The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  * * *

  —

  In the morning when I wake, the world is empty. It has evaporated and left me with its house, and three dogs. A small terrier and two springer spaniels. A big house, with big, empty rooms. Antique couches, sad lamps. Still walls. Little light. There is a wraparound deck with wooden chairs. I sit on the deck after work and watch the light move across the grass. In the kitchen, I open all the cupboards and rifle through the snacks. Fat-free potato chips, boxes of Jell-O. Fat-free mayonnaise. There are lots of prescription medications. I take them out and line them up on the counter, one by one. For the heart, for the blood pressure, for the joints, for things I do not know and cannot imagine. I open the fridge and eat slices of fat-free American cheese.

  On the deck I read a book. The book cannot hold me. The potted flowers need watering. There is a wilting sun and a bucket of Miracle-Gro. The afternoon is silent. The terrier is on a long tie-out and he bites at the grass where I peed next to the steps; he bites and tears and rips at it, swallowing the grass.

  I unleash the dogs and herd them into the woods. We go running down the leafy path, sticks and plants swiping at our ankles. The sun comes through in bars and patches, the air rushes past us. The little terrier carries a stick larger than his own body, joyously, like an ant. The springer spaniels bound stupidly, afraid of nothing. We run down a hill, through the woods. I trip and stumble over fallen logs. The mud of decomposition smears my calves. We run fast to keep ahead of the mosquitoes, which hide on the backsides of leaves, in pockets of shade. We have to run fast to escape the coming evening.

  At the bottom of the hill is a meadow. A mud path, a clutter of raspberry canes. The ground is sponge and blueberry bushes. Moose tracks are everywhere. We keep running, through the meadow, through the grass, into the woods again. I cannot see it, but below us is the valley. There is the river, the horizon to infinity, the silence of the huge blue sky. I urge the dogs on. The sun or rain falls down on us. It doesn’t matter.

  2019

  At six a.m. I wake in darkness. For a moment I can’t remember where I am, and then it comes back to me—I’m in my van, in the desert west of Phoenix, Arizona. I parked here last night under the nearly full moon. In a few days I’ll reach Death Valley, where I’ll hike 135 miles from Badwater Basin, the hottest place on earth, to the summit of Tumanguya, aka Mount Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48.

  I pull the magnetic covers from the windows of my van, letting in the predawn light, and rub the sleep from my face. The morning smells of creosote and warm earth. I light my camp stove, heat water for instant coffee. Sleep eluded me last night. I long to go somewhere cold, where I can burrow into the bed in my van and just sleep and sleep. Maybe Lone Pine, today’s destination, will be that place. Six years ago I discovered long-distance hiking, wherein one walks great distances with only what can fit in a backpack, and I’ve hiked ten thousand miles since, including from Mexico to Canada three times. Walking through nature until I become rangy, wild, and interwoven with the very fabric of the mountains is now one of my favorite things in the world.

  A week ago my grandmother passed away in Colorado. I visited just a few times after moving out at age seventeen, and those visits were awkward and strange. My blood family exists for me mostly as snapshots. Memories that live forever in the past tense. But two weeks ago an aunt I rarely hear from texted me—Grandma was dying, she said, and I should try to call her.

  I’ve longed for my grandmother’s love since I was a teenager, although I don’t like to admit it to myself. My grandmother wasn’t capable of giving love, though. She had a cold heart. It was what allowed her to survive her life.

  My grandfather answered when I dialed their number, his voice gruff. Grandma was no longer speaking, he told me. She had a few days left at most. No, I couldn’t try to talk to her.

  “Are those dogs barking?” asked my grandpa.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have two dogs.” Grandpa was silent on the line. He didn’t ask me where I was living, or what my life was like. The gulf between us was so large it had become a sea, and it was hard to remember that this water had ever been narrow enough to leap across.

