It was strange, and yet entirely appropriate, to spend the Jewish New Year in the desert. I seemed to have a significantly higher tolerance for this climate than Sandy; genetic imprinting, he said. I liked the sensation of baking, drying out, and absorbing the warmth from the earth. Especially after a summer in Alaska, there was nothing like Rosh Hashanah in Moab. Official synagogue worship never appealed to me, but I did feel as if I was the only lonely Jew in Utah.
The trail we took that day was toward Delicate Arch, the cover girl of all arches. From the observation point along the road, she was barely visible, though I held her image in my mind. Slim and curvaceous, she is a graceful athlete, her hands and feet firmly planted, stretching her bellybutton toward the sun. At three miles round trip, the trek was classified as difficult, though at first I could not see why. The dirt path was easy to follow, pounded daily by many feet. Shortly, however, across a small canyon formed by a stream that in other seasons may have had hope of floating something but now was merely a ditch, we saw little antlike things winding their way up the rock face. They were people, and we would be in their steps soon. Sandy forgot his hat and was dripping sweat. His Scottish ancestry was showing. I wore long sleeves against the sun and had my many-pocketed vest loaded with the accoutrements of touristdom: camera, film, tissues, lip balm, and water bottle. I felt serene, though I wished I didn’t pant so much going uphill.
As we climbed the rock face, ordinary trail markers were abandoned. This was no place for signposts: there were no trees to which a ranger might nail a colored tag, and no one painted arrows on the rock. Someone had thought to indicate the way by placing little piles of stones every so often. It reminded me that when I was a child, we would leave stones on the graves of my grandparents. I never understood why. “So the family would know someone paid a call,” my parents said. But we were the only family they had left. I thought it was so that God could see someone still cared, even after the war and Hitler.
We followed the line of sight to the next little pile, climbing steeper, breathing harder. Around a curve the ground to our left fell away. The trail became a ledge. Thankfully it sloped inward, allowing gravity to keep us safely tucked in. We finally reached the apex of the hike. Before us was a huge bowl carved from the rock. As if there had once been an amphitheater in the sky, various stone “seats” seemed comically molded to look like squishy hamburger buns. On the far rim stood the arch, the opening possibly sixty feet high. People braver than we were scrambled across the rim to walk under the curve of the rock. They looked like dancers on Mars, the red planet, to me. The noonday sun backlit their frolicking outlines. We looked toward the east and saw the earth spread out below us; way below, off in the distance, you could imagine the curve of the planet. This was better than going to temple, holier than being in a building. The synagogue was supposed to be the house of God, but surely there was some mistake. If that were true, then what was this? I felt a twinge of sadness at being the only Jew in Utah on New Year’s Day.
Reluctantly, we began our return. We offered encouragement by way of smiling at the upward-bound walkers, who now loped slowly in the midday heat. Again I saw the little piles of rocks and wondered what I should be doing to sanctify this day, but the thought passed. It was good to sit down and drive on.
We picnicked briefly in a pullout by the side of the road and continued through the park. Clumps of gathered vehicles generally announced the best places for views, even before we could see the signage. We stopped several times to stare at the sights. After getting out to photograph yet another arch, we headed back toward the Sue. There was only one other car in the little lot, a rental. Its engine was running, and it was surrounded by four people, two couples it seemed. They were rummaging through the stingy desert earth, apparently looking for a tool with which to wedge open the door or window. It was a case of tourists outside, keys locked inside. Sandy and I went over to see if we could help. They nodded and pointed and yammered about which one was an idiot, who should shut up, and where they would find help in the desert. One fellow had managed to wedge his fingers into the driver’s window, which he held slightly open with his considerable weight. The tips of his fingers were beginning to look like gumdrops from the pressure. Judging by the position of their electric window and door buttons, it seemed clear they needed some kind of long rod with which to reach in and stab something open. But the desert isn’t a place where you can find fireplace pokers or ski poles lying around. Aha! It occurred to me we had a long aluminum rod with which we opened our awning. I ran to get it. Jamming it inside the window that the fellow was holding down—now with a bunched-up hankie to keep his fingers somewhat protected—I tried to “feel” my way toward the buttons.
