Recapture. Erica Olsen
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the north side of town, on the way up to Arches, he noticed people pedaling their bikes earnestly on a path that paralleled the highway on the east. If the path had been there before, and he didn’t think it had been, it certainly didn’t used to be paved. What had happened to dirt?
That ribbon of asphalt—it symbolized all that was wrong with the world. An ever-expanding list that included, among recent items:
Having been passed over for a job that should by rights have been his
Having to go on this trip without his girlfriend, Courtney
Swanson had a feeling that things in general had been made easier for people in general, but not for him. Regarding the latter item: Courtney had canceled literally at the last minute, as he was loading gear into the car. One moment he was cheerfully wrangling tarps and lawn chairs, the next her voice was buzzing into his ear the excuse that work was “crazy busy.”
He should go, she’d said—of course he should go.
And so he did, resolving to make the best of it. This time, this gift, this Swanson solitaire.
For solitude, Moab in April was, it seemed, exactly the wrong place. The presence of so many determined fun-havers was giving Swanson a jaundiced view of canyon country. Sweating in his vehicle, he waited his turn through the Arches entrance station. Through his lenses (amber, polarized) the heaps of rock looked like so much hamburger. He parked next to a planted island, which a spindly cottonwood shared with some bravely blooming globemallow. On the other side of the parking lot some people were taking photos of the cliffs adjacent to their RV. Maybe this was as far as they were planning to go. To the west, the cliff wall amplified the sound of traffic where the highway climbed out of town. Swanson heard the other inescapable sound, the confirming horn-honk of a car door locking, and groaned.
He’d wanted an adventure, or at least a getaway from the Bay Area winter of endless rain, but he struggled through the new visitor center. The building was very nice, depressingly nice, with its displays of faux sandstone, its lessons on the Entrada and Chinle formations and all the rest. A video screen set into an indoor cliff told Swanson Congratulations! He didn’t want to know what for. He missed old visitor centers with their quaint dioramas, their dusty specimens of taxidermy and such. The high-gloss treatment here was like a billboard for the real world, which needed no advertisement. It was right there! Out the window! Through the glass, the red cliffs shimmered, a little paler than they were in reality. Inside was a scaled-down version of Delicate Arch that Swanson didn’t want to walk through and yet there he was, walking through it. If the outside was hamburger, this sandstone mockup was pink slime, the processed beef that had been so much in the news lately. An indictment of our culture, Swanson thought.
What worried him most was just how many things seemed to him, these days, to be an indictment of our culture. He understood this for what it was, a sign he was middle-aged. Moab, at this time of year, was a veritable slide show of past and present fun he’d inexplicably missed out on.
For him there was the parking lot ordeal of sun block and sun hat and sun shirt.
He drove up the switchbacks of the escarpment, passing the Gather No Wood in Park road sign, whose medieval diction he used to alter to Gather Ye, then rhetorically inquire, What about wool? Is wool-gathering allowed? He passed it with a morose acknowledgment; there was something that used to make him smile.
At the trailhead Swanson overheard a vacation dad lecturing his vacation son, who was maybe nine years old: When are you going to start acting appropriately? Which, in context, may well have been a reasonable question, but Swanson glared at the dad, felt for the kid.
He felt for himself, having planned this trip buoyantly for months. But to face facts: Courtney had been questioning the travel arrangements. He’d proposed car camping—air mattresses and bathrooms, with plumbing whenever possible. Her reaction had been less than enthusiastic. He had to admit, now, she’d been giving him signals that she didn’t want to go. She was really more of a hotel girl.
He passed a geology class trip from somewhere ridiculously far away, Texas or Tennessee, giving a group thumbs-up to some roadside rock formation.
Spring break.
Swanson headed down the Park Avenue trail then ducked off it at Courthouse Wash. The academic year had not been good to him. He’d put in the time as an adjunct—freshman English, American Studies. Swanson had always been flexible, accommodating—and he had not been selected for an interview. That was a blow. He suspected his colleagues of looking askance at his methodology. His ecocriticism. Swanson had not published, not enough and not well enough; he’d put himself on the fast track to perishing. But he wasn’t dead yet! He wanted—he wanted—what? Utah, the geologic opera that used to make what he called (for lack of a better word) his soul feel as big and light as a balloon, wasn’t working for him this time. He looked at nature, and he felt nothing. Maybe it happened to everyone. Up the wash, where he’d hoped for tranquility, some boorish idiots, or idiotic boors—no doubt the same ones who’d let their kids scratch their names and the date across the rock of the main trail—were hallooing for the echo.
He hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, between his grading and her work schedule. That might mean something. Or nothing—people were busy sometimes. There had been a fight, though. He remembered her angry tears, the queasy feeling that still came over him when he recalled her revelation that she didn’t want to settle. He hated that word, settle.
“Settle down?” he’d asked.
“Settle.” She added, “It’s not fair to you.”
Yelling and clapping. Were they playing Marco Polo back there?
Swanson slunk away, continued on to the next pullout.
Where, next to an interpretive sign, a ranger was lecturing someone about hiking off trail. The trail itself was quilted with footprints. In his sun-blocking armor, Swanson plodded past a plethora of petrified hoopla.
And then, just like that, he’d had enough.
Enough! he said to himself.
He stuffed the hated nylon sombrero into a trash can and marched himself back to the car.
Before getting on the road he checked for a signal, checked for messages (he had none), then speed-dialed Courtney. He got voicemail. “Hey. It’s Tyler,” he said. “I was just. I was just wondering.” He laughed a little laugh. “When are you going to start acting appropriately?”
South of Moab, he was back in starkly empty country, the sage plain interrupted here and there by reefs and fins of exposed rock. Back before it was paved, this road was one of the country’s last adventure highways. He’d read that somewhere. That was before his time, of course, but adventure highway was what he wanted. Spaced out on open space, miles and miles of it, he almost missed the turn lane. He braked hard and without signaling swung right onto the turnoff to Newspaper Rock. The RV behind him sounded a bitchy toot of the horn. Swanson wished his fellow humans a fuck-you-very-much. This was exhilarating. Up ahead was a good pullout, with a sturdy pinyon-juniper grove for shade. He set off cross-country in a tonic rage—the ranger the trail the rules—then headed up a pink sand wash.
Out here, he could begin to face facts. What mattered here was life and death, rock and rainfall, the weird-looking cryptogamic crust that Swanson stepped considerately around. Not the romantic travails of a forty-year-old, the humiliation of another middle-aged breakup. Courtney was a few years older than he was, and in the back of his mind he’d assumed that when things went south it would be his doing. (A pretty grad student, a conference fling.) He’d been wrong about that. In her forties, Courtney had started to turn heads. And she was likely not to be there when he returned. She’d said as much the last time they got together, after the holidays. He just hadn’t wanted to hear it. The thousand-mile drive had given him ample time to turn her words into something ambiguous, something he could reasonably interpret in his favor.
He hiked hard, feet plowing the thick hot sand, until the voice in his mind quieted and he started to see what was around him, the beautiful world. A phalanx of