  They had been married for more than sixty years. All that time my grandma had cooked his meals for him, laundered his Wranglers and his plaid shirts that had gone thin and soft with age, hung them on the line with wooden clothespins to dry in the sun. She had scrubbed their house until it shone, slept next to him in their bed, woken in the night to his snoring. She’d tended watermelons and tomatoes in their garden, sliced homegrown cucumbers into bowls of vinegar to eat with their sandwiches, bought packs of new tube socks for him when his boots wore holes in the old ones. How many packages of tube socks marked the passage of that much time?

  “Take care of yourself, Jenni,” said Grandpa on the phone.

  “My name is Carrot,” I said. “My name has been Carrot for eighteen years.”

  “What kind of a name is that?” he snorted.

  As I drive across the desert, I press my hand to my chest, searching for my feelings about my grandmother passing. They’re deep under the bones of my rib cage, in a spot I can’t quite reach. I have always wanted to know my grandmother’s inner world. To understand her. And now she’s dead, and I never will. I wish my grandmother loved me, but I can’t be sure that she did. And now she’s gone.

  Last summer I began to try to find my mother. I hadn’t seen her since I left Alaska as a teenager. I wasn’t totally sure she was still alive, but if she was, she’d be sixty-two years old, having somehow survived twenty-one winters homeless in Anchorage. The fact of her age was what pushed me to finally begin my search—I imagined she was okay in the summertime, in the warm dappled forests, but the winters were likely growing more difficult to endure. When it came to my mother, my heart was a bruised plum, but I didn’t want her to die alone in a snowbank, so I gritted my teeth and bought a plane ticket to Anchorage in August. I would look for her for a single week, I told myself. If she could endure winters as a homeless person, then I could endure seven days grappling with the reality of her existence.

  On my first day in Anchorage, I found a man who knew her. I was at a drop-in center for homeless folks that was three blocks from the apartment where I was staying, in the spare bedroom of a stranger I’d met online. At the drop-in center I sat in a torn vinyl chair in front of a chipped desk, behind which sat a large man, the director of the center.

  “I know Barbara,” he said. “I used to see her often. Tiny, frail lady, always had her little suitcase with her. A bit of a loner.” He smiled, as though at a fond memory. “I haven’t seen her in, oh…five years.”

  That was the final dead end of all my leads for the day. I’d followed various ribbons as they unfurled until this bonanza, a man who knew her—and he hadn’t seen her in a very long time.

  “Try to get support while you’re doing this,” he said, his eyes kind. “Talk to someone who knows about grief. Don’t white-knuckle your way through this.” I started crying, and he handed me a box of tissues. I felt like he could see right through me.

  * * *

  —

  The desert, warm and open, passes by outside the bug-splattered windshield of my van. In the evening I reach San Bernardino and pick up Laurie and Plants, two other long-distance hikers, who are joining me on this hike. We’re meeting another hiker, Pilar, in Lone Pine tomorrow. I am looking forward to being around people in the wilderness, even people I’ve only just met. Sharing the rushing quiet of nature with a handful of other human beings is the purest form of companionship I have found.

  The highway to Lone Pine is dark and lonely, and it’s hard to stay awake. At last Plants, Laurie, and I reach the Alabama Hills, those piles of smooth, sand-colored boulders at the base of the Sierras, where there is camping. The road here is sandy and the huge rocks are pale in the moonlight. Rising in the west are the mountai
ns of the High Sierra, the peaks jagged and aglow. There’s Tumanguya, where we’ll finish our hike.

  There are RVs parked in seemingly every dark pullout in the Alabama Hills, and we drive farther and farther into the rocks. Then we dip down into a wash and my van can’t get up the other side. The sand is too deep! We roll back and forth, wheels spinning.

  “Maybe we should try turning around?” says Plants. This is tricky, because it means leaving the road for the even deeper sand of the wash. Maybe we can do it?

  We can’t. The back tires of my van are wedged deeply in the sand. It’s a nice, level spot, though. I guess we’re camping here.

  Laurie and I fit on the bed and Plants curls into a fetal position on the small square of floor.

  “I’m the husky,” he says. Plants has the driest sense of humor of anyone I’ve ever met in my life. It’s nine-thirty p.m., hiker midnight, and we’re all exhausted. I turn off the lights and the night comes in, cold and vast. I pull the sleeping bag over my head and I’m gone.

