Bird, Rattlesnake, and Rain

I miss the shortgrass prairie. I miss the landscape falling apart into broken red rocks, in a blaze in early September. I miss the scorching sunlight, gusts of wind and low-flying hawks, and chirps from prairie dog towns. I miss abrupt, stony cascades, where no water ever does cascade, except in flash floods.

It’s Stockholm Syndrome. But I miss them.

I was a lot younger when I would go ranging there. I don’t mean the last, last time. I try not to think about the very last time. But when I was running around, unattended, exploring, making trouble, I was just a kid. I mean, I was only sixteen, the very last time. I used to find old pieces of barbed wire and follow them to see where the edges of the cattle pastures used to be. Or I would find other pieces of old metal, cans or pieces of farm tools, with a thin dry layer of rust across every face. I would dig these up out of the ground, using my bare hands, and they would leave an empty hole in the broken earth. Out there, all sorts of things could live in a hole in the dirt like that. Sometimes I used to dig open the holes to see what kinds of animals would come out. Sometimes tiny bees, sometimes tarantulas. Or scorpions. There were bigger tunnels, too, from prairie dogs, which would get chuckwallas or tortoises in them. What I dreaded, though, was finding snakes. When I was very little I would put sticks in the holes, hoping a gopher snake would come out, but that was before I knew what rattlesnakes were. I never put sticks down strange burrows again after I learned about rattlesnakes. That’s no way to die.

Snakes scared me the most, unless you count my uncle’s owl. It wasn’t really his, exactly, it just moved into his barn, uninvited. The barn itself was more of a lean-to, facing west with one whole wall open to the sunset, and a few parts of old rafters. It had been a long time since it had been a real barn. Nothing out there was working anymore, not the old barns, or the fences, or even my uncle.

I remember it was almost sunset, and I came around the corner of that barn and my foot made something crunch on the ground. I looked down and saw a tiny skull, probably a rabbit. I was always excited about finding bones, and I crouched to look for the rest of the skeleton. I saw a piece of spine, but when I got closer, it wasn’t a rabbit’s spine. It was some other tiny animal. So then I was looking for two skeletons, but the more I searched, the more I found, one bone after another. As I crept into the barn, there were still more bones, heaped on top of one another. There were tufts of fur, too, but no flesh, the bones were all impossibly, supernaturally clean. There were more and more, piled up into the back of the barn. It was an enormous, impossible ossuary of tiny creatures. I shivered, unable to explain what I had found, needing to flee but still stuck in place.

I didn’t hear it arrive–you can’t ever hear them–I just sensed something. I looked up to the rafters above me. Staring back were two dark eyes in a round, human mask. Surrounded by wings, and looking at me, was unmistakably the reflection of my own skull.

I ran as fast as I could back to where the grown ups were. I had to be pretty little back then–actually, I was eight years old, I know exactly. I had to have been eight because that was the same year my uncle died, the uncle who had the barn. He died in a freak accident, he was caught in a storm, he was still pretty young I think. I actually blamed the owl for a little while. I know better now, though, that that doesn’t really make sense. Even so, I still think it’s bad luck to see barn owls. I think they’re a death omen.

You ask me a hard question. I can’t give you a simple answer.

I guess–well, to answer you, I have to tell you about the last time I was there. It’s ok, I can, but, you might have to be patient. I have to sort of talk to it, I try not to remember it very much.

I was–well, there’s not a good reason for what I did. I was angry, yeah, but I was also stupid, and young. And I was so arrogant. I had lived out there a really long time, and I’d done a lot of things. I’d pulled cholla spines out of my own feet, with pliers or just my fingers. I’d been out when the temperature was a hundred and twenty degrees, it was awful but I’d done it and I’d come home fine. I’d run at wild coyotes. Coyotes don’t come around people much anyway, so when one is near a human, it’s already nervous, and when you run at it–it runs away. That’s the kind of things I’d done. I thought I was invincible, I guess.

And I’d seen stuff, like dead deer in gullies that got hit by floods. I’d seen javelina skeletons. But to me, skeletons were just parts of animals. Cactus has a skeleton, too. I didn’t think about death when I saw them, I didn’t think about me dying. I thought I was smarter than a javelina, somehow. Like it couldn’t happen to me.

So I guess–yeah, that’s why I ran away. Home was bad. I had some idea that if I got to the train tracks, I could hop on a freight train and end up, I don’t know. Somewhere better, anyway. Somewhere far away. That was all that mattered to me, then.

I was on foot, but I brought water. I was stupid, not crazy.

