The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  During all these city years, I have been an astronaut floating in space, the lifeline of my identity always securely fastened to Kansas, the mother ship. But I don’t realize that yet. Nor do I have any way of knowing that I will eventually remember this day as the beginning of the journey returning me to earth. In fact, I think of this guy I’m following up the mountain as my lifeline. He is the one who scooped me out of the ocean of loneliness I inadvertently dove into by finally getting the nerve to divorce my affable, spacey, totally incompatible husband.

  Before I met my husband, I’d dreamed of going to San Francisco, where the hippies were having love-ins; the war protesters were nailing establishment hypocrisy; and Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane were penetrating the darkness of the times, trailing psychedelic colors and my generation behind them. But short of sticking my thumb out, I didn’t have any way of getting there. I wasn’t foolhardy. I enrolled in college instead. I’d attended one summer session and was in the middle of my first fall semester at KU when along came this exotic guy with a plan. I hitched a ride on his volition. I know that I’m doing it again. It is not only the pace my boyfriend is setting, but the fact he is setting it that makes me want to burn holes into the back of his head.

  What is this? He’s stopping. He turns around, walks back to me, and with this ecstatic look on his face, takes me by the shoulders. “Isn’t this, isn’t this . . .” He tightens his jaw theatrically. “Err-grrr!” Apparently lacking a sufficiently exalted descriptor, he leans me back for a passionate kiss, then steadies me as I begin to topple under my unbalanced load.

  “Yes! It’s . . . fantastic!” I pretend to share his enthusiasm over this brutal climb through a dark forest just as I pretend to enjoy the frenetic, Coltrane-style jazz he drags me to most weekends. The one positive thing—the strain on my lungs prevents my craving a cigarette. I’ve been struggling to quit smoking since my divorce. Not the best of timing, I realize.

  Begrudgingly, I do allow that this seeming death march will probably have a payoff, like when we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and go to the beaches in Marin County, where we run barefoot. He has a philosophy for exertion outdoors, as he does for almost everything. Holding fingers to thumb in a teacherly circle and his pinkie in the air, he has explained to me that most people are “herd animals” who lack independent spirits and will not walk, let alone run, far. All you have to do to escape the crowd is put out a little effort. The same goes for moods. You have to power through them. Be physical, and the endorphins will kick in, elevating your spirits. Go even if it’s raining. Usually the sun comes out and you will have the beach all to yourself. At the very least, the effort in the face of opposition will win a revelation of some kind.

  We got up at five a.m. this morning, had our cappuccino at six, arrived at the trailhead by nine, and the sun is now at its zenith, so he’s been keeping up this grueling pace for three hours, most of that time in the trees. They were gloomy to walk through. I hated not being able to see far, but now that we’re getting above the timberline, the mid-July heat weighs on me and makes my pack feel twice as heavy. Admittedly, the vistas are terrific—gray granite slopes with waterfalls cascading over them, and now a solitary clump of tall trees, the last of their kind, leaning skyward like exclamation points. “Look at those amazing pine trees,” I call out, hoping he will stop to appreciate them.

  He turns his head but doesn’t even slow down. “They’re lodgepoles.”

  Thank you and fuck you too, know-it-all. The strap of my canteen is pinned under my pack and I can’t lift it high enough to get a drink. But damned if I’m going to ask him to stop. The muscles in my thighs ache, yet I continue to punish them, straining now through a boulder field, each step so high above the last one, I can barely lift myself onto it. “Just put one foot in front of the other,” he’s told me before. Well, I’ll do that one hundred times, then I’m stopping whether he does or not. One jerk. Two jerk. Three jerk. Four prick. I ration the pejoratives, afraid I’ll run out before I get to a hundred. Five prick. Six pri—

  His neat hiking shoes and straight-legged jeans are planted on the step above me. The toes are pointing toward me, not away. “How ya doin’?” he asks, with real concern, like a coach who has suddenly realized his drill is on the verge of murdering his pupil.

