©2007 - Authors retain all copyrights.
Dear Friend,
I am drained, on a fifteen-hour fuck home to a place that doesn’t deserve to be called such. A body and the sun warm my skin as I see signs that hint at our presence in Portland, but I should probably start from the top.
We took off on May Day morning, a two-week college field trip from western Washington to southern Utah for an ecological study. Forty-three students, two teachers, five vans, plenteous food, and a pile of camping gear – we were on our way. I climbed into a bulky white van (the kind used for bank robberies in the movies) and parked my backpack and pillow down in the third row, next to a glowing friend.
“It’s gonna be a long ride,” I said to her, even though that was more than obvious. She concurred, but we were both glad we had each other’s company.
I spent the first part of the ride as follows: I pondered over pages of crosswords with my blonde neighbor, her skills triumphing over mine. I buoyed between sleep and staring out the tinted windows, playing with my beard-in-progress (a beard is a prerequisite for this particular class). I ached out of the van at every gas station stop and purchased little greasy, sugary, etc. items that make up road trip meals. I buoyed in and out of sleep some more and conversed with fellow classmates as we got more comfortable with each other while lofty hours passed.
“Would you rather…,” a phrase used often in the van, “live your life with no hands, or live without everything below your waist?” someone asked.
I chose no hands, for obvious reasons, and my choice got mixed reviews. At sundown, we reached our halfway point at Farewell Bend in southeastern Oregon. We all set up our tents, ate slow dinner at a truck-stop diner, repaired our shelter from the wrath of a windstorm, and fell asleep in aural rain. The next morning we awoke early in sopping Oregon, packed up the clammy canopies, and kicked it south toward the Utah desert.
After a morning of sleepy rain driving, the sky cleared as we neared the Mormon state. Briefly after the van cut through the Utah border, we discovered the Magic Carpet. I believe it was after a gas station stop, most likely a caffeine-soaked one, when the droning sounds coming through the van speakers turned into dance music (hip-hop mostly i.e. Sir Mix-A-Lot, Vanilla Ice, Coolio, the list goes on). Nearly all of the ten passengers felt the beat in their bodies. We danced. Staring out the window became whipping heads around violently and would-you-rathers turned into sing-a-longs. After nearly two hours of dance party greatness, we were no longer on a van ride; it was magic, it was a carpet ride. I know, cheesy, but hell, we had been trapped in that white cocoon for a lifetime at that point.
The dancing died down to a joke telling session, compiled mostly of “how many [blank]s does it take to fill in a light bulb?” My memory can account for retaining zero jokes in my lifetime, so I contributed little but laughed considerably. We then came up with a Magic Carpet handshake because every significant underground society needs one of those. As we neared our final destination, sing-a-longs come back into play, this time a cappella. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was by far the most notable. The Carpet breezed in to the target campground at dusk; with urgent feet stomping and tired hands clapping, we chanted “We will, we will rock U-tah!”
On the morning of Cinco de Mayo, the third day in Utah, I breached the tent flap in winter socks and a scratchy beard to discover a desert of snow. Before this trip, I had never thought the words snow and desert could ever be used together in a sentence that wasn’t describing opposites to children. I managed to slip on my icy boots and, trembling, brushed my teeth amongst nodding compadres. Even though the snow should have been a hint toward something unusual, I was still unaware of what this day would bring me.
We trekked (I in The Carpet, of course) out to our eco-study site in Dixie National Forest and poured out into the warm-milk afternoon, quite a change from the snow-cloaked morning. After some group studies, I strayed from the group to take notes by myself. My group and I were studying the population of beetles in cactus flowers between burned and unburned areas of the forest. Knelt down, penciling into a pink flower, I heard light footsteps in front of me. I looked up to discover coyotes perched not five feet from my sunburned face. It only took a glance to conclude that two husky, wild animals were staring at me. Without making too much eye contact, I stood up, turned the opposite direction, and walked – not too fast, not too slow – I just fucking walked. All I could do was shuffle and think. Were they following me? What would I do if they attacked me? I had a knife somewhere in my backpack. No, that’d take too much time to get. If they approached me, I devised a plan to swing my book bag at their heads and maybe throw some punches.
Thoughts of self-defense faded quickly, and I became panic-stricken. Moments ago there were people everywhere, now there was no one in sight. I was in a foreign place with only one way to go – away from the coyotes. I would not look behind me. My heart swelled and my intestines were in my throat. This barren land was going to be my gravesite. I began thinking random thoughts of life: I don’t have to choose just one best man at my wedding, I can have my brother and my best friend be my best men. Man, I used to love baseball. I had a red plastic baseball helmet growing up. I wanted to be a fireman, like in the movie “Backdraft.” I bet my firstborn would be a girl, hopefully with red hair. I love red hair. My hair is getting too long; I should get it cut soon. Shit, I’m going to die today.
After ten minutes of hopping over boulders in what I thought was a rattlesnake breeding ground, I found two of my classmates and was finally able to look behind me to discern that the coyotes hadn’t followed me. It took me over an hour to regain a normal breathing pattern. Not since I was persuaded by a high school crush to climb up the underbelly of a towering bridge have I feared so terribly for my life. My body could’ve been desert debris right then. I told my teachers all about the incident.
“Maybe that is your power animal,” one of them said.
All I could think of was it definitely had the power to scare me shitless.
I awoke the morning after to a classmate pounding on my tent and telling me we were leaving early because someone went to the hospital for drunkenly passing out in the desert, another near-death experience (and a reason why perhaps tequila should not be available in giant plastic jugs). I sat up and coughed, lungs scratched from yellowed filters. After dismantling the tent, I shoveled cold oatmeal and shit coffee into my drowsy mouth. The Magic Carpet was waiting for me. I collected my gear and shook the morning from my hair.
That evening we all stayed at a Super 8 in northern Utah to get rest for the following day’s dash home. My motel roommates and I purchased icy drinks called Frazils from a nearby Texaco and hashed over the correct pronunciation of the product. I claimed that it was pronounced “frazzle” as in frazzled hair, while everyone else agreed that it rhymed with Brazil. Either way, my Frazil was orange but tasted like coconut.
The sunset was bittersweet that night as we blocked it with curtains to get our television fix. The godsend of the day came when “Twister” was broadcast on HBO. How that flick never won Academy Awards is beyond me. My Magic Carpet neighbor and I picked our favorite tornadoes. Hers was the one that split into three and tossed cows around; mine was the one that ripped through a drive-in screening of “The Shining.” Later – after pizza, cavity-causing drinks, and some “7th Heaven” – we all crashed hard in the glow of an outdated movie about a teen’s suicidal friend.
An early morning wake-up call followed by half an earth’s rotation of driving and here I am, drained, on a fifteen-hour fuck home to a place that doesn’t deserve to be called such. A body and the sun warm my skin as I see signs that hint at our presence in Portland – we’re almost done. I find solace in my blonde neighbor; her hands twitch while dreaming deeply of Helena storms. She wakes to a desert-drenched pillow in the five o’clock sun. The time of day I was born, but she wasn’t— the hours we usually neglect but now cling to. We don’t want to be this close to home. We don’t want to return from Utah. We rocked Utah.
Sincerely,
-Casey