Through the Shadowlands

by Julie Rehmeyer

  I checked my phone and found that it picked up a weak signal, not strong enough for more than an emergency call but sufficient for e-mail. I was relieved—if something went wrong, I could get help—but also a bit sad. I know I won’t be able to resist checking my e-mail. Will it dilute the experience?

  I watched a single car inching along the undulating black pen line of the one road, the only sign of humans I could see. I whooped, just to hear the sound of my own voice. The sound was swallowed, not even returning to me in an echo.

  I am alone.

  Aloneness had been my companion for years, though not so vividly as at this moment. I remembered the night after my mother died, lying in bed alone in our house, shocked by the fury that had come up in me: How dare you make me work that hard to save you, and then just die! Just under the rage was a fear so profound I recoiled before I could become fully aware of it: I felt as though my mother’s death proved that when tested, the people I loved most would abandon me or fall apart.

  And that fear seemed to prove true over the years that followed. Geoff had fallen apart. William couldn’t handle my illness, at least not in a way that I could live with. And now I was utterly alone in the desert, not entirely sure I could take care of myself and with no one to help me if I couldn’t.

  I laughed, looking at the moonscape of sand and rocks that surrounded me for miles, with neither a human nor even a single tree or spot of green. I sure know how to bring my worst fear to life!

  The air was cool as it passed through my nostrils and filled my lungs. The slight breeze carressed me like velvet. Outrageous streaks of purple and yellow and green in the mountains across the valley were sparkling into life as the sun grew higher. Frances nuzzled her nose against my leg, and her ears felt soft as whipped cream under my hand.

  Right at the moment, that aloneness didn’t feel so bad. In fact, it felt pretty fucking magnificent.

  I spent the day slowly setting up my camp. Before I’d left home, I cooked dinners for myself for the whole trip, frozen them in individual containers, and loaded them into an electric cooler. I had also bought an 80-watt solar panel and a battery to charge the cooler and my phone. I set up a little kitchen for myself on a folding table, with a two-burner, white gas camping stove.

  The work took me most of the day, and by the time I was done, I didn’t have energy for the walk I’d hoped for. But still, I felt very satisfied with myself. I watched the sky streak gold and red as I sat in my camp chair with my dinner in my lap.

  The next day, I took a slow, cautious walk up the jeep trail. Does it feel better than it would have before I left? Each step, I tried to assess, not sure. But the next day I crashed and was stuck lying on my camping pad. Okay, well, it’s probably too soon for much improvement. No reason for discouragement.

  Over the following days, I continued pushing my walks a bit longer, hoping each time that I’d break through to free, easy movement and get a clear signal of recovery. I occasionally got optimistic, but even on the good days, I typically spent several hours crashed out, feeling as will-less as a sack of potatoes, listening to the wind drum the sides of the tent and ring the zipper pulls like prayer bells.

  I spent time training Frances: drilling recalls, teaching her right and left, practicing loose-leash walking. Frances spent a lot of time on a rock at the top of the ravine above the tent, crouching up there like a mountain lion. She learned that the tiny ragged bushes often contained hidden lizards, so she scurried from bush to bush on our walks. I discouraged her from celebrating the rare passing car with a chase.

  One night she heard a visiting critter outside the tent, one that even had the gall to drink water from her water bowl, mere inches away on the other side of the fabric. I was as curious as she about who our visitor was—a coyote, perhaps?—but the zipped-up tent blocked our view. The critter returned nightly, even when I brought her water bowl in. One night was warm enough to just have the mesh door closed, and I hoped we’d be able to get a glimpse of our friend. I awoke in the middle of the night to a commotion: Frances was trying to crash through the mesh. I settled her back down, but then she tried again—and succeeded, ripping a hole right through the mesh and zooming off into the night. I heard her excited yips receding into the blackness, and my heart pounded until she came back, panting and delighted. I kept the solid doors mostly zipped up after that and cringed at the thought of telling Geoff that she’d destroyed his tent. Though she may have discovered who our visitor was, I never did.