It was September. I would never have tried something like that in August. I know that even the tortoises are hidden underground in August, and the birds have flown away to better weather, no living animal stays in direct August sun. Even the plants fall dormant, and try not to be alive for a while. But September can be ok. Sometimes it’s one hundred and five degrees, in the shade, in September, but the day I ran off wasn’t like that. It was overcast, the whole sky gray, but bright. The wind was cool, for once, and felt good on your skin. I didn’t think about it, but if I had thought about it, I would have thought that I was going to be ok. I wasn’t ok.

The first day started with me being stubborn, and it ended with me being lost. There was no particular moment when it changed from one to the other. I started out just walking–I know I can go upwards of fifteen miles a day without really trying, and I was sixteen, and I was trying. So I knew I could put some distance between me and everything. I just really wanted to be away from people. So I went off in the direction I felt had the fewest people, and I just kept going. And once in a while I would think which mountains I was seeing, far away, or what direction the wind was blowing, and I could sort of recognize these boulders, this ravine, I had been here before. And more and more as the day went on, I was wrong. I didn’t know the rocks, I didn’t know the ridges, I was in unfamiliar land. The mountains I’d thought I recognized were farther, and larger, than they should be. I wasn’t where I’d thought and I didn’t know where I was. And by the end of the day, I was lost.

I should probably have turned around, and retraced own steps. I actually–I had forgotten this–I did do that, at least twice, maybe more than that. Every time I tried turning back, I couldn’t find my own trail, and got so frustrated with the worthless effort, I couldn’t force myself to stick with it. I was wasting steps by trying to return, I felt I had to go on forward instead. And every time I reversed, I probably lost my direction a little bit more, got a little more turned around, a little more hopelessly lost.

So I was still out there when the sun started to go down. I remember that first night vividly. I was desperately hungry, I’d been going entirely on an empty stomach. I had rationed my water all day, but even so, I was out. I wasn’t carrying more than a day’s water supply. I tried to find a spot where it would be safe to sleep, worrying about the wild animals. Nothing would mess with me except maybe a mountain lion, and they were pretty rare. I wasn’t worried about mountain lions; I was scared of snakes.

I slept on some big rocks, to get above the ground. It was the type of spot a lizard might like early in the morning, but it was empty when I laid down on it. It was not level, or comfortable. I remember I kept ending up with my head a little lower than my collarbones, regardless of which side I flipped to. I was so hungry I was ready to start roasting cactus pads, and I didn’t know if the good weather would hold for another day.

But the most important thing was to get up high, so I could scan the horizon for human lights, like a house or a highway. Out there, you can really see forever. I was scared, because I’d always been able to see some kind of structure, and if I couldn’t, that would mean I was more lost than I’d ever been. But, scanning from my rock, I could find the distant crawl of tiny stars in a line through the landscape. It was the interstate, for sure. I studied the direction to get to it, carefully, like my life depended on it, which it did. I tried to guess how far off the cars were. I guessed I could go another ten miles without needing help. The cars could have been ten miles off, or forty. It was impossible to say. If I had been smart, I should have kept walking, right through the night, when at least I’d have known it was cool. But, I wasn’t smart, and like I said, I was really afraid of snakes.

I did sleep. Not a lot, and I was so sore when I woke up. I was strong back then, but I was still starting to get dehydrated, and anyway, I’d slept on a rock. When I got to my feet, I could see that my hands were trembling. I decided to just walk, and try not to think about it. I was very careful to go the right direction.

I was so scared that I would have gone home if I could. I had never been lost before. I wanted to give up, several times. I caught myself gasping, or hyperventilating. I remember sitting down and just staring at the little gravelly rocks in the dirt below me. But I realized there was no way to give up, there was no option to get out. I just had to keep going, as long as I could. So every time, I calmed my breathing, and I stood up again. I didn’t really have any hope, I was just going on. I don’t remember, really, but standing up must have been really hard for me to do.

I don’t remember a lot of that day, honestly.

I remember thinking it was good that the sun wasn’t out. Two overcast days in a row was crazy. The one piece of luck I’d had, I thought.

And I remember wondering if anyone was looking for me. There was nobody around, no roads, nothing at all in all directions. Just wind and creosote and exposed rock. I didn’t know how anyone could look for me, and not end up in exactly the situation I’d put myself in. So I decided no one was.

A few times in my life, before that, I had been severely exhausted and dehydrated. From those times, I remember things like my vision going to grayscale, and everything I saw appearing at the end of a dark tunnel. I had experienced my head becoming very light, my body not feeling attached to myself. I had passed out and come back from heat exhaustion before. I imagine all that was going on, too. But I don’t remember.