  I’m almost woozy enough to pass out. I wish I would. That would teach him. “Great!” I say as convincingly as I can muster, but hearing the hollow ring in my voice, revert to sarcasm. “How are you doing?”

  He laughs. “Don’t worry. This is the final assault.”

  My fists clench at the enticing images that word conjures. He waves his hand at a vertical wall of rock to our left. Only now do I see that the path turns here, to go straight up it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He frees my canteen for me. “Here,” he says, pouring water into me as if I were a plant. Or a child. He takes my hat off, pushes my hair off my sweaty forehead, jambs the hat back on with two hands, pats my shoulder as if placating a tiger. “It will be worth it, Juleney. You’ll see. I promise.”

  “Thanks,” I say, liking that he at least acknowledges my anger. I picture the campsite we will build on the shoreline of the lake. Tomorrow morning we will sleep in together in the comfort of sun-dappled nylon and plush down. I remind myself that I have good reason to be optimistic. He’s proven his theory to me many times. When we go to the ocean and those magical endorphins heighten my awareness, something as commonplace as a sand dollar can fascinate me. Once, a pod of seals followed our progress along an otherwise empty beach, their rubbery black heads bobbing in the surf so close to us that we could see their whiskers and limpid black eyes. Another time, a couple of miles up the beach on a foggy day, we discovered a driftwood hut to shelter in. Sitting in that tepee with cold, gray sky showing between the sea-smoothed slats, the fire we’d built casting its warmth over me, I imagined a buffalo rug beneath us and the walls sheathed in hides. I speculated that if we lived mostly outdoors, the way the Indians had, we would experience the gratitude we were feeling in that moment every time we stepped inside.

  My boyfriend remarked, as he often does, on how the prairie shaped my aesthetics and my imagination. He thinks of the plains as a pure and open place, an outer representation of my inner nature. He puts me on this pedestal and I know he’d be appalled at the impure thoughts coursing through me right now, but when he says things like that, I feel almost as proud of my Kansas roots as when I was a kid singing “Home on the Range,” the state song. It was written only about seventy miles from where I grew up, I liked informing him. He grew up among New York intellectuals, went to an Ivy League school, and has a successful career. Yet he says that sparks fly between us because we are “equals but opposites.” Being admired by a man with such lofty credentials and who has such a correspondingly high opinion of his own worth gives me a higher opinion of mine. His thinking I am his equal makes me aware of my potential and fuels my lonely weekdays, which I spend at my bookkeeping job as the only employee of an accountant.

  My boyfriend scales the virtual cliff before us, then stops on what I hope, for God’s sake, is the crest. “Eureka!” he shouts.

  I grab on to boulders to keep from losing my balance and climb. My eyes, as always, are aimed toward him, but the sun blinds me. As he reaches down, all I can see is his dark silhouette outlined by blue sky. He pulls me up beside him. We stand on the edge of what he tells me is a cirque, a silver-gray cup of granite filled with glacier melt as clear as the air. A few trees grow on the shoreline protected by this wall of granite, and in their shade on the water, we can see the undersides of boulders and the sandy bottom. My boyfriend beams a dare at me, then slaloms down the gravelly path, tossing his pack, his hat, his shirt. He is putting on a show, but I can’t take my eyes off the water.

  It beckons glasslike, receptive. The world’s purest element in its purest form. Seemingly innocent, yet I suspect it is so
cold that a prolonged immersion in it could kill. Every cell in my body and every neuron in my heat-addled brain thirst for that immersion.

  I make my way down the path faster than feels safe, skidding over talus, banging my hip on a boulder, and almost falling more than once. I drop my pack on the pine duff along the shoreline, then my boots, socks, and jeans. An unusually dark boulder with mica sparkles in it calls to me, but it’s almost too hot to touch. So I dip my hat into the startling cold water, scooping it onto the rock, then lower myself into the now wet and warm shallow depression down the boulder’s center. I hang my arm off the edge, and, trailing my fingers through the water, begin a slow, delectable flirtation. The high-altitude sun presses my back as with a dry iron, while below me, riffles slap rock. Glare refracts off the water, dappling my arm and flashing hypnotically on my retinas.

