The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  Now Tara was in Anchorage for a social justice conference. Next week she’d head north again, back to her cabin on the river. I lit the pre-roll and we smoked it on the back deck with the mosquitoes and the wild roses and she told me about her day, about standing in fluorescent-lit rooms for hours speaking about the criminalization of sex work. I’m not much of a weed smoker but I wanted to numb out, wanted Tara to talk and talk forever so I could just listen and I wouldn’t have to hear my own thoughts, wouldn’t have to feel the rough waves of grief crashing against my shores, threatening to pull me out to sea. I got as high as I could and Tara watched TV with me until it got so late I was able to sleep. Tara got it. She didn’t ask me why I was sad. She got it more than anyone I knew. Tara was the person I texted late at night, racked with insomnia on a full moon, having just decided that I was unlovable trash, that I was a terrible person, and that death was the only thing that would ever bring relief.

  “I understand,” she’d say. And I knew that she did.

  * * *

  —

  The sun is setting over the salt flats of Badwater Basin in Death Valley. The salt flats are amorphous. They contain multitudes. They are free from the constructs of inherent form. They are alternatingly smooth and spiky, brittle and soft. Our minds and feet work to make sense of these textures as we wander across the expanse of white. The lavender and orange of the sky intensifies, until it feels as though we are suspended within it. I stop and bend over, plucking a piece of salt, putting it in my mouth. It tastes like metal and the earth.

  Tonight is the full moon in Aries. This bloated moon spills over the crest of the pink mountains behind us, casting long moon shadows just as the last of the daylight fades in the west. We don’t need headlamps. The night is dark and also bright. Cronch, cronch, cronch go our footsteps as they break through the crusts of salt. The cronching echoes in the thick air, which swallows all other sound.

  The first water source on this route is Hanaupah Canyon, fifteen miles from the start. We’d considered walking there tonight. But after six miles we leave the salt flats and start climbing on a dirt road, eating pieces of the elevation gain that will eventually bring us to the cold piñon forest of Telescope Ridge. It’s night, the adrenaline has left us. We’re beat. Who walks this late?

  “This reminds me of when I worked overnight as a baker,” says Pilar.

  I sweep my arms. “All of this is bread,” I say.

  We throw our bedrolls in the dirt. This is as good a place to sleep as any.

  I eat my cold-soaked instant refried beans with tortilla chips. The texture and flavor of the beans are pretty bad. Pilar passes around a bag of candy corn. The candy smells like, and has the texture of, vanilla-scented taper candles. I eat a whole handful, biting each piece into three, according to the color demarcations. Dinner finished, I tend to my butt chafing with baby wipes and Vagisil, then inflate my sleeping pad under the moon.

  I have not “cowboy camped” in a long time. When you cowboy camp, you do not set up a tent. Your roof is the stars, and you are cradled by the wind. Insects crawl over you in the night. They pause on the bridge of your nose. They check their watches. They are running late. They hurry down your cheeks, muttering to themselves. They don’t think of you, of your heavy human worries. They have their own lives.

  The moon shines on our faces like a flashlight. The air dries the sweat from my clothes. Is it too bright to sleep? Eventually the answer is no.

  * * *

  —

  My third day in Anchorage, I walked to a homeless café and discovered that half the staff knew Barbara.

  “Little old white lady?” said a big man in a fluorescent safety vest. “Sometimes uses a walker? Keeps to herself? She’s in here all the time. Was just in here this morning.”

  “What?” I said, feeling my skin start to tingle. I looked at the clock. It was noon. I sat at one of the long tables, next to the people eating lunch. Sloppy joes and boiled carrots on a plastic tray. I looked around the huge room, checking all the faces but moving my eyes quickly. If any of these folks were paranoid like Barbara, they wouldn’t want me looking directly at them. I tried to imagine my mother now, aged twenty-two years since the last time I saw her. In 1997, at forty, her hair was already silver. Her face was haunted. The flesh of her body hung from her bones. Her illness had accelerated time, rocketed her into the future, toward death.

  “What are you looking at me for?” shouted the woman sitting next to me at the table.

  “I’m looking for my mother,” I said.

  “Your mother robbed a bank,” mumbled the woman. “She went to Cancún. She went to the moon.”

  I left the café and walked in the bright afternoon light to the women’s shelter.

  “We can’t confirm or deny that Barbara is here, or has ever stayed here,” said the woman at the front desk. All of the shelters had given me some version of this answer. It was meant to protect Barbara, to allow her confidentiality. “You can leave a note,” said the woman. “And if Barbara is here I will pass it along.”