“You see,” said one of the wives, “the women always have practical ideas!”
Bad time to rub it in, I thought. The other guy dashed to the opposite window and began shouting directions to me.
“Over,” he groaned.
“More under,” he grunted.
“This way!” he demanded.
Two things became clear: (1) English was not his native language, and (2) if this was ever going to work, Sandy—calm, handy, and English-speaking—had to step in and direct me instead of this quasi-hysterical guy. He went around to the passenger door and faced me through the car windows. We focused on each other as if I were the player, he was my coach, and the game depended on this play.
Hunched forward, both hands on both knees, Sandy began. “Straight down. To the left. Your right. Down a little. Press.”
Click, the door unlocked. Lots of smiles and thank-yous. One guy, now free to be casual and comedic, jokingly asked for our address, in case it happened again. As we walked back to the Sue, I called over my shoulder to him, “Where are you from?”
“Israel.”
Not the only Jew in Utah after all, I thought, and decided to give him two of my six or so Hebrew words.
“L’Shana Tovah,” I said, wishing him happy New Year.
Shocked, he looked at me and then said something to his crowd and pointed to his head, as if he suddenly had an explanation for why I’d been able to figure out a way to help them.
“Sechel,” I said, pointing at my head and using up another precious word, this one meaning common sense.
“Mazel,” he volleyed back, and smiled. “Luck. Ours for having met you.”
They left, and we climbed into the Sue. I felt a strange connection to this place, those people, and the day. We were all lucky on a day like this. I thought it must be a good omen.
Gathering Marbles
We were still drifting through the possibilities of our dreams when we took a trip down the Colorado. Floating in the calm stream at this time of year was easy compared with fording the raging torrent it was in the spring or crossing the ocean it once had been. Red cliffs hovered above us, many dripping with black desert varnish. We relished the soothing day as an interlude between the emotional rigors of the past week and the sea of change ahead of us.
We spent a day in Canyonlands. Conveniently located just across the road from Arches, it presents a completely different terrain. Instead of leaving heaving shapes carved in space, this territory has deeply etched recesses. Where Arches takes your eyes skyward, Canyonlands takes them down. In Arches the smooth slickrock makes a damp impression. In Canyonlands layer after layer of eroding sandstone made me thirsty. Gouged deeply into the rocks below is the almost comically green Green River. This was surely the home of a devil we didn’t know. Nothing looked familiar, everything looked foreign. We spent the evening watching the sunset at Dead Horse Point, where we had a 360-degree view of the world. I had never seen the sun go down in the west and the darkness rise on the mountains to the east before. I felt like the center point of the seesaw in the solar system. We slept late the next day, exhausted by all our new discoveries.
* * *
Our unfettered days were waning. We had several dates to keep over the upcoming weeks. Our first stop would
be in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, to visit Marianne and Timm. Marianne, and her brother Patrick Jr., were among the first people I remember on the planet. Our mothers met over strollers, and the couples became fast friends. Both women died young, but the men remained friends. Patrick and I were born a few days apart and spent many happy days tossing sand at each other in the playground. When Big Pat’s work took them to Washington, D.C., we still spent holidays together. Usually we met midway along the Jersey shore, either in Atlantic City, then a crumbling resort town, or Wildwood, a quiet undiscovered beach area. Marianne, two and a half years younger than we were and a baby in our eyes, usually tagged along wherever Patrick and I went, even horseback riding on the beach. She still tries to make us feel guilty about the time we indifferently abandoned her under a pier, sobbing on a pony that refused to budge. We still laugh about the time we went on an Easter egg hunt and Patrick slipped on a wet rock, going into the creek in his Sunday best. And we remember each other’s mothers. Since few people in my life now remember my mother, that connection seems even more important. Pat Sr. died a year ago and now there’s just my dad. Though we hadn’t lived in the same city for forty years, somehow we were friends.
* * *
Once upon a time it was easy to have and to be friends. You all lived in the same area, attended the same church or synagogue, and sometimes were even slightly related. (In some places I hear this got a bit out of hand, and over time people looked more and more alike and had fewer and fewer brains. But that’s another story.)
