All these hours alone crisscrossing the desert weren’t spelled out in the grant, but she couldn’t ghost the project, not after all the strings Dr. Songetay had pulled for her. She felt lucky (but still bitter) to have found a project that would support her big idea, which was for the profession to abandon its museums and repositories and leave artifacts where they lay. She was beginning to see how professional life would be an unremitting stream of compromises. She had professional contacts here and Mrs. Gladstone, but most days she spent alone, with one exception.
As Mrs. Gladstone observed, she often tried to coordinate her research agenda to be in an area where she knew Paul Thrift, an NPS ranger, was likely to be on patrol. They first met through emails that arrived after her grant funding had come in. Those emails often began with an apology. He was sorry for the late reply. He was not often in the field station. There was no good internet connection on the monument. Cell service was unreliable. He was always willing to help, but his help always came late.
As fall arrived in Princeton, Paul’s response time quickened. His answers grew longer, and around Thanksgiving, he began asking about her dissertation. They shared books and articles, maps, names of people she might reach out to. He mentioned a man named Bruce Cluff, a self-taught archeologist, who knew more about the ruins on the monument than anyone he knew. Now, she thought about Mrs. Gladstone and this man and the sadness built into human connections.
Paul Thrift had been fascinated to hear that Sophia wanted to measure the degradation of cultural sites managed by the federal government. She thought it was possible that national parks attracted destruction. He wrote in an email that it was the nature of people. Yellowjackets don’t mean to ruin a picnic. They’re just doing their thing. Paul admitted that he was amazed that the Department of the Interior would fund this kind of research, but he said he’d help however he could. Deep in the bleak, snow-drifted days of January, Paul told her he wished someone had started this kind of work a hundred years ago. He told her it was almost too late.
When she had finally arrived in May, she arranged to drive to the field station at the far end of the Dellenbaugh Valley at Paul’s invitation. It took most of the morning to get there. The directions were good, but the road had been washed out and battered in many places, the destruction focused and intense with wide areas of sand gathered in low sections of the road. She’d been warned to keep going when she felt the wheels strain in these traps. Paul told her if you stop, you’re sunk.
Eventually she came into the broad valley filled with blooming orange globe mallow like something from an impressionist painting. The small stone field house was sheltered by the talus apron of a rusty-gray serrated edge of the Kanab Plateau. The rest of the valley stretched off to the west, bisected only by a barren landing strip. The road came in straight, then hooked at a right angle a few hundred feet from the station at a sign that said GREATER DELLENBAUGH METROPOLITAN AREA. Above the house was a water catchment, a solar array, and two frantically spinning turbines. A few miles beyond the station lay a slumbering cinder cone volcano. Beyond that, the eroded blood-orange expanse of the Grand Canyon.
The station was crowded with SUVs, Boy Scouts, and their fathers, who were there for a weekend conservation project. They barely noticed her as she climbed out of the truck and gathered her bearings.
“Hey, you must be Sophia!”
She had turned, looking for a gray-bearded Edward Abbey type, but instead found a grinning bird-faced man with the build of a triathlete. He was tan as a stone, wearing gray shorts, a lightweight green T-shirt, an NPS baseball cap, and wraparound sunglasses dangling from his neck. He extended his hand. “I’m Paul. Great to meet you face-to-face. I hope you didn’t have any trouble on the way in.”
“No, it was uneventful. But gorgeous.”
“Oh, good. Can’t wait to catch up.”
She noticed a thin transparent snakeskin draped over his shoulder like a dishcloth. He saw her eyes dart to it, and he lifted it carefully and draped it gently across her hands. “That’s Daisy—well, actually that’s old Daisy. New Daisy is back under the fridge in the equipment shed. She likes the heat from the compressor, and we don’t seem to have any mouse trouble down there anymore.”
“Must be nice to be able to transform at will,” Sophia remembered saying, and she’d written that line in her journal after she’d returned to her trailer in town.
A jackrabbit appeared in the road, zigzagging in front of her truck as she slammed on the brakes. As the terrified thing bounded off, she gripped the wheel, her heart pounding, the remnants of that day at Dellenbaugh dissipating. Sophia held on to the memory of that snakeskin for another few moments, thinking that it was impossibly thin but utterly complete, plain but unique, a thing that would disintegrate at some point and return itself to the earth. Not gone, but something she couldn’t name.
She returned to the voice of her audiobook, looking around to see that she was down in a draw. She drove to the top of a rise to get her bearings and found she was near House Rock, which was near site EV-111, the first of two stops she needed to make today. She checked the GPS and drove the last few miles before she stopped and grabbed her pack.
She hiked away from the truck, blindly following the GPS arrow into a draw that narrowed into a shrub-filled slot canyon that swallowed her up. She hiked through the labyrinth, noticing how the scrub oak clung to the rock walls. It was an hour before she climbed out, scrambled across the exposed open rock, then dropped down into another box canyon that flared and opened onto a second plain. As she went on, she fell into a meditative state. Back in Princeton, she’d tried classes and phone apps, and she always found her thoughts bouncing around. Here, mindfulness came without intent, which was a help because these sites were all new to her and her work schedule didn’t allow her many opportunities to circle back. She had one chance to take it all in.