  I found that I had no desire to see or talk to people face-to-face. From time to time, the wind or the sun got so intense that I’d briefly reenter civilization to seek refuge in the blessed dim coolness of the café in Furnace Creek, a building my moldie friends assured me was okay. I’d fill my eight one-gallon jugs of water there along with my five-gallon solar shower, and the staff quickly embraced me as a regular. But that was only every few days, and the human contact felt incidental: It was the coolness, stillness, and water that drew me.

  Nearly a week into the trip, I took a walk up the road and felt better than I had previously. I wrote exultantly to friends, “I have had the first indication that this experiment might be working. I just went for a walk in which I think I would have kept up with your sedentary Great Aunt Thelma, who rarely gets out of her barcalounger. I might even have outpaced her.” And the next day, I felt okay—woohoo!

  I got more ambitious and took Frances to nearby Golden Canyon, a gentle hike along a twisting ravine through fantastically colored badlands. I managed to go two-and-a-half miles in a couple of hours, but I had that usual feeling of draaaagging my body along, and the next day my eyes were swollen and moving was difficult.

  Another day, I drove to Ubehebe Crater, a great round hole in the earth created when magma crept up close enough to the surface to meet up with underground water, which turned to steam so fast that the ground exploded, leaving a 650-foot-deep crater. William and I had visited it together, and we had ventured beyond the crater across the hills. The solitude had been intense, the landscape extreme, its unremitting dryness heart-expanding.

  When I arrived this time, however, hordes of people were crawling all over the crater. I knew that the crowd would peter out once I got beyond the crater itself, but as I climbed up the hill toward peace, my body dragged, each step grinding. Frances had to be on leash around the crater, but she kept pulling—strictly forbidden on our service-dog training program—and I was too exhausted to deal with her and get up the hill too. I could feel my frustration with her bubbling toward the surface to meet the pool of loss I kept hidden underground: the loss of my strong body, the loss of my relationship, the loss of much of my career, the loss of my sense of control. I felt the danger that all that grief might erupt as rage at Frances, so I allowed my legs to creak to a halt and my body to sag down to the ground. I sat peering down into the crater, imagining the explosion that had so suddenly ripped a vast hole into this landscape, perhaps only 300 years earlier. I felt a glum kinship with it, feeling the crater in my own ripped-apart life.

  I gave up my ambitions after that. After all, my moldie friends had told me that I might or might not feel better while I was in Death Valley. The real key was to see if I reacted to my trailers and stuff when I got home. As much as I wanted to know if the experiment was working, there was no point in pushing myself.

  So then I stayed by my campsite, and contentment returned. Just being there, taking little walks, sitting in my chair watching the colors of the desert change as the sun moved across the sky—it felt like enough to me. A full life.

  I could just stay here forever.

  The contentment felt unfamiliar, even a bit shocking. An anxious internal drive had prodded me forever—but I only noticed it in the desert, once it was gone. That striving had started with the need to save my mother, but when she died, it had transmuted itself into a feeling that I was obliged to be a success myself in order to redeem her life. I had always imagined that contentment would come as the nat
ural end product of accomplishing my goals, but I never quite seemed to get there.

  Now, though, plunked in my camp chair in Death Valley, achieving “success” seemed absurdly beyond my capabilities. So much effort, I thought. I quit! Just taking one breath after another, managing to heat up my food and wash my dishes, occasionally sweeping the sand out of the tent—that felt like success enough for me. With all my assumed obligations removed, life seemed unimaginably spacious. Just being alive was a thrill, a blessing, a tiny miracle beyond my expectation or control. Anything I managed to accomplish above that was a gift.

  One day a few months before my mother died, she told me, “I’m not worried about you anymore. You’ve learned everything you needed to from me. Now, I just want you to be happy. That’s the only thing I’m not sure of—that you’ll be happy.” I’d been stunned. Happy? I’d never heard her talk much about happiness before. A statement that might be banal from most people was, from her, astonishing, a benediction.

