Looking for Bears in the Desert

Today I wore a little bronze owl necklace around my neck. This is the reason:

The summer after my freshmen year of college I lived at home. Me and my best friend of 16 years,  Jessica, worked like crazy that summer. I labored at a greasy pizza place making .08 cents less than minimum wage. Jessica worked in a garden, pulling weeds and dealing with people who didn't know how to pull weeds. I worked there also from time to time, but that's another story. One day we were sprawled out on the floor of her living room, just laying there. Cedaredge is a very small town, sometimes for a young person it is suffocatingly stagnant. So we were just breathing on the floor, listening to each other and the flies buzzing around us.

Our waking dreams were soon interrupted by her Dad. He informed us that he had received an email from an old friend of his. This old friend, Tom Smith,  was coming to Eastern Utah to look for a motion sensor camera that had recently gone missing from a bear cave. He was willing to let us come along and help. Not the type of gals to turn down an adventure, especially having been engaged in a dazed kind of lethargy for quite some time, we asked, "when do we leave?"
We embarked after work on a Wednesday. We grabbed some camping equipment, pasta, food, plenty of water, and a few books of poetry, jumped into my pathfinder and set off. We drove into the sun, blinded by its ferocity. As the blaze faded into evening we crossed the border into Utah and left the freeway for highway 6. Our directions were not very clear. All we knew was that there was a place called three canyon's, it was in Utah, and we were supposed to find Tom at a bed and breakfast. We found a map on the internet of what we thought was our destination. Off of highway 6 we turned onto a BLM road, dirt, straight. It was completely dark by then and increasingly obvious that there was no Bed and Breakfast here. We started looking for campsites, or a fire, but it was completely dark. Jessica navigated and I drove in and out of washes, on soft dirt trails, further and further into the night. After about two hours we reached the end of the road.  We stopped and hiked around a little, occasionally yelling, "TOM SMITH!" There was no answer save for our own voices echoing off the canyon walls that we couldn't even see. We camped in the back of the car, reading short stories and poems to each other till we fell asleep.

When we woke the canyons were illuminated around us. There were three, each littered with huge sandstone boulders and winding into the distance. We climbed atop a butte to eat breakfast and watched the sun rise, warming the air, and further lighting the sky. After breakfast we decided to explore the largest canyon. We left a note on the windshield of the car that said, "honk if you're Tom Smith" and started walking up the wash. We figured at that point that we were far from the right canyon. There was no sign of a Bed and Breakfast, a cave, bears, or really wildlife of any kind. The desert was so dry that few animals dared to call it home. We hiked for hours up the sandstone wash, talking, exploring, doing exactly what we love. Eventually we reached a point that we could call the top. It was completely beautiful to inhabit that space in that moment. Because even though we didn't find Tom Smith, or the bears, we found exactly what we needed to find. Adventure.

Returning to civilization later that day we wanted to commemorate our experience in some way. Neither of us had our ears pierced so we thought that would be a good idea, but it turned out that was a little out of our price range (when you make less than minimum wage...). So we bought these weird little owl necklaces and journeyed homeward.

Our lives to that point had been somewhat parallel. We had different experiences, yes, but somehow they were always aligned. I think at the end of that trip, at the end of our funny together summer, we knew that our lives would be moving in separate directions. Not that we would stop being soul friends, or that our friendship didn't mean as much, but we knew that our journeys would require us to be far away from each other. Today when I wore my owl necklace that says "friends" (Jessica's says "Best" because she is that), I went back to that day in the desert. I went back to the blinding sun and sandstone. I went back to the thirst, and the magnificent stillness of the desert, and I was grateful for the warmth I have seen. I was grateful for the friends I love, the taste of water, the adventures of the past, and the way they are guiding me toward the future.

Archaeology

 This is what archaeology looks like

numbers! little bags! whiteware!

 human beings

PAINTED SHERD!

 

and hopefully someday this

Uphill

This post is about my commute.

My house is situated behind an elementary school, next to a river (note the house.. I don't live in a van). Every day I ride my bike to school. The first 2.5 miles are hilly. The pavement rises and falls, winding through neighborhoods and briefly passing through downtown. The last mile is difficult. Some (I) might describe it as a ferocious hill of death. There are three ways up it, each provides a unique challenge: one is extremely steep and windy, one is long and very steep, and another is medium short and steep followed by a gradual climb for an additional bonus mile.
All semester I've been waiting for the special day when it's not hard to climb the hill. All semester my legs have been pushing down the pedals and sweat has been forming on my forehead. All semester I've been pushing myself up the hill and not once has it been easy. Not once.

Many parts of my life have been steep these last few months. I have struggled through this term. School, social life, work, art, none of it has been simple. I have been pedaling uphill, sweating, hurting. At many times I have felt disconnected and despondent. This is not very much like me. I love to feel love for what I'm doing, who I'm with, the world that I see. I haven't felt that love much lately. I chase it along the trails that wind around this town, and sometimes I find it and settle into it on the top of mountains, but it doesn't always follow me home.  Sometimes I find it in my dear friends, but when they leave it goes with them. I don't understand why I feel this way. I have innumerable blessings, but sometimes knowing that makes me feel worse. I think, "my life is so easy, why do I feel so sad?"

Here's another thing about my commute.

When I get to the top of the hill, I'm at school. If I look around I can see the San Juan mountains in the distance, the Weminuche wilderness, and rolling ridges toward New Mexico.There are mountains on every side. It is beautiful and vast. I am surrounded by mountains, where love is. There is always a top to the hill, every single time. There is a top to that hill, and another side, and another hill. This life is just like a crazy bike ride across the universe. A crazy bike ride where you pedal and pedal up hill after hill and roll down, coasting across the flatlands to another hill to climb, fly, climb, fly, coast, climb, fly!

I can see the top of the hill. My legs are strong. My lungs are working. My heart is pulsing. I can see the top of the hill, where I can finally settle into love.