She looked at her watch to figure her position: another thirty minutes. The curved layers of sandstone wound past an arroyo, and beyond it was a section of cliff that curved under like something that should collapse but has refused to. She continued down a gentle slope following the cliff, and without warning a delicate stone structure with three dark square windows and a small rectangular doorway appeared. The sight of it raised the hair on her arms.
She unslung her pack and pulled out the paperwork, reread the description to see that it matched. The photocopied black-and-white photograph was identical, taken from almost the same vantage point. She double-checked the GPS unit. The reading also matched. Here she set about her work. She measured plants in the area, checked the soil moisture, took photographs with a digital camera, logged the image numbers on a printed spreadsheet, then sketched the features in the wall that would not show up in the photos. After she gathered the data requested by the NPS archeologist, she zipped up her pack and stood before the dwelling. This site was difficult to get to. She wondered why it was on her list. How could something this remote be at risk?
She put her head through the center window. On the floor, in a shaft of yellow midday light, sat an intact clay vessel, partially buried in the gray sand. It was pear-shaped with a faded zigzagging chain of squares and lines like the markings on a snake. In the dust alongside the vessel were the complete woven remains of a lone sandal.
She pulled a different notebook from her pack and drew more small sketches. They were quick but remarkably fine. As she drew, she noticed small Y-shaped disturbances in the dust. In the far corner of the room was the random stick assemblage of a pack rat nest. She wanted to get closer, and the door would give her access, but she didn’t want to indulge the temptation or explain herself to anyone about how she had damaged the site with a stumble or a wrong step. She would have to record her own impacts.
When she finished drawing, she drank some water and ate a granola bar. She marked the sun’s altitude and checked her watch. There would be just enough time to return to her truck and make the second stop. With the sun flaring behind
her, she backtracked over the sandstone and through the canyons, this time thinking of the site and the quiet majesty of the remnants of these lives.
When she reached the truck, she was hot and out of water. She pulled one of the canned iced teas from the cooler and rubbed it across her neck in a way that would have been embarrassing if somebody else had seen her doing it. She drank half the tea, dropped her pack behind the seat, adjusted the GPS for the next stop, and drove on, sipping the tea until it was gone.
She drove for thirty minutes to the south, the smaller roads joining successively larger, smoother ones as the hills flattened out. The Hurricane Cliffs emerged from the horizon like a fleet of ships. At one of the triangular crossroads, Sophia came upon the turquoise Ford pickup that had cut her off at the grocery store. The wheel wells and rearview mirrors were over-sprayed with orange dirt. The tailgate was down, showing that the workbox in the back was open on both sides, with its tiny diamond plate wings frozen mid-flap.
During her orientation, she’d been told to always check on a stopped vehicle. It was an ounce-of-prevention approach, they said. Sometimes a pound of cure was too little too late. She slowed and saw that nobody was inside, so she parked in front of it and got out. This section of the monument was multiple-use land, so sometimes there were people running cows, buzzing around on four-wheelers, treasure hunting, flying drones, taking pictures. According to Paul, most of the people out here were looking for something they’d found on Instagram. They had no idea just how dangerous it was to be this far from the pavement in a part of the world the invisible tether of cell towers didn’t reach.
The cab of the truck was filled with paper cups and fast food bags. A small plastic skull hung from the rearview mirror. There was a deer rifle on a rack in the back window. She put her hand on the hood. The engine wasn’t ticking. She walked to the back and noticed a large map spread on the tailgate, weighed down on each of its four corners with a stone, a thermos, a boot, and an open can of beer in a foam koozie that said ASU SUN DEVILS.
The map was hand drawn with old, delicately inked contour lines of varying thickness that had been rendered with a nib pen. The landforms had been shaded with hairline hatch marks to give them a sense of solidity and weight. In various areas, there were carefully rendered crimson rectangles filled with dots of the same color. Next to each dot was a small number that corresponded to a legend on the left side, which named some sites on the lists given to her by the archeologist. There were two sets of initials—KT and PT—scattered across the maps, with dates next to them. Some of the dates were quite recent. Quite a few of the sites she did not recognize. The map was exquisite, and she felt a larcenous impulse to run off with it. Maybe she could just snap a picture.
“Hey,” somebody shouted. She looked up past the truck and saw the silhouettes of two men up on the rim of a layer cake bluff a dozen yards from the vehicles. One was tall and thin and off-kilter. The other one looked like a burnt stump.
“You guys need any help?” she called out. “Looked like you might have broken down or something.”
The short one spread his arms to each side and called back, “It’s all good. We’re prepared for self-rescue. How about you?” His voice was coarse and accusatory.
“I work out here, so yeah, I’m ready. I was wondering if you had a permit for—”
“Okay, lady BLM,” the short one interrupted, “if we were broke down, could you call out of here on your radio?”
Sophia didn’t want to tell them that she did not have a radio, but she didn’t want to remain silent either, especially if she could stop them from doing something that couldn’t be fixed. The truck outed her as a Fed, but they didn’t know she had no real authority. She looked back at her truck, then remembered she’d been told to leave the scene if there was trouble.
