Remembering the Desert

Thank you, Edward Abbey

It was heaven.

The land was vast, open, startling. I had never experienced my heart opening up like it did that day.

It was years ago on a long cross-country road trip, an afternoon in the rust and red dirt of the American Southwest. I’ve never lived there. Have no ancestry that connects me. Yet. I was overwhelmed. I cried in the beauty of it.

A few days ago, I picked up a book that I had never read before, surprisingly. Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbey’s masterpiece about his time as a park ranger in and around Moab, Utah. It’s a moving meditation of desert life, aloneness, and solitude, yet unapologetic in its realistic depiction of existence in the canyons and mesas. After such a spiritual experience in the Southwest, how could I not have read this book?

Only paragraphs in, I was captured. The spirit of the book enveloped every part of me. And, not surprisingly, reminded me of my own rather limited experience in the Southwest, more specifically near the Navajo Nation several years ago. That moment in heaven.

Below is the story I wrote about that day. It’s part of my book of essays: The Consequence of Stars. Thank you, Edward Abbey, for reminding me of what the desert does to my soul and how it reawakened some form of spiritual awareness I didn’t know I had.

***

Navajo Nation by David W. Berner

There’s a road that spills out of the Grand Canyon, not far from the famous lodge on the east side of the park. It serpentines down a hill and lands in a wide-open space, arid ground below a broad sky that appears untouchable, distant yet close, a sky that falls on you before an expansive valley, empty of trees, caressed by blood-colored rocks, forever enveloping endlessness. If God exists, this is where you would find him.  

I pulled the RV off the road next to a bluff and stepped out along with my passengers, a trio who’d traveled beside me for over three thousand miles. It would be five thousand before we’d rest with our journey behind us.

“I have never,” I whispered, the way one would in a temple.

My teenage son, Casey, began taking photographs. His younger brother, Graham stepped to the edge of the rocks to lean in. My friend Brad, sunglasses pushed back on his head for an unobstructed view, was silent as if nothing he could say would matter. And all I could do was push back tears.

The Navajo Nation is more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, and it appeared every acre of it, every inch stretched out before us. It was ancient, teaming with echoes. It was if I had stepped into a primal cathedral and somewhere out there God was watching me, his eyes on all my religious and spiritual baggage, the trunk loads of guilt, doubt, and faithlessness.

* * *

The church I attended as a kid was a characterless yellow brick building with a high, modern steeple above the entranceway. Without the steeple, St. Albert’s could have been an insurance company. There was nothing grand about it. It was a square box with steel front doors. Inside it smelled of incense and mold, the interior just as stark and unforgettable as the outside. The altar was sparse; a large golden challis rested in the middle of a simple stone table. Behind it, hanging from the low ceiling was a large cross, a wooden Jesus nailed to it, red paint signifying his bloodied hands and feet, a crown of thorns. Father Hannon ruled the place. He was a stick of a man, tall and gaunt with salt and pepper hair and a pockmarked face that had one expression—a scowl. He smelled of Lucky Strikes. 

On Sunday mornings I sat with my mother, father, grandmother, and great aunt, and tried to shrink into the dark wooden pews. I pretended to follow along in the mass book and sing the words of medieval songs tucked inside worn black leather hymnals, hoping Father Hannon would never notice me. He was the one who knew all my sins. He was the one who knew I had lied to my grandmother about taking the open pack of Clove gum from her purse. He knew I had thrown that snowball at the car traveling down our street on a dark January night. He knew I wanted to kiss the flaxen-haired girl who sat at the desk in front of me in my elementary school classroom.

On confirmation day at the age of twelve, we stood in two lines—the boys in their Sunday suits and ties, and the girls in frilly dresses and bows in their hair—outside the walnut confession booths in the rear of the church. One line was for the new young priest and the other for Father Hannon. We were allowed to choose. But when the line for the new priest grew twice the size of Father Hannon’s and began to snake far down the north aisle along the big stained-glass windows of the saints, my mother insisted I stand in the other line. She wanted me to show Father Hannon some respect.

I sat with my hands in prayer inside the shadowy confessional booth and waited. My little sport jacket buttoned tight around me, my skin hot and sweaty. I had to pee. The silence inside the darkness seemed permanent. I heard the squeak of wood on wood as the small sliding window opened and in came a slice of dusty, ghostly light. On the other side of the remaining metal screen was Father Hannon. I could hear him breathe. 

“Son,” he said.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I whispered.

I don’t remember what I confessed, but I’m certain I said nothing about the blonde girl. And I’m not sure what he offered as penance, but it was likely some countless combination of Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

A few years later, my father and mother stopped attending church. My grandmother had died after a long illness and because she had not been making regular donations on Sunday mornings, Father Hannon questioned her allegiance to God and the Catholic Church. He refused to offer a funeral mass. After more than a week of debate and arguments, Father Hannon eventually agreed to hold a mass for my grandmother. It was the last time on any regular basis that my parents could be found inside St. Albert’s Church. I, however, returned for evening religious classes once a week with the rest of the Catholic boys and girls who went to the public school and somehow passed the mandatory exam on the saints and the tests on all the sins one could possibly commit.