Sandy and I are lucky. We have many good friends, some, like Marianne and Patrick, dating back to tiniest childhood. While we were on the road, physically removed from friends, in a funny way we became closer. Our e-mail correspondence was voluminous, particularly the responses to Sandy’s (depending-on-the-electronic-gods) weekly journal transmissions. We loved getting mail. Visiting with family and friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in a while, had been on the agenda for this trip from the outset. Friends have always been terribly important to us. The prospect of moving to a new place and leaving them behind terrified me. Yet we had managed to maintain long-distance friendships with all these people we were now visiting. Perhaps it could be done. Then again, whispered the devil I didn’t know, maybe not. What if people in other places were truly different, or thought I was? I didn’t need to have the grade-school feeling of wanting to belong all over again. Once was more than enough, thank you. Is there life without friendships? I wondered.
As we traveled and spoke to people about their lives, from Alaska to Washington State, Montana, Colorado, Tennessee, and back toward home, an underlying motif of sadness drifted up through the conversations when we asked if they had many friends in their community. There were, of course, a few yesses, but the negative answer always drew my attention. Some shrugged off this lack, saying they preferred to spend time with their spouses and children. The absence of friends was clearly something I’d worried about, and hearing it reflected back at me as a reality made me uncomfortable and anxious to define, in my mind, the reasons for it, in order to be able to avoid it. Having friends was important. Having friends with whom one built a community was important. I wasn’t looking for a commune or utopia. I was the last person anyone would even consider a “joiner.” I just wanted to know there was a community I could be part of. If I wanted to. At my discretion. My choice. What a brat.
There seems to be this constant tug-of-war in the American nature and in me. Build a community. Be an individual. In New Hampshire the license plates read “Live free or die.” An interesting though perhaps exaggerated generalization about the nature of individualism and how it relates to community. In the West, once known for its lawlessness, people still pride themselves on having their own space and being rulers of their own destiny. “Don’t tread on me” still has real meaning and is given due respect. We came upon an example of how poorly Westerners take to being trod upon several years ago in Montana. We were late for a plane, and I desperately needed a bathroom. Sandy was driving a bit fast. A state trooper pulled us over, sidled up to the driver’s side, and informed us we’d been doing twenty miles an hour over the limit, 75 in a 55 zone. Having no time to argue, we said, “Uh-huh,” or something equally brilliant, hoping to just hurry up the torture. I crossed my legs tighter. Sandy showed him his license, the ticket was written up. At this point the trooper leaned down and said, “Do you think you have five dollars on you today?” I almost wet my pants. Was he asking for a loan? A bribe? Lunch money? Or was that the cost of the ticket? Five dollars? No points? For twenty over? “Sure,” we said in unison in another fit of eloquence. We paid up and were history. It was later explained to us that when the federal government passed the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit law, the state of Montana had never had a speed limit of any kind before. The theory was that the state wasn’t about to monitor your every move. Montanans liked it that way. They weren’t happy to be told by the feds what to do. So, in fact, they did very little about the speed limit other than to offer a “courtesy ticket” to speeders. That way they still got their highway money from the feds, but they didn’t really get in anyone’s face about how fast to drive on a road where you rarely saw another human. Pretty sensible, it seemed to me. Montana has since gone back to having no speed limit. Being unfettered by the feds is one facet of the “everyone for himself,” “good fences make good neighbors” kind of attitude. Being an individual was fine by me, but I couldn’t picture that the welcome wagon concept ever made it west of the Mississippi. I could be wrong, but that’s how it felt. You could thrive, you could rot. It would be all the same to the guy on the next butte.
The men and women we spoke to reflected this attitude in their different ways when I asked them about friends. A fellow in Seattle, who had returned there after many years in the East, said he put his energies into work, and contrary to how it had been in New York, his work relationships didn’t extend for him beyond that. A couple in their late forties, Dakotans by birth, who had raised three chilldren in one Montana city, were eagerly looking forward to moving to another town several hours away. They didn’t give me any sense that they thought they’d be losing much. One woman, very outgoing by nature, had moved to Colorado three years earlier, when her husband’s job had relocated him. They’d made no close friends in that time. A woman in a small town, whose husband had lived there before their marriage, said she felt she’d made acquaintances in the five years she’d lived there, but she felt no real closeness to anyone. That scared me. Where would we ever belong? Another item to add to the growing list of requirements: a place to belong.
