She moved quickly through the tiny market, picking up a bag of beef jerky, an unblemished Fuji apple, two cans of iced tea, a box of granola bars in green wrappers, and a bag of ice. For breakfast she grabbed a sleeve of powdered sugar donuts, then traded it for a sleeve of chocolate ones, then traded back again. She paid and transferred the ice, tea, and apple into a cooler that already held three jugs of water. She drove south, out of town, past the public safety building and the BLM offices. A few minutes later, she crossed from Utah into Arizona, then a few miles later, she turned onto the Antelope Valley road, the red rock bluffs in her rearview mirror and the unfenced long-grass plains ahead. Forty miles beyond that, at the horizon, a dark stone terrace separated the high hollow sky from the planet’s curve.
She had maps and a GPS, but after weeks crisscrossing a million acres, never going to the same site twice, she felt herself growing more and more comfortable navigating on her own. The distances were vast, but she was learning how to measure them by feeling the increments. She would meditate on the high school math of it: distance, rate, and time. The miles she’d already driven this morning would have taken her from Princeton to Baltimore, but she’d only cleared a few small desert towns and only just left the pavement behind. The land here was as wide and open as every cowboy song said it was, the sky immense and impossibly still. The singularity of the colors overwhelmed her, though she thought she might actually be starting to understand it.
Shortly after she had arrived in the spring, she switched from listening to music to audiobooks. The distances were too great to be measured in three-minute pop songs. Books, especially the very longest ones, put time and space into their proper proportions. She began with a memoir about women and wilderness but soon found she wanted something with a patina, so she tried Willa Cather, which was perfect for a time, but when the narration and the landscape and her work all blended together, she quit that book and decided to stay in the past but move across the Atlantic. At this point in the summer, she drove with Thomas Hardy. She was the most comfortable with a story that did not duplicate her day.
All these hours alone crisscrossing the desert weren’t spelled out in the grant, but she couldn’t ghost the project, not after all the strings Dr. Songetay had pulled for her. She felt lucky (but still bitter) to have found a project that would support her big idea, which was for the profession to abandon its museums and repositories and leave artifacts where they lay. She was beginning to see how professional life would be an unremitting stream of compromises. She had professional contacts here and Mrs. Gladstone, but most days she spent alone, with one exception.
As Mrs. Gladstone observed, she often tried to coordinate her research agenda to be in an area where she knew Paul Thrift, an NPS ranger, was likely to be on patrol. They first met through emails that arrived after her grant funding had come in. Those emails often began with an apology. He was sorry for the late reply. He was not often in the field station. There was no good internet connection on the monument. Cell service was unreliable. He was always willing to help, but his help always came late.
As fall arrived in Princeton, Paul’s response time quickened. His answers grew longer, and around Thanksgiving, he began asking about her dissertation. They shared books and articles, maps, names of people she might reach out to. He mentioned a man named Bruce Cluff, a self-taught archeologist, who knew more about the ruins on the monument than anyone he knew. Now, she thought about Mrs. Gladstone and this man and the sadness built into human connections.
Paul Thrift had been fascinated to hear that Sophia wanted to measure the degradation of cultural sites managed by the federal government. She thought it was possible that national parks attracted destruction. He wrote in an email that it was the nature of people. Yellowjackets don’t mean to ruin a picnic. They’re just doing their thing. Paul admitted that he was amazed that the Department of the Interior would fund this kind of research, but he said he’d help however he could. Deep in the bleak, snow-drifted days of January, Paul told her he wished someone had started this kind of work a hundred years ago. He told her it was almost too late.
When she had finally arrived in May, she arranged to drive to the field station at the far end of the Dellenbaugh Valley at Paul’s invitation. It took most of the morning to get there. The directions were good, but the road had been washed out and battered in many places, the destruction focused and intense with wide areas of sand gathered in low sections of the road. She’d been warned to keep going when she felt the wheels strain in these traps. Paul told her if you stop, you’re sunk.
Eventually she came into the broad valley filled with blooming orange globe mallow like something from an impressionist painting. The small stone field house was sheltered by the talus apron of a rusty-gray serrated edge of the Kanab Plateau. The rest of the valley stretched off to the west, bisected only by a barren landing strip. The road came in straight, then hooked at a right angle a few hundred feet from the station at a sign that said GREATER DELLENBAUGH METROPOLITAN AREA. Above the house was a water catchment, a solar array, and two frantically spinning turbines. A few miles beyond the station lay a slumbering cinder cone volcano. Beyond that, the eroded blood-orange expanse of the Grand Canyon.
The station was crowded with SUVs, Boy Scouts, and their fathers, who were there for a weekend conservation project. They barely noticed her as she climbed out of the truck and gathered her bearings.
“Hey, you must be Sophia!”
She had turned, looking for a gray-bearded Edward Abbey type, but instead found a grinning bird-faced man with the build of a triathlete. He was tan as a stone, wearing gray shorts, a lightweight green T-shirt, an NPS baseball cap, and wraparound sunglasses dangling from his neck. He extended his hand. “I’m Paul. Great to meet you face-to-face. I hope you didn’t have any trouble on the way in.”
“No, it was uneventful. But gorgeous.”
“Oh, good. Can’t wait to catch up.”
She noticed a thin transparent snakeskin draped over his shoulder like a dishcloth. He saw her eyes dart to it, and he lifted it carefully and draped it gently across her hands. “That’s Daisy—well, actually that’s old Daisy. New Daisy is back under the fridge in the equipment shed. She likes the heat from the compressor, and we don’t seem to have any mouse trouble down there anymore.”
“Must be nice to be able to transform at will,” Sophia remembered saying, and she’d written that line in her journal after she’d returned to her trailer in town.
A jackrabbit appeared in the road, zigzagging in front of her truck as she slammed on the brakes. As the terrified thing bounded off, she gripped the wheel, her heart pounding, the remnants of that day at Dellenbaugh dissipating. Sophia held on to the memory of that snakeskin for another few moments, thinking that it was impossibly thin but utterly complete, plain but unique, a thing that would disintegrate at some point and return itself to the earth. Not gone, but something she couldn’t name.
She returned to the voice of her audiobook, looking around to see that she was down in a draw. She drove to the top of a rise to get her bearings and found she was near House Rock, which was near site EV-111, the first of two stops she needed to make today. She checked the GPS and drove the last few miles before she stopped and grabbed her pack.
She hiked away from the truck, blindly following the GPS arrow into a draw that narrowed into a shrub-filled slot canyon that swallowed her up. She hiked through the labyrinth, noticing how the scrub oak clung to the rock walls. It was an hour before she climbed out, scrambled across the exposed open rock, then dropped down into another box canyon that flared and opened onto a second plain. As she went on, she fell into a meditative state. Back in Princeton, she’d tried classes and phone apps, and she always found her thoughts bouncing around. Here, mindfulness came without intent, which was a help because these sites were all new to her and her work schedule didn’t allow her many opportunities to circle back. She had one chance to take it all in.