Twenty years later I was back inside a grand cathedral in Erie, Pennsylvania to be married. But before that I was required to attend regular church-sponsored marriage classes.

“But that’s what faith is,” the religious counselor said. “You must learn to trust.”

“And why would I do that?” I asked. “What proof do I have?”

He asked me what I did for a living.

“Journalist,” I said.

“That explains it.”

I came back to the church years later when my sons were born. There was no epiphany. I simply acquiesced, agreeing with my wife that it would be best to give the boys some religious upbringing, some foundation they could later build on or reject. As for me, I never voluntarily returned to a Catholic Church. And when their mother and I divorced, I did not consider an annulment. What would have been the point?

My religious life had always been fractured. I didn’t know what I wanted out of spirituality or why I wanted it. After the divorce, I tried a Lutheran service. It felt too Catholic. I studied Unitarianism for a time and attended a Unitarian Church off and on. Sunday services were laced with quotes from Thoreau and Emerson. I thought this might be my spiritual center, but for whatever reason its lure did not last. I read books on Buddhism and thought I might find the Zen in Zen. But like a young boy jumping from one summer sports camp to another, I failed to master any one thing. What I certainly was doing, however, was searching. That was the singular constant. But whatever it was I was attempting to find remained helplessly out of reach. I believed in nothing and at the same time I believed in everything.

With all this religious baggage, I had found myself on the barren ground of the Navajo Nation.

* * *

A summer shower fell from high broken clouds of buffed chrome and white, filtered rays of sun touched our shoulders.

“Let’s take the road awhile,” I said.

We climbed back in the RV and drove slowly with the windshield wipers on the intermittent setting. The road before us narrowed and toppled through the valley. For several miles there were no other vehicles and no other sounds but the chug of the RV’s engine and a persistent warm wind. To our left was a cabin built from stone and wood, a getaway of four or five small rooms. A man and a woman dressed in jeans and dark colored tee-shirts sat on rough-hewn Adirondack chairs in the rust-colored dirt near the entrance and watched the sky. They held hands. The woman waved to us, and the man pointed to the distance.

“A rainbow,” I said.

The ribbon had formed across the sky from a plateau to the low mountains. Light rain spritzed the RV windows as we pulled off to the shoulder. Free roaming cattle stood near the edge in the sparse vegetation along the road, ignoring our vehicle and unaware of our presence as we stepped out of the RV to a position on raised ground about twenty-five feet from road’s edge. The rain shower ceased, and the rainbow intensified, the colors becoming deeper and more distinct. My son Casey again took photographs. Graham stood silent under nature’s prism, his eyes turned upward.

“How’d we get so lucky,” Brad said, nodding toward the south end of the valley.

Materializing slowly near the horizon just above a gathering of slate gray clouds was a second rainbow. It grew into the expansiveness, half of it crystalizing directly under and nearly touching the first one. Within minutes, the first rainbow began to fade, gently and then swiftly. And just before it disappeared, the second one began to dissolve even more quickly, melting into the atmosphere. In less than a minute, the rainbows were gone, so were the clouds, and the full sun owned the sky once again.

“This place is an awakening,” I sighed, stepping a little higher on the ground toward the valley.

Fortunate timing allowed us to experience heaven’s fractured light. The notion of emergence, of arrival was primordial and ancient.

“Doesn’t it seem like God is in this land?” I asked no one and everyone, my gaze remaining on the landscape. “Holiness is in wide open spaces.”

We walked the road a bit, boots scraping the dusty earth. We inhaled and listened, and we traveled east through the valley. After a few miles, the road began to climb back up to the mountains and at one turn where the land plateaued for a short distance, a group of Native Americans had arranged several wooden tables near the road. The early evening light settled over jewelry made from silver, opal, and turquoise—bracelets, pendants, rings, and clasps of alabaster and lapis. On one table was a necklace, carrying a small bear carved out of black stone.

“It’s the symbol of strength,” said the sturdy young man seated behind one of the tables, proud of the goods before him. We were the only customers there now, likely the last of his day, and maybe the only ones over the last several hours.

“And the stone?” I asked.

“Acoma,” he said.

Acoma black jet is a fossilized wood, not unlike coal. A common stone used by the Navajo.

“It fights the spirits of depression and fear. It’s a protective force. It refreshes the body,” he said. “Is it for you?”

I hadn’t thought about that, being drawn to the black bear for no clear reason.

“Well.” I paused. “I think I want to give it to my mother.”

“Is she sick?”

My mother had been moved to a nursing home in Pennsylvania after home care was no longer realistic. She had suffered a long history of lung and blood ailments, and now dementia was eating away at her mind.

I paid him $20. He wrapped the bear in a soft white cloth, delicately folding it around the necklace and placing it in a small cardboard box.