  * * *

  —

  My second day in Anchorage, I parked at Loussac Library, the big library where, as a kid, I would hide from the cold or, alternately, from my home life, which was messier and scarier than the weather. In the library, as a kid, I sat in antique leather chairs under walls of beautiful old books, reading magazines by the light of a stained-glass lamp. The air was quiet. Predictable. Sometimes my mother was there with me, muttering to herself in a chair in the corner. Sometimes she was hiding too.

  Anchorage is full of forests, undeveloped chunks of land tucked between wide, car-choked boulevards, and these forests, besides having grizzly bears, wolves, and streams that run with salmon, also hold many homeless camps. These forests are wild, they harken to another time; they exist outside of society. And if you come here to hide, you can exist outside of society too. Was my mother in one of these camps? I wasn’t sure.

  “Barbara, yeah,” said a woman in the homeless camp in the woods behind Loussac. We were standing among the birch trees. The air was warm, and I could feel the loamy ground beneath my feet. It’s nice here, I thought. I imagined my mother in this forest, in her tent—did she own a tent? If not, how did she stay dry in the rain? What did she do in winter?

  “She used to come into McDonald’s when I worked there,” the woman was saying. “I would give her free food. Talks to herself a lot. I last saw her two days ago, in Walmart. She goes in there to wash up, I think.”

  The woman’s pit bull whined inside his wire kennel. The light dissolved in the boughs of the trees and then re-formed, pooling on the mossy ground. Here was someone who’d seen my mother recently, which meant that she was definitely still alive. That sudden truth was like this forest light: gentle, golden, all around me. Nearby was a folding table with blue jugs of water. Boxes of food and piles of blankets were stacked next to it. An older white man and an Inupiat elder sat in folding chairs at the entrance of the camp, where the mowed park ended and the path into the forest began.

  “We do security here,” said the white man. “We take shifts.”

  It’s nice here, I thought again.

  I stopped by the apartment complex where we had lived for four years, the longest we’d spent in any single spot. It was unchanged—packs of loose children, circling on bikes like feral dogs. Peeling paint, broken window blinds. The air smelled of baby formula and Top Ramen. Here was the ground-floor window my brother would climb out of when he ran away. Here was the hole in the fence through which we’d sneak over to the mall and pull broken electronics and expired candy bars from their dumpster. Everything seemed smaller now, almost depressingly so. Was this really the hill we sledded down? Where I collected dandelions in the summertime? Were these the trees I loved? I walked behind what had been our apartment, as close to the back door as I dared. Was my name still carved into the wood of the patio? I wandered the complex, looking at the drab buildings, the windows open to let in the good summer air. Children swarmed around me and then past, like schools of salmon. Dirty children, clutching Popsicle sticks, their hair uncombed. Were these children loved? What worlds did they disappear into, behind the closed doors of their apartments? What did these children imagine the future to be? Did they dream of running away, and wonder what would happen if they did? I wished I could tell them that I had been here too, and that I had been just as scared. I hadn’t known what else the world held, besides this basic, essential darkness. But I had gotten away. I had learned that you couldn’t escape the darkness entirely, but you could learn to live above it. Grief was an ocean but you could reach the surface and bob there, where the light was.

  The corridor leading to the front door of our apartment was dark and somehow still smelled like Smarties candies, a scent so familiar I felt it in my body like an old friend. Home. This smell was one of my homes. How many homes do we acquire during the long unspooling of a human life?

  * * *

  —

  I wake at six a.m. in my van in the Alabama Hills after sleeping eight whole hours. I feel so good, like I could punch through a wall. Plants and Laurie are still asleep, motionless in their sleeping bags. Outside is the palest shade of dawn, and I squat to pee in the sand. It’s too cold to be awake! I shiver back into my bag and drift off, to anxiety dreams. At eight I’m awake again, feeling groggy and strange. The sun is up now and the others are awake and blinking. I set up the folding table and chairs outside in the bright desert and heat water for coffee.

  “Looks like you’re stuck in the wash,” says a man, from above us on the ridge. He’s got a dog with him.