“It’s so easy to get hurt out here,” the short one shouted.
“Specially when you’re all by yourself,” the tall one finished. “Two’s better than one.”
Sophia stepped back so their truck was between them, offering some cover if the bottom dropped out of this thing. She considered getting out of there right away, but she hesitated, trying to work out a plan to get another look at that map.
After a moment, the short one barked, “She’s nobody. Get her away from the truck.”
The tall one stumbled down one side of the bluff, collapsing the ground under his feet as he went. He dropped, howling, in a cloud of dust, and in the confusion, Sophia ran back to her truck and drove off.
She checked her mirrors every few seconds, thinking maybe she could give these two the slip if she pulled onto a side road, but she decided it was safer to stay out in the open. When the road straightened out, she sped up but backed off when she imagined what getting a flat would do to this situation.
After thirty minutes of empty rearview mirror, she pulled over and wrote everything down, scribbling for nearly a page until she realized she didn’t get the license plate. There was no way she could make her report and get to the rest of sites on her list, which meant she was going to have to come back on her day off. Furious, she opened her cooler and ate while she drove.
Two hours later she walked into the BLM offices, and the only person there was a bored intern, who handed her an incident form.
“Do you get a lot of these reports?” Sophia asked.
“Nope. I mean, I don’t, but they say this kind of thing happens all the time.”
“And nobody reports it?”
The intern shrugged. “That’s how it goes out there. It’s, like, the Wild West, right?”
“Where is everybody, anyway?”
“At meetings in St. George.”
Sophia frowned and filled out the report, transcribing her notes onto the form. When she handed it back, the intern took it and set it on the left side of her desk, then decided it was better to put it in an empty basket on the other side.
Sophia drove back to her trailer and took a shower, but she really wanted a bath. She drank a beer, emailed Paul about her experience, and told him to watch out for a turquoise Ford. Who knew when he would get the message, but she sent it anyway. Her head dropped to the pillow, then she remembered Mrs. Gladstone’s request, so she pulled herself out of bed and slipped her feet into her sandals.
The summer twilight was still luminous as she crossed to the other trailer. Mikros barked and then retreated as she knocked. Mrs. Gladstone was asleep in her chair with her mouth open and her head back. Mikros was now on top of the chair, and she scrambled up to the counter and began eating something out of a green ceramic bowl. Sophia carefully opened the door and crept inside. She found some paper and a pen and wrote:
Mrs. G—I made it back safe and sound. It got a little crazy out there. I’ll tell you about it later. Thanks for the lunch. Tomorrow I go up to Bryce for my big presentation in the lodge. I hope you were able to take care of your friend, and I’m sorry for her loss.
Sophia
She tucked the note under the television remote that sat on the table next to Mrs. Gladstone’s chair. Mikros turned her head from the bowl, lowered it, and growled. Sophia backed her way to the door and let herself out.
Day Three
Fake news : Far from the Madding Crowd : A time of reinvention : Death by PowerPoint
Sheriff Dalton stood outside the HooDoo Diner, staring through the window, shading his eyes with one hand. He carried a copy of the Red Rock Times folded in thirds under his arm. The door opened, a bell jingled, and a heavyset man in denim overalls came out, working a toothpick in his mouth. “Stan’s in his regular spot,” he said, trundling past.
“Am I that obvious, Pete?”
“Pretty much,” he said without stopping.
Dalton yanked open the door and went through.
“It’s a heck of a thing,” the woman behind the register said.
Dalton held up the paper. “I know.”
“I meant Bruce. Didn’t figure him for it,” she said. “They say his wife
found him. Is that true? Because if it is, I don’t know what kind of world we’re living in anymore.”
“Can’t talk about it,” Dalton said.
“It’s okay. I understand. I just wanted to say something.”
“Jenny, I’d speak to it if I could.”
“I know. You’re a good man. Can I get you something?”
“How ’bout a piece of Stan Forsythe?”
Jenny slapped Dalton’s shoulder and pointed to where Stan was sitting.
Forsythe was spread out across the whole table, an iPad on one side, a legal pad on the other, a plate with the remnants of his breakfast in the middle. He was scraping the last of his hash browns through a streak of ketchup. When he saw Dalton, he sat up and said, “Let me explain,” right as Dalton lobbed a copy of the paper into the center of Forsythe’s plate.
“There was still good food on there,” Forsythe said.
Dalton pointed to the headline: ARE THE FEDS BACK FOR YOUR POTS?
Stan looked down with a fork and knife sticking out of his fists.
“That is garbage, Stan,” Dalton said. “Completely false.”
“Garbage and falsehood are not contraries, Sheriff, and besides, a question can’t be true or false. This is meant to provide my readers an opportunity to ask questions and reflect. It’s called critical thinking. Backbone of a free democracy.”
“I’m not here to split hairs.”
Stan lifted the paper from his plate and turned it over, ketchup side up. “Splitting hairs requires a delicacy that is missing from this morning’s repartee.” He folded the paper in half the other way and set it aside, then looked at his plate and decided he was done.
Picnic in the Ruins Page 4