My mother never hung crosses or framed depictions of Jesus on the walls of her home, and never wore religious jewelry. My father kept a pendant, a stainless-steel St. Christopher medal around his neck. He never took it off. Mom, however, was not one to outwardly exhibit her beliefs. She prayed in church and around the Thanksgiving table, and I remember hearing her whisper to God while she sat alone beside my father’s bed days before cancer took him. She had faith, that enigmatic state of acceptance, but she rarely displayed it.

“I wish her serenity,” the young man said. “And I wish you good journeys.”

I thanked him and placed the cardboard box deep in the inside pocket of my suitcase. We took our places inside the RV and climbed farther into the mountains.  

* * *

When I was a kid, playing Cowboys and Indians in the yards of my neighborhood—pretending to fight the natives, a toy revolver and holster strapped to my waist and a straw cowboy hat on my head—it never occurred to me that the savages believed in something. We fired pretend rounds of bullets at make-believe Indians, chasing them down in the woods across the street from my parents’ small Cape Cod on a hill. We had no idea why we had to kill them; it was simply our job. If you were a cowboy, you shot at Indians. We never considered that their souls might go to heaven. Decades later and years before traveling to the Navajo Nation, I was hiking at Starved Rock, a large state park along the south bank of the Illinois River about 100 miles from Chicago. I stepped along the trail that led to the top of an isolated sandstone butte. Not far from this great rock is the site of a combative 18^th century tribal council meeting. As the legend goes, Kinebo, the head chief of the Illinois tribe stabbed Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe during the council. The reason for the attack is unclear, but it sparked vengeance and soon the tribes were in a bloody battle. The Illinois took refuge on the butte and Pontiac’s followers surrounded them. After many weeks, the Illinois starved to death on the rock. Standing on that ancient precipice hundreds of years later—above the flowing river and the tall maples hugging the cliffs—I could think not of the beauty before me, but only of death. The same way I did when I was a young cowboy shooting up the barbarians. Now, leaving the Navajo Nation, life not death was all that seemed to matter. 

* * *

As the RV pulled us back to a four-lane road that would lead to a campsite for the night, we stayed quiet, a mixture of weariness and awe. Brad was behind the wheel and the boys had settled on a bench in the RV’s cabin. I stared out the passenger side window, occasionally glancing into the oversized side view mirror. It would be easy to dismiss and simple to label the late afternoon and evening as just one of the many special moments of a two-and-a-half-week cross-country road trip through the Rocky Mountains, the Salt Flats, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and Big Sur. But I knew better. Somewhere out there in the broad prehistoric land of America’s southwest where the foreground and background are impossible to distinguish, where long shadows cast by the sun appear to be tattooed on the far-reaching acres, where the moonlight tints red earth to a deep maroon, there are spirits—angels, Mother Nature’s soldiers, Navajo gods. Whatever they are does not matter; what they’re doing does. They dance in the corners of a different dimension, unseen but awaiting discovery, anticipating the right time and place to appear to those who are searching, to lay a hand on a shoulder of those who do not understand. Not to offer some inevitable truth or instill a faith that one does not deserve. It’s not religious; it’s not necessarily spiritual. It’s instead, deeply ancestral. It’s the essence of a passage to peace, a home. It is the individual quest for a quiet place to watch the stars.

We arrived late at a dark and nearly silent campsite, the boys slept, one on the cabin bench, the other had moved to the bed in the rear of the RV. After backing our traveling home into a reserved space, Brad reached into the small cabinet behind the driver’s seat and pulled out an unopened bottle of wine.

“A toast?” he asked.

I worked the corkscrew and poured the red blend into two clear plastic cups.

“Ever think about where you’re supposed to be in the world?” I asked.

We tapped our cups and took our sips.

“All the time,” he said.

“Did you go to church when you were a kid?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. Can’t tell you the last time.”

“Why does that happen?” I asked. “I look at people who are locked into their religion, their church. They seem pretty happy?”

“You’re not thinking about going back to church, are you?” he smirked.

We drank two more classes of wine and corked what remained for another day. The next morning, we would head for Albuquerque and Santa Fe, through a long stretch of infinite land and a rumbling and flashing thunderstorm that forced us to pull off I-40 somewhere near Gallup and the Cibola National Forest. We sat in the RV on the scruffy desert land, the vehicle rocking in the high wind, and watched the horizontal lightning snap from cloud to cloud. Between thunder cracks we heard a whistle, faintly masked by the weather. To the north of us in the distance was a freight train, traveling east. It chugged on toward an unknown destination and undoubtedly on a deadline. It had a schedule to meet, a place to be. Its route was clear. It did not matter that it may be heading away from or to its home; it had its definitive path of travel, presenting its own serenity. The whistle may have evoked a familiar melancholy born out of the belief that there is sadness in loneliness, but this did not matter. The crew knew where to take this train, the long-ago laid track made certain of it. The train was solitary in the vast open land, in unforgiving weather, driving toward an end its crew would never question. The storm would eventually pass, the sky would clear, and the train would keep on running in the remoteness for a hundred more miles, distant but parallel to the highway, occasionally blowing its whistle, reminding us it was right alongside for as long as the track would allow.

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Photo: Dmitry Smolyanitsky