  “We used to stay here sometimes when I was a kid,” I said. “Memories, you know?” The woman smiled. I pushed the note across the desk. “She can’t read,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  In Death Valley, the alarm on my phone goes off at five a.m. and wakes me into a world that is suspiciously like yesterday. It’s dark. Dry. Moony. I slept maybe five hours? Oh well. I select “Eye of the Tiger” from the music on my phone and turn the volume all the way up. The others laugh themselves awake. We need to start hiking at this terrible hour because it’s going to take us an absurd amount of time to get to the top of this mountain. We knocked out one thousand feet of climbing last night. Just nine thousand more to go today! I mix protein powder with water in the screw-top container that still tastes like yesterday’s beans. I’m determined to be a good sport about these early wake-ups for as long as I can. Coffee will help. I shake a packet of instant coffee into my water bottle and swish it around. It tastes terrible, but it works.

  The moon is setting behind Telescope Ridge as we work our way up Hanaupah Canyon on a jeep road. The road is distinct at first, then less so, then there is only the dry wash and picking one’s way through piles of rock, stretches of sand, brush.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the wave-particle duality of light, the concept in quantum mechanics wherein light can act either as a particle or as a wave. The funny thing here is that this doesn’t make any sense—according to our understanding of physics, objects are either particles or waves, but never both. And yet, light can be both. We’ve been studying the wave-particle duality of light for hundreds of years, and we still don’t understand how it’s possible. The short answer is that it’s not possible. And yet, it is.

  The sun rises over the salt flats that are below us already, somehow. We hear the happy burbling waters of Hanaupah Spring and then we see them, bursting from the earth into a tangle of bushes and reeds. The water is clear and cold, and it runs over a bed of clean gravel. Bright yellow flowers hang over it. We crouch in the shade and shove chips into our mouths. I’m soaked in sweat and the cortisol of the morning is wearing off. I’m tired. Eight thousand feet of climbing left until we reach the top of the ridge. Fuck!

  * * *

  —

  On my sixth day in Anchorage, I walked to the Catholic church downtown where Barbara would take me when I was small. Where she would speak in tongues in the little room off the main worship hall, the one with the metal rack of novena candles in red glass, and I would wander the empty pews, fingering the curled songbooks. That day, there was a mass in Spanish going on and I stood in the foyer with the women bouncing their babies, quieting them. Did Barbara still come to this church? Did they know her here? Everywhere, in this city, were people who knew her. Somehow she had made herself a life here. Somehow she’d stayed alive.
Through the grace of God. Through the small righteous fire that burned inside her.

  Next door was the gift shop where, as a kid, I would lust after turquoise rosaries in pleather snap pouches that we could never afford. I was an adult now, impossibly tall and stronger than the sun, and I could buy whatever rosary I wanted. I selected a rose-colored glass one that sparkled and fought back tears as I paid six dollars at the register. Had the rosaries here always been this cheap? Had six dollars really been so much? Any amount was too much, I remembered, when you had no money at all.

  My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic who does not want to be found. The information I had acquired on her whereabouts was from someone at a shelter or homeless café who was breaking the rules—the most recent one was a volunteer offering that he’d been seeing her around for a year, that she’d gone off her meds and had been extra cantankerous but now she was back on them. He told me to return at six p.m., but when I knocked on the door of the shelter that evening another worker told me, with a serene face, that she couldn’t give me any information due to confidentiality laws, nor would she be able to give me information at any time in the future. I knew why these rules existed, and I respected them. I respected my mother’s autonomy. Would she even know me if she saw me? So much time had passed. I had changed my name. Our worlds had diverged. We each existed for the other as mythologies, memories that bore little resemblance to what lived today. Her delusions, I knew, often centered around being chased—by demons, by other people. How would it make her feel to know that someone was trying to find her now, even if my intentions were good? I didn’t need to have a relationship with my mother, if she didn’t want that. I didn’t want to cause her more stress. And yet, I wanted her to be safe. I wanted a warm room for her, where she could live out the rest of her days.

  I pocketed my rosary and walked quickly down the street as the city buses rumbled past. At six a.m. the next day, before the homeless café opened for breakfast, I would fly back to the Lower 48. I now knew that Barbara went there most mornings, but I wouldn’t get another chance to cross paths with her. Once back at the apartment where I was staying, I packed my things, my head so heavy it felt as though I would fall, and if I did, I would most likely break. I’d already decided that I would come back to Anchorage in the winter, to look for her again. Maybe there was a way. Maybe she didn’t have to freeze to death, alone in the woods. Maybe that didn’t have to be the ending to her story. Barbara couldn’t give me anything, but maybe I could give her this one thing. I’d spent so long running from her, from the pain that threatened to overtake me. It was time to stop. To stand still, to ever so slowly turn and face the tsunami behind me. Barbara would be there, looking at me. Holding my heart in her hands, the hot meat of it, as it pumped blood onto the floor.