  But the truth was, she’d been right to be concerned about me on that score—I hadn’t been very happy. Oddly, now that I was abandoning my perceived obligation to my mother, I was at last fulfilling her final wish for me.

  I thought about that strange feeling I’d had that I was going to the desert to die. Perhaps now I knew what that feeling had meant. Yes, I was still breathing, but I had reached the end of everything I had worked so hard for all my life. The path I’d been following had evaporated beneath my feet, carrying the world I had known with it. I was now standing in a vast blankness, trusting that the world would form itself beneath me as I walked forward.

  And I liked it.

  My thoughts wandered to the future occasionally, though the unknowns were so enormous that it felt almost beyond contemplation. Since the moldies said that the outside air in Santa Fe wasn’t good enough to heal in, I figured that if the mold hypothesis held out for me, I’d end up living out in the desert wilds for a while.

  I came up with the image of buying a Volkswagen Vanagon, which could be stripped down to bare, mold-free metal if necessary. The minimalism appealed to me. I imagined Frances and me in southern Utah in our Vanagon, watching the colors change there, just as we were doing in Death Valley. I could write from anywhere, of course, if I was well enough. But mostly I imagined just being, the way we were just being right then, far from people, out in nature, with nothing to do or accomplish or strive for.

  These fantasies, I noticed, didn’t include anyone else, not even on the sidelines. I figured that eventually I’d have a partner again, but in an immediate way, I felt like I just wanted to pull away, far away from a society in which I no longer seemed to be capable of functioning.

  But then, of course, this experiment could simply not work. Maybe mold had nothing to do with my illness. Maybe I’d get home and have no reaction to my trailers whatsoever. What then?

  One thing was clear, whether the experiment worked or not: I was going to need money. My savings were close to gone. If the experiment worked, I was going to need to get rid of everything I owned, and if I were living off in the wilderness, I had no clue if I’d be able to make much money, or how quickly I’d be well enough to do so. And if the experiment didn’t work, well . . .

  A little more than a week into the trip, I decided to e-mail Lenny, my undergraduate advisor, to ask for help. Of course, he hadn’t the slightest obligation to help me—it felt kind of outrageous to even ask—but I hoped he might be willing. He didn’t have kids, and in some small way, I felt like I played that role in his life. I explained the situation and ended the e-mail with, “If it did feel like something you could be comfortable with, my gosh would it make a difference for me, and I’d do my damnedest to use your generosity to bring riches into the world.” I sent the e-mail off fast, before I lost my nerve, and then I tried hard to put it out of my mind. The next day I got a response—Lenny simply offered to send me $10,000, no strings attached. I sobbed.

  I also got another small financial reprieve: The tenant in my house asked to stay one more month, changing her earlier plan of breaking the lease with thirty days’ notice. I suspended my efforts to arrange showings from afar, with relief.

  Twelve days into my trip, I watched a bee discover Frances’s water bowl, buzzing around it as if drunk. I poured the water out to get rid of the bee, and within minutes, it returned with hundreds of recruits in a great invasion, sucking every drop out of the ground where I’d spilled the water, as well as from a damp sponge and my drying clothes.

  How do the bees survive out here anyway? There are no flowers and no water! Surely they don’t get by on a few hapless campers like me.

  The sun had addled my brain, I was feeling poorly, and I wanted to get the hell away from the bees, so I decided to head down to the dim, cool, bee-less café in Furnace Creek. As I took long licks from an ice cream cone, I realized that despite my casual dismissals of the whole thing as crazy, I desperately wanted this mold hypothesis to be true. And over the course of my time in Death Valley, the hypothesis had come to feel true. Emotionally, it felt like it fit somehow, like it made sense in the overall trajectory of my life. The theory had brought me here, to this extraordinary place, to this extraordinary suspended moment. I felt emptied out, as though everything I had once thought of as me had vanished. To go through such an experience, only to get to the end and conclude that the whole expedition had been a crock of shit—it seemed almost inconceivable.

  But of course, that didn’t mean that the mold hypothesis was true.