  “We sure are,” I say. “You know how to get vans unstuck?”

  The man lights up at this call of duty. He circles the van, inspecting the tires. “You got a shovel?” he asks.

  “Nah. Got a piece of cardboard maybe.”

  “Here’s what you do,” he says. “You take air out of the tires for more traction.” He depresses a tire valve, and it begins to hiss. “You dig out the sand in front of the tires with your hands, to make a flat spot for the tire to roll. You put the cardboard under the tire that’s most stuck. You straighten the wheels. You rock back and forth. You make your friends push.”

  I kneel down and dig the sand from in front of the tires. I am so grateful.

  “You want me to drive it out while you all push?” he asks.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I say, relieved. The man starts the van, three of us lean on the rear end, the tires spin, and suddenly the van is free. The man revs it to the top of the hill.

  “I feel like we all just had a dad for a minute,” I say to the others, laughing.

  We meet Pilar in Lone Pine. She drove down from Northern California, where she’s been living in a cabin in the woods. We take a table in the crowded Alabama Cafe and order giant plates of food. There’s a parade today, and older white men are dressed as cowboys. The fantasy of colonization is strong in the rural West. I think about my great-grandparents, homesteading in what is now a suburb of Denver. For white people of North America, colonization is our only remembered connection to the earth. How fucked-up and sad is that, I think, as I pour hazelnut creamer into my second cup of coffee and touch my face, which feels hot. I’m sunburned already, somehow. Plants, who is vegan, tears into a plate of sautéed zucchini. Restaurants have hilarious ideas of what a vegan meal is. He’s not complaining, though.

  At the store we buy ten gallons of water to cache in the desert, some canned goods for our resupply box at Panamint Springs, the campground we’ll reach a few days into our hike, and several bags of candy corn. We pack all these things into the trunk of Pilar’s car. My van will stay in Lone Pine, parked behind the small grocery store.

  Death Valley is a dry place, even drier than the Sonoran Desert, where I live, and as we drop down into it on the winding road my nostrils sting and my throat goes hoarse. The mountains are raw and bare, the valleys
scoured featureless by the wind. The air is thick. My mouth feels wrong. I drink water, but it doesn’t help.

  At Badwater Basin the sun is setting, the sky lavender and orange above the white salt flats. A crowd of people swirls on the salt, taking selfies from every angle. It’s not very hot right now—the air is a warm bath. I take a deep breath, looking out across the salt flats. We’re 282 feet below sea level. Across the expanse of white is Telescope Ridge, ten thousand feet above sea level. Tonight, we cross the flat. Tomorrow, we climb ten thousand feet up to that ridge and then descend seven thousand feet down the other side. The next day, we cross a long, exposed, hot valley before finally reaching our first stop—Panamint Springs Resort, with its showers and burgers.

  Am I strong enough for this hike? Or will this hike break me, crumbling me into a thousand small pieces that will blow away on the wind? There’s only one way to find out.

  I buckle my hip belt. I feel good right now. My pack is light, filled with minimal layers: my one-person tarp, four liters of water, no stove, and only three days of food. I think that I can do this.

  * * *

  —

  After stopping by my old apartment building that second day in Anchorage, I bought a pre-roll at the weed store and met Tara at her friend’s house, where she was staying for a few days, sleeping on the couch. Tara hadn’t spoken to me for years after I’d snapped at her that night we were processing the roadkill caribou. Tara and I are both too sensitive, but in different ways. The summer of the caribou we’d understood each other intensely, until we hadn’t anymore. After three years of silence, she responded to one of my emails, saying that she was passing through Oregon. She stayed with me in the trailer in the woods where I was living. I made pot roast in the Dutch oven and we talked about our feelings and listened to the rain. I knew that she would never see exactly what I saw, and I would never see exactly what she saw, but we could learn to dance around each other’s sensitivities, to show up without getting so close that we got burned. Maybe that’s all human relationships are—accepting the fact that we’ll never be truly seen but sticking around anyway, for the pure animal comfort of knowing someone over the span of a life.