow in the Uintas, so that hasn’t been an option either. These limitations push me towards places I’ve been aware of but which always seem to fall far behind my usual choices. These limitations push me west. They push me out past the humming city, past the glittering, horizonless lake, past the Oqirrhs, and the 1,215ft tall Kennecott Garfield smelter stack, past the Stansburys still capped in snow, past Skull Valley and the few scattered Goshutes who inhabit it, to the Cedar Mountains Wilderness.
At 70 miles per hour I skirt the northern edge of the range which protrudes dark and cedar-speckled from the flat, yellow desert floor. Other ranges appear in the west sitting blue and remote on the perfectly flat earth. I turn off onto an exit with a warning that reads “No Services”, and Porter follows behind me. Social distancing necessitated the use of separate vehicles for this trip. A waste of gas maybe, but the world is on track this year to spew 3% less greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than usual, so it’s a wash. My low tire pressure gage has been on for about a year, so I won’t know when I get a flat. And I know it’s a matter of when, not if today. Sometimes I just have a feeling. Our trucks crawl slowly up the rocky road to Hastings Pass where the Donner Party came through on Monday, August 31st 1846. They really did need to be here in April if they were going to make it all the way.
At the top of the pass we pull over beside some junipers and I get out to check my tires. Yup, front passenger tire is deflating quickly. I pull the truck back onto the road where it’s flatter and quickly swap the flat for the spare. Porter is ready to go by the time I’m done changing the tire, his pack on his back, his trekking poles leaning against his truck. After a few more minutes I’m ready too and we set out south, climbing a dry, yellow hill with the knowledge that nearly 50 miles of Wilderness lies before us. Emptiness to escape into. Emptiness to enter simply in order to view it as not empty. Emptiness to counter our doubt with its meadowlarks, wind, mosquitos, and tiny purple flowers.
Is that why we push into these places? To find out if there’s anything actually there? I feel like I sometimes live in disbelief, lying in bed at night aware only of the neighborhood around me. Less. Aware only of this room, the confinement of it. Even less. Only the rumination inside my skull. That’s all there is. But I want that to be proved wrong too, so I have to go to the desert to see if anything actually exists. If anything at all exists outside my head the Cedar Mountains Wilderness will show me. It’s a place one passes on the freeway, identified from the car window as a place that is no-place. If my mind as the sole arbiter of existence is going to be proved wrong, only a place as subtle and unnoteworthy as the Cedar Mountains will be capable of doing it.
I won’t be at all surprised if we walk to the top of this first hill and look south only to see the void. The edge of the video game where the creators stopped creating. I’d say, “I knew it,” and we’d walk back the way we’d come and hop in our trucks and head back to the city, the holograms disappearing behind us as we go. A gray wall of nonexistence following us home, bordering our very minds. Just as I expected.
But no, that’s not what happens. We get to the top of the first hill and look south and the yellow, velvet range extends for miles and miles into the infinite desert. The sun and the wind together swirl hot and cold across the trembling grasses and the sweat on my skin.
Porter and I try to walk a good twenty feet apart, yelling at each other when the wind makes it hard to hear. “What?” I say. “I said what have you been reading lately,” Porter shouts. I tell him I’ve been reading a book called The Trickster and the Paranormal, and a bunch of self-help books because of couples therapy. Porter pauses, but doesn’t pry. And tells me he’s been reading some Willa Cather and other fiction. One of the benefits of lockdown. We’re all absorbing a lot.
The afternoon sits in my gut as afternoons do. Heavy. Potential asking more of me. Infinity not present in it. The distance between the sun and the western horizon closing. The end imminent. But I want the end to come. So why is it so heavy to have to anticipate it? I feel this heaviness all afternoon. I feel homesickness for the blooming trees in my neighborhood. I still feel it setting up my tent while the shadow of the range we’re on crawls across the valley to the east and climbs the Stansburys. And then suddenly I start to feel better; the sun is setting.
Porter and I climb to the top of a hill so we can see the transition more clearly. The finite day has been replaced by the infinite apparent in the change. It’s both day and night. It’s neither day nor night. The floor of the salt flats is laid out lilac now with jagged, navy mountains jutting out from it. A train cuts across the floor below us and distant like a long, steady millipede. Coyotes yip in some arroyo beyond the tapestry folds of the velvet hills and there is no moon. There is no direct light but there is still light coming from the west, and darkness coming from the east. This yin and yang meet on the rounded hills before me and I am comforted by the dualistic division of the day and night meeting. They are found to be undivided after all, together on this very hill on which I stand.
Everything is alright. Day doesn’t exist alone, it just appears to for a time. Night doesn’t exist alone, it just appears to for a time. Here they both are. And my mind, neither does it exist alone in my bedroom, with thoughts on repeat. It exists here too, without thoughts at all. Thought and no-thought meet here just as light and no-light meet. I notice bright yellow yarrow blooming at my feet and squat down to take a picture. I’m surprised by how luminous the colors still are in the fading light. Then I stand and make my way back towards camp where Porter has already gone while the meadowlarks continue to sing their analog synthesizer songs from the tops of burnt, gray junipers.