  I am irradiated, intoxicated. I rise to my feet, pull my now wet shirt and underwear off and try not to notice where my boyfriend is or whether he notices me. I don’t care about his shouts of cold and pleasure or the splashes he makes cavorting. This is about me and you, I think toward the lake. Not me and him. Go, I urge myself. Go! Go!

  I’ve done something really, really stupid, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The lake is liquid ice, the cold so shocking I panic at first. Echoes of my scream circle the jagged peaks. So do those of my boyfriend’s “yee-haw!” His example and approval help me resist the urge to splash ashore. It only takes a half minute or so and I’m willingly giving myself to the water and it is giving itself to me, driving me into my body the way good sex does, only better, the climax unending. I am nothing but sensation, all of it glorious. I dive back under. I’ve never swum naked in broad daylight and I love the water’s silken feel on my skin. I love watching my hands move underwater, as if I were a creature who evolved in this medium. Drifting like a fetus in a womb of laced sunlight, I ponder the startling clarity and whiteness of my hands and feet.

  But I’m beginning to feel this strange, hot sensation high in my stomach, as if a burner has ignited inside me. This cannot be good. Because my brain has lost all sense and thrown me into this predicament, my body is resorting to metabolic triage, my blood abandoning my limbs and rushing to save my vital organs. I climb out and, shivering, lie down on my boulder. Soon the sun’s high heat penetrates me, lifting and nullifying the lake’s deep cold. Enlivened, awakened, I savor all to which I’ve been reborn—the rasping call and obsidian sheen of a raven slicing the depthless blue above me, the tickle of my arm’s sun-bleached hairs as I drag my lips over them, breathing my skin’s smell. The fragrance doesn’t come only from the lake, but from granite, ozone, and pine.

  • • •

  I DID A LOT OF THINGS DURING the six years I lived in the city after my first divorce. The love-hate relationship with my boyfriend lasted for two of them. I took an eclectic smattering of courses—accounting, computing, Spanish, Eastern philosophy. I made new friends, became part owner of a picture-framing business and the volunteer director of a filmmakers’ organization. I grew more confident and ambitious, eventually winning a grant and producing my own film. But nothing I did affected me so powerfully as that first dive into a mountain lake. I couldn’t get enough of the scent of water and wilderness on my skin.

  In November, four months after our trip to the Desolation Wilderness, the smells of wormwood and sage folded themselves into that bouquet. To avoid awkward Thanksgivings with our respective ex-partners and the friends we had in common with them, my boyfriend and I fled south through hundreds of miles of empty grasslands, stopped for a bleak turkey buffet in Bakersfield, then crossed the Sierras by way of Lake Isabella. Winding into Death Valley from the Panamint Mountains, we saw our planet laid breathtakingly bare. The pink gold of sunset gilded the sand dunes, alkali plains, saltwater ponds, and labyrinthine canyons. Although we rolled down the narrow highway as fast as we could in my little Honda, the planet rolled faster. Glancing over our shoulders, we watched helplessly as the Panamints heaved upward, consuming the sun.

  We took the only spot left in the official dunes campground—a bare patch of gravel beside snoring, elephantine RVs. It was a lot colder out than we’d hoped it would be, but it seemed ludicrous to erect a tent there. We threw a few supplies into our day packs, tossed our canteens and sleeping bags over our shoulders, and against park regulations, headed for the objects of our fascination. As we walked, a nearly full harvest moon overtook the eastern Amargosa Range, spilling orange light onto the dunes’ flanks.

  We climbed the nearest dune, plunged down the back side, trudged upward again. All evidence of the day’s tourists gradually disappeared, the snaking ridgelines becoming sharply distinct undulating spines, unmarred by footprints other than the ones we left behind us as the moon’s orange glow faded to white. I had never seen anything more sensuous than the milky-white skin of the earth lapped in moonlight.