* * *
We arrived in Glenwood Springs before our hosts got home from work. We let ourselves in with the key they had left for us. Sandy made a dive for the phone outlet to pick up e-mail, and I headed for the washer and dryer. Even though we’d never been there, we felt at ease. That’s how it is when you visit friends, I thought. Marianne and Timm had a beautiful home facing a red mountain covered in fir trees. It was wonderful to visit with them, meet some of their friends, and play stick catch with their dogs, black and brown Labs, Jessica and Keillor, who had perfected the hilarious art of joint fetch-and-retrieve. Together we toured the extravagant town of Aspen, looked at an old family album, soaked in the Glenwood hot springs (twice), and made a series of memorable meals. It would not have been fun with strangers. There are certain rules that dissolve when you are with friends.
We crossed the state of Colorado in the north, hoping to spend some time in Rocky Mountain National Park. As we drove, cold weather caught up with us again, and snow turned the landscape from full color to black and white. It was the first of October. At 11,000 feet the weather turned raw. We decided to head south.
Just before Denver the high mesa and mountains we’d been on gave way to a huge expanse. We were looking down on the geological beginnings of the plains and the Mile High City. We stopped in to see Jody, a friend I’d worked with in New York. Originally from the
Midwest, she’d moved to Denver because of her husband’s work. The last time I saw her she had been very pregnant. This time we met the adorable Peter, their ten-month-old son. Dad was off on a business trip. The four of us caught up over supper. We talked a lot about relocating, both the challenges and the up side. Jody had made an impressive start developing her own literary agency. Friendships, she said, were slower in forming when you worked out of your home. An interesting point to remember. It was a sweet visit, but short. Needing to get some miles behind us, we headed off into the night.
* * *
On the interstate we listened to a little CB jive. I remained convinced it was always the same two guys, piped in for my amusement. I could catch only every fourth or fifth word Nasal Nose and Marble Mouth said, but hey, they never said much anyway. Their conversations, such as they were, always seemed to involve headlights of one sort or another. As we cruised along in the darkness, I was glad we had seen our friends. Though we liked Glenwood, it hadn’t sung to us. Denver’s suburbs were like most others. No closer to knowing where we might land, but a bit wiser perhaps about what we were looking for, I fantasized about finding the right place and then tipping the earth just so, in order to have our friends roll in, like marbles.
Ruin Junkies
We drove a backward “S” through Colorado, trying to reach all the places we’d heard of, falling in love with the one we hadn’t, Mesa Verde. Unfortunately we couldn’t move there, as the last residents had left more than six hundred years ago, but I’m sure we would have found friends among them. It was a magical, mystical place. An ideal place to spend the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. The way I’ve always understood it, eight days after the Jewish New Year, we’re supposed to atone for our sins of the previous year and pray to be written into the Book of Life for the upcoming year. It is a day for fasting. As a child, when my mother was too sick and my father refused to participate, I would spend the day with cousins in their synagogue, located one flight above a men’s clothing store. Theirs was a much more Orthodox shul than what I was used to. The congregation, segregated by sex, was largely immigrant and elderly. The services were somber. Old men rocked back and forth as they stood, draped in ancient prayer shawls, chanting in a language I could not understand. Heat rose from the street and the closely packed bodies. Stomachs grumbled, and breath was sour. Not even water was allowed. There were always fainters. A few strong young men seemed to be in charge of reviving procedures. I was supposed to concentrate on my sins, prepare to cast them off into the river, and pray to be written into the Book of Life. Instead I prayed that I could go home soon. I saw nothing religious in this torture, felt nothing spiritual in the air. I smelled sweat, bad breath, and my own impatience. When my mother died, my dad and I started a new tradition: Every year we had lunch together, just the two of us. This year I would miss that. Instead Sandy and I visited the Anasazi cliff dwellings.
First We Quit Our Jobs Page 16