The desert
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One problem with growing up in Utah is that it gives you a warped perspective on natural beauty. Just as in New York you’re always walking onto a subway car full of demigods, in Salt Lake City you can drive a few hours in any direction and end up in a landscape that makes you wonder how much psilocybin they slipped into your Starbucks. This effect is especially pronounced if you head south, to the red-rock desert.
For a dear one’s fortieth birthday last weekend, I made my way to the town of Torrey, Utah, near Capitol Reef National Park—one of the lesser-known spectacles in a state where charter buses pull up all day to Bryce or Zion or Arches; just as wondrous but with the added element of a lunar solitude. You wander through a radiant prism all day and then head inside to huddle against the whistling dark. The last time I was there, a decade ago, my sister had just graduated from college, and we sat after dinner in a borrowed cabin while I read aloud, Robert Caro on the death of JFK.
How did it take this long to come back? I wondered as my friends and I began the dull southerly drive along Interstate 15 and then turned—past a shuttered gas-station petting zoo still lived in by an enormous camel—onto a series of smaller and windier roads surrounded by a series of weirder and more ornamented landscapes.
The same question came up last year, when a little cohort of friends I’d met on the threshold of adulthood—and then kept in touch with at best intermittently—managed a sudden slapdash late-July rendezvous in Joshua Tree, the bewitched and sprawling desert counterweight to our manicured suburban college a hundred miles west. Here I discovered that their truth-telling and genius and ecstasy, their hyperverbal effulgence, were no invention either of my memory or of the slightly make-believe circumstances in which we’d met, but real qualities made sharper by two decades of age, and so exceptional—so unmatched in their particular delights by anything else adulthood, for all its abundance, has supplied—that we’re meeting there again, for the third time, next month.
These expeditions had an effect the opposite of the desert archetype: not isolating but binding, not harrowing but reverential, not parched but restoring. On each of them I went for a run, gasping hard and kicking up the sand, then returned to faces I have known since what seems like a previous life: before the broken bones, before the coming out, before the athletics (mostly), before the jobs, before Los Angeles, before New York. I would say before my self-knowledge altogether, except at least I knew enough to draw these people close.
The desert has a reputation for harshness, but what about its simplicity? The easier to see where you came from, what took you to the lights who dot your sky. Travel far enough out into the desert, far from home, and what is still close to you becomes easier to discern. And from this appraisal you can see that not even the most sweeping act of personal invention lacks antecedents; that whom you loved was always a clue.
Forty years, a marker I soon will hit myself: Maybe it’s just enough time to begin to see, and be seen, plainly—the lines of wind and water appearing at last in your facade, the real shape of you coming into relief.
Coming, after a brief pause, next Tuesday: Running.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.