  We bedded down in a hollow between dunes, zipping our bags together and pulling the drawstrings so tight all we had to breathe out of was a small hole. Even then, the cold woke us early. We put on every stitch of clothing we’d brought, draped our sleeping bags over our shoulders as shawls, and climbed to the peak of the nearest dune.

  Pink dawn light illuminated the entire valley, a few lustrous clouds floated above us, and as we watched, a sheet of sunlight inched operatically down the face of the Panamint Range toward the valley and us. “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah. Wow,” said my boyfriend. He hadn’t been to the desert before either. I liked discovering it together. For once, he wasn’t the expert.

  When the sunlight reached us, warming the top of my head, then my shoulders and thighs, it felt like an all-encompassing caress.

  If we kept our backs to the distant campground, it was easy to imagine ourselves the only humans on the planet. So we did that, following the ridgelines away from all signs of civilization. By midmorning, the sun was beating down on us. I needed to put some sunscreen on my arms and face and, grateful that I’d brought a pair of shorts, took off my boots and socks, then my jeans. How wonderful to feel the sand on my bare feet, especially during November.

  Mark Twain got it right when he said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Except for my trips home to Kansas and camping trips with my boyfriend that summer, I hadn’t felt truly warm in eight long years. I pulled my shorts on, but couldn’t bring myself to put my feet back into my boots. Instead, I sat down and dragged my toes through the sand, savoring the contrast between the sun’s heat on the surface and the night’s chill beneath it. I made rainbow arcs in the sand, then tried to erase them with my hand. Failing, I lay down.

  How quiet it is, I thought. There was no traffic or other human-generated noises to filter out. I’d always thought of the desert as a wasteland, eerie and alien. I hadn’t been prepared for this softness or the stunning beauty. I felt at home here. I stuffed my jeans into my pack and, carrying my boots, climbed upward again.

  All this climbing took effort, but I was now a complete convert. As on the lakeshore after my cold swim, I felt enlivened, awakened—not just in body but in mind. I wanted to visit every mountain range that surrounded us, to see into each dark, distant crevasse.

  The desert wasn’t alien. We were. The only humans for miles, we’d sprung up clothed, with Gore-Tex day packs, wearing boots and shielded behind polarized sunglasses, as if the light on our own planet was too bright for our eyes, the ground too harsh for our feet. In fact, with crumpled brown mountain ranges as boundaries, the Death Valley dunes seemed as safe and finite as a cradle. Shadows hugged the southern convex sides of the steepest hollows. We wandered—cool to hot, up and over, light to shade.

  With the dune’s curving tan walls as a backdrop and a blue limitless ceiling overhead, every plant we saw might have been a statue in an otherwise empty gallery. Blades of rice grass, swayed easily by the slightest breeze, had traced circles around themselves in the sand.
Wind had exposed the roots of mesquite bushes, making them look convoluted and sinister. We skirted the valleys they grew in but were drawn to the shade of one plump specimen. I got out my knife and opened a can of tuna. Leaning on my elbow to drain the juice, I noticed tiny tracks leading under the bush. I crouched down to investigate and came face-to-face with a lizard. He swallowed, thin white shutters lowering over his eyes.

  • • •

  HAVING SPENT THE NIGHT AND MORNING DRENCHED in transfixing beauty, neither of us could stomach the thought of erecting our tent in the campground, so we gassed up and headed for more remote desert. After leaving Death Valley on a gravel road, we saw no other vehicles for the rest of the day. The only evidence of human habitation was a weathered-gray abandoned cabin perched all by itself on a smooth mountain slope. Intrigued, we hiked up to it and toed through broken glass and chunks of aqua plaster to look out a window onto an infinity of sandy-brown soil, uniformly small and equidistant sagebrush, and blue sky. The window frame had no glass in it, so nothing stood between us and the vibrant desert. Staring at the unlimited space fanned out before me, I felt magnified and ethereal, yet grounded, as if the house were my body and the window my eye sockets.

  I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word—not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.