  * * *

  —

  Our morning break at the clear waters of Hanaupah Canyon is over. I roll up the Ziploc bag of smashed tortilla chips I was eating and stash it away. I clip my pack back onto my body. It is time to climb the mountain. The mountain in question is a sharply angled slope, pebbled with scree and loose rock, and the climb is going to be brutal. Partly because of how steep it is, and partly because we’re carrying eight liters of water each. I begin the slow, steady work. I am panting, stopping every few feet to rest. Picking my way around obstacles. Pausing to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  Do you ever exercise until you are exhausted, sit down in the fragrant piñon duff knowing that you cannot possibly go on, and then stand up with great effort, swaying under the weight of your pack, and continue climbing? Today I do this about eleven times. The hours turn liquid and slip by. Time is marked in snack breaks, shaky breaths, the twinges in my knees, tablets of fizzy electrolytes dropped into my water bottle, and the increasing tension in my Achilles tendons, which feel as though they’re going to snap like old rubber bands. I cannot possibly go on. But I do. We all do.

  I think about how subjective reality is, how even looking directly at a thing, saying it out loud, will alter it. This is what physicists found while studying the wave-particle duality of light—that the intention of their experiments, whether they were looking to show that light was a particle or that light was a wave, would influence the results. Basically, whichever they tested for, the universe said yes. Is light a particle? Yes. But is it a wave? Yes. Einstein, who was frustrated by this, said:

  It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.

  The air grows thinner and now we’re more out of breath. Seven thousand feet. Eight thousand feet. Nine thousand feet. The world is bright and then we’re in the shade of the piñon forest; the air is warm, then cool. The sun is at our backs, then directly above us, then shining into my left eye, then at our fronts. Step. Step. Step. Pause.

  The last two thousand feet of climbing happens in a single mile. This is just as fucked-up as it sounds. The scree is too steep. The brush is too steep. We fall back a half step with each step forward that we take. We push our way through thorns. I have been beyond exhausted for hours. I have been exhausted since the day I was born. I want to cry in frustration. Life is suffering. I go on.

  When I reach the top of the mountain, I feel nothing, just a shaking, hollow fatigue. Nine thousand feet of climbing today in ten miles, and for what? There’s a biting cold wind and the sun is setting. We have to get off this ridge and as far down the other side as we can before dark. These last five miles of climbing took us eight hours to complete.

  I pull on all my layers, feeling the sharp pains of the thorns embedded in my fingers, the burn of the hotspots on the pads of my feet. It’s so cold and I can’t get warm—I seem to have used up every last bit of heat in my body to get to the top of this climb.

  My grandma’s funeral service is tomorrow, in Grand Junction, Colorado. I won’t be there. I’ll be here instead, in Death Valley, crossing a playa under the full moon. What happens to our inner mysteries after we die? I imagine another life, in the future or happening simultaneously, whichever way reincarnation plays out. I am there, and so is my grandma, and my mother. Except this time, we’re three aspen trees in a grove, or three birds in a flight of swallows. Or I am their mother, and I do a better job. Or the same job, because we’re all doing the best that we can. We’re all just holding on, waiting for the waves to stop shaking us, staying alive if only because we know that if we died, we’d just wake up somewhere worse.

  We live in a universe in which multiple things are true at once. Sitting at the Formica table with my grandma, cutting the earwigs from a bushel of peaches. My grandpa pulling off my nose but it was his thumb all along, then laughing at his own joke. In the rocking chair with Barbara, in that gray time before memory begins. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

  Tara’s father, playing the piano in a windowless bar in Fairbanks, Alaska. Tara’s father, whose mother survived a concentration camp in Poland. The sound coming from the piano is so beautiful that Tara’s father ceases to exist—he is no longer an old man who beats his sled dogs. He is a network of nerve endings leading to piano keys. He is music.

  My brother in Afghanistan, where he works as a diesel mechanic for the U.S. military. Standing on a concrete balcony watching the sun set over the desert, the light marigold and rose.

  And me, on this mountain. I am new. I am as clean and empty as the wind.

  For John, who was there.

  And for Tara, who understands.

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been many years in the making, and I am deeply indebted to all the wonderful people who supported me and offered me encouragement along the way: my agent, Rebecca Friedman, whose warmth and generosity of spirit buoyed me countless times; my editor, Annie Chagnot,
whose feedback was crucial and brilliant and who was kind, even when she didn’t have to be; everyone at The Dial Press; all of the punk houses that sheltered me in my twenties, when I was a young oogle who refused to work very much because I was “focusing on my writing” and so was always broke and mooching off my friends—the Wych Elm house, Mississippi Co-op, the Sassy Shack, the Ramshackle, Mimosa Street house, and the Mendenhall house, as well as others I am forgetting; Tara, whose friendship has served as a container for so many of my complicated feelings about the nature of embodiment and whose influence has shaped the way I write memoir; and all of the other friends who took a chance on me in the years contained in this story, who helped teach me how to be a person in the world and who are now characters in this book. You are important to me, I am thinking fondly of you, and if we haven’t talked in a while, I miss you.

  By Carrot Quinn

  Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart

  The Sunset Route

  About the Author