I remember when I realized I didn’t know where the road was, anymore. I had been running on empty for so long at that point, like some broken kind of adrenaline that kept me marathoning for hour after hour, and when I saw that I was lost, again, something just failed inside me. I had been using my fear to fuel myself, but I was just out of fear at that point. I started to cry, but I didn’t have any tears. I was just choking and gasping. Even then, I kept my mouth closed. Somehow I knew I would lose water evaporating from the inside of my open mouth. And I didn’t stop walking when I cried. I wasn’t controlling my own body anymore, as far as I could tell, but my body had been walking and so it kept on walking.

I stopped at the edge of an arroyo. It was really deep, and sheer. I couldn’t just step down into it. I had to think, to negotiate a path, and when my mind came back to me it thought, I could follow this. I could keep going where the water carved the arroyo, and eventually come to a river corridor, eventually maybe even get to a creek, somewhere the water was actually flowing. I could drink, and fill my empty bottle. Maybe there would be people around the water. Maybe something I could eat. But that didn’t matter, what mattered most was finding water. Without water, soon, I would die.

So I climbed down into the arroyo and started following it. It was dry and sandy at the bottom, but eventually it got soft. I walked, and walked, and after a while my feet pressed into the sand to the tops of my shoes. I thought that was probably a good sign, it meant there was water flowing under the surface, probably. I got down and scratched into the sand, but there was only more sand, I couldn’t get to water, so I kept going. The ground kept getting softer, but not enough, and there wasn’t water. The dirt didn’t smell wet. If there was water, I could have smelled it.

But I was on the right track. There were twisted trees on either side now, palo verde and mesquite, and I knew their roots must have reached down to water somewhere, sometime. Water had come this way, or it would. I had a little bit of hope, and it gave me energy. The day was dragging on. There were shadows growing.

And I remember the moment my foot fell through. It happened so fast, and then I was just looking at my own leg, up to the thigh in the soft soil. I was in sand that hadn’t compacted, it had been pushed up by moving water, but when I stepped onto it, it collapsed all around me. The dry bed had a sinkhole. There was a minute, probably, when I could have saved it, hoisted myself up with my foot that was still on the solid part, maybe, or pulled myself out, I don’t know. But I was exhausted, and my brain was loopy, and what I did instead was try to step forward, out of the unseen pit I had stepped into. I didn’t know how big the hole was, I just assumed, and so when I tried to step over, I didn’t, I just stepped all the way into it.

I was calm for a little while, trying to get up. When I started to realize I was stuck, I panicked. I thrashed, and beat at the ground I could reach and tried to claw my way out, everything you aren’t supposed to do. I was getting myself more stuck, more trapped. I wasn’t sinking, but I wasn’t going anywhere, either. I thought, I am going to die here.

I don’t know how long I was stuck in that sand. But I remember the sky starting to get dark, and I could see the clouds. I was there long enough that I could watch the clouds move. I saw, distantly, when they started to hit the mountains, and they formed fine gray streaks going down to the ground. I was watching them start to rain.

Even after all that had happened that day, seeing that rain was a fresh terror. Because anyone in the desert, even the javelina, even the deer, knows to stay out of arroyos when there’s rain on the mountains. In a monsoon rain, it’s a matter of time, maybe minutes, or maybe hours, before the arroyos fill. Flash flood.

I wasn’t graceful. I struggled, and fell still, and struggled again, over and over and over. I’m sure I screamed. I probably cried. There’s a lot of it I don’t remember. Of all the parts of it, that’s somehow the part I don’t remember most. The sun was starting to go down, and I thought if a flood comes, it will be dark, I won’t even see it. But you can hear them. I had heard flash floods before. They roar.

In the early twilight darkness, there was a strange clacking sound. I knew it but couldn’t place it. My mind went instantly to my deepest fear. It must be a rattle. It had to be a snake.

I cast around myself, and because I was looking for a long, dark body on the ground, it took me a very long time to find the source of the noise. It wasn’t slithering, sliding along the ground toward me, it wasn’t in the dirt at all. It was in one of the trees above. And it wasn’t a rattle, it was a different warning call, alien, unnatural, animal but strangely mechanical. It wasn’t coming from the thing’s tail, it was coming from its throat.

I hadn’t heard it arrive. But, you never do. You asked me, before, if I ever saw it again, after my uncle died? I did see it. It was there. The death-portent bird.

Don’t ask me to remember any more.