  When I looked at the situation dispassionately, the results seemed unsettlingly ambiguous. I felt better than I had right before I left, not having any of the days where I woke up unable to move for no apparent reason. I didn’t, however, feel as well as I had during a good spell in the middle of January. With just a couple of days remaining, it looked like my experiment was coming out just as I had worried it would: a meaningless muddle. How I felt ordinarily varied so much that it was impossible to pull any signal from the noise to know what the experiment was telling me. I had feared squishiness and uncertainty, and that seemed to be just what I was getting.

  I reminded myself, though, that my moldie friends had warned me that I might not feel all that much better in the desert. The real test would only come once I got home, when I’d find out if I reacted to my trailers and stuff. Every single patient who’d made an effort like mine, they claimed, reacted strongly once they returned home, no namby-pamby, maybe-maybe-not stuff. So I just had to hope that when I got home, I’d get really, really sick.

  One of Erik the Mold Warrior’s comments from before the trip niggled at me, though. He’d pointed out how hard it can be to get completely free of contamination—and honestly, I had no way of knowing if I had succeeded. Then he’d said, “The real way to learn this is to go places with a moldie and have it demonstrated.”

  I had been annoyed and dismissed his comment, but now that my time in Death Valley was wrapping up, I worried about it. Erik was supposed to be the great guru in this whole moldie game, and I wasn’t following his advice. I’d be goddamned if I was going to go to all this trouble and not be sure I’d given it a full shot.

  The obvious moldie to demonstrate the effect to me was Erik. Reno, where Erik lived, was only a six-hour drive away. I could meet the Mold Warrior himself and have him take me to famously moldy locations that had sickened people during the Tahoe epidemic (or at least so he said). I’d be going from the best possible place, Death Valley, to the worst possible place, Lake Tahoe, and if anything would make me react, I figured, it would be that. The idea intrigued me journalistically as well. That guy seems like such a freak that I’d love to meet him!

  But when I e-mailed Erik to ask for a “mold tour,” he said no, in his typically extreme way:

  I conducted a tour for someone who really wanted to see it for themselves, without having an adequate backup plan. I made a huge mistake and almost killed her . . . Before I do any more tours, I want to have a decontamin
ation facility within fifteen minutes’ time of exposure available. Otherwise a mold tour is almost certain to cause harm. So . . . sorry, I’m still working on it, but it won’t be ready for a while.

  I wrote to my moldie friends about his response, and one said that she knew the situation Erik referred to: That patient had been extremely sick and had also ignored Erik’s instructions, charging into a very moldy building. For me, she said, Erik’s concerns were overblown. She said she’d try to talk him into it—and the next morning, I heard that she’d succeeded. Woohoo!

  I packed up my tent, my solar panel, and my mini-kitchen, and when I was done, the only sign I’d ever been at my camping spot was the soon-to-evaporate moisture in the sand from where I’d just emptied Frances’s water bowl.

  As I drove away, the land returned to its silence.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE MOLD TOUR

  As I drove out of Death Valley, I sent a somewhat sheepish e-mail to Gary, who owned the little Subaru I was borrowing: “I’m now on my way to Reno—hope you don’t mind.”

  After a few hours, I stopped at a campground, and as soon as I got out of the car, a swarm of midges surrounded my head—midges in my eyes, midges whizzing past my ears, dozens on my arms moments after I wiped them off. I ran around, but they followed me. I went into the bathroom but didn’t elude them. Even getting in my car didn’t allow me to escape the insufferable buzzing.

  With no nearby lake to jump into, the only solution I saw was to kill the little bastards. That plan presented two problems: One was that I had no insect repellent with me, and the other was that, even if I had some, I’d been warned that if I was indeed a moldie, I’d likely have developed chemical sensitivities by now.

  A possible solution to the first problem presented itself when a van pulled up. My halo of midges and I walked over to say hello, and I asked the bright-eyed, white-haired couple inside if they had any insect repellent I could use. They had an extra bottle—I could keep it, they said.